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Personally, I find needing to provide references at all to be akin to me needing to get my parents permission. It makes my skin crawl and I will actively screen

• em-bee 2y ago
  i have friends that i worked with, who would gladly be a reference, and i would not mind them doing it, but really, at best they could confirm that i am a nice person to work with. and i would never use anyone as a reference who would not do that. so the whole thing feels rather meaningless. but that's not the only thing. in germany it is common to ask for written reference letters which are called "arbeitszeugnis" (work report card, like the report card you get from school). that term makes me feel like i was a kid. it clearly establishes a hierarchy. i am the lowly subordinate employee and you are the superior employer that i am to look up to. it gets really wierd when i consider that i have been on the other side as an employer myself. (and by law these letters must be honest and may not contain unfounded negative statements which makes employers avoid writing anything negative because they could get sued.) and then there are places who ask for actual school report cards or at least grade averages or want to know how i did in math in school, as if that was in any way useful to understand how i would do as a programmer decades later.