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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Unless it's a government job, the interviewers don't have guns. They just have money. Nobody said I have to talk to them.

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There is an ongoing tension between the idea that our behavior is shaped by the systems around us and the belief that it stems solely from our personal choices. The truth is, it’s never one or the other exclusively - both factors play a role. Nobody says you have to eat processed food, but when 90% of the food available to you (and 100% of the inexpensive food) is processed, it's misleading to argue that eating processed food is a personal problem. The same applies to AI interviews, or any number of other issues.

There's a third possibility: collective action. It's easy to forget this, because the powers that be have been working hard for many decades to denigrate it.

Collective action needs to come from somewhere. In a nation of destroyed extended family, primary family, racial or national identity, with no religion, workers unions, or any other sense of community, where everyone is a snowflake individual, it's pretty impossible that a group of people will ever form a collective capable of doing any actions.

Now, think about it why we were conditioned from the ground up to forefeit any connections with other people and basically bared of forming high trust communities.

It's part of the american capitalist dynamic to protect capital by reframing systemic societal problems to be exclusively issues of personal responsibility.

It's largely why Americans are so, so fat compared to other nations.

>Nobody said I have to talk to them.

My bank account does.

Seriously though, I don't think this dynamic arises when people have choices, sure, but specifically in the land of job seeking the relationship is brutally asymmetric a lot of the time. People need jobs. One need only to look at the terrible current state of "send us your CV, also fill up our form in our website, also yeah we might sell your info".

If the cost of interviewing drops to close to 0 for a company, we can expect to see interviews being part of the process along with everything else. Juniors have it bad and they might just get it worse.

I take your point, but whose side do you think the government is on? Ours?

> "Nobody said I have to talk to them."

You don't need money? NEED money, like your life depends on money to keep surviving? 'cos most people do and don't have your luxurious options.

I need money. I don't need money from a job that makes me interview with an AI. There's lots of other places.

They don't have guns - yet ;)

More like they don't have guns any more.

Go back a hundred years, you can see what went on when they did. And the government was right there with them.

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