Most any form of helping someone out carries risks. Part of what makes acts of kindness praiseworthy is the acceptance of those risks for the sake of another person.
>> Most any form of helping someone out carries risks.
Really? I've never heard that. Can you give some examples? Preferably ones that seem harmless but could go wrong. I guess providing such examples is my job but I'm too tiered, so help me out.
Killing the messenger - it's true but they'll punish you for hearing it. You may remember that saying, if not: "No good deed goes unpunished."
All actions can backfire, I remember an old friend getting reamed out by his friend he'd given a computer to, when the hard drive failed, for not providing enough free maintainence. Given!
I had a friendship nearly end when I repaired a friend's computer. Something else went wrong a week later and he just assumed it must have been something I did.
A generous uncle of mine is forever finding that temporary favors like free rent are bitterly resented when withdrawn. People ain't all nice all the time.
Benefiting someone is not the same as pleasing them; psychopaths and narcissists please others, but the rest of us like to mix in a little benefiting-but-not-necessarily-pleasing now and then. Otherwise, the world just falls apart.
''Dressed in faded, threadbare GoreTex, a couple of months shy of his sixty-ninth birthday, Pete was a gangly, slightly stooped man who had returned to the high reaches of the Himalaya after a long absence. In 1966 he’d made the first ascent of the Vinson Massif, Antarctica’s highest point. In 1958 he’d made history as the driving force behind the first ascent of Hidden Peak, a 26,470-foot mountain in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan—the highest first ascent ever achieved by American climbers. Pete was even more famous, however, for playing a heroic role in an unsuccessful expedition to K2 in 1953, the same year Hillary and Tenzing reached the peak of Everest.
The eight-man expedition was pinned down in a ferocious blizzard high on K2, waiting to make an assault on the summit, when a team member named Art Gilkey developed thrombophlebitis, a life-threatening altitude-induced blood clot. Realizing that they would have to get Gilkey down immediately to have any hope of saving him, Schoening and the others started lowering him down the mountain’s steep Abruzzi Ridge as the storm raged. At 25,000 feet, a climber named George Bell slipped and pulled four others off with him. Reflexively wrapping the rope around his shoulders and ice ax, Schoening somehow managed to single-handedly hold on to Gilkey and simultaneously arrest the slide of the five falling climbers without being pulled off the mountain himself. One of the more incredible feats in the annals of mountaineering, it was known forever after simply as The Belay.*''
Someone knocks on your door, bleeding from a wound on their arm. Are the a person in need or an armed assailant waiting to gain entry into your home?
A person flagging down help on the side of the road. Are they going to do something while you're in a vulnerable position changing a tire?
Most any interactions where "help" is more than verbal information transfer usually lead to situations where the helping party is put into a position of vulnerability. To help someone is to literally "go out on a limb" i.e. put yourself in a precarious position.
^ this. also, there's an entire family of laws[1] designed to protect people from certain risks they take on when they decide to help someone in dire need.
These are all extreme examples, but I think the parent post example (not giving feedback b/c of liability issues) is cut from the same cloth.
Businesses take liability risks day in & day out. For some, the calculus concludes that (practically) selfless gestures, like giving applicants feedback, aren't worth that risk. That, imo, is a shame.
>A person flagging down help on the side of the road. Are they going to do something while you're in a vulnerable position changing a tire?
There have been at least 2-3 different murderers who have used that technique in my local area within the last 5 years alone.It's just so wrong that I can't even wrap my head around it.
That is, in the US. I live in San Francisco, but I'm from Italy and have worked (and hired, and fired) people there in the past. I can assure you that all this "legal wall" around everything doesn't really exist in Italy, or at least it's vastly mitigated.
As a consequence, I was able to provide detailed feedback every time I rejected a candidate, for example, without even thinking of the legal consequences.
Because the way our laws protect protected classes make it trivial to hustle employers.
I’ve been sued and served with human rights complaints for firing a sleeping employee (I wasn’t checking on the sleep/wake status of employees not in protected classes) and for allegedly terminating an employee because of their protected substance abuse issues.
It’s an incredibly time consuming, expensive and stressful process.
Medical conditions give you certain protections for good reason -- otherwise employers would just fire employees with cancer to keep insurance rates down.
99/100 these things are good, but it takes a couple of jerks to make life miserable for all.
>>Agree this is a US problem and I don't understand why.
Because the US has very severe issues related to racism, sexism, ageism and many other types of discrimination. So the laws are much tighter, which results in extreme caution and risk aversion on the part of employers.
And other paces dont? Almost every country has severe issues related to all the above. In the US, we have litigation everywhere, you fall and slip in a supermarket? Lawsuit! You tripped over a pothole? Lawsuit! Heck, lawyers advertise to do this...
Part of this is we don't have a social safety net, like universal health insurance.
>you fall and slip in a supermarket? Lawsuit!
You fall and slip in a supermarket, due to a careless employee and now you owe hundred of thousands in medical bills. Some executive somewhere realized it was easier to extract that cash from a corporation than putting some person deep in debt.
Secondly, I believe America's relationship with race/sex/age discrimination goes a lot deeper than most countries, despite the fact we are younger.
Because nobody wants to be caught holding the bag. I went to the ER once because of a bad reaction to a burrito. (Serious pain and my fiancé made me go)
When I needed back surgery a few years later, I attracted the attention of my insurer’s subrogation team, who tried on several occasions to get me to state that I was in a car accident during the burrito incident.
You get hurt in a big way, your insurer will make you sue.
I have had this experience with a few companies I interviewed with in EU, where I got feedback after rejection.
It feels so pleasant, yet strange, after having taken it for granted that I'll just get a templated rejection letter based on interview experiences in the US.
I've heard the "MeToo" movement, with its guilt by accusation, is having unintended consequences. Male executives are starting to avoid women employees in any situation where there are not other people present.
This means no going out for drinks to make a deal, no business lunch to brainstorm, no meeting on the golf course to pitch your plan. Not even a discussion of confidential matters in the private office of one or the other.
Huh. Well, for my part, I haven’t changed my behavior one bit due to it, and I’m (still) not worried in the least about being sued or something for treating my women colleagues as ordinary people. Shrug.
Male school teachers I know in Canada tell me its common sense to never be alone with a female student in a room. One false accusation and your livelihood is DOA.
There are reasons for everything. The liability isn't so great that is outweighs the benefit; it's simply that the corporation ascribes 0 value to helping the candidate improve.
Liability as in the more that you have said, the more likely it is that a lawsuit will be filed based on a misunderstanding of what you did say.
It doesn't matter how unlikely the lawsuit is to win on the merits. Fighting in court and discovery both bring costs and distractions that institutions would prefer to avoid.
Companies also tend to settle frivolous lawsuits because it's cheaper. Not giving feedback is not leaving any opening for frivolous lawsuits over the reason given.
