Nice, pretty solid bit of Godwin's Law trolling. I'm not interested in debating this to the level of detail that will spare me being called a nazi by someone on the internet, so suffice it to say that _any_ blacklist based on generalized attributes and affiliations will unfairly target innocents.
Companies have lots of tactics to shorten applicant stacks ("wrote a personalized cover letter", "minimum 12yrs experience HTML5", "name printed in blue"). Power to Yammer if they want to add "dates employed at yahoo" to the list - talented folks will have little trouble finding work.
It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole. It's the model case.
> It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole.
This is a deeply idiotic statement. In fact, it's quite easy to talk about how much responsibility Yahoo employees have for the intellectual property lawsuits started by management, and yet not make use of comparisons to the Nazis.
When the roads into Sunnyvale have signs saying "Arbeit macht frei" over them, then you can feel free to make such comparisons. Till then, you're a complete jackass.
No, it's not. It's a debate commonly held when people claim to be innocent of the actions of an institution that they were a part of, and the source of modern debates about the ethics that apply are sourced in the writings of Arendt about the subject. You're not the only person in the room that realizes that Yahoo aren't the Nazis, Facebook aren't the victims of WWII, and Yammer certainly isn't Nurnburg, so cut the name calling and histrionics.
Just because naked mole rats aren't ants doesn't mean you can't refer to ants when talking about them, silly.
I think the Godwin-ing of the thread happened in the original post, which referred to Stalin. Responding with Nazi stuff is not an escalation at that point.
Companies have lots of tactics to shorten applicant stacks ("wrote a personalized cover letter", "minimum 12yrs experience HTML5", "name printed in blue"). Power to Yammer if they want to add "dates employed at yahoo" to the list - talented folks will have little trouble finding work.