Slashdot Mirror
More Warnings Against Oversharing on MySpace
Skapare writes "Your next prospective employer might be watching your MySpace page, according to a story at the New York Times. And if you think Facebook is more private, maybe not if that prospective employer has an intern from the same school checking up on you." From the article: "Students may not know when they have been passed up for an interview or a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet. But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs had raised serious questions about their judgment, eliminating them as job candidates."
Is a job which would pass you over because of your personal life really one worth having anyway? I mean really?
Some people need spines.
I've been in the Biz for some time, being on both sides, that is. Actually, an employer has a reasonable right to check how do you behave in a informal online situation as it might also be reflect what you do in an informal situation offline. Now way am I advocating it, but it seems to me that data mining is a significant part of future's corporate intelligence. And if you think you can spy on your partners or competition, your moral will allow you to spy on your employees.
Next time you're going for an interview, look up the interviewer.
You might find that the higly professional lady wearing a smart business suit spends her weekends dressed up in strange clothing and hanging around with a motorcycle gang, to pick a real example at random.
Also your government:
5 56.200
""I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals."
Full story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19025
I had a pretty wild time at University and eventually dropped out because of it. This was back in 1991, and some of my posts on Usenet were pretty telling about what I was doing in my life at the time.
Of course, at that time we were quite naive and none of us realised what the Internet would turn into.
When Google released the Usenet archives for searching I had to scamper to get all my posts (hundreds of them) removed from the archive, as my employers would probably not have been too pleased - for a week or so my name in the google search engine produced thousands of posts none of which I am proud of now.
Smart people often break taboos: Richard Feynman loved strip clubs and Paul Erdös took amphetamines, to name but a couple.
I think your first statement had it right:-
Most employers don't want to hire people who rock the boat they want warm bodies that do the job their asked to do. Given the choice of Richard Feynman, a known stoner and a guy in a smart suit and tie, they will go for the suit and tie almost every time. Feynman would be great to have round the office playing the bongos and being insightful, but productivity would plumit and he'd make a rotten DB admin.
The simple fact is that what you describe as wrong is just the way it is. You can try to change it and you may be successfull, after all the days women were considered totally incapable of doing anything but be mothers and nurses is long gone (says a while middle aged male who thinks a glass ceiling is nice for letting in natural light) so maybe one day this will change too.
Maybe one day nude photos of a famous person will not have every tabloid drooling. Maybe one day a politician can freely admit to have smoked pot. Maybe one day not every word you say will be weighed on a silver scale.
For now the practical terms is that you either carefully examine everystep you take OR be prepared to accept that someday somebody might hold it against you.
You can rant against it for all you want but that does not change the way things are now. I got long hair, almost to my ass and I am male. Not really for fashion, I just like it. The price I pay is that I have been invited several times by high profile companies for job interviews based on previous work they have seen of me. When they then get a look off me their jaws literally drop.
I am good, they like my work but to the suits long hair like mine just doesn't work. Is it wrong? Not really. It is my choice to have long hair and it is their choice not to hire people that don't fit their idea of a well groomed employee.
As for my co-worker (well actually she is a manager of a different department and I only took notice off it because this piece of gossip included nudie pics) she will just have to accept that all men are pigs and all women are vindictive bitches. I personally couldn't care less but that is probably why I am not management at middle age. She is finding that something she did ten years ago is now biting her in the butt. Oh sure she may do wonderfull work and there is that email that circulated with her in the buff. Also up for a promotion is a guy who does not have nudie pics circulating.
You would claim the past of a person makes no difference. But does it?
My long hair is perhaps a way of me saying that I am not like everyone else. A rebel or just a social misfit? Perhaps I just can't be bothered with convention? Whatever the reason you think up it might be enough for you to consider me too big a risk to hire.
Same with the woman appearing nude in a play. As I pointed out this is something that a lot of woman do for the sake of art while all the male artists keep their clothes on. For me this suggests these women lack a certain amount of logic. Wouldn't it be more arty to keep the women clothed and the men naked? If you look at all those pics of girls caught naked circulating in your email don't you notice how rare it is to see the guy, even if he is in the pic great care has usually been taken to obscure the face.
Don't any of these girls who pose ever ask the guy to pose for them? If you want to be save as a girl posing nude just ask the guy to pose naked for you so when he releases your photographs you can release his.
That no women does this suggests to me women ain't paranoid enough and I would never hire any person as a system administrator who isn't 100% paranoid. Cause on the web they really are out to get you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm a college freshman, I work as a network tech at our school. There are a grand total of three people maintaining our network. I'm mostly responsible for field work such as installing new or replacing dead switches, access points, data drops and the like. I'm also the resident scripter. In the interview, when my boss found out I read slashdot, it actually helped my chances. Part of our morning ritual is to talk about the previous day's slashdot stories and this even went so far that when they interviewed a second person to work over the summer, they asked him if he had heard of slashdot.
Last year we were interviewing for a helpdesk position and one of the candidates mentioned that he'd written tools to aid posting to LiveJournal. This meant that there was a good chance he had an LJ himself so, out of interest we did some googling and found it.
In it he had written...
-That he was currently suspended from work for misuse of IT equipment.
-That his current duties were less technical than the impression he'd given in the interview.
-That he wasn't really interested in the position we were offering and would be hoping to leave within a few months.
Needless to say he didn't get the position.
His blog also went into some detail about his sexual fetishes. This wouldn't have been a reason not to employ him, but it might have made things a bit awkward in the office especially with him not knowing we knew and such.
Sure, everyone breaks laws, but do you really want to hire someone stupid enough to advertise that (and provide photographic evidence) on the web?
My server
"For most people, they'd look elsewhere for a doctor or lawyer."
Thats pretty funny.
In this field, one of my better friends is a well respected lawyer in the intellectual properties arena -- and he is the biggest commie hippy you could come across, but he makes certain his clients get their due because they afford him the lifestyle he wants (and then turns around and donates a good chunk every year to the EFF and other causes directly against him). His clients know this and its always a joke. His latest venture was to buy land in Honduras so that he could eventually start a law school to help the leftists get into power through the backdoor (without the guns).
Another good friend is a well regarded child psychologist. Because of this, he has to blunt some of his reputation because he can't seem overly familiar to his clients and hus doesn't go on line at all. But he is asigned a *LOT* of court cases and the folks in the courts that make these referals so that he can work with the troubled youth. He is generally the first person I know that raves about games like GTA and we've gone to many concerts such as NIN and Marilyn Manson over the years that his clients actually go to him for (because their child is posessed!!! You gotta deprogram that devil music outta him) -- everyone that he works with from the courts knows that he is a huge gamer and likes the darker side of music (I've actually heard a few of them state that if he turned out so well, maybe this stuff isn't so bad).
And I can go on with examples like this for a few hours because if there is any common tie between me and my friends it is the fact that we are all pretty opinionated (generally not in agreeance) and we have all been somewhat successful in our areas of expertise. Might help that we all refer each other to others as well and thus we have like minded people coming to us. Who knows.
I can agree with that 100%. I interned at a corporate office of a Coal Mining company this year, and HR department told me to help them recruit new interns. In essense, all of the resumes filtered through me first. I facebooked all of the candidates... and it just so happened that the number one candidate for the position (with a 3.91 GPA) was part of a malicious environmentalist group on campus at my school. I can give you 2 guesses to whether or not she even got the interview, but you'll only need one.
I got my current job as a result of posting my resume on the Internet. Someone did a keyword search on Google, found my resume, e-mailed me, put me in touch with a company, and I got hired. Narcissism can, in fact, pay off.
Of course, the rest of my web site is pretty inoffensive. There are a few pictures of a party but I don't list my interests as including "smoking blunts" on the home page.
The internet, and Myspace in particular, has never been a place that's considered to be 100% private and anonymous...even less so when you're putting information and images directly involving your personal life on a web site that's as popular as Myspace is. I think Myspace is fantastic. If some jerkass is going to put nothing but pictures of his beerbong/kegstand adventures on his Myspace and then make posts about that kinda stuff, I wouldn't hire him if I saw his Myspace. It's a fantastic way to see a persons character when you're considering them for employment. If you don't know how to make your own web site, do NOT expect privacy on Myspace or any other site like it. I just don't know how or why this is news...we get it. Employers use the internet just like everyone else. NEXT.