[secondcoming]

A few years ago an American company that approached me (UK based) about a job opportunity insisted I sign an NDA before I could interview with them. I refused and they couldn't understand why so they even put me in contact with one of their lawyers. I still refused, and they eventually relented, but I could never understand why I'd need to sign an NDA to attend a job interview. There's literally no benefit to me in doing so.

At the time I was working for a competitor and I figured they could use the fact that I interviewed with them to argue that I - either intentionally or unintentionally - gained proprietary knowledge of their product and my current employer gained from it.

[lanyard-textile]

If you’re an employee under NDA, and your company considers almost everything about your work to be confidential, you can’t effectively paint a detailed picture for the role.

The NDA gives them some protection to answer your questions openly and transparently.

[throwaway2037]

You had to know your response would get no love here on HN. You seem to be missing the point that this is like a free option for the interviewing company. Did they offer to compensate this person... say 1000 USD per hour to interview? I doubt it. As a result, the person signing this NDA has 100% of the downside, with no upsides except a "potentially lucrative job offer". That seems like a wildly unequal offer.

[lanyard-textile]

You know, in moments like these, you have an opportunity to build a connection — to meet someone in the middle who sees the world a little differently, who is perhaps indoctrinated into a disrespectful aspect of capitalism and is unable to see through it yet, or who perhaps offers a perspective you don’t have yourself.

And you slam dunk any chance of connection for what seems to be the sake of argument and posture. All because of a difference in opinion? Because you have the mighty all-seeing eyes of an objective opinion we should all see through too?

I “had” to know my response would get no love? The only mistake I made here is my continued thought that this was a place for some kind of industry togetherness: It is just a constant stepping over each other for no apparent reason than to satisfy a kind of unfulfilled ego.

I wasn’t concerned with how much you would love my response. I didn’t cater it for you. You are not the only person in my god damn universe. It was meant to be my authentic perspective, to be helpful, or to invite conversation and debate if I missed another perspective unhad.

But with responses like these, gosh, why bother? What a waste of my love.

I think the argument you made is just an entirely different one. The inequality in your argument is basically whether you should be compensated for interviewing with a company — which, I don’t know what’s economically fair there and I’m not making an argument about. I’d love to be paid to interview :) I don’t know the economic impact of it though. I wonder if it would just lead to more selective hiring practices and worser mutual fits.

Requesting payment for just the NDA is weird to me. Without something like this, you’re asking the company to provide detailed specifics of the role you’re interviewing for, but you won’t give them any legal peace that you won’t run away with the secrets you learn: It’s a free and permitted distribution of anything your interviewers go and share with candidates.

It leads to interviews where you have no idea what the role actually is and what you’ll be doing on the job. Every question stonewalled with a generic answer so the employee doesn’t get in trouble. An atmosphere of curation and inauthenticity, to gauge how you will potentially spend years of your life.

Lovely.

[Tesl]

You should probably keep to LinkedIn for this kind of crap.

[teejmya]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

    Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.