How To Lose Your Job, Thanks To The Internet 654
The New York Times has up an article discussing the trend of employers tracking the 'free time' activities of their employees via their web presence. "When they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible. In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one's off-hours can have career-altering consequences." The piece likens this activity to the 'Sociological Department' that the Ford Company ran to monitor the home lives of their workers. Overstatement, or the corp as Big Brother?
Always use an alias. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Always use an alias. (Score:5, Interesting)
Should I pay for chasing my dreams?
Boston Legal (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Always use an alias. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, but you should find an employer that's willing to let you chase your dream without having to hide it from them. Next time you change jobs, I'd be up front about being a comedian, and about some of your work being offensive, and let them know that it won't come into your work life. If they don't hire you, keep trying till you find someone that will. You may lose some good opportunities, but at least you won't live in fear of losing your job.
Re:Boston Legal (Score:2, Interesting)
They've also touched on similar topics on the show, specifically smoking. On that episode, a woman who only smoked at home or offsite got fired because of a company rule. The boss was a health nut and wanted his employees healthier. In the end he hid behind having to supply health insurance, but his earlier conversations were zealous: I know better than you. The boss won.
It comes down to a lot of states having "right to hire" rules. This means they can fire you for just about any reason (or none at all) so long as it isn't motivated by certain things: race, religion, gender, perhaps age, etc.
Your boss could say "you wear the color blue too often" and they'd be fine.
I personally think it's a horrible law. I'm all for letting someone go if the person isn't performing well, or you need to make cutbacks, or if the boss feels the employee isn't working well within the team. But if you're going to fire someone because they're a bad bowler then you're in the wrong.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:5, Interesting)
Freedom of speech is a nice thing, but in real word people don't say to employers what they think if it means they lose their jobs. Goverment mostly protects citizens being harassed by goverment itself, but it does very little if private citizen limits other persons freedom of speech or goverments agencies as employer do it.
Or lets phrase that again. Yes, anyone can say anything and freedom of speech is almost without limits. But no law guarantees using that right won't have consequences like losing your job or business. On private or public sector.
And thats the fundamental problem of political rights. If they don't protect people who exercise them economically too, they are just laws that state 'you can do this or that - if you can afford it'.
In real world it means that if you can't afford it, you have to give away your rights. Even those protected in name by constitutions. So actually, freedom of speech for example, knows bounds.
Fundamentals question is then, shouldn't political rights be also economical rights?
Shouldn't they be if they can't be separated in real world?
What are those rights that can't be taken away, but you can't afford to exercise? They are no rights at all far as I can tell.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:2, Interesting)
You can argue all you want over if a company should be able to discriminate in certain jobs over political beliefs, religious or ideological beliefs, or conduct considered unethical and even immoral. But the actions of some high level employees in their personal lives directly reflect the company's image. Imagine if Apple's top level managers supported terrorists, it would be no time before people started conflating their employment in those positions as an official stance of the company. It should be apple's right to control this to some extent. And that isn't even getting into the implications of fascism you made.
Here is a better example, politicians lives are open and scrutinized by the public. Why? because we want to know who we are hiring to make decisions on our behalf. A senator who supports homosexual relations with under aged teens or preteens wouldn't stand for a minute in a serious election. I'm not sure there is much of a difference at MS or IBM or the Steel plant down the road. The owners, the company, and other top level executive should know or have the ability to know without invading privacy, exactly what type of person they have making decisions in their company. Certainly, if you have a high level exec on the Internet ranting about capitalist pigs and how corporations are ruining everything, and you notice that your company hasn't turned a profit since they gave him a promotion and he became in charge of key decisions related to that fact, they should have a right to fire him. Similarly, if the company isn't turning a profit and they find that you are praising the competition and have purchased their stock, he should be let go too.
It isn't a matter of everything you do off the clock effecting your performance on the clock. It is about the image your off the clock actions press into the companies image and your performance potential as reflected by your admitted preferences.
Re:Always use an alias. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, but you should find an employer that's willing to let you chase your dream without having to hide it from them. Next time you change jobs, I'd be up front about being a comedian, and about some of your work being offensive, and let them know that it won't come into your work life. If they don't hire you, keep trying till you find someone that will. You may lose some good opportunities, but at least you won't live in fear of losing your job.
I have a profile on linkedin.com which includes a highly fictional Bio (I invented rope and television, and taught myself how to hover, for instance). Since I added that 2 or 3 months ago, I've had more direct emails from linkedin members asking me if I'm looking for work than I had in several years previously. Some people don't value a sense of humor but, for me, it's important to know that the people I hire not only can do the job, but they're someone I want to hang out with 40-50 hours a week.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:2, Interesting)
They have absolutely no risk -- they have nothing to lose. You pay them no matter what, and you can almost never hold them accountable for your actual loses when they screw up. And yet, your client holds you responsible, as well they should.
That's the difference. When an employee screws up and, say, a little bug in their programming forgets to actually charge the tax on every purchase, the client forces you, the owner, to pay that money. And you can't make the employee pay it because first, the employee doesn't have that kind of money, second, it's like three years of their salary, third, they're not responsible for their mistakes, I am. It's my fault that I didn't check their work, and it's my fault that it went live before it was perfect.
That's called accountability, and that's called risk. The employee doesn't have any skin in the game. They can lose their job, and they can get another one. But they can also lose my house, and I can't get another one.
It's my business, I know is my company because I started it, I've been there every day, and unless I have partners, no one else has any skin in the game.
Employees are most definitely slaves. They get no decisions, and they aren't responsible for their actions. They get paid for their time, independent of the work they do -- that's better than slaves. Don't get me wrong, employees are great. You get to grow a business, you get to handle more things and take advantage of someone else's expertiese. But you get to me accountable for their actions, which makes them a liability as well. So it's a balancing game. And you never forget that you've ante'd your house.
Re:You can still make an effort (Score:5, Interesting)
I see reasons both for and against. On the one hand, yes, you have these privacy concerns that are totally valid. On the other, here you have the internet, which is *designed* to connect people. In the early days, *everybody* used their real name - heck, I still belong to one forum that was probably among the first on the web where I still use my real name (few other people there do).
The great thing about the internet is that people *can* find you. I've been contacted by long lost friends and family that I never thought I'd speak to again, and I've got a big network of people that I talk to online now (and in real life) that I'd never have found offline. This is one of the big attractions of the net; in fact, I consider the internet pretty pointless otherwise. Is the internet nothing more than a bunch of companies hawking products, low-quality amateur scat porn and anonymous strangers yammering at each other? That's even worse than real life. Why would anyone want that?
But I also don't see this as just an evil plot by the corporations. A person's outside behavior has *always* been fair game in terms of employment... the only difference is the internet makes it easier to track. Let's say a company hires an accountant, who at some point during his term of employment gets into a bar fight and gets arrested. He comes in to work the next day bruised and bloody, and the story makes the local newspaper. What do you think is going to happen? Most likely, he's going to get fired. It doesn't matter that he did it on his own time; companies want well-adjusted, positive people working for them, and in an "at will" system of employment, "job security" has always been an illusion. You have job security provided you play the game right, and that means at work and at home. It's always been that way.
People act like asses on the internet because they think they can get away with it. But they can no more get away with it on the net than that accountant could get away with being in a real-life bar fight that makes the local papers. An ass is an ass, and no company wants to employ somebody like that.
Of course, you can argue about moral standards, but if your company doesn't share your own moral standards, then maybe you shouldn't be working there to begin with.
As for me, I don't make any particular effort to hide my full real name but I don't freely give it out either. In a Google search of my name, I don't come up at all. Even still, I try not to do anything that's going to make me look stupid online, regardless of who's going to see it. I think that's probably good advice for anybody.
The Burden of Proof (Score:3, Interesting)
To someone even minimally trained in psycops and IP diddling for whom such stuff appears, it should occur that one couple protect themselves from such an action by posting equally off the wall junk, spoofing the IP to hide the fact they posted it themselves, to bait the boneheads trying to make a case. Posting some equally disturbing info about these who're performing the the search would let them know they've been bested in such a way that they dare not continue without outting themselves on the process. One can even make it obvious but unprovable who did it (or had it done for them) without the hyperactive little HR people being able to do anything about it, except perhaps admit they're not good enough at this for the company to use their services, possibly even getting them cut from the salary list.
The best defense if a good offense. The best offense here is to make them publicly shove proof of their own inadequacy up their own ass. A person could have enormous fun and possibly set themselves up for a healthy early retirement. Getting the fsckheads who tried to out you fired would just be icing.
Re:More like how to lose your job cause you're stu (Score:3, Interesting)
The Idea that someone would post something trashing their current job and then expect that no one connected to the job would ever see it is moronic.
screwmyminicity.com (Score:4, Interesting)
I've really had it with the myminicity.com crowd, and to put a stop to this nonsense I've set up a little website. [screwmyminicity.com]
Stop posting your myminicity links here and elsewhere, if myminicity.com wants to grow they can surely find a way to do it without inconveniencing others.
If you don't then I'm calling on the rest of the audience here to report those links to the site above and if they want to help a little further to place a 1 pixel image tag on their website which will give the myminicity
For starters I've placed one on http://ww.com/ [ww.com] , feel free to come and help.
This is just another spam wave and if this doesn't get stopped now then it will be seen as a vindication of the principle and before long there will be 100's of sites doing this.
Rewarding your users for bad behaviour has to be one of the most annoying marketing tactics that has ever been devised.
Re:Company image...to an extent (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Where to draw the line, though? (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't make a paranoid case. I live in the Bible Belt, and you would be amazed at the sheer amount of fundamentalist Christians who, when they interview, try to figure out if the person they are talking to is like them or not and use that as an unspoken basis for who to hire.
Legal issues aside, personally, I think that religion is a private thing and is the business of the person practicing it, and that person alone, provided they don't try to shove it in the faces of everyone around them (which I consider tacky) or try to convert people (which I consider downright rude).
I have friends from a great many places around the world who belong to a large number of faiths. I've known and am welcomed around groups as diverse as Benedictine priests (as well as other sects), Tibetan monks, and even Native American Medicine societies. I don't have a problem with any of them provided they don't try to convert people, etc. I even enjoy the company. It makes for really interesting conversations on occasion.
It's funny. Despite the fact that I'm not, I get called an atheist rather frequently where I am because I express distaste for the locals trying to use government to endorse their religion. I even wrote a displeased letter to our governor (whom, once upon a time, I used to know) this year for endorsing the placement of Christian iconography in state parks while refusing to allow other faiths to place theirs there as well.
Then again, a lot of the locals seem to think that anyone who isn't Christian (or, rather, isn't the kind of Christian that shows everyone how Christian they are) is a godless atheist. I really wish I was joking, but a lot of them take the mere existence of other religions as proof that they are being repressed and persecuted.
Re:Well, no kidding! (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep my private and business lives well-encapsulated, even to the extent of never introducing my coworkers to my friends. My employer asserts the customary feudal prerogative of controlling every moment of my waking life while still only paying me for part of it. This is not because they have some God-given right to direct my life, it is because they can get away with it in the present rigged system, and they have more power than I do. But having an unfeeling, brain-dead bureaucracy stick their nose into my private life is no better when it's an HR department than when it's a government agency. It's repression all the same. It's an odious feature of the present system.
I don't regard them as malicious so much as arrogant, overzealous and misguided. So I practise operational security and communication security in order to minimize their opportunities to mess with me. But that's out of necessity, not out of any belief that I owe it to them to do that. And I'm not talking about any "right" to a job. I'm just saying that they don't own me, yet in many respects they behave as though they do. And due to the extreme, government-backed asymmetry of power relations in the workplace (you think employers have it tough? Look at the restrictions on union activity sometime), those are the conditions we have to live under in the US. And I'm a well-compensated employee. It's far worse for those with lower-paid, more commoditized jobs. That's where employers really run amok.
And please, never talk about "extreme risk" when all you're referring to is money. I've lived in parts of the world where risk means you or your family getting killed, dismembered, driven from your home. That's risk. What you're talking about is just putting your money where your mouth is.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see how selection of ideas should have anything about chance to present them.
By definition, they are two diffrent things.
Ideas have never killed or harmed anyone, only executing bad ideas have.
And like subprime mess proves, people still choose wrong ideas.
Despite allkinds of limiations and systems that supposedly should enchance the way people select ideas.
I also think that it is diffrent to have obligation to support somebody because his/her opinions.
Compared to punishing somebody for presenting opinions publicly.
What harm there could be if people could present their opinions publicly without fear of economic sanctions?
Can you tell me any practical example?
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:2, Interesting)
a) publicly companies can't have anykind of idelogoue because it would distance them from potential customers
b) but they can still demand it from their employees and even refuse to work with employees they disagree with their ideology
Isn't above quite insane way of facing world? How do you know when companyes internal policies and values clash with customers? You can't know, because they are always symmetrically opposite. Other is ultraliberal, while other is anything but.
I'm not also convinced that having ideologically diffrent people is recipe for failure.
First of all, average job shouldn't raise deep ideological diffrences. If employer spends his time preaching Adam Smith,
Hitler or Jesus to employees, his not doing business but running a political or religous party.
Secondly, average worker can't anyway choose people he/she works with and certainly not customers.
If all companies and project would be just be run by mormons just because they share same values, it would be recipe for failure too(nothing against mormons btw.).
I think its easier to get 10 persons to do things because they have the skills, than finding 10 people who have the skill and also agree with you ideologically. I know employers in real who try latter one, and I can only feel sorry for them. They certainly don't have too many options.
So based on above, what's the sense limiting employee's opinions? What's the beef?
Companies don't need freedom of speech, but inviduals do.
Re:Not much is new here. (Score:4, Interesting)
Control - Military Style (Score:4, Interesting)
First, the type of employment matters a lot. Technically, military personnel are under a "Personal Services Contract." We are paid no matter what we do, where we do it or even IF we do it. I do not clock in or out, I receive no overtime, comp time, sick time. I have annual leave but technically it is simply permission to be away from my duty location for a period of time. Given the nature of the contract, it is perfectly reasonable for my "employer" to have an interest in my personal life.
Compare that with about 99% of the jobs out there any the question becomes more clear. If I get paid overtime or receive comp time then the portion of my day that you do not pay for is my business. If you want to be involved in that part of the day, pay up.
Now the argument is normally image. If I am doing table dances at Hooters at 1 AM how can I represent the company at 9 AM. I have no problem with that either but it needs to be clearly spelled out in the Performance Work Standards. If I work in the mail room and my interaction consists of the letters and the box they go in, you would have a hard time getting away with saying the company image had been damaged. Of course none of this applies to "at will" employees. Where companies screw up is when they TELL an at will why they were fired. Idiots, just fire them.
Back to my situation. My employer has complete control of my life. 99% of the time, my employer does not exercise that control. Anyone who has been even close to a military base knows that soldiers drink and do dumb things. The mere fact that the military CAN punish people for off duty behavior prevents a lot but not all dumb stuff. Still, we are not a machine and decisions are made by PEOPLE. Most military leaders understand the where the line is and when it has been crossed. They know because the military is unique in this county as the only large organization that ONLY promotes from within. Everyone starts at the bottom meaning no one gets to a decision maker position without spending far more time subject to someone else making decisions. Right now we are struggling with blogs and MySpace because of generational differences in leadership. Nothing new. It was Rock and Roll vs Big Band in the 60s. Almost everyone I know has had a boss at one extreme or the other - either holding prayer meetings or starting with drinks at 1500 (3PM) on a Tuesday. Neither one is good. Most of us shoot for the middle but most actually end up far more "liberal" then most people outside the military would think. We tolerate far more off duty behavior than most people believe simply because the alternative is so crushing on moral. IMHO civilian companies could learn a lot from seeing how the military restrains itself despite the tools for total control.