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How To Lose Your Job, Thanks To The Internet
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?
Fascism is older than the internet. Witch hunts are older than that. What you see is a bunch of companies that think they are so powerful that they can tell you to do and think as they say, 24/7. With government granted franchises, rubber stamped consolidation and bad joke anti-trust enforcement big company perception is not that far from reality. Shutting down online expression is both an exercise and enhancer of corporate power, just as book burning and other forms of censorship have been.
If your company is like this, do yourself a favor and quit.
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer. No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer. The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.
Now if employers terminate people unreasonably for being part of a political organization, due to their ethnicity or religion or for some other discriminatory reason the existing legal protection needs to come into play (as is the case of Stacy Snyder mentioned in TFA - terminating someone for being seen with a large glass of alcohol is moronic - that said she's better off with a different employer if that's how her current one acts). We don't need new special laws for the Internet. We may need minor adjustments to existing laws to take the Internet into account. We certainly don't need special protection for morons be they employer or employee.
Are we really suppose to have sympathy for morons who don't know what they put on the net is public?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Just because it wasn't possible before to know what you're employees are like is not only not the point, it's also very much the point. On the first note, more information is a good thing. And you if can discover that your employee is whatever you consider weird, you're welcome to stop working with them. On the second note, if you can discover that your employee is whatever you consider weird, so can your clients. A public face is a public face, and if an employee intends to work in a job where that face matters -- i.e. the face of the company -- then yes, their on-line activities count just as much as their off-line activities.
My father taught me this when I was six, and it rings true here. At a baseball game, some reporter was going around asking for public opinion regarding some baseball issue. My father denied the interview saying that he was the officer of a public communications company, and should not be presented publicly by this reporter; even on a matter as unrelated as his opinions on baseball.
Now, I own and operate my own company. And yes, I look for good people to work with me. You'd beter believe I want them to be good people all-around. Their welcome to vent to me, and they can insult me to my face all they like. They can insult my clients to my face as well. But when they do anything that my clients can see, or to which my clients have access, they had better conduct themselves in a manner that I deem suitable.
Right or wrong, if my client says that they don't like my employee, I take that very seriously. Accidents and general human error are acceptable in moderation. Disregard for my business -- even during off-hours -- is completely unacceptable.
In my perspective, many employees (I don't mean only mine, I do in fact include many of my friends that work for others) consider their employment to be a right. No matter how good you are at your job, your employor has invested way more time and way more effort, and way more RISK into the business than you'll ever even consider for as long as you're an employee.
You don't deserve squat -- that's why you get nothing but money for your time. You work is appreciated, but the intelectual property isn't yours, and the risk wasn't yours, and the value-rewards won't be yours. The clients aren't yours, the company isn't yours. There's an enormous risk in starting your own business, and it's a gigantic under-taking to maintain any business. Being a cog in the machine is worth the grease, and little more.
My father would come home, after long days of negotiating some government contract for the communication company for which he worked. After a successful victory, he'd boast to his wife how he'd saved the company millions of dollars. She'd turn to him and say: "so, how much of it is ours?". Of course the answer is zero. That was his job, he did it well, he got paid as expected, plus or minus an annual bonus. The given victory meant nothing financially.
Know that when you work for someone else, you get to avoid the many headaches that go into running a business and being accountable to an entity that you've created. Also know that when you go out on your own, you deserve all of the glory, credit, blame, and defeat.
The real problem isn't that you post the pictures of yourself, it is that one of your "friends" posted them.
I want to quote this first:
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer. No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer. The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.I agree that "conflicts of interests" as mentioned above do have a right to be known to employers. However, when does this stop becoming an genuine effort to root out the so-called "stripper teacher," and become an threadbare excuse to fire someone for lack of conformity? Let me illustrate. I am always 110% work appropriate when I am on the job, however in my off hours I wear alot of piercings, I show tattoos, I like to go out and have drinks and hang with friends. There is, with today's digital camera boom, a good chance pictures will be taken of these activities in my off time. Now, if the place I work for is generally church going, khaki and polo button down straight edge family types, they might absolutely abhor my personal life, even though I don't bring it to work. Now the issue becomes, "if one worker doesn't fit the company image in and out of work, cut him loose." Can you see how easy the line between business interest and privacy can get blurred and abused? It feels like a door for socialized work places(sans government). Maybe I make a slightly paranoid case, but self expression is highly important to me; I'd hate to live half a life for fear of losing my job.
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
I find that their sense of ethics is usually quite impaired.
Have gnu, will travel.
Two of the three examples you cite are about people who have been convicted of a crime. Convict status is something you don't need the Internet to find out and is something where there is a legal reduction in rights. The third example of a teacher moonlighting as an actor or model for pornography is rather an extreme and (I believe intentionally) inflammatory example. It is by necessity a public profession and one in which participation could be revealed even if no Internet existed.
Where I live, the state of Georgia here in the USA, your employer has the right to terminate you for any reason whatsoever (excepting of course discriminatory reasons based on minority, religious, veteran or disabled status) or without cause. So its not about the right of your employer to terminate. Its about the wisdom of terminating someone based on something you found out about them online. Any competent manager should be able to tell whether you are doing your job well or not, without the aid of facebook photos showing your drinking, getting high, or snorting coke off a strippers tits. If you can do your job, why should it matter what you put on the net?
You seem really fond of the word moron and its variants which you use thrice in your post. It of course refers to someone with diminished intelligence. So in response to your question, should I have sympathy for someone who has limited intellectual faculties, my response is yes. Of course, I do. What kind of monster are you that you don't?! But perhaps your repeated use of moron and variants is an indication of your own limitations, in this case of vocabulary. Maybe you meant to describe the individuals as foolhardy, naive, ignorant... In all of these cases, I still have sympathy for them. Everyone makes mistakes, but the Internet can trap those mistakes indefinitely like a fly in amber. Preserved for who knows how long... It is a major shift from a time when even the most celebrated of mistakes a person might make would fade in the collective memory and only diligent searching of newspaper archives, public records, and other references would uncover it.
I think your callous dismissal of the serious issue raised here is unwarranted. If anything it contributes to the ignorance that your deride (inaccurately with the word 'moron'). You suggest that people should already be aware of an issue at the same time you mock the fact that the issue is even being discussed. Obviously, given that people are ignorant of it, it needs to be discussed more, not less!
If I'm employing a salaried worker, then they're never "off the clock." When they're thinking about work, that's work I'm employing them to do. I own their ideas because they are my employee, and that's how work-for-hire works.
People know who works for who, and so my employees' actions reflect on the company. I have to protect the image of my company. Firing someone for having a drunken binge and then gloating about it online reflects poorly on the professionalism of my company, and therefore could result in a loss of revenue, and that could result in a stock holder lawsuit. So you see, even if I didn't want to, I have no choice other than to constantly monitor the actions of my employees and reprimand them when they're actions run counter to the company's interest.
If potential employees didn't like this behavior, then they wouldn't interview or accept offers from my company. That's just how the free market works, and since people do work for me, that shows they don't have any problems with this arrangement. The free market works again! And anyway, they posted the things online, so they gave up any privacy, so they should just accept the consequences.
And finally, this is all private surveillance instead of government so there's nothing wrong with it.
* * *
Of course, I was being sarcastic, but I fully expect there to be multiple posts that reiterate these ideas, only for real. There are plenty of people in today's America that want to essentially repeal the 20th century. I strongly suspect because there are people that for whatever reason, never saw power they didn't like, because they have the delusional belief that someday they will have that power.
Employers can read your email because they own the network. However they can't listen into your phone calls, even though they own the phones. The difference? One law was passed in the 30s or 40s. The other in the 90s.
The lassie faire free market capitalism is model. Nothing more. It's an ideal model, not unlike ideal wires in electrical engineering. They don't exist. The perfect market doesn't exist, because it hinges on perfect information, which doesn't exist. The market doesn't capture lots of things, namely pretty much everything that doesn't have a directly quantifiable cost. Even if you could assign a cost to these things, which you can't, the market doesn't necessarily work fast enough.
Fortunately, you are not limited to two online identities (the real and the pen name.) You can have as many as you want, and use them in proper spheres. You can be one on /., another on music forums, yet another on car enthusiasts' forums, and yet another, the real one, for official use. This will allow you to separate your technical opinions from your political or musical interests, and to prevent cross-contamination of your opinion on Urusei Yatsura with your comments about Ron Paul, for example.
The great thing about the internet is that people *can* find you
Sure, they can find someone known as foobar123 on Ford forums just as easy as otaku456 on manga forums. Nobody needs to know more, unless you choose to tell someone.
"job security" has always been an illusion
Still there is no good reason to be a witness against yourself. In many cases if the real name of the poster is not known, it will remain not known (unless there is a really serious, legal or security-related need to find that out.) Besides, how does it matter to me what your real name is? Your name is whatever you tell me, and that's all I want to know. It's not like I'm planning to send you snail mail, for example. Your real name is of no use to me.
An ass is an ass, and no company wants to employ somebody like that.
In 99.999% of cases that person is bad at home and just as bad at work. If you can find someone who is Dr. Jekyll at work and Mr. Hyde at home, he is an exceptional actor. There are people like that, especially among criminals, but that's not what we are talking about here. If such a criminal is working as your cashier you won't hear a single bad word about him until he steals everything you have; he'd be excellent at work and at home until that last moment.
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.
Of course, it implies that you have to sacrifice your job just so you can openly display something that the company - an amorphous, amoral, collective entity - has no need to know to begin with. Sounds like a bad deal to me, in terms of gain vs. reward. When I work for someone I sell my labor, not my soul.
A paragraph from the cited article:
Employment law in most states provides little protection to workers who are punished for their online postings, said George Lenard, an employment lawyer at Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris in St. Louis. The main exceptions are workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements or by special protections for public-sector employees; members of these groups can be dismissed only "for cause." The rest of us are "at will" employees, holding on to our jobs only at the whim of our employers, and thus vulnerable.
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And for this, you can thank those who deride unions as "corrupt organizations, whose sole purpose was to aggrandize the union bosses".
Yes, the statement may be true in some cases, but they did protect their covered employees from the "at will" horseshit. I worked for a company whose new management put the employee manual online on the intranet. Cute trick -- before you could look at what the provisions were, you had to click on a box following a statement saying that you agreed that you were an "at will" employee and could be dismissed at any time for any reason.
Union employees could have told the company to stick the intranet up their asses and to provide a written, dated statement of employee rights and responsibilities.
Most of you nerds should keep in ming that you're on call 24/7 or are working 50 to 60 hour weeks because those fine folks in your parents' generation who fought bloody battles for the 40-hour work week have been cast aside as "productivity-robbing parasites".
As an exercise, everyone in an "exempt" position should divide their yearly salary by the appropriate number to see what their actual hourly wage is.
I once was awarded a check large enough to be worth $500 after taxes for work "above and beyond" on a certain project. It felt nice until I added up the extra hours I'd put in and found out the cocksucking bastards had gotten me to work for about five dollars an hour.
Goddamned self-serving pricks.
No one cares what you do in your off time. No really they don't. But if you're going to perform watersports on a dog, while licking ice cream off an asian prostitute, while sodomizing a bum, at least put it under an alias.
The shit people do and then link to their name is ridiculous. If I post something under my given name that can reflect badly onto me and the company I work for. Now at the same time if I post something under a pseudonym (kinglink is one) then that at least should not be considered the same thing. However at the same time if I link my account to my last name in any way (signing a post with my real name?) then again that becomes public knowledge. My company likely knows kinglink is me, that's fine I'm not betraying my company I'm not being stupid, I'm not trying to hide who I am, but the minute I would need to believe me, Kinglink will not be the name I try that with.
At the very least let's all realize that the internet is here to stay. So it's fine to post a picture of you as a fairy in a pride parade. But at the same time also realize someone searching for your information is likely to find and can and will make opinions on you or your background based on it.
Oh and a little hint, if you're playing hooky, and you take pictures DONT POST THEM ON FACEBOOK OR ANYTHING LINKED TO YOU! There's too many stories about this with people getting busted. Or again at the very least tamper with the date and time on your camera before you take your pictures.
The point about lawyers flexing laws is pretty much legit, as is the observation that laws have consequences, some of which may expose you to negative impacts in running a business. The question is whether or not the goods they're crafted to bring about are worth it.
I'd agree that requiring employers to make allowances that mean they need to consider a single man and mother equally means there may be calculable drag on employers. That by itself doesn't mean it's not a good idea, it simply means there's no such thing as a free lunch. The question is if that's the best place to pay/way for the problem of mothers who don't have sufficient incomes in their households, and if it's by and large an acceptable tradeoff.
In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power"
I'd argue that it's also better to have a society that doesn't discriminate based on religion than it is to have businesses at peak efficiency, too, but that's not really relevant to your statement. Because you're not talking about operating a peak efficiency -- any development schedule that can't accommodate up to a dozen holidays a year and a weekly sabbath of some kind (whether spent in piety or revelry or somewhere in between) is already screwed up, likely negatively influenced by fatigue and diminishing returns, and it ought to scare off any developer with good sense, who ought to run hard and fast unless you're offering some unusually good compensation.
Even if, however, the documentation fell the other way, it's possible that the good done by encouraging a society that doesn't discriminate based on religious belief might outweigh the business economic case.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
who says it was me (I) who put that video up?
Here I am, enjoying my drunken rave - having a great time, I even leave my phone at home.. no disturbances for me this new years' eve.. just me, my friends, that cute girl I met and jello shots.
A week later, I get fired, because my boss saw a video of it.. turns out the girl was his niece; go fig. Now what video? I don't know - I certainly didn't take any, let alone give it to him. Turns out that somebody else was shooting some video of their friends.. I don't know them, they don't know me, but I sure was in the background of their video.
Not everything is a "babysitter caught doing drugs", but may still be something you don't really want to share with the world for whatever reason; but you don't always have a say in this yourself.
So the solution is not so simple; unless you're saying that the real simple solution is to live puritan life 24/7 so that there is never a chance of anybody, anywhere, catching you doing things that might be perfectly acceptable in the situation you were in, but perhaps not so acceptable to your employer.. parents.. whoever/whatever.