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Ask HN: Ethics on Interviewing as a Future Competitor?

1 points by golly_ned ↗ HN
Hi,

I've been job-searching for a few weeks now, since I don't think my start-up has legs. A recruiter from a company recently reached out to me, and I was interested in it both because (1) they'd built an open-source project I liked, and (2) I knew my company was building something very similar, and even did a product analysis of the other company.

I'm genuinely interested in joining the other company. But I don't have a clear sense of what I should be sharing with whom. My own company's product isn't out yet, so I don't feel comfortable sharing with the other company (which I would likely join instead of my own company) that we're building a competing product -- though I'm not on the team that's working on it.

I also don't feel fully comfortable asking probing questions about the business or engineering of the start-up, even though it's really important to do so to evaluate a company before joining -- it feels kind of wrong for me to be getting good information that I could potentially then use to help my own company's product.

Does anyone have advice on how to navigate this situation?

Thanks.

5 comments

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uberman
What NDA if any have you signed?

Note though whatever the answer, no matter what company you end up working with you could potentially put yourself or them in hot water.

I would have told the company in the interview that your current employer was contemplating a similar product and directed your participation in the interview away from it and any particulars to it.

AlDante2
Sharing that the current company is contemplating a similar product is already sharing sensitive information and is probably in breach of contract, regardless of whether an NDA is in place.
uberman
I disagree, but I'm not a lawyer.

I would rather have said, Sorry I cant talk about this topic because of a conflict if interest with my current employer than to talk openly with them about what they or my current employer were planning and have either of them find out after the fact.

AlDante2
Sharing your own company’s information is a big no-no, and probably a breach of contract, both at the interview stage, and also if you decide to join the other company. Don’t even share that your current company is working on a competing product. Your potential new employer knows who you work for and will not disclose competitively relevant information, so ask anything you want. Even if it wasn’t an open source product.

It would only be unethical if you have no intention of joining the new company and are only interviewing to gain information for your current employer.

golly_ned
Thank you for the clarity on not sharing my company's own information. That settles that.

> Your potential new employer knows who you work for and will not disclose competitively relevant information, so ask anything you want.

One small hitch is that my potential new employer doesn't know that my current company is going to enter the same space, and may have already shared competitively relevant information -- I'm not sure what qualifies as competitively relevant, but we had a talk.

But in any case, I think the tack I take is that I should trust the potential new employer not to share anything they wouldn't be comfortable sharing regardless of my employer -- does that sound right?