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by Dystopian 2099 days ago
Not to defend the op, since I think they're taking a particularly hard line, but qualifying candidates based on their previous work is just something that happens.

I've personally been disqualified because I've worked at a legal, but "vice" based company - I've seen others not hired because their previous company was too "legacy", even though they did very similar work.

It's not necessarily right, but companies use the signals available for them - even if they're not 100% agreeable to everyone.
1 comments
jentist_retol 2099 days ago
I'd like to emphasize the nature of the answer which was a defensive "I was just following orders".

At that point, I was conducting dozens of interviews a year, and I think that sort of question came up... maybe three times? One of those people was from a medical company with a very large and very embarrassing contemporary incident, and the interviewee and I talked about development process problems. In fact, they admitted, it was part of the reason they left! We hired them and I enjoyed working with him.

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gabereiser 2099 days ago
exactly this... I think there are more factors at play than “Didn’t you think about what you were doing?” such as, maybe they have a family they have to provide for and they actually like the people they work with and what they do it’s just Jim from sales all of the sudden suggests a feature that’s unethical but the company believes it’s the thing to build... at some point, leadership should be blamed, not the engineer who just implemented it so they can go home to their spouse.
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jentist_retol 2098 days ago
In software, there is incredible demand and engineers have a lot of negotiating power. So, we have the power to actually get new jobs easily!

And fine, but then when that horrible thing makes the news and their answer is "i don't care, i was just building the feature", I take that to be an extremely unsatisfactory answer.

And if they work at Facebook with those kind of unsatisfactory answers, they are probably very qualified for a lot of positions, and I don't think they'll be hurting for job offers elsewhere.

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