terrbear.org

This might be my most confusing post title to date. My apologies.

The subject of transparency and social networking in the workplace has come up a few times in different blogs. In a related topic, I read a post by another twitter-er about self censorship a few weeks ago that has closely reflected my sentiment from time to time.

I tend to swing (to an extent) back and forth between a conservative and liberal posting policy, and this seems to tie closely with my job security and job searching. If I’m looking for a job, you can bet that my facebook has been locked down for weeks, I’ve locked down my tweets, have taken down my blog, and tried as hard as possible to break all ties with pseudonyms. If I’m comfortable with my job situation, and with the coworkers, I tend to let more out.

There’s a couple of things that sprout from this. Some are amazing, and I realize would never have happened 15 years ago. Others are annoying to terrifying.

First up, I’ve burned a few bridges. Not many, but I’ve gotten in trouble for my blogging a few times. Well, once. At Company ST, where I posted about how I was unhappy with how some features came out, that came to backfire. I was already considering working my way out of the company, though, so it wasn’t too disastrous. As a learning experience, though, I’ll only write company initials most of the time.

I’ve also learned things about coworkers in a much more vented atmosphere. While some tweeps keep their politics and opinions and religion to themselves, others pepper their stream with it. I do as well. This has led to some discussions, though rarely deep ones, that if anything let me know some of my coworkers better. I think this is fantastic.

What I think is incredibly important in this transparency process is that we provide ideas and reasoning behind them. This does two things. First, it provides a much better understanding for readers where we’re coming from, so we don’t just come off as crazy. And second, it gives opponents an arena for discussion, instead of having to go after the person or bring up some other unrelated garbage.

Anyways, back to the title. I think there’s two ways we can keep ourselves employed and be opinionated.

The first is to not share those opinions. It’s how things worked in the mid ’90s down to the dark ages, and if it was good enough for them, then it’s good enough for you.

The second is to share those opinions in a reasoned fashion, with enough volume that you’re not likely to be tagged by a single post. For those unfamiliar with Zed Shaw, the guy wrote a post “Rails is a Ghetto” that torched the Rails platform and community. It made it onto Slashdot, and even people who didn’t care about Rails or Zed thought, “holy crap, that guy just ended his career.”

Of course, if you read the rest of Zed’s site, you see that the post isn’t anything spectacular. He flames tons of different subjects on his site. What you also get from reading his posts? The guy’s incredibly smart.

Now, I don’t think Zed’s a shining example for flooding your opinions out there to provide a quick look at your character, I think as long as you’re not flaming people you work(ed) with and keep things reasonable without too much hyperbole, you’re not going to put too much of a bad taste in someone’s mouth.

Essentially, I think exposure is good. It helps you vet ideas. It lets people know you before they meet you. If you spout racist nonsense on your site, then I probably won’t let you through a phone screen. If you say you want to go to a burning man festival, which sounds weird to me, I’ll listen to what you have to say and think about both the technical merits of your answers and how you’d fit in with our culture.

I’m not sure how older generations feel about this, but it seems that people I went to school with subscribe to the same mindset. We disagree about issues, and try to write up compelling arguments justifying our points. I might disagree with you fundamentally on politics and religion, but I don’t think that should keep you from working with me.

*I generally don’t link to blogs of people I work with, because I don’t want to take responsibility for putting a link to my blog on your site, since I do let almost everything air out.