Doyce recounts the story of some copy shop guy at the Micro$oft campus who was fired for posting a picture of Mac G5s being delivered. Whether that was an appropriate thing for M$ to do is another debate — the guy was a temp, which means he can be fired for pretty much any whim so long as it’s not explicitly an EEOC-forbidden reason. It may be shoddy, but we also know only one side of the matter, so there’s not much more to say about that.
Anyway, Doyce raises the perennial debate of what you can, or should, say about your job online. And, by the same token, whether your employer/co-workers should know about your blog.
The fact is, you shouldn’t say much. Some employers will accept it with a shrug, but most will likely be annoyed. And, frankly, with reason. My company, for example, has a policy that nobody should talk to the press without explciit permission from the corporate office (this has gotten a few folks in trouble when they talked to trade mags, even if what they had to say was favorable). It is, after all, the suits back at HQ who are responsible for the image the company presents to its customers and potential customers, not to mention potential hires, folks considering law suits, and the like. Reading someone bitching about this, that, or the other thing can obviously have an impact. Even reading about relatively innocuous things can (e.g., talking about how cool it is that everyone in the office got brand-new PCs may be offputting to a client who is looking for a low-overhead operation).
So, for example, my employer’s name is not listed anywhere in this blog. I don’t want someone looking for info on my employer to associate them and me through a simple search on Google, or in the sidebar.
It gets more complicated than that, of course. Someone trying to track me down wouldn’t have too hard a time of it, given my name and where I say I live and where I work. Someone from my office, if they took a mind to it, could probably find this blog. I’m not aware of anyone who has (nobody at the office has said anything), but that neither means it’s impossible or that it hasn’t happened.
So I’m circumspect. I don’t blow whistles (not that there have been any to blow). When it comes to talking about my job, I either just keep quiet, or speak around issues, or just talk about how I’m feeling. Being a manager, I certainly never say anything that someone would be able to clearly associate with any given employee or incident (names, genders, locations, and other specifics are all scrambled thoroughly). That’s only fair to the employees, but is also appropriate to my employer.
Ultimately, I try not to say anything that, if my boss were to call me up and point me to a blog entry, I’d be in trouble talking about. This is, ultimately, a public and searchable forum. Just as I’m circumspect, when required, about friends’ feelings, and family, so, too, my employer (and my job) deserves my discretion.
Why I’m blogging during office hours is another question, of course, but that’s a separate post some time.