but companies demanding extreme(/disproportionate/unreasonable) levels of devotion is a real thing
Sure, but that’s not the point I was trying to make. I was hoping that people would read my comments as making a point for effect, not as a literal statement to abase yourself to the corporate gods.
I still read it as trying to demonstrate a level of desire for the job that’s incommensurate with the truth,
So when you show up at a job interview wearing a suit (or dress better than normal), is that a lie, too? Or are you trying to make a good impression?
… saying it’s exaggeration doesn’t quite sound right to me.
Well, it’s what I intended it to mean. And I do appreciate that your comments here are communicative, and charitable. That’s a lot nicer than the wide range of fantastical inventions I’ve seen.
the commenter clearly understood it as you “pretend”ing to “genuinely want” the job
I hope you understand that’s a negative interpretation of what I said. A positive interpretation is a much simpler trying to make a good impression, or trying to see things from someone elses view.
(and) such pretence would be lying and an act of self-harm,
Is it lying to tell the interviewer that you want the job? It is an act of self harm to phrase your resume using words from the job posting?
Such a response is deeply odd to me. Unlike some commenters, I don’t assume that prospective employers are evil bastards who want me to work for nothing. I expect that there will be a mutually beneficial exchange. If it isn’t beneficial to me, I’ll leave.
Their view that such pretence would be lying and an act of self-harm is so obviously the opposite of all of those adjectives to me …
This is the disconnect. I fail to see how putting yourself in a positive light is an act of self-harm. Calling a positive action “lying” or “self harm” does come across to me as a very negative interpretation of what I said.
If the original commenter interpreted my statements as shitting on prospective employees, and demanding that they abase / abuse themselves to get the job, then yes… such I agree that demanding such abuse is negative. But I would gently suggest that such an interpretation is not a charitable one. If anything, it’s extreme, and negative. Hence my describing it that way.
My $0.02 is that if I’m trying to get a job, I communicate that I understand the requirements, that I want the job, and I put myself in the best light. Yet a large number of other commenters seem to think that’s an insane / evil thing for anyone to do.
but companies demanding extreme(/disproportionate/unreasonable) levels of devotion is a real thing
Sure, but that’s not the point I was trying to make.
You’ve said that. I was trying to explain why:
a) your “exaggeration” is something too real and normalised by enough people that it doesn’t immediately come across as obvious exaggeration, and
b) even interpreting it as exaggeration doesn’t work, because the very act of communicating a higher level of desire for a job than you have, even if it’d be a reasonable, non-extreme, and proportionate level of desire to have for the job, just a level you don’t have, can still be a lie and an act of self-harm; I wouldn’t use such strong language myself, but I wouldn’t consider such an opinion to be extreme.
So when you show up at a job interview wearing a suit (or dress better than normal), is that a lie, too? Or are you trying to make a good impression?
Depends why you’re wearing a suit. Is it to fulfil some corporate dress code? Then, no, why would that be a lie? Unless it’s your intent to communicate a message that you know or believe to be opposite to reality, then wearing clothes you wouldn’t normally wear is not a lie.
For example, a police officer wears a uniform on the job, but doesn’t off the job. That uniform is meant to communicate something to the people around them, something that’s true, which is that they’re a police officer. A (non-officer) criminal might wear the same as a lie. The police officer doesn’t normally wear those clothes outside of the job, that doesn’t make it a lie.
As for dressing better than normal, it depends exactly. When you say “better than normal”, does that mean dressing to a standard that you wouldn’t at home, or that you wouldn’t when hanging out with your friends, or what? And the purpose and intent matters. You’ve not given enough information to judge. It can be a lie, or there can be some other reasonable explanation for that behaviour.
… saying it’s exaggeration doesn’t quite sound right to me.
Well, it’s what I intended it to mean.
Then you chose your words very poorly IMO, because even now with your clarification, I can’t look back at your original words and think, “oh, yeah, I see how they meant that”, I just look at it and think, “these words are very different from what they’re now saying they meant”.
“Communicate to the employer that I had read the job posting, and had relevant skills” has nothing to do with “communicate to the employer that I want the job”, irrespective of whether you’re communicating a reasonable level of desire or an extreme level of desire and also irrespective of whether the level of desire you’re communicating is truthful.
But, to reiterate, even interpreting it as exaggeration doesn’t work (see “b)” above).
I hope you understand that’s a negative interpretation of what I said. A positive interpretation is a much simpler trying to make a good impression, or trying to see things from someone elses view.
You saying it’s a negative interpretation of what you said doesn’t respond to my point. See where I said, “even if they misunderstood you” [emphasis added]? It was obvious from their comment how they interpreted your words, they attacked their negative interpretation of your words, and you, instead of saying, “hey, you misunderstood me”, call their rejection of their negative interpretation of your words extremist and negative.
It’s like if someone overhears me shouting “you took my stuff, I’m gonna beat you to a pulp for that” into my headset, and storms into my room shouting, “what the hell, that’s not okay!”, and instead of telling them, “what?, no, I’m playing a video game”, I go, “why’re you defending a thief?”. If that person ends up wondering whether I might think what I’m doing is okay even outside the context of a video game, I wouldn’t blame them.
Is it lying to tell the interviewer that you want the job?
I mean, it would be (a lie) if you didn’t (want the job) and it wouldn’t be (a lie) if you did (want the job). Is this supposed to be a difficult one? I genuinely don’t understand the point you’re making here.
Edit to add this paragraph: All these questions are beside the point. They don’t get us closer to understanding whether our reading of your original comment was truly uncharitable, because even if I say that no, it’s not a lie, it doesn’t answer whether we were unjustified in reading your original comment as meaning ‘pretend to desire the job a lot more than [you do / is reasonable]’ instead of meaning ‘truthfully say that you want the job’.
Unlike some commenters, I don’t assume that prospective employers are evil bastards who want me to work for nothing. I expect that there will be a mutually beneficial exchange. If it isn’t beneficial to me, I’ll leave.
I suspect how it usually happens is that the employer makes a reasonable choice to prefer candidates who are ‘excited about the mission’ or super concur with the ‘company values’ or other preferences, not requirements, but as the job market gets more competitive, more prospective employees start feeling like their only choice is to start, let’s say, ‘playing up’ their desire for the job.
Calling a positive action “lying” or “self harm” does come across to me as a very negative interpretation of what I said.
You didn’t say they had a “negative interpretation”, you said they had a “negative worldview”, knowing full well — unless you misinterpreted their comment, and it’s okay to admit so — that their “worldview” was an attack on something you didn’t say, so of course it comes across as if you’re saying it’s negative to even disagree with the strawman of you.
See the video game analogy above.
My $0.02 is that if I’m trying to get a job, I communicate that I understand the requirements, that I want the job, and I put myself in the best light. Yet a large number of other commenters seem to think that’s an insane / evil thing for anyone to do.
I doubt anyone here is saying it’s insane or evil to communicate that you understand the requirements, that you want the job, and to put yourself in the best (truthful) light.
I would submit that if a “large number of other commenters” had a seemingly uncharitable interpretation of your comment, then there might have been a problem with how you’re communicating, or at least, it could be improved.
And, frankly, looking back at your original words and how you say you intended them, I see an unresolvable (to my mind) disconnect for the reason “b)” that I outlined.
When people complain that a company wants cult members, not employees, they can be exaggerating the degree while still meaning that the company wants an extreme/unreasonable level of love, devotion, unquestioning obedience, sacrifice, etc.
In fact, that’s the norm; most people making that complaint aren’t literally saying the company wants truly that level of devotion and obedience. So people interpret your comment in light of that fact.
My “exaggeration” could have been taken in a number of different ways, with different possible responses to each one.
Literal interpretation. Response Uh, you do realize that if you put over the top gushing text into a resume / CV, it will be creepy, and people will reject it. Don’t do that.
Positive interpretation. Response I think this sounds a bit exaggerated. But I do agree it’s a good idea to make sure that your resume / CV addresses the points in the job offer.
Negative interpretation. Response You want me to crawl under the desk of the interviewer and service him, in order to get the job? What a horrible thing to say!
The repeated insistence that my comments have terrible intent says more about the reader than me, TBH. It’s not just an interpretation, it’s a world view that negative interpretations are the most likely ones to be correct.
Note that there was no clarifying question. Just a bare statement that my comment was terrible.
Depends why you’re wearing a suit. Is it to fulfil some corporate dress code? Then, no, why would that be a lie? Unless it’s your intent to communicate a message that you know or believe to be opposite to reality, then wearing clothes you wouldn’t normally wear is not a lie.
That is exactly my point about customizing the resume / CV for a job offer. It’s not a lie. It’s not self-harm. So why is it so hard to understand that customizing a resume / CV is also a positive thing?
“Communicate to the employer that I had read the job posting, and had relevant skills” has nothing to do with “communicate to the employer that I want the job”, i
So… if you don’t want the job, you should still communicate that you had read the posting? Or if you do want the job, you shouldn’t communicate to the employer that you do want the job?
In my view, the two situations are tightly bound. It is very odd to suggest that they are completely independent.
In fact, that’s the norm; most people making that complaint aren’t literally saying the company wants truly that level of devotion and obedience.
Reading the other comments here, I’m not so sure about that. The massive negativity I’m getting for explaining a position assumes all kinds of evil intent.
So people interpret your comment in light of that fact.
So people talking about companies aren’t literally saying bad things about them. But my comments were clearly intended to be negative, and it’s difficult to see them otherwise.
The repeated insistence that my comments have terrible intent says more about the reader than me, TBH. It’s not just an interpretation, it’s a world view that negative interpretations are the most likely ones to be correct.
I haven’t said anything about your intent. But in the same breath as you’re chiding people for inferring your mental state from your words, you’re making proclamations about their mental state based on the interpretation they read from your words, and refusing to entertain the possibility that your communication was lacking.
That is exactly my point about customizing the resume / CV for a job offer. It’s not a lie.
No, customising a resumé or CV for a job is not in and of itself a lie. But, like the clothes you wear, if the intent is to communicate a message that you know or believe to be opposite to reality, it would be.
You specifically tailored your CV to communicate a message of desire for the company. Again, in and of itself, nothing wrong with that.
Now, here’s the thing about exaggeration: it’s (usually) used as an intensifier. So you saying that you “tried to send a message of OMG, my entire life I’ve been working towards getting this job!” comes across as you saying that you tried to send a message of intense desire to work for that company, to the point that if you didn’t need the money to survive, you’d work with the company solely to enact their mission because you care about it that much, something many people do and advocate for. Your words can even be interpreted as that you tried to send a message of desire for that specific company as your top choice to all the companies.
So when you say, “Positive interpretation. Response I think this sounds a bit exaggerated. But I do agree it’s a good idea to make sure that your resume / CV addresses the points in the job offer.”, you’re still ignoring my point (which I’ve been making) that one can read your words as exaggeration while still interpreting the exaggeration as intensification, just not to the degree of the words taken literally, because that’s generally what exaggeration is for.
So… if you don’t want the job, you should still communicate that you had read the posting? Or if you do want the job, you shouldn’t communicate to the employer that you do want the job?
Talk about a lack of charity (which you’ve been ironically demonstrating yourself in this conversation).
All I’m saying is that you claimed:
More charitably, I’ve exaggerated […].
The practical (and real) goal [of the exaggeration] is simple: Communicate to the employer that I had read the job posting, and had relevant skills.
But communicating that you’d read the job posting does not entail communicating an intense level of desire for it. Even communicating an intense level of desire doesn’t necessarily communicate that you’d read the job posting, although that’d be a reasonable assumption of the hiring manager.
Reading the other comments here, I’m not so sure about that. The massive negativity I’m getting for explaining a position assumes all kinds of evil intent.
Okay, first off, we keep talking about other people. I’m not gonna read the whole thread, but given the lack of charity I feel I’ve received in how you’ve been engaging with my comments, please forgive me if I reserve my judgment on that.
But the negativity to me doesn’t seem to be for explaining your position, it seems that your explanation of your position seems to be confusing people. Bear in mind that it’s possible for someone to say one thing, then backtrack in the face of a negative response, while pretending they’d meant something more innocuous all along; I’m not saying you’re doing that, but people are reading your explanations and unable to reconcile them with your earlier words.
As I said before:
Then you chose your words very poorly IMO, because even now with your clarification, I can’t look back at your original words and think, “oh, yeah, I see how they meant that”, I just look at it and think, “these words are very different from what they’re now saying they meant”.
Normally, I’d swallow my confusion and accept your clarification, but when you responded to @hjvt by dismissing their reaction to their misinterpretation of your words as “deeply cynical”, “fatalistic”, “extremist”, and “negative” in two sentences, you can understand how
a) people might want to defend @hjvt’s interpretation as reasonable and even your interpretation of their words as _un_reasonable, especially when
b) your failing to correct their misinterpretation and responding to their statement with an implicit acceptance of their framing makes your response even more confusing; again, see the video game analogy I made in my previous comment, and please respond to it, because it’s a big part of the reason why I was compelled to even respond to your response of @hjvt’s original response to you.
When I was reading your original comment and got to the part about the “message” you were trying to send, it turned me off majorly from the comment. Then, I saw your response to @hjvt and thought, “my God, they actually meant it the way I read it”, shocked that you would somehow claim their rejection of the clearly negative thing they interpreted your comment to be was itself negative.
Your original comment doesn’t say their interpretation was “cynical”, “extremist”, etc., it says their “worldview” is; except the worldview they advocated in that comment was a rejection of something you yourself don’t stand by, because you claim it to be a misinterpretation.
So people talking about companies aren’t literally saying bad things about them. But my comments were clearly intended to be negative, and it’s difficult to see them otherwise.
This is very much a double standard.
Sorry, I’m confused. What are you referring to here? Who’s saying what about companies which we’re contesting whether they meant it as a negative thing or not?
(edit) I had a different reply, and deleted it. I think it’s better for me to address the main issue, rather than get lost in the weeds of issues 4-5 messages down.
The claim is that my comment was extremely negative. The words used were “self -harm”, and “lie”. The claim is that this position is an entirely reasonable conclusion.
My counter-point is that there are more reasonable, and more likely interpretations of my comment. I’ll note that when I offered such interpretations, those interpretations were ignored, and my entire argument for that was not addressed.
So I have a request. Please go through the original message where I made the “OMG” statement. Please interpret the “OMG” statement in context:
did I express hostility towards potential employees?
did I express fawning adulation for employers?
did I suggest that job seekers abase / abuse themselves in order to get a job?
did I suggest that job seekers lie about wanting the job?
did I suggest that job seekers lie at all?
did I suggest that job seekers commit acts of self-harm in order to get a job?
I think the answer to all of those questions is “no”. Given that, the most reasonable interpretation of the “OMG” comment is that it’s hyperbole.
Yet despite my repeated protestations and explanations, you’re still doubling down on the idea that the comment was extremely negative. And, intended to be negative. My clear explanations of what I think, and why, have also been rejected. Instead, my explanations that I didn’t intend a negative meaning have been used to confirm this extreme misinterpretation of my position.
Since the opinions here aren’t based on facts and evidence, they can’t be refuted with facts and evidence. You’re right, I’m wrong, and no amount of discussion will get you to admit that my comments weren’t intended that way, and that my position might in any way be reasonable.
I myself have made no claims about what your intended meaning is. So, at this point, I don’t think I’ll ever get you to understand my view on this, not before our deaths or maybe even the death of the universe.
I don’t know what your original reply was, but I expressly requested that you engage with a specific point I made, which I used the video game analogy to help explain, and in this edit, you again ignored it.
If you want to understand one of my main points regarding the “main issue”, reading that part of my comment which I’ve already posted is your best shot.
Those are the two reasons I asked you to engage with it; it’s one of the main points I’d hoped to get across to you, and it’s my best attempt to do so. Given that, I see no reason to try again until you engage with it.
Before then, I won’t be going through any original messages. I’ve already gone through them enough times.
I’ll just close off by saying that I never said your position was unreasonable. You keep ascribing positions to me that I never espoused. You’re the only one saying that my opinion is not based on facts and evidence and they can’t be refuted with facts and evidence.
I said no such thing about you. I do think if you engaged with the part of my comment I asked you to engage with, you might actually understand a big part of what I’m trying to say, and you may even be able to respond to it in a way that gets me to change my mind on at least that part.
But I understand that things slip through the cracks. That’s why I’m pointing it out, because I actually do believe that, if reminded, you’d be happy to look at evidence or reasoning that you ignored the first couple of times.
So yes, I’m sure you’ve formed your opinion on facts and evidence and reasoning. I think you missed some reasoning that I asked you to look at, but that doesn’t mean you have a commitment to ignoring facts and evidence and reasoning on this topic or something. It takes a lot for me to come to that conclusion about somebody.
And frankly, insincerity is a gradient, anyway, and often invisible to the insincere person themselves, and it starts small. I’m not the judge to sit here and proclaim that I have 100% pure sincerity in the way I’m looking at the evidence, and that you, my disputant, are just insincerely ignoring the evidence. Let the outside observers make their judgments.
The original reply described my comments as supporting “self harm” and “a lie”. You’ve been supporting that position. Quote:
it’s still the case that such pretence would be lying and an act of self-harm,
Further, when I denied that my intent was to support those ideas, you took that as instead confirming that my intent was negative:
I saw your response to @hjvt and thought, “my God, they actually meant it the way I read it”,
This is not something I misunderstood. These are not points I’m avoiding. I’ve been trying to make it clear that I object to both of those characterizations, and that I think they are objectively unreasonable.
For the video game analogy:
It’s like if someone overhears me shouting “you took my stuff, I’m gonna beat you to a pulp for that” into my headset, and storms into my room shouting, “what the hell, that’s not okay!”, and instead of telling them, “what?, no, I’m playing a video game”, I go, “why’re you defending a thief?”. If that person ends up wondering whether I might think what I’m doing is okay even outside the context of a video game, I wouldn’t blame them.
That is a rather convoluted and exaggerated analogy. And not as relevant as you think. First, it assumes that the statement itself was extreme, and negative. Taken in the context of the message, my original “OMG” comment was clearly hyperbole, and clearly not telling the job seeker to do anything actively negative.
i.e. You’re re-phrasing my point in such a way as to assume your interpretation is correct.
Here’s a more on-point analogy: You’re talking to a friend, and say Wow, I love my job. Your friend expresses great shock and horror, and says Why are you saying that you want to crawl under your bosses desk and service him? You’re happily married! You love your wife!
Such a negative interpretation of a positive comment is at best, bizarre.
So we’re left with this, at least from my side:
Me: Edit the resume to make yourself look good.
Response: You’re really saying that people should self-harm by submitting to abuse from interviewers.
Me: You should apply for jobs you want
Response: You’re really saying that people should lie, by submitting resumes to jobs you don’t want.
Me: No, I don’t mean that at all!
Response: You’re really saying that you actually do mean that!
This is seems to be either trolling, or evidence of unordered thinking.
The original reply described my comments as supporting “self harm” and “a lie”. You’ve been supporting that position. Quote:
it’s still the case that such pretence would be lying and an act of self-harm,
X would be an act of self-harm. Whether you intended X or not is immaterial to that specific point of mine. X would be an act of self-harm regardless of whether you intended X or not.
The problem is, the person you’re responding to obviously interpreted your words as X, responded that X is an act of self-harm, and you responded to them by calling their worldview (not their interpretation) as negative — and the view they espoused was clearly a rejection of X, even if you didn’t intend X in your original message.
If you say you didn’t mean that, then okay, I’ll take you at your word. I’m not doubling down on what your intention was; as I’ve said, I don’t know your intention.
But you seem to think people’s interpretation was uncharitable, and I simply disagree that it was. Charity is to:
a) take the more likely meaning; e.g. someone says, “killing is not okay”, and you assume they probably or at least maybe mean “murder” because pacifism is a rare worldview.
b) take the less damning meaning because what they said comes across as unprecedented or logically contradictory or otherwise extremely problematic to immediately assume they meant exactly what they said; e.g. someone says “we should legalise murder”, but you assume they meant the opposite of what they said and got the words jumbled up, maybe typo’d and forgot to insert a “not” in the sentence.
c) reserve judgment on what they meant because what they said sounds outrageous to you but you can’t infer another interpretation from their words, or any other interpretation you do see would be too strained.
There’s only so far that charity can take you. Personally, I chose option c, but once you responded to @hjvt, I could no longer reserve judgment. It seemed so obvious from their words that they interpreted your words as X, they clearly were rejecting X, then you responded by assigning to their view, not their interpretation, four negative, loaded attributes; you didn’t even call their view extreme, you called it “extremist”.
So what the hell am I supposed to think except that you understood their words — since they were clear, certainly far more in line with their intended meaning than your original words seem to be — and actually did mean to call their view extremist and cynical and fatalistic, since you didn’t take the opportunity to correct their misinterpretation instead of just blithely dismissing their comment with such loaded language?
Sure, I probably could have been more charitable at that point, but I don’t think I’ve been _un_charitable. Certainly no less charitable than you were to @hjvt.
That is a rather convoluted and exaggerated analogy. And not as relevant as you think. First, it assumes that the statement itself was extreme, and negative.
Whether the statement itself was or wasn’t extreme or negative is immaterial to the actual point that I’m trying to make with the analogy; either way, in reality and in the analogy, the original statement could have been interpreted in a negative or a non-negative way.
We’ve literally been arguing about whether the negative interpretation was the more reasonable to infer from the words, but that’s not the point the analogy is trying to settle the debate on, so again, it’s irrelevant.
Can you put into your own words in a sentence or two what point I’m trying to make with the analogy? Here are some clues: it’s specifically about your initial response to @hjvt, and it’s essentially stated in the first sentence after the analogy, the last sentence of your quoting of the analogy.
If you can accurately state my point, I’ll let you know and you can engage with it.
Here’s a more on-point analogy: You’re talking to a friend, and say Wow, I love my job. Your friend expresses great shock and horror, and says Why are you saying that you want to crawl under your bosses desk and service him? You’re happily married! You love your wife!
This is waaay further from what actually happened than my analogy. You literally nitpicked about my analogy making the “statement itself” negative when that has nothing to do with the point it’s making, then you come out with this?
After saying that whether the “statement itself” is negative or not isn’t relevant, I was going to actually express sympathy for not making the original statement in the analogy more ambiguous, but that I simply reached for something quickly to illustrate my point, which was about your response to @hjvt and not about settling the debate of which interpretation is more reasonable;
I was even going to apologise for unintentionally smuggling in other parts of my view into the analogy, distracting from the actual point of the analogy by not being more precise with it even on the parts that weren’t relevant to the point, etc.
But you come out with this after nitpicking my analogy? Any sympathy I had left for you is gone now.
Such a negative interpretation of a positive comment is at best, bizarre.
Nah, your analogy’s bizarre. That’s it.
You complain my analogy makes the statement itself extreme, but you freely admit your analogy makes the statement itself unambiguously positive? This entire scenario doesn’t happen if the statement is unambiguous.
My analogy had it so the person coming in misunderstood the comment and interpreted it in the more negative way when the person meant it in the more positive way (which we’d both agree is analogous to your situation; people coming in misunderstood the comment and interpreted it in a more negative way when you meant it in a more positive way — so you say, I struggle to even believe you at this point).
Yours doesn’t even turn the respondent into a caricature of uncharitability who takes a strained interpretation, but into a non-sequitur machine who changes the meaning of what was said.
So we’re left with this, at least from my side:
Me: Edit the resume to make yourself look good.
Response: You’re really saying that people should self-harm by submitting to abuse from interviewers.
Me: You should apply for jobs you want
Response: You’re really saying that people should lie, by submitting resumes to jobs you don’t want.
Me: No, I don’t mean that at all!
Response: You’re really saying that you actually do mean that!
Yeah, this is also far from what happened.
You wouldn’t be able to match up each back and forth in this analogy to each comment in the start of the thread and point out what the analogous attributes are, why they’re relevant.
It’s also not a more apt analogy, because you’ve changed what the analogy is even about (rather than making an analogy that inverts my point about the same topic (your response to @hjvt), your analogy is talking about a different topic entirely (@hjvt and others’ responses to you), and making a different point (that they misunderstood you), rather than being an inversion of my point, which I’ll still give you an opportunity to put into your own words).
This is seems to be either trolling, or evidence of unordered thinking.
The only one with unordered thinking is you. I think you’re feeling aggrieved and you’re not thinking straight. That’s the only reason I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.
If it weren’t for that, your last two analogies in any other context, especially after nitpicking my analogy and failing to engage with its point — although you at least this time engaged the analogy itself on a superficial level — I would have considered to be a troll from your end.
I won’t fake concern for you by telling you to take a break or something (although I think you should), the aforementioned troll behaviour was the last straw and I’m pissed off now, so I’ll just tell you straight up, it’s you that’s not thinking straight, not everyone else who interpreted your original words negatively.
You’re in the thick of it, feeling victimised, and it’s clouding your thinking. You can take a break or not, but I’m done responding, at least for a couple weeks.
the view they espoused was clearly a rejection of X, even if you didn’t intend X in your original message.
Again, basic reading comprehension is missing. I’m not concerned that they’re rejecting X. I’m concerned that they thought my comment intended X. When every reasonable interpretation was that it didn’t.
I think you’re feeling aggrieved and you’re not thinking straight.
Do you think that you can read peoples minds?
You previously commented that when I said “I’m sorry”, it was really "fake condolences.
So you know better than me what I mean. You’re 100% sure that basic, positive statements have secret negative intent.
I don’t feel victimized. I’m amazed the simple, clear, statements are read as having secret meaning.
Sure, but that’s not the point I was trying to make. I was hoping that people would read my comments as making a point for effect, not as a literal statement to abase yourself to the corporate gods.
So when you show up at a job interview wearing a suit (or dress better than normal), is that a lie, too? Or are you trying to make a good impression?
Well, it’s what I intended it to mean. And I do appreciate that your comments here are communicative, and charitable. That’s a lot nicer than the wide range of fantastical inventions I’ve seen.
I hope you understand that’s a negative interpretation of what I said. A positive interpretation is a much simpler trying to make a good impression, or trying to see things from someone elses view.
Is it lying to tell the interviewer that you want the job? It is an act of self harm to phrase your resume using words from the job posting?
Such a response is deeply odd to me. Unlike some commenters, I don’t assume that prospective employers are evil bastards who want me to work for nothing. I expect that there will be a mutually beneficial exchange. If it isn’t beneficial to me, I’ll leave.
This is the disconnect. I fail to see how putting yourself in a positive light is an act of self-harm. Calling a positive action “lying” or “self harm” does come across to me as a very negative interpretation of what I said.
If the original commenter interpreted my statements as shitting on prospective employees, and demanding that they abase / abuse themselves to get the job, then yes… such I agree that demanding such abuse is negative. But I would gently suggest that such an interpretation is not a charitable one. If anything, it’s extreme, and negative. Hence my describing it that way.
My $0.02 is that if I’m trying to get a job, I communicate that I understand the requirements, that I want the job, and I put myself in the best light. Yet a large number of other commenters seem to think that’s an insane / evil thing for anyone to do.
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You’ve said that. I was trying to explain why:
a) your “exaggeration” is something too real and normalised by enough people that it doesn’t immediately come across as obvious exaggeration, and
b) even interpreting it as exaggeration doesn’t work, because the very act of communicating a higher level of desire for a job than you have, even if it’d be a reasonable, non-extreme, and proportionate level of desire to have for the job, just a level you don’t have, can still be a lie and an act of self-harm; I wouldn’t use such strong language myself, but I wouldn’t consider such an opinion to be extreme.
Depends why you’re wearing a suit. Is it to fulfil some corporate dress code? Then, no, why would that be a lie? Unless it’s your intent to communicate a message that you know or believe to be opposite to reality, then wearing clothes you wouldn’t normally wear is not a lie.
For example, a police officer wears a uniform on the job, but doesn’t off the job. That uniform is meant to communicate something to the people around them, something that’s true, which is that they’re a police officer. A (non-officer) criminal might wear the same as a lie. The police officer doesn’t normally wear those clothes outside of the job, that doesn’t make it a lie.
As for dressing better than normal, it depends exactly. When you say “better than normal”, does that mean dressing to a standard that you wouldn’t at home, or that you wouldn’t when hanging out with your friends, or what? And the purpose and intent matters. You’ve not given enough information to judge. It can be a lie, or there can be some other reasonable explanation for that behaviour.
Then you chose your words very poorly IMO, because even now with your clarification, I can’t look back at your original words and think, “oh, yeah, I see how they meant that”, I just look at it and think, “these words are very different from what they’re now saying they meant”.
“Communicate to the employer that I had read the job posting, and had relevant skills” has nothing to do with “communicate to the employer that I want the job”, irrespective of whether you’re communicating a reasonable level of desire or an extreme level of desire and also irrespective of whether the level of desire you’re communicating is truthful.
But, to reiterate, even interpreting it as exaggeration doesn’t work (see “b)” above).
You saying it’s a negative interpretation of what you said doesn’t respond to my point. See where I said, “even if they misunderstood you” [emphasis added]? It was obvious from their comment how they interpreted your words, they attacked their negative interpretation of your words, and you, instead of saying, “hey, you misunderstood me”, call their rejection of their negative interpretation of your words extremist and negative.
It’s like if someone overhears me shouting “you took my stuff, I’m gonna beat you to a pulp for that” into my headset, and storms into my room shouting, “what the hell, that’s not okay!”, and instead of telling them, “what?, no, I’m playing a video game”, I go, “why’re you defending a thief?”. If that person ends up wondering whether I might think what I’m doing is okay even outside the context of a video game, I wouldn’t blame them.
I mean, it would be (a lie) if you didn’t (want the job) and it wouldn’t be (a lie) if you did (want the job). Is this supposed to be a difficult one? I genuinely don’t understand the point you’re making here.
Edit to add this paragraph: All these questions are beside the point. They don’t get us closer to understanding whether our reading of your original comment was truly uncharitable, because even if I say that no, it’s not a lie, it doesn’t answer whether we were unjustified in reading your original comment as meaning ‘pretend to desire the job a lot more than [you do / is reasonable]’ instead of meaning ‘truthfully say that you want the job’.
I suspect how it usually happens is that the employer makes a reasonable choice to prefer candidates who are ‘excited about the mission’ or super concur with the ‘company values’ or other preferences, not requirements, but as the job market gets more competitive, more prospective employees start feeling like their only choice is to start, let’s say, ‘playing up’ their desire for the job.
You didn’t say they had a “negative interpretation”, you said they had a “negative worldview”, knowing full well — unless you misinterpreted their comment, and it’s okay to admit so — that their “worldview” was an attack on something you didn’t say, so of course it comes across as if you’re saying it’s negative to even disagree with the strawman of you.
See the video game analogy above.
I doubt anyone here is saying it’s insane or evil to communicate that you understand the requirements, that you want the job, and to put yourself in the best (truthful) light.
I would submit that if a “large number of other commenters” had a seemingly uncharitable interpretation of your comment, then there might have been a problem with how you’re communicating, or at least, it could be improved.
And, frankly, looking back at your original words and how you say you intended them, I see an unresolvable (to my mind) disconnect for the reason “b)” that I outlined.
When people complain that a company wants cult members, not employees, they can be exaggerating the degree while still meaning that the company wants an extreme/unreasonable level of love, devotion, unquestioning obedience, sacrifice, etc.
In fact, that’s the norm; most people making that complaint aren’t literally saying the company wants truly that level of devotion and obedience. So people interpret your comment in light of that fact.
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My “exaggeration” could have been taken in a number of different ways, with different possible responses to each one.
Literal interpretation. Response Uh, you do realize that if you put over the top gushing text into a resume / CV, it will be creepy, and people will reject it. Don’t do that.
Positive interpretation. Response I think this sounds a bit exaggerated. But I do agree it’s a good idea to make sure that your resume / CV addresses the points in the job offer.
Negative interpretation. Response You want me to crawl under the desk of the interviewer and service him, in order to get the job? What a horrible thing to say!
The repeated insistence that my comments have terrible intent says more about the reader than me, TBH. It’s not just an interpretation, it’s a world view that negative interpretations are the most likely ones to be correct.
Note that there was no clarifying question. Just a bare statement that my comment was terrible.
That is exactly my point about customizing the resume / CV for a job offer. It’s not a lie. It’s not self-harm. So why is it so hard to understand that customizing a resume / CV is also a positive thing?
So… if you don’t want the job, you should still communicate that you had read the posting? Or if you do want the job, you shouldn’t communicate to the employer that you do want the job?
In my view, the two situations are tightly bound. It is very odd to suggest that they are completely independent.
Reading the other comments here, I’m not so sure about that. The massive negativity I’m getting for explaining a position assumes all kinds of evil intent.
So people talking about companies aren’t literally saying bad things about them. But my comments were clearly intended to be negative, and it’s difficult to see them otherwise.
This is very much a double standard.
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I haven’t said anything about your intent. But in the same breath as you’re chiding people for inferring your mental state from your words, you’re making proclamations about their mental state based on the interpretation they read from your words, and refusing to entertain the possibility that your communication was lacking.
No, customising a resumé or CV for a job is not in and of itself a lie. But, like the clothes you wear, if the intent is to communicate a message that you know or believe to be opposite to reality, it would be.
You specifically tailored your CV to communicate a message of desire for the company. Again, in and of itself, nothing wrong with that.
Now, here’s the thing about exaggeration: it’s (usually) used as an intensifier. So you saying that you “tried to send a message of OMG, my entire life I’ve been working towards getting this job!” comes across as you saying that you tried to send a message of intense desire to work for that company, to the point that if you didn’t need the money to survive, you’d work with the company solely to enact their mission because you care about it that much, something many people do and advocate for. Your words can even be interpreted as that you tried to send a message of desire for that specific company as your top choice to all the companies.
So when you say, “Positive interpretation. Response I think this sounds a bit exaggerated. But I do agree it’s a good idea to make sure that your resume / CV addresses the points in the job offer.”, you’re still ignoring my point (which I’ve been making) that one can read your words as exaggeration while still interpreting the exaggeration as intensification, just not to the degree of the words taken literally, because that’s generally what exaggeration is for.
Talk about a lack of charity (which you’ve been ironically demonstrating yourself in this conversation).
All I’m saying is that you claimed:
But communicating that you’d read the job posting does not entail communicating an intense level of desire for it. Even communicating an intense level of desire doesn’t necessarily communicate that you’d read the job posting, although that’d be a reasonable assumption of the hiring manager.
Okay, first off, we keep talking about other people. I’m not gonna read the whole thread, but given the lack of charity I feel I’ve received in how you’ve been engaging with my comments, please forgive me if I reserve my judgment on that.
But the negativity to me doesn’t seem to be for explaining your position, it seems that your explanation of your position seems to be confusing people. Bear in mind that it’s possible for someone to say one thing, then backtrack in the face of a negative response, while pretending they’d meant something more innocuous all along; I’m not saying you’re doing that, but people are reading your explanations and unable to reconcile them with your earlier words.
As I said before:
Normally, I’d swallow my confusion and accept your clarification, but when you responded to @hjvt by dismissing their reaction to their misinterpretation of your words as “deeply cynical”, “fatalistic”, “extremist”, and “negative” in two sentences, you can understand how
a) people might want to defend @hjvt’s interpretation as reasonable and even your interpretation of their words as _un_reasonable, especially when
b) your failing to correct their misinterpretation and responding to their statement with an implicit acceptance of their framing makes your response even more confusing; again, see the video game analogy I made in my previous comment, and please respond to it, because it’s a big part of the reason why I was compelled to even respond to your response of @hjvt’s original response to you.
When I was reading your original comment and got to the part about the “message” you were trying to send, it turned me off majorly from the comment. Then, I saw your response to @hjvt and thought, “my God, they actually meant it the way I read it”, shocked that you would somehow claim their rejection of the clearly negative thing they interpreted your comment to be was itself negative.
Your original comment doesn’t say their interpretation was “cynical”, “extremist”, etc., it says their “worldview” is; except the worldview they advocated in that comment was a rejection of something you yourself don’t stand by, because you claim it to be a misinterpretation.
Sorry, I’m confused. What are you referring to here? Who’s saying what about companies which we’re contesting whether they meant it as a negative thing or not?
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(edit) I had a different reply, and deleted it. I think it’s better for me to address the main issue, rather than get lost in the weeds of issues 4-5 messages down.
The claim is that my comment was extremely negative. The words used were “self -harm”, and “lie”. The claim is that this position is an entirely reasonable conclusion.
My counter-point is that there are more reasonable, and more likely interpretations of my comment. I’ll note that when I offered such interpretations, those interpretations were ignored, and my entire argument for that was not addressed.
So I have a request. Please go through the original message where I made the “OMG” statement. Please interpret the “OMG” statement in context:
I think the answer to all of those questions is “no”. Given that, the most reasonable interpretation of the “OMG” comment is that it’s hyperbole.
Yet despite my repeated protestations and explanations, you’re still doubling down on the idea that the comment was extremely negative. And, intended to be negative. My clear explanations of what I think, and why, have also been rejected. Instead, my explanations that I didn’t intend a negative meaning have been used to confirm this extreme misinterpretation of my position.
Since the opinions here aren’t based on facts and evidence, they can’t be refuted with facts and evidence. You’re right, I’m wrong, and no amount of discussion will get you to admit that my comments weren’t intended that way, and that my position might in any way be reasonable.
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I myself have made no claims about what your intended meaning is. So, at this point, I don’t think I’ll ever get you to understand my view on this, not before our deaths or maybe even the death of the universe.
I don’t know what your original reply was, but I expressly requested that you engage with a specific point I made, which I used the video game analogy to help explain, and in this edit, you again ignored it.
If you want to understand one of my main points regarding the “main issue”, reading that part of my comment which I’ve already posted is your best shot.
Those are the two reasons I asked you to engage with it; it’s one of the main points I’d hoped to get across to you, and it’s my best attempt to do so. Given that, I see no reason to try again until you engage with it.
Before then, I won’t be going through any original messages. I’ve already gone through them enough times.
I’ll just close off by saying that I never said your position was unreasonable. You keep ascribing positions to me that I never espoused. You’re the only one saying that my opinion is not based on facts and evidence and they can’t be refuted with facts and evidence.
I said no such thing about you. I do think if you engaged with the part of my comment I asked you to engage with, you might actually understand a big part of what I’m trying to say, and you may even be able to respond to it in a way that gets me to change my mind on at least that part.
But I understand that things slip through the cracks. That’s why I’m pointing it out, because I actually do believe that, if reminded, you’d be happy to look at evidence or reasoning that you ignored the first couple of times.
So yes, I’m sure you’ve formed your opinion on facts and evidence and reasoning. I think you missed some reasoning that I asked you to look at, but that doesn’t mean you have a commitment to ignoring facts and evidence and reasoning on this topic or something. It takes a lot for me to come to that conclusion about somebody.
And frankly, insincerity is a gradient, anyway, and often invisible to the insincere person themselves, and it starts small. I’m not the judge to sit here and proclaim that I have 100% pure sincerity in the way I’m looking at the evidence, and that you, my disputant, are just insincerely ignoring the evidence. Let the outside observers make their judgments.
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The original reply described my comments as supporting “self harm” and “a lie”. You’ve been supporting that position. Quote:
Further, when I denied that my intent was to support those ideas, you took that as instead confirming that my intent was negative:
This is not something I misunderstood. These are not points I’m avoiding. I’ve been trying to make it clear that I object to both of those characterizations, and that I think they are objectively unreasonable.
For the video game analogy:
That is a rather convoluted and exaggerated analogy. And not as relevant as you think. First, it assumes that the statement itself was extreme, and negative. Taken in the context of the message, my original “OMG” comment was clearly hyperbole, and clearly not telling the job seeker to do anything actively negative.
i.e. You’re re-phrasing my point in such a way as to assume your interpretation is correct.
Here’s a more on-point analogy: You’re talking to a friend, and say Wow, I love my job. Your friend expresses great shock and horror, and says Why are you saying that you want to crawl under your bosses desk and service him? You’re happily married! You love your wife!
Such a negative interpretation of a positive comment is at best, bizarre.
So we’re left with this, at least from my side:
Me: Edit the resume to make yourself look good.
Response: You’re really saying that people should self-harm by submitting to abuse from interviewers.
Me: You should apply for jobs you want
Response: You’re really saying that people should lie, by submitting resumes to jobs you don’t want.
Me: No, I don’t mean that at all!
Response: You’re really saying that you actually do mean that!
This is seems to be either trolling, or evidence of unordered thinking.
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X would be an act of self-harm. Whether you intended X or not is immaterial to that specific point of mine. X would be an act of self-harm regardless of whether you intended X or not.
The problem is, the person you’re responding to obviously interpreted your words as X, responded that X is an act of self-harm, and you responded to them by calling their worldview (not their interpretation) as negative — and the view they espoused was clearly a rejection of X, even if you didn’t intend X in your original message.
If you say you didn’t mean that, then okay, I’ll take you at your word. I’m not doubling down on what your intention was; as I’ve said, I don’t know your intention.
But you seem to think people’s interpretation was uncharitable, and I simply disagree that it was. Charity is to:
a) take the more likely meaning; e.g. someone says, “killing is not okay”, and you assume they probably or at least maybe mean “murder” because pacifism is a rare worldview.
b) take the less damning meaning because what they said comes across as unprecedented or logically contradictory or otherwise extremely problematic to immediately assume they meant exactly what they said; e.g. someone says “we should legalise murder”, but you assume they meant the opposite of what they said and got the words jumbled up, maybe typo’d and forgot to insert a “not” in the sentence.
c) reserve judgment on what they meant because what they said sounds outrageous to you but you can’t infer another interpretation from their words, or any other interpretation you do see would be too strained.
There’s only so far that charity can take you. Personally, I chose option c, but once you responded to @hjvt, I could no longer reserve judgment. It seemed so obvious from their words that they interpreted your words as X, they clearly were rejecting X, then you responded by assigning to their view, not their interpretation, four negative, loaded attributes; you didn’t even call their view extreme, you called it “extremist”.
So what the hell am I supposed to think except that you understood their words — since they were clear, certainly far more in line with their intended meaning than your original words seem to be — and actually did mean to call their view extremist and cynical and fatalistic, since you didn’t take the opportunity to correct their misinterpretation instead of just blithely dismissing their comment with such loaded language?
Sure, I probably could have been more charitable at that point, but I don’t think I’ve been _un_charitable. Certainly no less charitable than you were to @hjvt.
Whether the statement itself was or wasn’t extreme or negative is immaterial to the actual point that I’m trying to make with the analogy; either way, in reality and in the analogy, the original statement could have been interpreted in a negative or a non-negative way.
We’ve literally been arguing about whether the negative interpretation was the more reasonable to infer from the words, but that’s not the point the analogy is trying to settle the debate on, so again, it’s irrelevant.
Can you put into your own words in a sentence or two what point I’m trying to make with the analogy? Here are some clues: it’s specifically about your initial response to @hjvt, and it’s essentially stated in the first sentence after the analogy, the last sentence of your quoting of the analogy.
If you can accurately state my point, I’ll let you know and you can engage with it.
This is waaay further from what actually happened than my analogy. You literally nitpicked about my analogy making the “statement itself” negative when that has nothing to do with the point it’s making, then you come out with this?
After saying that whether the “statement itself” is negative or not isn’t relevant, I was going to actually express sympathy for not making the original statement in the analogy more ambiguous, but that I simply reached for something quickly to illustrate my point, which was about your response to @hjvt and not about settling the debate of which interpretation is more reasonable;
I was even going to apologise for unintentionally smuggling in other parts of my view into the analogy, distracting from the actual point of the analogy by not being more precise with it even on the parts that weren’t relevant to the point, etc.
But you come out with this after nitpicking my analogy? Any sympathy I had left for you is gone now.
Nah, your analogy’s bizarre. That’s it.
You complain my analogy makes the statement itself extreme, but you freely admit your analogy makes the statement itself unambiguously positive? This entire scenario doesn’t happen if the statement is unambiguous.
My analogy had it so the person coming in misunderstood the comment and interpreted it in the more negative way when the person meant it in the more positive way (which we’d both agree is analogous to your situation; people coming in misunderstood the comment and interpreted it in a more negative way when you meant it in a more positive way — so you say, I struggle to even believe you at this point).
Yours doesn’t even turn the respondent into a caricature of uncharitability who takes a strained interpretation, but into a non-sequitur machine who changes the meaning of what was said.
Yeah, this is also far from what happened.
You wouldn’t be able to match up each back and forth in this analogy to each comment in the start of the thread and point out what the analogous attributes are, why they’re relevant.
It’s also not a more apt analogy, because you’ve changed what the analogy is even about (rather than making an analogy that inverts my point about the same topic (your response to @hjvt), your analogy is talking about a different topic entirely (@hjvt and others’ responses to you), and making a different point (that they misunderstood you), rather than being an inversion of my point, which I’ll still give you an opportunity to put into your own words).
The only one with unordered thinking is you. I think you’re feeling aggrieved and you’re not thinking straight. That’s the only reason I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.
If it weren’t for that, your last two analogies in any other context, especially after nitpicking my analogy and failing to engage with its point — although you at least this time engaged the analogy itself on a superficial level — I would have considered to be a troll from your end.
I won’t fake concern for you by telling you to take a break or something (although I think you should), the aforementioned troll behaviour was the last straw and I’m pissed off now, so I’ll just tell you straight up, it’s you that’s not thinking straight, not everyone else who interpreted your original words negatively.
You’re in the thick of it, feeling victimised, and it’s clouding your thinking. You can take a break or not, but I’m done responding, at least for a couple weeks.
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Again, basic reading comprehension is missing. I’m not concerned that they’re rejecting X. I’m concerned that they thought my comment intended X. When every reasonable interpretation was that it didn’t.
Do you think that you can read peoples minds?
You previously commented that when I said “I’m sorry”, it was really "fake condolences.
So you know better than me what I mean. You’re 100% sure that basic, positive statements have secret negative intent.
I don’t feel victimized. I’m amazed the simple, clear, statements are read as having secret meaning.
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