Disclosure

A constant internal battle that I have is what I should disclose to people. Compared to others I feel that I disclose way more. By way of example I've

• Told two separate people I didn't enjoy kissing them
• Have told people I find them unattractive
• Told a manager their feedback was devoid of substance

In isolation someone can see these behaviors, and conclude I am a dick. In fact, I had a colleague at my last job who told me, "hey you have great ideas, now if only you weren't such an asshole you might be able to build consensus". This perspective was delivered in such a cheerful way that it didn't even make me mad. My conversations with him were also about 75%+ complaints, so I could see where he was coming from.

The classic example of disclosure is, if you see someone with food in stuck in their teeth would you tell them, or not say anything? The answer for me is very context dependent. I likely won't tell strangers that they have food in their teeth. If I am having a serious conversation with a friend maybe I am less likely to tell them. If there are more people in the conversation maybe singling them out in this instance can be weird, or make them self conscious. A key distinction with having food stuck in your teeth vs commenting on a ripped shirt is that people have more agency to immediately fix food stuck in their teeth, as opposed to the ripped shirt.

Usually the type of disclosure that I am doing is not about direct observations about someone. The disclosure is more about conversations that happened about someone, some people may refer to this as gossiping. For example, in the Tango class I was taking there was a couple that broke up. This resulted in one of the partner's no longer attending Tango class. A few classes later the other person remarked that they would like to remove their ex from the group chat. I happened to encounter their ex probably a few days later. The request to remove them from the group chat wasn't even on my mind, but she asked how's Tango, and I said oh your ex wants you removed from the group chat.

This is a common conversational pattern of mine. If someone mentioned something about them I'll usually let them know. When others observe this behavior they say that I am a shit stirrer, an instigator. Perhaps they are right. There has to be a slight element of me that enjoys the juiciness of the gossip. However, I think the main element is it feels easy to operate in this manner. If there's a topic that relates to someone perhaps it comes up and you mention it. To me a lot of the time it's not obvious what's secretive. It also takes more mental energy to account for everything that is acceptable to share or not.

Here's an example that I'll slightly anonymize for what I hope are clear reasons. A few months ago a friend of mine A was robbed at gunpoint in a city. There is a separate friend B whose career overlaps with law enforcement, and also knows A. I wanted to talk to B about the repercussions of the crime. However, I was effectively told by A that B was afraid of the city, and if they got more evidence that the city was dangerous they might move out. B moving from the city was undesirable because B's partner wants to continue living there so their partner was conspiring with A to keep this information secret. If no one told me this context I wouldn't remember that B is afraid of the city, and you better believe I'd bring it up in conversation.

You could classify having a discussion about the armed robbery as gossip, however I think it's discussing the moments that currently stand out to you. Framed another way I am processing what happened in a social way. Of course processing socially in the extreme can be referred to as trauma dumping, so you have to be careful about what you say, how much you say, and who you are saying it to.

There's also big ethical components here. Is it reasonable to try to protect someone by not sharing information with them and keeping them in the dark? Sure crime statistics may say the city is reasonably safe, but if your friend was robbed, and you already were worried about your safety in the city shouldn't you be given the information to make the decision yourself? In this case I think telling B makes sense, but I don't know the full details of how they feel about the city, and things are further complicated by B's partner, as well as me not being super close with B.

I bring disclosure to our attention, because this morning I read a writer's advice about avoiding writer's block, and it said maybe you should stop lying. A grey area for lies is lying by omission. Granted lying by omission refers to purposefully omitting information that is critical to what you are saying. For instance, even though I think I disclose more than the average person when it comes to writing on this blog I may proceed more cautiously. In a conversation you have the ability to discuss something that was said. There's no written record. People may forget what was said. The conversation is also localized it's you and a few people. Even though I have only a few readers it's not too hard to find this blog, and it can be worrisome than something can come back to bite me.

There's no shortage of people advocating for being open and writing. However, there are also repercussions. Recently Aella who is very open and very online realized how negative people are towards her, and decided to be less online.

Based on my life experiences I know I have a difficult time knowing what someone is going through unless I have gone through something similar. As it stands I am not nearly famous enough to experience the online hate, and I definitely cherish that. In addition to the internet hate (which as I pointed out is harder to conceive for me) I think a huge fear for me and probably others is reputational damage. The concern is that someone will find your online profile see something you've done wrong, and rule you out of job opportunities because of that.

Anyway enough preamble. A few days ago I requested access to a data analytics tool at work. This data analytics tool is connected to a variety of company data sources allowing us to answer questions about the business. The most powerful data here is our application databases that allow us to answer questions about the usage of the app in different ways. Among these data sources was the applicant tracking system used for hiring people at the company. One of the first things I did was try to list the offers, to gather insight on pay at the company. Who doesn't want pay transparency? Understandably the access to this was blocked.

I mentioned to a few colleagues that we had access to this data in the app. One of them laughed, and said what are you going to do lookup your scorecard, and that's exactly what I did. As a candidate the interview is really a binary decision did you get an offer or not. If you're lucky a recruiter will often let you know areas where you could improve, and things you did well. It's rare that you get to read the unfiltered feedback. It's probably also ill advised, because you are reading feedback from people that you likely need to collaborate with in the course of work.

Nonetheless, this was a unique opportunity. You might say curiosity killed the cat, but cats have nine lives, so they can risk it. Maybe I should have been more cautious, because I doubt I have nine lives. The last thing I'll say when you are interviewing someone you have limited time to gather information so it's not uncommon to mention small things that are maybe predictive of concerning or positive behavior. Also having conducted many interviews before, after you have been on a few panels everything blends together, and you forget about the details from individual interviews.

I obviously did well enough in the interview because I got the job. The parts that stuck were the critiques though. In a few different cases they mentioned that I wasn't that receptive to feedback. Someone mentioned that my story telling ability wasn't very good, so it could be that my communication was bad, and they had doubts about the impact I had at my job. Someone else said that I gave a really long intro, and they had a hard time getting started. In one of the interviews I asked a clarifying question of whether I should also account for budget functionality and two separate interviewers docked that as a negative thing, for not paying attention to the given prompt (lol).

In one of my interviews I recall making a poor technical decision, and then continuing to comment about how I should've done this more optimally. One interviewer went so far as to extrapolate that this might mean that I am bad at decision making or sticking to something. As if a timed one hour coding session where you are performing for two people is representative of how you work day to day. At some point there was also a bug in my code. Both the interviewers tried to provide suggestions on how to fix the bug, but neither were able to help. Ultimately I was able to fix the issue, but the notes were about how I had the bug and how long it took me to resolve not the fact that both of them failed to help.

It's so easy to get defensive, and that's exactly what I am doing. I've brought you here to my corner of the internet. Spent a long time to cue up the fact that I operated in a grey area of reading my scorecards only to become defensive and lose the plot, perhaps validating the feedback that I am bad at storytelling. That's the nature of interviews though they are an imperfect process in which the company hopes to gather enough information on you to make a pretty big bet on you.

As much as I would love to analyze additional data to determine what interviewers are more lenient than others, what elements are predictive of success or failure at the company from the interview, if we interview a certain demographic disproportionately, if we have any other biases etc. I won't be meddling in this data. Rest assured that I'll be instigating in other ways. Ahem I mean at least that is how it'll be perceived.