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."
This is great news; my Facebook site is a combination resume, cover letter, and reference letters. Hey recruiters, this way!
There are many highly qualified and intelligent people here (it's a top 20 university) with very vapid social lives.
these employers using google and myspace to research their prospective employees may as well be basing their decisions on the bible or the magic 8 ball.
There are many people who can quickly switch personalities to a work mode, many of the most intelligent are also the most eccentric as well. Passing people up because of eccentricity, quirks, or political views will harm employers in the end.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
While it's not much a surprise that employers would do some unconventional background checking, the article seems to make it seem increasingly prevalent. Unless you are completely in an online pseudonym, don't portray yourself in a manner online that you wouldn't want seen in real life. As far as a Google search is concerned, I can't find much with just a straight name search. My only online profile would be a Facebook listing where nothing is risque.
On the Internet - everybody knows that you are a perv' ...
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.
Unfortunate postings to Slashdot are also pretty, well, unfortunate, because Slashdot has a high Google-rank, so your Slashdot postings will place highly in Google on a search for your name. I don't think you can get a Slashdot comment removed.
Bjarke Roune
In my opinion this could be as much of a good thing as it is a bad thing. Sure if you write all sorts of useless MySpace one line "lol ponies are cute!!!!" comments then yes, you may be less likely to be hired. But then again making such comments indicates that you are a fairly shallow, and possibly annoying person, and thus may not be a good person to hire. On the other hand if you are generally insightful and have useful things to say then it would seem that you would be more likely to be hired, and I can't think of that as a bad thing. So in general if you act like an idiot you are less likely to be hired, if you act like an adult you are more likely to be hired. If we feel that this is an acceptable consequence of real life behavior why shouldn't it be an acceptable consequence of online behavior?
Philosophy.
Every so often, I get an email from someone I've never heard of, asking how I've been and why I never respond to email at some other account. Turns out there's someone else with my name, of a similar age (well, plus or minus 5 years, I guess), in the same country, and studying informatics of some form (AI rather than CS). Also, he appears to be impossible to find contact details for. I'm not making this up, and unless spammers have suddenly become much more intelligent and literate (and created a specialist website to back up their story), these are quite genuine requests.
What's to guarantee that the person a company finds on Myspace or Livejournal - I don't know much about Facebook - is the same person they're actually considering employing? I'd be quite upset to find I'm suddenly employed and expected to be an expert in genetic algorithms, when my total experience with them is a couple of lectures several years ago. Names aren't unique, and sometimes there are enough similarities that I'm contacted by people who believe they know me personally.
I'm an intern at a software development firm and when looking for another intern, my employer asked me to look the person up on Facebook - so this is a very real issue.
But I did not know the person, nor did anyone I knew, so it had no effect on the hiring of them.
No real suprise here, it's been coming for a long time. With so many people thinking they will never be seen on the net and that only a small amount of people can reach their personal pages, smart employers will google around for them and find out a lot more about the person than they need to know and you can't blame them, that way they will find the best candidate for the job no matter what CV they are presented with or how many qualifications you have.
It may be a harsh way to do things, and some may argue that work should stay work and personal life should be private, but if you compromise yourself publically on the web - expect to reap what you sow.
Business Voyeur
What seems kinda silly is however to go to far with this. The odd thing is that those kids who do extreme things are the ones who do best in real life. I should know, I didn't as a kid and I am very mediocre in my adult life.
Who do you want in your company? Joe Average or somebody going places? For certain jobs yes somebody with a solid boring past is perhaps best. Chartered accountants would be nice to know they never ever broke any law of any kind ever. Read up on Arthur Andersen to see what happens when you go from the boring accountants to the exciting ones.
What is a problem is that people who do stuff like posting pictures of themselves smoking pot online then seem to want the kind of job that calls for people who think a cup of tea is a rollercoaster ride. There are just certain kind of proffesions where your entire life will come under close scrutiny. It doesn't matter so much as what you did but how easily it can be found out. Have an affair as president just don't let it get into the papers.
The problem is that we fear overlap. Is the guy who smoked pot in college still doing it? That doesn't really even matter, cocaine has a certain respectability. What matters, is he still stupid enough to post evidence of criminal behaviour for the entire world to see?
Women especially are truly stupid in this regard. Take your top off in front of a camera and those pictures WILL find their way onto the internet. Surely everyone knows this by now? Yes women still take their kit off and act all suprised when they end up on the net. How much are you willing to bet that if these women ever want to have a position with any importance later in life these pictures will come back to haunt them?
I bring this up because I recently had a rather weird discussion with a co-worker about this whose pictures off an art thing she did in university came up. She was full frontal in some play they did. It was art. When I asked her why none of her fellow male students were in any kind of naked state she was unable to find a reason. I noticed this before. A lot of times women in art go naked while the males telling them it is for art keep their clothes on. Odd that.
But she is now known on the workfloor not for her brains or years of good work but her perky tits. This doesn't matter if like me you got no ambition but if you want to move up who do you think they are going to choose. The guy who jerked off to naked girls or the girl that got naked?
Life ain't fair, that boss who drives his suv while drunk will not hire the kid who smoked a joint and the boss who fucks his secretary half his age will not give a promotion to a woman who got her kit off. If you got ambition, think about what you do. And while it ain't entirely fair, I am not certain I want the world to be run by people who can't think ahead. Is somebody who can't think ahead about his own future really fit to think ahead about say a companies future or even the entire country?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is a DUPE! The fact that people have been able to search for your name online has been around for years. I swear I saw an article a year or more ago with virtually the exact same wording.
I never use my real name as a handle except where I want people to know who I am. Generally in these cases the online has a basis in real life (a forum discussing a conference or something). But for sites like Slashdot, I can post anything I like and people are not going to be able to associate my comments with me in real life.
The lesson we learn from this, on the Internet people can find out stuff about you. Therefore if you have stuff you do not want people to find out about, do not put it on the Internet!
I wank in the shower.
Imagine if a prospective employer saw your Slashdot postings!
Employer: I'm sorry but your just not the person we're looking for.
You: But why?
Employer: We saw that all your Slashdot posts were rated -1 Troll and our company doesn't need anymore trolls.
You: Damn it!
Yes a marketting job could well do with someone who stands out. For a lot of real jobs it don't matter shit. You don't care what your plumber did in school did you?
But for a lot of the more exciting/succesfull jobs who you are matters because the risk for choosing the wrong person are high.
Tell me, what kind of pilot do you want. One who leads a perfectly boring life who just spend a quiet weekend home with his wife and kids or one who just spend the weekend on a drug and booze filled rampage? Who do you want managing your stocks. Someone with all the political motivation of a jellyfish or someone who firmly believes money is the root of all evil?
Do you want an eccentric person in charge or a nuclear powerplant. A police officer with quircks, a judge with political views (especially one that doesn't agree with yours)?
Luckily most people never need to worry about this. There are plenty of jobs out there where they don't give a shit what you do in your private life. And I can't help but feel that if you want a bigger job then you should be willing to adjust what you do in your private life so you can get the big bucks.
If you want to be your own person in your personal life then the price is that you will have to accept the kind of job where your personal life don't matter. The fast majority of jobs will be open to you. Sure the fast majority of jobs also have bad pay and are boring but hey, at least you got a full and un-spyed upon private life.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
A blog full of half-literate paeans to partying does suggest that you are overeducated and perhaps incompetent.
Smart people often break taboos: Richard Feynman loved strip clubs and Paul Erdös took amphetamines, to name but a couple.
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
Clearly many people who are creating myspace sites have a strange relationship with this very public forum. On one hand they view it and understand it as public. It is the web afterall and everyone is just a Google search away. But yet they still seem to place a psychological shield around it. So while they surely must know it is public, they still regard it as somehow very private and personal ("my space") and are shocked when people hold them accountable for the information content they advertise.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
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.
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 have no idea what is so bad about MySpace. You are clearly missing something..
I'm all for personal privacy, but I think one great thing about MySpace is that it's hard to "fake it". You can pretend to be somebody you're not, but by and large kids in particular are really savvy to this kind of "fronting". Let's just all be who we are, whether we smoke weed, like kinky wierd sex acts, or are a creepy vegetarian. Let's stop lying about it and just have a good time, online and off. People are such fucking cry babies I swear. If every person in the country was totally honest about who they were, and these lame corporations still had all their lame "standards", they'd quickly not have ANY employees. Trying to make everyone pretend to be something they're not is just stupid.
Go ahead and check my MySpace, my piss, my driving record, and my credit record. I ain't perfect, but I'm a good worker and I get the job done, and there's probably about 200 million others of me in this country so STFU.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Exactly! With everyone bitching about losing freedoms, you'd think more people would share that healthy view of yours.
:x
Well. It's so hilariously obvious it's funny.
One must really be a non-hireable idiot if he thinks he can post anything on the Internet and then stay anonymous.
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.
I threw my name in Yahoo people search and it came back with 10 results, none of which included me. I've thrown my name in google and there was plenty of results, but again mostly referring to other people. There's even a myspace page by somebody else with the same name. Recruiters should be cautious to make sure that when they are investigating somebody, the information they find really is about the right person. The world is a big place and the internet is accessible from just about anywhere so it's just about guaranteed that there are other internet users with the same name as you. Now if there's photos of you on myspace, then they will know it's you. And you will deserve everything you get.
No one should be suprised this is happening. The job market is tough and HR will use anything they can to weed out the freaks. The hiring process isnt free, and every loser they deal with costs the company money.
Not saying you are a loser beacuse you have a stupid webpage, but its not worth the risk if you have stupid stuff posted up there.
And if you think that is invasive, wait until you get a 'security clearance audit'.. Then they come to your house personally..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In general, I think you'd be much better off hiring the quiet, hard-working kid or the kid who's reasonable and talkative. The kids who posture in stupid and irresponsible ways are, surprise surprise, not as smart nor as hard-working as the other kids. I don't think this has anything to do with smoking the odd blunt or getting loaded or liking satire, but it does have a lot to do with what you think is funny, what your core values are. Why hire the person who blogs vicious gossip? Why hire the person who mocks the boss? Why hire the person who thinks misogyny is funny? Or that vandalism is? And I'm not saying the responsible kids aren't rebellious or critical; they're just not stupid about what they think is funny. Basically what I'm saying here is that many students are irresponsible jerks, and I think it's good to weed them out. In fact, some posters here reveal themselves to be the sort of person I would not hire. I wouldn't want people with such loser ideas about women working around any women I'd hired.
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.
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.
People need to realize that the internet is a public forum. IANAL but management training I've been at had the opinion that posting something publicly is the same as volunteering information in an interview. And just because an employer can't ask something doesn't mean that they can't use it as a factor in hiring you or not.
Even if they can't, like posting you're gay for instance, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. People are a slave to their preferences and if a person doesn't like gays, you're less likely to get the job.
Also people need to realize that if you post it on the internet, it may forever be unretractable. Think that picture is gone just because you deleted it from Photobucket? Think again. It may be on the next CD of 2,000+ images of college girls gone wild. Same goes for your friends posting photos/stories of you. It may be gone for years. Then surface when you run for public office.
People have to realize that hiring someone is difficult. I Google people before offering every time as resumes and interviews can only go so far. MTF, since we do internet work, if I DON'T find any trace of someone online that will set of red flags.
If stalking on the Internet is okay, then so is stalking in real life. If they can, without cause other than curiosity, check what you've ever said to anybody (remember, the datamining the NSA et al are devising are done by private entities, who have no reason not to sell the information to anyone who wishes to pay), see who you've talking to (a DailyKos reader, eh? Commie. Not our type of people), see what porn you like, check to see if you're easy to talk into bed -- not all filtering is to block bad immoral types -- some of it will be to find a hot chick employee who gives it up. The possibilities are endless.
Henry Ford used to hire private investigators to follow his employees around to check on their moral fiber. No doubt hornier employers used PI's to find blackmail fodder against female employees. And male, too.
There's no business reason to spy on people. We've gotten along for thousands of years with employers being in the dark, and they can damned stay that way. There are however an infinite number of evil reasons to spy on people.
I wonder how many politicians and businessmen will let their private lives be monitored by their employess. After all, politiicians are public employees, and therefore subject to monitoring. And businessmen are entrusted with corporate licenses, granted by the public through the government, and so therefore should be watched closely, with publically available records datamined from all possible sources, including sex lives and phone conversations.
This is hell on earth. And not many people give a damn.
'Google' is an everyday word the article is right-on, just google your name; Does anything come up? That is a great, quick first check, but then of course there's the blogs and other social networking sites that the article lists.
Anything you put on the Internet today is pretty much free for anyone to 'grab.' You need to be careful of what you put on there.
I also want to take this time to say hello to any company out there who is reviewing this message.