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I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

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Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#221

Post by vageli »

tyingq wrote: post #201
wayneftw wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO discussion forums should show the user comments that they'd likely agree with instead of comments that some majority-of-the-moment agrees with. Sorting comments on a majority average is such a dumb metric. The Internet would be a better place if forum discussions more closely modeled real life, where we simply don't have disagreeable opinions constantly shoved in our face because we don't hang around with those p…

Insightful, thank you. It's a bit theoritcal, but I'd like a way for replies to be sorted by merit versus controversy or popularity. I'm not adverse to the idea that I'm wrong.

How would you quantify merit?

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#222

Post by hysan »

guntars wrote: post #164
n4r9 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine and dandy for people in tech but if you're a single parent with a narrow set of skills who's struggling and been applying for jobs for over a month then you're going to take the offer. And then you're not going to have much time to continue job searching.

Who’s responsible for you being a single parent with limited skills? The corporation?

Or what if your significant other was the one working while you were a stay at home parent taking care of N children only for them to die in an accident at a young age. What then?

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#223

Post by heavyset_go »

ci5er wrote: post #210
heavyset_go wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste. Background reports like these, along with drug testing for office jobs that don't deal with heavy machinery, are indicative of companies that have unhealthy views of the employer-employee relationship, especially in a countr…

Often the drug-testing things are related to contracts with either the (US Federal) government or contracts with companies that have contracts with the (US Federal)government, such as O&G, Healthcare and Banking. That is to say: Sometimes companies don't have much choice in some of this. EDIT: I just remembered that I was talking to my corporate attorney's office recently (medium-size-law), and they say that if any a…

> Do you disagree?

Not at all. I understand that drug testing is required due to contractual obligations and things like security clearances. However, I choose not to apply to such jobs because what I do on my own time doesn't need scrutiny from my employer. I've heard from colleagues of companies in the consumer app space sometimes requiring drug tests for their engineering and non-engineering roles, which is more of what I'm addressing. There just isn't need for that beyond an employer or HR department not liking the idea of someone smoking a joint on the weekends.

People who choose to allow their public online presence to be unprofessional are allowed to be scrutinized by those who care about those things. However, if your employer is hiring companies that use bots to friend your private profiles and mine content from them, that's an overstep in my opinion. Wanting a dossier on an applicant's likes, opinions and a sentiment analysis on their posts is kind of absurd in my opinion.

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#224

Post by ci5er »

heavyset_go wrote: post #223
ci5er wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often the drug-testing things are related to contracts with either the (US Federal) government or contracts with companies that have contracts with the (US Federal)government, such as O&G, Healthcare and Banking. That is to say: Sometimes companies don't have much choice in some of this. EDIT: I just remembered that I was talking to my corporate attorney's office recently (medium-size-law), and they say that if any a…

> Do you disagree? Not at all. I understand that drug testing is required due to contractual obligations and things like security clearances. However, I choose not to apply to such jobs because what I do on my own time doesn't need scrutiny from my employer. I've heard from colleagues of companies in the consumer app space sometimes requiring drug tests for their engineering and non-engineering roles, which is more o…

I think I probably mostly agree with you.

For one - I haven't thought through the ins-and-outs of this very well yet.

But in this new world, I may need to. I may come back with some questions, as you seem to be quite sensible! :-)

(BTW, IMHO: Bots to friend and mine is clearly over the line)

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#225

Post by techanon »

Jupe wrote: post #111

Get used to it... this is the world we (the tech community) helped, even pushed, to create. I ask myself, would a FAANG company hire someone who doesn't actively tweet? Somehow, I doubt it. It is increasingly impossible to live in the modern world without using the internet. Try buying something these days; many of the brick-and-mortar stores are disappearing. Try getting a job without using online services. Try buyi…

this is a weird illusion you have going on. it’s very possible to live without tweeting every 5 minutes and remaining inactive on these attention draining social media platforms.

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#226

Post by maest »

wayneftw wrote: post #183
thaeli wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do work with people who don't think I should be allowed to exist. But they're required to be polite to me at work, and to use my pronouns, and as long as they do that no lines have been crossed.

If my personal issues demanded that people use special pronouns around me in order to protect my own self identity, I think that I would eventually be more self-conscious about the fact that the majority of people in my office are now most likely making fun of me behind my back and calling me whatever they want when I'm not around... Don't people just avoid using pronouns altogether for you though if they feel so opp…

Why would people make fun of them behind their back?

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#227

Post by MrMorden »

tzs wrote: post #133
tyingq wrote: post #18

Oy. Similarly, I'm mystified with the CIA's and NSA's fascination with mandatory recurring polygraph tests. It's pretty well known the whole area is flawed bullshit. It doesn't measure anything remotely related to "truth". Edit: I know we aren't supposed to discuss downvotes here, but the activity on this comment and my replies are very interesting. It's curious why discussion on this topic is so controversial. Why w…

It's pretty well known that it is flawed bullshit when applied a small number of times to a small number of people that you have limited information where you are trying to find out the truth about something very specific. Applied repeatedly over a long time to a large group of people that you have extensive information on where you are aren't looking for information about some specific thing, by an agency with exten…

They don’t. Unless you count giving a Lebanese Hizballah illegal a security clearance, which might have been due to something other than the polygraph but is hard to reconcile with any background check actually being performed.

Polygraphs could work as advertised for 99.99% of people being processed for security clearance and still be useless, because their effectiveness against people who take the job with the intention of leaking, selling, or otherwise inappropriately handling classified information is nil. The US government has spent tons of money on polygraph research and administration over the last century despite knowing from the beginning that it was a fraud, and has never even once prevented an act of espionage with one.

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#228

Post by thecleaner »

throwaway8291 wrote: post #34

They claim machine learning, but I'd guess their workhorse is a "grep -f badwords tweets.json | makepdf | send boss@employer" kind of thingy.

And I guarantee that this will be faster than using Hadoop with distributed NoSQL database. Which I presume is what the company is probably doing.

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#229

Post by dvtrn »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #134
aloknnikhil wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like Hire Right ( https://www.hireright.com/ ) uses this. And a lot of the FANG tier companies use Hire Right. That'd a exclude a lot of the tech companies.

HireRight almost failed my background check because I got the month wrong on my graduation from high school. I legitimately don't understand why a background check has to be this in-depth. Edit: actually I think it was elementary school. Even worse.

I often get questions about background checks because I have a painfully common American name and there's a few people who share this name that have been convicted of some pretty serious crimes.

On the one hand I'm not sure what this says about the veracity of background checks performed at the time, on the other hand I'm glad one job bothered to bring this up and ask "This isn't you is it?"

I ended up petitioning the state of California (a state I'd never even visited up to that point) and providing some key information to receive a letter from the state attorney stating "This isn't the dvtrn you're looking for".

The company wouldn't tell me who the background check provider was so I could try setting the record straight, and I ended up taking another job entirely in the end but it was NOT a fun experience and it's filled me with all kinds of anxiety to wonder "how many jobs and housing opportunities have I just missed out on because a background checker thought I was a felon?"

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#230

Post by s45 »

xwowsersx wrote: post #67

Fuck Fama and fuck any company using them. If you're a candidate and a company asks you to submit to one of these, just save them the time and write a giant fuck you on a piece of paper and hand it to them.

Nah don't do that. Just ghost them like so many companies do to candidates.
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