Comment by dataflow
5 years ago
I get what you're saying about it being blurry but I don't buy that it affects the ability to reject it. He can quire simply reject it and then explain it might be a misunderstanding or something. Or say it might have happened unintentionally. Or whatever. There are several options here, and refusing to deny the claims doesn't bolster his case.
And that's all kinda beside the point - note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting itself for us to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition, with or without ghosting. That should be far less blurry and easy to deny head-on, whatever you think of the ghosting.
One other story (I feel bad for blitzing with replies and in a weird order, I hope that's ok)...
I ran a workshop with abut 35 people in the audience. For about 15 mins, I had them sit quietly as I asked them "how do you feel when you think about this? How do you feel when you think about that?" And so on, and had them reply in their heads.
At the end of the session, I opened up group reflection. One woman shot her hand up and said "I feel like you manipulated us." And i asked if others felt this way, and maybe 5 others raised their hands and started talking about how my questions manipulated them. And then this other guy raised his hand and said how for the first time in months, these questions helped him stop thinking about politics and the chaos in the world and quieted his mind and thanked me. A few others agreed with a similar feeling.
So my one action caused (at least) two very different responses in the same group and I would likely have had no idea if they didn't tell me how they had received it.
I wouldn't say "I never ghosted you" if I don't remember the interaction, because perhaps I did? Why would I make that bold claim without having more info about which situation it is?
> And note that the bad part isn't even the ghosting to quibble over, it's fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition.
Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months. One person who feels very secretive and protective of their business knowledge (even some people in startups who don't even have companies yet but just ideas) can feel very violated by one email with one question, whereas other people may not believe they were being fished for info after 3 months of interviews.
> I wouldn't say "I never ghosted you" if I don't remember the interaction, because perhaps I did? Why would I make that bold claim without having more info about which situation it is?
This whole discussion is about intent, which you can (and honestly, must) address separately from how you imagine your actions might have been perceived. See below.
> Even "fishing for information under the guise of an acquisition" could be anything from sending one email with 3 questions to five intense 2-hr interviews over 3 months.
This is irrelevant, the question is about intent. You should not have a hard time making it crystal clear whether that was your intent or not, regardless of whether you spent 10 minutes on it or 10 days. The only reason you wouldn't be able to make your intents clear is if you're doing things so borderline deceptively that you honestly cannot tell if they're clearly ethical or not, in which case that fact would sufficiently speak for itself.
P.S. I see you're repeatedly leaving parallel replies, I don't know why you do that (can't you just edit your comment?) but they drown out mine and divert the conversation, so I'm not going to reply to them and have 3 parallel conversation tracks, sorry about that.
Ah, I think I had misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you were saying to deny the action: "I never ghosted you." But now I think what you actually meant was to deny the intention of the action: "I never intended to ghost you."
I would agree one could deny the intention first, yeah, I might actually do that. "I didn't meant to ghost you but perhaps that's what happened or how it landed for you. Maybe you think it should be obvious to me but I feel unclear, will you share more with me about it?"
*edit: I'm not trying to leave the parallel replies, I guess I'm more used to replying on Twitter where I just add another reply to my reply if I forgot something, instead of editing the previous reply, and HN was stopping me from replying to my own reply. So I'll try to edit here, I wasn't sure what the HN preferred way was to do this, so thank you for helping me adapt better.
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