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Infamous Emails Don't Always Kill Careers
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Those oft-forwarded email gaffes don't always lead to career meltdowns for the ashamed senders, Jared Sandberg writes in the Wall Street Journal. In some corners of the business world, preserving a reputation can be less important than acquiring one in the first place. For instance, the 2003 legal summer associate who accidentally emailed 40 colleagues to announce he was 'busy doing jack' ended up getting a job at the firm. More recently, the young woman who told off a lawyer offering her a job -- and saw her email forwarded worldwide -- is quite confident that the notoriety can't hurt, and might even help, her career."
there's no such thing as bad publicity.
(1st?)
fak3r.com
You can't extrapolate from one intern who was hired despite having sent out a stupid email. TFA implies he spent the rest of the summer kissing ass and working his butt off.
As for Abadala, she's a trust-fund baby. I suspect she'll learn the hard way that professional networking is extremely important in a services career.
Many people have been passed over for hire for something stupid they posted to Usenet or an Internet forum. Googling a person before hire to learn as much about them as possible is standard practice these days.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
In the company I work for, misuse of e-mail may constitute a CLM.
That's a Career Limiting Move. Not to be confused with sleeping with the boss's daughter--a Career Ending Move.
My work here is dung.
>>>>
>>>> SEND THIS EMAIL TO AT LEAST 50 FRIENDS AND YOU WILL
TOTALLY
>>>> GET A JOB AS A LAWYER. IT WORKED FOR ME LOLZ. IF
YOU
>>>> DO NOT SEND IN THE NEXT 10 MINUTES YOU WILL NOT GET
THE
>>>> JOB AND A LAWYER WILL COME AND BEAT YOU UP LOLZ
>>>
>>> DO THIS GUYZ IT WORKS
>>
>>
>>
Does this article remind anybody of when Peter got the promotion, and Michael and Samir got layed off?
Hey, I was busy putting off my project work and came across this funny page: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/21/175222 6
You guys all get the irony, right?
Or if your boss's name is Jack...
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Maybe this is because in the legal profession you need to be forceful and unyielding in order to help you argue your cases. Who has ever heard of a famous lawyer who felt others pain, considered their positions and was meak and soft-spoken in court?
As a geek, though, I have found that many human resources types leave you alone when you come off strong and watch your language. Projecting dominance works well with them. If you do it right, you leave them no grounds to say "he was intimidating me" because the authority looks at your conduct and says, "uh, right. Next case."
It's about a simple rule. The average person doesn't really respect those they think are weak and/or vulnerable. This applies to both genders. Women don't like men who just give them what they want, and men don't respect women who just blindly take whatever a man does. People who are unwilling to just sit there and take it get much more respect in almost any organization. Usually the types that complain shut up in the face of a counter-challenge.
C'mon folk, this is /., gotta keep the crusade going!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'd like to move us right to Peter Gibbons. We had a chance to meet this young man, and boy that's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
testimonial: I was leaving work one day and...the elevator stopped between floors. I pushed the emergency talk button and got a P..rson talk.. th..sounded ..ike t.is (the sound cut in and out) . I was told, by the dispatcher (what I could hear of the conversation and from later discussion) communication problems were my fault (huh?). Since I could hear little, I talked into the mike and explained where I was and what the circumstance was. then settled back on the floor of the car, and waited 2 hours for someone to get me out. This was a Friday night and I was perhaps the only one in the building by then...
By the way this was the 2nd time I had been stuck on an elevator in that building and the final upshot was the maintenance company lost the contract. But, on to the thread: I sat down with my iBook and wrote a log of my experience via email(s) and sent it to Building maint. CCed to my supervisor (wireless) and by 1.5 hours the email contained the word "damn" in one line. Nothing worse; just that.
Next Monday I was called on the use of offensive language.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Her finances are going to be just fine. Did you see her picture? That's professionally done promotional photo, not a candid by some hack ABC photog. I'd lay money she'll get a few dozen job offers, and probably a few marriage proposals out of the deal. She could probably even start up an email-etiquette advice column in some legal rag.
This was such a non-story on a slow news day. "bla bla bla"? So what? I've seen much worse.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
... she said this: I'm more worried about whether I've left my hair iron on than this little email exchange
Translation: I can't get a job now.
In tabulario donationem feci.
We had a movie lunch at mylast job once. Until it was ended after the organizer was "spoken to" for bringing an inappropriate movie. The movie- Ferris Beuller's Day Off.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
From another article on the topic, the hiring firm had decided after the verbal agreement to lower the pay. If anyone would be liable for breach of contract, it would be the hiring firm. And then he would be seriously in violation of breach of confidentiality by doing this... if I knew of a lawyer that did this I would do everything in my power to never hire him. And I don't believe that responding "Bla bla bla" is really that bad as the extremely unprofessional threat the lawyer made: "You need to realize that this is a very small legal community, especially the criminal defense bar. Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?". To me this sounds like a very thinly veiled threat that he is going to try to get her disbarred for 1)not accepting the job after he had changed the terms of the contract by lowering her pay and then 2)making a rebuttal to his statement that her actions were unprofessional.
Now, maybe she should have thought a little bit more carefully in dealing with this creep, but you think a seasoned lawyer would be the one showing some modicum of professionalism. Instead, he acted like a whiny little brat, used semi-vulgar language, made threats and then forwarded a conversation on to others that may have had a small expectancy of privacy.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
From TFA:
As for Ms. Abdala, she says a mea culpa "will never happen." She's living on funds provided by her father and has rented office space for her own practice. "I've never been the type to work under someone," she says.
I won't work under someone, earning my own way, but I'll shamelessly nurse from the teat. That doesn't work for people whose parents don't have the funds to be venture capitalists for their children.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
The guy's name was Bernard Shiffman. More info can be found here.