Many would agree, but it's not relevant to the free speech debate
It's the same logic as those who made the "this guy kinda sucks though" argument based on George Floyd's criminal history to deflect from what the issue really was about - policing practices.
Maybe the company won the deal because the CTO and CPO said "yep - we can do that in 12 weeks" whereas the competitor said "we need to confer with our building teams to estimate the full project timeline" and promptly lost the deal...
And maybe the company will lose the next deal, or the one after that, because the customer won’t give a reference; or because they took too many shortcuts and hosed the product; or they have so much technical debt the next project fails.
That’s the problem with this kind of kick-the-can-down-the-road thinking. At some point you get to the end of the road, at which point your competitors can come and kick you.
Joking aside, Something I find fascinating about ancient wisdom literature that has been in circulation for centuries - honed and refined generation after generation, is how succinctly key concepts are boiled down in ways that can be easily grasped/remembered. (In this case, avoiding conflict of interest/segregation of duties.)
1. Selection bias. There's a lot of stuff in the Bible that is total gibberish to modern ears.
2. Inversed cause and effect. Even if you aren't Christian, there's a good chance that the morals you were taught as a child are influenced by it. The Christian Bible is literally the world's best selling book.
Going further it's in fact the very foundation of the morality of western civilization. It's little wonder why it's constantly under attack and diminished.
Western civilization existed long before the bible (the Greeks) and the predominant culture spread throughout western civilization (Roman) was non-Christian long before it was Christian.
I've hired a lot of people over the course of my career, and questions like this would be a major red flag. I'd pass on the candidate.
Completely fine to ask how performance is measured and/or how performance reviews are handled, but the nature of these questions is off-putting. Is a candidate trying to figure out how they can get away with being a low performer? How would their poor judgment in asking questions like this show up elsewhere? Likely a high-maintenance individual.
And, the caveats at the end of the comment indicate the author knows these questions would not make you look good to the hiring team. If the company hired you anyway, probably wouldn't be a good place to work.
Agree. I would simply ask about team growth and turnover (also ask about engineering department in general). That's a totally legitimate question and it might even get you the answer you want without bluntly asking when they last fired someone. That's like being asked if you took a shit that morning. Like, yeah... and everybody does it, but it's not ok to ask someone about it.
Former Enron employee here - I have some swag I was given when I first started (lunch kit, values booklet, etc. Also have some golf shirts and baseball caps.
Related - cool "circular economy" company in Vancouver that collects chopsticks from restaurants and, using a similar process, makes some pretty amazing stuff: https://chopvalue.com/
