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> Back when I was in college, people in my department shared what was being offered by companies that came over to job fairs trying to hire us. We talked about the hiring processes, the interview processes, and what their culture was like, because we were all part of a community of people who were going to be interacting with the same companies.

I don't really have a problem with someone saying a company low-balled them. Honestly, the fact that she took screencaps of what appear to be private conversations (where the other side specifically refers to it as a personal conversation) and refers to specific people at that company is where I think it goes from being something equivalent to "that time Analogue tried to hire me but vastly underestimated the cost and my value, so I turned them down" into something else. If the author had written something along those lines, even at length, then I don't think the vast majority would have a problem with that.

Instead what we have is something that seems far more personal, and far more targeted as specific people, but without context as to why that's warranted, and not necessarily shared with some people with like situations, but for the world to see.

> Some additional context here is possibly warranted that the author didn't share this post to HN, somebody else did.

The author posted it online. It wasn't some private conversation (although she doesn't seem to think posting private conversations is worth noting enough to justify from what I can see), but pushed out for the world to see. Google's going to index it, people are going to share it.

> there's a weird phenomenon where communities being open enough that people outside of that community can look in suddenly means that anything posted publicly is expected to be intended for a global audience or planned out as a potentially viral piece.

I think perhaps people show be more careful what they say online in open locations. These are not private conversations. Other people see them. When you say something in an open forum it's the equivalent of carving it into a tree in a public area in the real world. Any expectation that it's private is ludicrous, no matter how many people seem to fall back to that excuse when called out for something they've said. Perhaps people just should act as they would like to be treated in public. The author, by making a private conversation public deserves no consideration that her public post wasn't intended to be seen by the world, in my opinion.

> But in the same way that I don't think the negotiation process here is worth as much debate as its seeing in the comments

I wouldn't think it was really worth doing an expose on either, but the author seems to think it worth while. The negotiation is rather mundane. It's that she decided to air it to the world which I think is the more interesting thing, even if it's interesting in a way that I think doesn't speak well of her.

> this is a reference to a video game title.

I noticed that, and I think that's a bit less objectionable because of it. It's still kind of ick though, and I think speaks to a lack of care regarding the situation.

In case it hasn't come through as obvious, my real objection to the behavior is the airing of private conversations with individuals for no useful reason. That the conversation seems utterly mundane but is presented otherwise makes it worse in my eyes, because there's no obvious reason from the conversation either.

I think I've written enough on this. The only reason I've written what I have so far is because people keep equating her behavior to less objectionable comparisons, but to me it seems clearly different when it's public on the internet, aimed at specific people, and uses screencaps of a private conversation in a way that I think would make most people feel violated if it was put online like that, regardless of whether they said anything objectionable in it.



> I think perhaps people show be more careful what they say online in open locations. These are not private conversations. Other people see them. When you say something in an open forum it's the equivalent of carving it into a tree in a public area in the real world.

I can agree to disagree on things, but I will leave out by saying that the Internet is a global medium that spans multiple continents, cultures, and languages. If the expectation is that everything posted online needs to be thought of through the lens of a global press release, the end result of that is you are going to have a lot less interesting content online and lot less culture.

There is a difference between a truly private post (meaning that no one is supposed to see it) and a targeted post intending to primarily communicate with a specific audience. When I write posts on HN going into programming details, I don't preface them for people who are unfamiliar with the concept of programming. I don't write in the same style on HN as I do in other contexts, and I don't engage in the same topics. All of that stuff is public, people can correlate it if they want to, in which case I'm going to kind of shrug and kind of look at them weird.

This may just be a personal opinion, people are welcome to disagree with me on this, they can disagree with me on anything. But I think transparent communities with their own circles, memes, cultures, and concerns are a good thing, and making those communities more insular, or demanding that they constantly explain themselves to people who don't understand the references, have a background of their concerns and internal debates, or recognize the people involved -- I think that's an unnecessary burden to place on people.


I understand, and for the most part entirely agree with that. I don't think every single group should have to guard their words entirely. I do think it's worth people considering whether those statements violate norms in what someone would expect as confidential without cause. If we message privately and then you expose those conversations for your own social gain and there's no real cause to do so, I'm going to feel violated, and the amount of violation will probably scale to some degree with how public it was, regardless of whether I said anything bad. And, I can only hope, people would look upon you unkindly for the act. That's really what I'm doing here, looking unkindly on the author for what I see as a violation of norms I think we'd all be better off keeping from becoming common.




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