I've worked a number of software roles (around 10 in the last 15 years) in the UK. Only been asked to sign away my working time directive once, and that was for an American owned company. I declined to do so, and still got the role.
I've been following this series of posts on this job search (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30003106), and this post really resonated with me. I've experienced interviewing companies making unreasonable demands before, and generally, these are the companies to avoid. In my experience, they're also the companies that are most resistant to making any allowances to the interviewee's personal circumstances. As always, the interview is a two-way process, and it gives you a view of what working at a company could be like. When a company treats you badly as a candidadte, they don't suddenly improve when you become a full-time employee.
When I started out doing this, I thought it would be a lot harder to grab the names. And I thought it would take several months. Frankly, a month isn't long enough and 48 hours is downright shocking.
I thought it was a great breakdown of how trivial this process is on various services and that it actually works.
A lot of these seem like security nightmares. I'm glad someone did the research at this small expense.
These comments are barking up the wrong tree. Nobody here is lambasting these companies for having such horrifying policies that ensure anyone targeting you is basically guaranteed to snatch up your username.
Interesting article, has similar concerns to those raised by Cathy O'Neil in her book 'Weapons of Math Destruction', and also by Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants. Those of us working in software rarely stop to think about the biases we're hardcoding in our programs, and how it can impact users. We really need to wake up to how we are affecting people's lives.
I couldn't agree more. Engineers are often so far (physically and metaphorically) from the actual impact of what they work on, it can be really easy to miss the damage it does.
People who work for Facebook must have to work very hard to remember the people they are experimenting on are people, not just "users", and that they don't have cart-blanch with how they treat them. Especially if they are building addiction into their service!
Also, Weapons of Math Destruction is a fantastic book.
I like the fact that this is a simple, easily measurable metric that can give you a very good idea of the quality of your application. In fact, I'm now trying to think of what simple metrics I can use to track the quality for the application I'm currently working on (a web application).
