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This guy is wasting everybody's time, either deliberately or grossly negligent. There should be a way for the candidates to sue him/the company for lost opportu

This guy is wasting everybody's time, either deliberately or grossly negligent. There should be a way for the candidates to sue him/the company for lost opportunity cost as candidates could have spent their time doing something worthwhile or even gainful.

dahart 5y ago
Fortunately for us, there are no laws against wasting time, nor losing opportunity cost, nor doing gainful things with every moment, otherwise Hacker News would be long gone. ;) The manager might be wasting time, but we only have one lopsided view of the situation. Keep in mind that as far as we know, the manager might be protecting the team from something worse, and the employee may have no idea what it is.
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  Writing "wear a red tie" in 1pt email signatures is not just accidentally wasting time, or wasting time for procrastination/entertainment purposes. That's deliberate and he has to know he is playing with people's (professional) lives. Good for him if he somehow does this to protect the team, but he is abusing candidates at the same time, so fuck that. When I waste my time on hacker news, I know what I am doing, and hacker news is not trying to trick me, and hacker news does pretend to offer me money or a job. An interview however suggest there is an opportunity for gainful employment, and if there really isn't and you sink time into that regardless, then that's a different beast.
  - dahart 5y ago
    The guy is absolutely definitely wasting time consciously and on purpose. Fully agree with you there. Figuring out how to fix that particular case still requires knowing the whole story. And yeah, when I interview, I know some of my time is going to be wasted, there’s no way around that, but it’s better to (1) research the job/company before interviewing, (2) use the interview as part of your research to filter out bad companies to work for like this one, (3) focus on the goal of finding a good employer, good salary, etc. One way to look at this is that the manager might be, in the big picture, saving time for the candidates. It might be much worse for them if they were to take the job, it might be years of time wasting as opposed to an hour.

dahart 5y ago

Fortunately for us, there are no laws against wasting time, nor losing opportunity cost, nor doing gainful things with every moment, otherwise Hacker News would be long gone. ;) The manager might be wasting time, but we only have one lopsided view of the situation. Keep in mind that as far as we know, the manager might be protecting the team from something worse, and the employee may have no idea what it is.

rndgermandude 5y ago
Writing "wear a red tie" in 1pt email signatures is not just accidentally wasting time, or wasting time for procrastination/entertainment purposes. That's deliberate and he has to know he is playing with people's (professional) lives. Good for him if he somehow does this to protect the team, but he is abusing candidates at the same time, so fuck that. When I waste my time on hacker news, I know what I am doing, and hacker news is not trying to trick me, and hacker news does pretend to offer me money or a job. An interview however suggest there is an opportunity for gainful employment, and if there really isn't and you sink time into that regardless, then that's a different beast.
- dahart 5y ago
  The guy is absolutely definitely wasting time consciously and on purpose. Fully agree with you there. Figuring out how to fix that particular case still requires knowing the whole story. And yeah, when I interview, I know some of my time is going to be wasted, there’s no way around that, but it’s better to (1) research the job/company before interviewing, (2) use the interview as part of your research to filter out bad companies to work for like this one, (3) focus on the goal of finding a good employer, good salary, etc. One way to look at this is that the manager might be, in the big picture, saving time for the candidates. It might be much worse for them if they were to take the job, it might be years of time wasting as opposed to an hour.