Re: Reputation based hiring (was REQUESTING INFORMATION)

[ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)]

George A. Stathis wrote:
> I would never hire you. What I need is people with a VISION;
> NOT people with IMPAIRED VISION, distorting things so unreliably.
> 
> I need TRUE VISIONARIES able to work creatively in High Technology.
> People like Philip Kahn (Hurrah) and Richard Branson (Hurrah, Bravo);
> even Bill Gates himself, were SELF-MADE visionaries.
> 
> In contrast... people "threatening others with unemployability files",
> are CLAY MEDIOCRITIES.

You do not want "visionaries" who will steal your files and ruin your
business. There are many persons who are very smart and creative, and
yet one can expect to have a net loss from hiring them. Intelligence and
any other factor cannot be the sole determinants of employments.

Reputations are very important economically: since everyone knows that
their reputations, and not only current contracts, are on the line, they
avoid incurring losses to their employers for a short-term illicit gain.
That prevents a lot of theft, for example, among other things.

Also, employers have their own gain by discriminating between employees
with an expected loss and employees with expected profit. Employees,
likewise, can gain by having good references from previous employers.

If you, in your "pro-freedom" rage, somehow manage to make employers to
ignore reputations when they make hiring decisions, you will immediately
create incentives for an economically damaging behavior. As a result, 
there would be a net loss in the economy. People will also trust others
less because cheating will not be punished as seriously as it is now.
Lack of trust would force them to waste more money on lawyers.

George, if you calmed down a little bit, you would have thought about
the following: just as people have the right to speak on, say,
cypherpunks mailing list, people have exactly the same right to speak on
"hiring-punks" discussion list. There is not a whole lot of difference.
Limitations to one right (like rules by list owners) are exactly
the same. It is illogical to defend one right and to deny another.

Another issue is, whom should we trust in their "DON'T HIRE ..." 
recommendations? You could insist, for example, that a certain list
made by a certain person should be ignored because that person was
not fit to make hiring recommendations. I do not view such activity
as economically damaging. 

If you, however, fought with the very notion of "unemployability
lists", you would in fact create an economic loss. Of course you are
still free to speak against these lists, but your position is not
sound.

Another issue: can employers base their decisions on the content of
applicant's USENET posts and other public messages? Why not?  Just as
"DON'T HIRE" lists, this is an issue of freedom: employers should be
free to seek whatever information they can find.

I may be completely mistaken, but I think that some of the
freedom-knights misunderstand what freedom of speech means. It is not a
positive right that someone (John Gilmore or Dave Hayes or the
government in form of free subsudized broadcast) should provide. There
is no "right to broadcast". Rather, this is something that the
government cannot regulate and take away. In the broadcast example,
no one should be forbidden by law to broadcast anything. That's it.

Of course, different people can disagree on whether kicking various
persons out of mailing lists and not allowing certain persons to
subscribe to certain mailing lists is a good idea, BUT this is not the
issue of freedom of speech as a constitutional right.

	- Igor.