This message is a cleaner re-write of an earlier assault on the irksome convention of some employers requiring references as part of the interview process.
URL to previous discussion thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg00433.html
WHY REFERENCES SUCK IN GENERAL
1/ They require the time of the reference. 15 minutes per reference phone call means 2-3 hours out of each references work week during a typical job search. Your reference (and his boss) will love you for taking up his time.
2/ The reference and/or his company can get in legal trouble. Oracle, for example, has a policy that its employees will not give references to former employees. The extent of referent information is manager name and time and location of employment. I worked at Oracle. I can't get a character or technical reference from them. I love the skeptical looks I get when I try to explain this to people.
3/ They allow a bad boss one more shot at tyranny. If you worked for a jerk, then what? As an extreme example, assume that Martin Luther King worked for 3 closet white supremacists. Would he ever get a good reference? Probably not. But that doesn't mean that he is a bad person.
4/ People move, retire, die, or go belly up: I worked during the dot-com era. That's 3 years worth of references that I will never be able to resource because all of those people have bitten the dust. I guess that makes me a bad person.
WHY TECHNICAL REFERENCES SUCK
1/ If you want to know how good I am technically, break out the appropriate technical test.
WHY CHARACTER REFERENCES SUCK
1/ Let's assume that a character reference is a good way of knowing how good person X is. If this is true, then you really must have references for the references of person X before you can trust the references of person X. And you must have references for the references of the references of the references of person X before you can know how good the references for person X are.
Logically:
X good => (references for X good)
(references for X good) => (references for (references for X) good)
(references for (references for X) good) => (references for (references for (references for X)) good)
So we see that we have a recursive and non-terminating algorithm for determining if X is good.
The self-referential unsolvable nature of the character reference proof system shows its fallibility.
