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Wellness Wednesday for January 25, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I understand why it sucks but.... why would I open up my company to legal liability by providing feedback? For someone who didn't make the cut?

First of all, > 50% of the people asking for feedback aren't ready to hear it. I don't like telling someone they suck when they're an employee I've invested in. Sometimes it's as simple as "You're unlikable." When someone's arrogant or stupid, there's no point in trying to help them grow.

People interviewing are also investing time. Arguably more than the candidate. Your 2-hour interview process was 2 hours from you. The 3 people on the other side of the table invested 6 as a team, and that's not counting any research or prep they did beforehand.

Our policy is we only give feedback to people who are being interviewed because they're personal recommendations. We're a very employee-focused company but it's one of the rare times I'm very comfortable throwing up my hands and saying: "You sicced the lawyers on companies to avoid being 'discriminated against' and this is what happened, tough shit."