[nextaccountic]

well, ripgrep is not a company.. what means to "buy" an open source project?

companies either "fund" open source developers (usually a pittance), "contribute" code, or if all fails "fork" them, but straight buying, that's something I never see

[rurban]

This is when a company buys the sole developer.

[rcxdude]

You don't generally buy people. You can employ them, though.

[rurban]

In slave states without proper civil rights, like the US, you can buy them. Your contract forbids everything. Eg every SW you produce in private belongs to the company, not to you. Or everything you say in private will affect your contract.

[celdon25]

Well, the background checks in the US at least have to follow laws.

Then theres reference checks, less formal but generally still follow some kind of rigor or process and you generally know who they’re going to talk to.

Then there’s the third type of investigation, where they actually don’t tell you they’re doing it, may or may not admit to doing it, and you have no way of knowing whether you were singled out for some reason, assuming you are able to find out it happened in the first place.

And good luck searching for any recourse if ethics or even laws (such as HIPAA) are ignored in that situation, even if it’s for example a b2c healthcare company that is expected to set an example for health privacy standards, rather than calling everyone you knew to probe their memories of how healthy you appeared to be at the time, then using that information to evaluate your performance with different criteria than other employees.

Sure, it’s not a typical scenario, but if it happens to you, you’ll probably never be able to scoff at a comment like this again. You might never get over it.