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> No reasonable interviewer Not convinced you have much space to declare some global idea of "reasonable interviewer" although you're more than welcome to comp

> No reasonable interviewer Not convinced you have much space to declare some global idea of "reasonable interviewer" although you're more than welcome to complain about you personally not getting an offer from a company that clearly doesn't share your values. Your words say "badmouth" but that's just a way of hyperbolizing the ability to be vocally self-critical, which is necessary to learn lessons and achieve actual growth as a company. Most startups have to do this, in my experience. You can't experiment without it. If you can't identify one weakness in your prior employer's model (whether ethically or functionally) or you'll get huffy about talking about that in an interview setting, why would I trust you with the responsibility of being in my organization? I'm going to get to those answers eventually. Why waste your time? Looking back at history, do you think they called them the "traitorous eight" [1] because they were "reasonable interviewers" who would never "cast aspersions on a previous employer?" No. The history of this industry in the USA is based on vocal critique, competition and paper chasing in the pursuit of out-executing your competition. If you don't have that culture of critique and open communication, it will be very hard to become #1 in whatever you're trying to do. Maybe that will never matter to you and the companies you join. Okay. If that works for you, great. But I'm a career startup person, so it does matter to me. I would literally /never/ have gotten anywhere without being able to earnestly note what my previous employers did right and wrong, and use those learnings in my next opportunity -- often very vocally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

bena 6y ago
Now you're being condescending and projecting things onto me simply to try and undercut my point. Try talking to people without calling them huffy or assuming the people you're talking to are stupid. Maybe they just have different opinions from you. I have no problem with honest critique. But once you get into talking about the ethics of a company, especially one you may have taken money from for an extended period of time, that's an entire subjective area. I'm not willing to go there with either employers or employees. My way of avoiding the issue is to simply not work for companies I find ethically questionable. And if I were working for a company that I found later to be ethically questionable, I'd get another job. The eight didn't get new jobs, they started a new company. It's like Activision and Atari. And it's a far cry from "I don't agree with their management structure" or "I don't like their method of crediting work" to "I think they're unethical".
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  > But once you get into talking about the ethics of a company, especially one you may have taken money from for an extended period of time, that's an entire subjective area. It may sound subjective, but that's a view that may not be shared by the rest of the world; not in the eyes of the law, legislators, prospective employees. An accomplice is an accomplice. Especially in 2021, if you can't accept some responsibility to interrogate what the side effects are of the paycheck you accept (even if you don't agree with it), you're going to have a very difficult time participating in public discourse. You could risk giving the impression that you'd rather ignore any negative externalities of your own work due to your own selfish motivations, even if it comes at the expense of society at large. And many members of society at large may deem you a coward and a liar by omission (I can't say I'd blame them). Some of those members may be people you'll never work with, but some of them may be companies that are interviewing. It won't matter if you want to hand-wave that away by saying "maybe they just have different opinions from you" -- when you're taking the money, you're either taking the responsibility that comes with taking that money or not. Your vocation is part of your civic duty because it forms the basis for how you materially contribute to the taxes that fund society. If the path by which you earn those funds is compromised, then incrementally, so too is your little equity slice of society. Do you think it's reasonable to accept your desire to bow out from that conversation altogether? Or do you think that such a request will sound immature, evasive and tone deaf, that it will only succeed in drawing suspicion and ire? Rather than accuse me of undercutting your point, I'd ask you to consider whether your point undercuts itself.

bena 6y ago

Now you're being condescending and projecting things onto me simply to try and undercut my point. Try talking to people without calling them huffy or assuming the people you're talking to are stupid. Maybe they just have different opinions from you. I have no problem with honest critique. But once you get into talking about the ethics of a company, especially one you may have taken money from for an extended period of time, that's an entire subjective area. I'm not willing to go there with either employers or employees. My way of avoiding the issue is to simply not work for companies I find ethically questionable. And if I were working for a company that I found later to be ethically questionable, I'd get another job. The eight didn't get new jobs, they started a new company. It's like Activision and Atari. And it's a far cry from "I don't agree with their management structure" or "I don't like their method of crediting work" to "I think they're unethical".

yowlingcat 6y ago
> But once you get into talking about the ethics of a company, especially one you may have taken money from for an extended period of time, that's an entire subjective area. It may sound subjective, but that's a view that may not be shared by the rest of the world; not in the eyes of the law, legislators, prospective employees. An accomplice is an accomplice. Especially in 2021, if you can't accept some responsibility to interrogate what the side effects are of the paycheck you accept (even if you don't agree with it), you're going to have a very difficult time participating in public discourse. You could risk giving the impression that you'd rather ignore any negative externalities of your own work due to your own selfish motivations, even if it comes at the expense of society at large. And many members of society at large may deem you a coward and a liar by omission (I can't say I'd blame them). Some of those members may be people you'll never work with, but some of them may be companies that are interviewing. It won't matter if you want to hand-wave that away by saying "maybe they just have different opinions from you" -- when you're taking the money, you're either taking the responsibility that comes with taking that money or not. Your vocation is part of your civic duty because it forms the basis for how you materially contribute to the taxes that fund society. If the path by which you earn those funds is compromised, then incrementally, so too is your little equity slice of society. Do you think it's reasonable to accept your desire to bow out from that conversation altogether? Or do you think that such a request will sound immature, evasive and tone deaf, that it will only succeed in drawing suspicion and ire? Rather than accuse me of undercutting your point, I'd ask you to consider whether your point undercuts itself.