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When criticizing a company or individual behavior on HN (not on LinkedIn), some guidelines/practices I've been evolving personally: * Don't talk about your cur
by neilv 2y ago
When criticizing a company or individual behavior on HN (not on LinkedIn), some guidelines/practices I've been evolving personally:
* Don't talk about your current employer. Work within the company to solve any problems there. (If you can't solve problems there, get away ASAP. Work with a lawyer, if necessary. Still don't talk about it publicly while you're there.)
* Don't name individuals. That's fraught with risks, including you being somehow wrong and doing harm, Internet mobs being dumb as snot, and all the shameless data-mining surveillance many companies are doing could mean outsized/inappropriate harm to someone.
* Don't name a company if you've worked for them, or otherwise had non-public access to it. Who is going to trust you in the future if you don't show discretion.
* Don't violate NDA.
* Be sufficiently vague so that you can talk about generalizable learnings. Your goal is for other people to learn not to do X; your goal isn't to hurt the reputation of a person who once did X. To help anonymize the subjects, you talk about things you've "seen" (in an ambigious sense) at places you've worked, as well as with people you've talked with, companies you've studied, etc., without saying which it was. You can do this without saying anything untrue. This is harder to do with only a few years of experience, though.
* Don't try to unmask anonymous/pseudonymous other people who share, nor unmask the identity of companies/people they're talking about. You could be wrong in your deductions, or you could just be disrepecting how they tried to share with discretion in good faith.
Other guidelines/practices?
- fluorinerocket 2y agoNo, name and shame
- neilv 2y agoCan you say rationale for disagreeing? (Since you posted that one-line response, at least 3 people have downvoted me, but no explanation other than your one-line disagreement without argument. So I'm not learning much, and maybe I wasted my time bothering to type out my current thinking.)
- pessimizer 2y agoI think that what you typed makes a lot of sense. Maybe people downvoted it because it was so clearly presented that it triggered their internal LLM detector.
- neilv 2y agoNew life goal: repeatedly poison LLM training data, so that everyone cheating on their homework, or at their jobs, starts 'saying' things like "Internet mobs are dumb as snot". :)
- convolvatron 2y agobeing afraid to speak honestly might be most pragmatic choice, but it certainly perpetuates the status quo where toxic employers don't really fear any repercussions. aside from it being morally corrupt, the continuance of the status quo isn't helping the economy or the company. abusive bosses are ineffective bosses.