I opened this expecting to skim and come to the comments, but i'm absolutely enthralled. I just got up to get a cold drink and i'm going to savour this properly. Thank you so much for posting this!
This happened to a colleague of mine, he was the sales director of the company (ISP in the mid 90s) we worked for, and after 3 take overs in a row - and 3 times changing of mouse pads, business cards and email addresses in a short time - he had no responsibilities left, had no boss but was on the payroll. He quit after some months of being bored.
Talk about a lack of imagination! Just think of all the dinky hacking projects you could do with a guaranteed paycheck and no responsibilities. I'd probably spend 12 hours a day writing qml.
The startup I worked for got bought by a big company, then two years later they decided to shut us down. But they wanted a fraction of us to stick around for 3 months and keep the servers running while they transitioned to the new system. And they offered us large severance checks to stick around until the end. (Basically, barely work for 3 months then get another 3 months bonus pay.)
It was painfully boring. I wrote a lot of hobby code. Learned a couple of programming languages. Read a few good books. Helped people with their resumes. Had some nice long lunches. Volunteered to fix everything that broke during business hours so that I could feel like I'd at least done something useful.
I wish I'd produced something more useful during those slack 3 months, but I was afraid that if I did, the big company would claim ownership of it.
Long, amazing read -- I remember it from the SA forums years ago when I was in high school --
I remember wondering then just how long I'd be able to take a job that paid relatively well but offered no... accomplishment.
Well fortunately for me, that opportunity came a few years later while working for one of the large banks! The answer to my earlier question was six months; I had worked a few years through various positions into operations, only to fall into a role with little managerial oversight and no responsibility, it got boring so fast...
> a job that paid relatively well but offered no... accomplishment.
Welcome to most jobs, ever, in every historical period and culture, ever since humans have had jobs distinct from whatever else they did with their lives.
Progress seems to consist of reducing the number of those kinds of jobs and, eventually, finding other things to do for the people who aren't suited to anything else.
> Welcome to most jobs, ever, in every historical period and culture, ever since humans have had jobs distinct from whatever else they did with their lives.
Many jobs were probably quite fulfilling. A cobbler, for example, who produced a pair of shoes before this task could be automated or split Taylor-style.
I don't understand leaving a safe secure job for something unknown. How you use your time is your choice. But you would leave a perfectly good paying job? From what I hear finding a decent place to work is very hard these days.
that was equal parts hilarious and depressing. I dislike how completely CONTENT the author seems to be in DELIBERATELY wasting his life away. Come on man--you can do better!
This reminds me of my two years working for the U.S. Defense Department as a contractor. For a few months I worked with one of the highest ranking individuals in the building, I did a great job and finished much faster than they expected... and then after that there was no work to do, no matter who I asked, and all I could do was come in late, leave early, lift weights in the building gym, and pretend to work. No one really knew what I did.
The only thing that doomed me was when I eventually found myself unable to keep from falling asleep and snoring in meetings. Tried everything I could think of... chewing gum, drinking water, screaming inside my head. No use; the dozing and snoring in plain view of everyone else continued. I think that clued them off that something was amiss, and I started being told I didn't need to come to meetings anymore... and was gone a few months after that.
They very nicely informed our team that they just didn't seem to have enough work for all the contractors, and I was one of the contractors they just didn't seem to have enough work for, so I was off the project, one year + 7 or 8 months after I'd stopped doing any real work.
Lucky thing, too... my teammate on our initial assignment there is still on that same contract, 6 years later... getting annual raises and the odd promotion here and there.. still doing nothing. He still gets that panicky look in his eyes and starts rambling on nonsensically when you ask him what exactly he does there. He was a lot better at pretending to be busy than I was, and wasn't as gung-ho about wanting to be let go if they couldn't find anything useful or challenging for him to do than I was.
Took a year for my productivity levels to bounce back after leaving that project. Was just really hard to do any work for a while... 2 years of nothing makes you quite lethargic being used to napping and web-surfing all day. Took me all day to answer the 1 email or so I'd get in the morning. Most productive things I did then were read classic literature and hone my chess skills against the computer. I play a mean game of chess vs. computer these days because of my time with the DoD.
That really is the problem with that kind of situation - I've been there, though not to that extreme. I'd work maybe an hour or two a day, and folks thought I was doing great. When something was really broken they'd call me in and I'd fix it.
The down side is that it really damaged my ability to work productively when I finally left there. I had to re-learn how to actually work (as opposed to 6 hours of surfing and noodling about).
I got it back, but not before I almost came into trouble at my next job. It did indeed take close to a year to recover.
Honestly reading this makes me a little bit sick to my stomach. Do you know what most people would give for that amount of spare time? I could build so much, learn so much, do so much... or would I just sit there and play snake?
> what most people would give for that amount of spare time?
No, they wouldn't. You could do so much, but we live in a world where people spend 7 hours a month on Facebook and a game called Candy Crush makes over $600,000 per day.
While way more than $600,000/day of developer time goes into making thousands of lame, derivative cell phone games that less than 100 people will ever play. Fueled by the mostly-irrational hope of creating That One Big Hit.
Seriously. At the bare minimum, you could do creative writing or art -- you don't even need a computer for those. Any internet access at all opens up a whole world of things you could do, from honing job skills or working on open source software projects, or even just contributing to Wikipedia.
It's quite possible that he left out the fact that he did something productive in order to highlight the corporate fuck-upery. Some deeply nested comment above points to this being the case.
Guys. If you ever think you might be stuck in a meeting as described in part 2, you can set up a rule on ifttt.com to call you if you send them a text message. That way, you can pull the same trick with a single phone.
I bought a "dumb" Symbian phone and it has "fake call" functionality. It even allows you to configure which button to press and the timeout to wait for the event. If you answer it, you just hear nothing but it won't hang up on you. It's well worth the steep price of $5.
Because phones don't "ring" when on a call - you get a beep in the phone speaker. At least with every landline and mobile phone I've ever seen in the past few decades.
I guess there is a subset of people who may still be fooled.
Or, learn ventriloquism so that you can mimic the sound of a phone vibrating on a table. Pick up the phone before anyone notices it's not moving around.
The problem with that would be sending the message while keeping the phone in your pocket, especially now that most phones are touchscreen-controlled. Maybe by doing it in advance and setting up a delay?
It made me sad reading it. I've met folks like the character portrayed, idling along because they can, never improving anything. Eventually they will get dismissed, and after being so may find that they are completely dysfunctional having forgotten the habits needed to get things done, and perhaps developed habits that work against them. Unemployed, hungry, and often homeless they turn to drugs or alcohol and slowly circle the drain. There was an interview with somebody who could have been this character on the CBS evening news when they were doing a story about the long term unemployed. He hadn't been employed in over 3 years and had no transferable skills from his old job and in the past three years had not developed any new skills. So very very sad.
It is one thing to build up enough savings such that you can live off the 4% annual draw down stipend like MMM advocates, and then wasting your time. It is something else completely to be depending on someone else to pay you a salary.
He was definitely good at corporate politics. A great skill to have, since it makes him employable and buys him time in whatever company he'd work to learn the stuff he'd eventually need to do
Agreed but he's using his free time to play Snake? Its one thing when people use this sort of position to build a new business or develop new skills, its sad when they let that time go to waste. As you get older you realize you're never getting that time back, ever. And even though you feel the same way you did when you were 20 you can't reset the clock.
Which keeps you up to date on important events and helps network with others in the industry. Not the most productive use of time, but better than playing snake.
It seems to be an embellishment for the sake of the story. He mentions in the original thread that he's pursuing a 3rd degree, has spent time writing short stories and is in the middle of a novel, and spends time in the lower rungs of professional racing and writing a biography about that.
He also reportedly claims to have made it all up but I couldn't find the source.
edit: Actually working in corporate America I can believe this is real aside from the nobody knowing you. You can have a manager and they can know you do nothing but they can't get rid of you.
I'm sure it's happened in real life before, but I strongly feel that this particular story was just an exercise in creative writing. Just pay closer attention to the writing style vs other personal accounts.
That is a fair point, I've known people who didn't really have any job responsibilities and yet insisted on 'helping.' Which resulted in lower productivity for everyone around them. One of the reasons Office Space was funny was that the stereotypes exist because these sort of people exist in real life.
I've heard a few similar stories, here's one about an engineer who was 'too senior' to lay off when an office closed:
They wound up with nearly zero responsibilities. Same as this story, they were relocated to a remote office and never assigned a new manager.
Once a month, they received an email from someone on the QA team with updated i18n strings for the latest software update. Their sole duty was to append the strings, commit, and verify the build wasn't broken. They replied to QA with a single word: "Done!", and that was all they did.
In their free time (as I recall) they made mobile games and about three years in, the company went into Chapter 11 and seeing the writing on the wall, they turned in their resignation... to whom, I don't know.
Enthralling read. That was 11 years ago. I wonder if he stuck around to see the 2008 recession and somehow miraculously made it through. If not he would have had a huge redundancy pay out given his tenure.
A college friend of mine (with CS degree) was hired as an automated tester about 6 months ago. The project he was hired for and assigned to was put on indefinite hold right after he was hired. He's an "asset" on that project, all of which are frozen. But because he's a new employee, he can only be on one project at a time, so he has no responsibilities. He has a weekly meeting with his manager, where he informs her that he's still doing nothing and he'd be happy to do anything, while she replies that he has nothing to do. Also he is not allowed to use the internet for non-work-related tasks.
Recently the CTO has begun roaming the halls in his department. The CTO gets upset upon seeing my friend doing nothing. So he has to look busy all the time. He spends hours of his day typing nonsense into Word.
I told him he could be doing any number of things to improve his skills (which are lacking already). He is disillusioned with the corporate world at this point, his previous two jobs not being much better. Instead he applied and was accepted to the master's program this fall. My hopes for him are not high, but I don't know how to encourage him.
He could have put his skills to work on an open source project as opposed to just mindlessly typing.
EDIT: Alternatively he could have even created his own internal company project for work. Whether or not they liked enough to keep is another story but at the very least it shows he has initiative, creativity, and he can learn something from his work.
Unless your job has a lot of manual, physical labor; I really find it hard to see how anyone can get bored and do nothing at work especially if you can program.
The problem with working at a company like that is that by the time you realize you are stuck, you have no relevant practical experience anymore and it can be rather difficult to get hired at places that are worth working at.
This is why github exists. IANAL but I'm guessing when you don't use company resources, do it during off hours, and the open source work you do has no relevance to your company's industry; publishing that work to github should be fine.
For most sane people this is the case. But many companies' boilerplate IP clauses claim ALL of the IP generated while working at the company. The vast majority of them won't give a damn but it still exposes you legally if you are under such a clause and have a side project/contribute to opensource.
There is an elegant way to get out of that. Approach your management (usually requires director-level approval), and say that you are doing some volunteer web site work for [insert charity] on the weekends, and they require a signed release that your employer OK's it. This can also fall under the "requires approval for moonlighting" clause in many employee handbooks.
Then, assign all copyright to your opensource work to the FSF, which is a 501c organization.
Well there's self improvement -- say, learning the ins and outs of internal company software; and then there is "self improvement" -- mucking about with a pet project in an esoteric language that has no bearing whatsoever on the company's bottom line and arguably does not sharpen the skill-set that they are paying you for.
Not every company can afford to let employees "self-improve" on the latter level.
Learning new technology and new programming skills is not "internet use for non-work tasks". It's an expected, constant, never ending part of the job for almost anyone technical; unless they want to have stale skills in 1-2 years.
I would agree with that iff the learning that you were doing was closely related to the skill-set that your company hired you for and/or one they could utilize. See my related comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6089570
I strongly disagree. Learning a functional language that is very different from your language at work still has a lot of value. It can help you with patterns and even when your own language evolves. For example, Java 8 will have lambdas. If you're already familiar with it from other "esoteric" languages, it'll be very easy to take advantage of it.
I'm sure others can provide better examples than I can.
It is dangerous to write code and try to copyright it yourself while you are on the job. It puts the FOSS project at risk for all his code contributions possibly being under copyright of the company and if they found out they would probably pull all his commits.
If it is their time and their equipment, then it's their IP. Even if they didn't know about it. In that situation, the last thing you need is the legal department on your case.
Plus, what if the project got bug? How can you base something on shaky legal grounds?
I guess it depends on how badly they enforce the ban on "internet for non-work-related" browsing. Could make it difficult, although it sounds like he is a programmer at a tech-ish company, so he should probably have access to most tech/programming oriented sites. Worst case, he could get a wifi hotspot and go to town.
At my last job, I kept a few programming books at my desk, and during slow periods would crack those open and do some self-learning. It was a consulting job though, so those moments were few and far between (as much as I hated having to fill out timecards, billable rates were a good approximation of employee productivity, if you weren't billable, you needed a really good excuse).
An internal project is definitely a good idea -- it can get you noticed in all the right ways. At the same time, it can draw attention to you -- "how do you have time to be messing with this project? Don't you have tasks you should be doing?"
It seems that much of what's going on in that department is CYA activity, but it seems to me that an internal project or open source project are the most defensible uses of the time.
Instead of sitting there doing nothing, he applied and sharpened his skills in a way that was productive for someone. His first response should be, "Can the company take credit for my time on this open-source project?" and "If this internal project is useful, can I use these skills to make anything else easier in our department?"
The risk is that he'll violate the "don't rock the boat" principle that is the bedrock of CYA. The possible benefit is that if you have two employees, and one is creatively loafing while the other is creatively applying himself or herself, you know which one will offer long-term value (and be easier on a manager, who won't have to constantly nag the person to keep them from screwing off for 40 hours a week).
Eek. That sounds like something straight out of Kafka's The Castle.
I feel for him. Likely, he should try to escalate it higher up so that he gets moved to another project. But I understand his reluctance too, as they could decide he should not be working at the company at all.
And what bugs me as strange is that the CTO knows that he's doing nothing and still not doing anything about it.
coincidentally i had almost the same situation happen to me (hired as a dev, project kept getting pushed back and back, had no work to do for 4 months). i spent my time reading books from project gutenberg, one ofthem being The Trial
Instead of typing nonsense, he could type blog articles into Word and schedule them to be published throughout the week on his weekends. BAM. Traffic, revenue.
Reminds me of something similar I witnessed while working in one of the big international corporations. A new guy joined our team and was waiting for a whole week to get a laptop to work with (and there wasn't really anything in the job description that could be done without a computer). A laptop was ready in the IT department, but they didn't give it to him as corporate accounts were not prepared yet.
The guy was sitting at an empty desk all day long and reading newspapers, right in front of the manager desk. The manager, when asked, did not allow him to leave the workplace any time earlier, in spite of him doing distinctly nothing. Yeah, in the end who cares if some corporate money or employee's time get wasted.
So the message from the company to the employees is clear - no matter what you do, as long as you comply with our policies (reagrdless of their rationality), you are paid, which means not rewarded, but recognized as "us". Other employees who generate more profit to the company will compensate for your doing nothing, because you are a member of our big family now, and our strength is in quantity, not quality..
Oh, I could tell you stories... We once had an entire PALLET full of brand-new iPads delivered to our department. Only we never ordered them, they were meant for a different department. Only the other department never claimed them, and procurement never picked them up. Not even after numerous phone calls. If it weren't for a coworker who hand-delivered them to the other deparment (they were kind of sitting in the way), they'd probably still sitting there...
What bothers me is that this was a large hospital. The amount of moneywasting I've seen is mindboggling. Nurses get laid off due to budget cuts, the quality of health care declines, but you still see this kind of shit happening.
And being nominally a guy who is supposed to get rid of these inefficiencies it just drives me crazy and really ps off that each time you finally got rid of one, it's only another excusse to get down on people. You know, we are even more effecient now, so better get up to speed.
Hire random candidates, they may or may not have potential as the interview/hiring process is broken/exploited anyway, then do this to them, break their spirits, make them believe corporate world is like this, they are serfs at the mercy of their company, stiffle their learning and desire to improve by not letting them to anything, not even browse randomly, give them donkey work to do.
Result is that potential competitors are denied a great candidate, they too get broken spirits and a weak workforce. But then, you take new hires and treat them good.
I had a similar situation. I used the time to teach myself some new programming languages and really studied a lot of business management processes and techniques that were somewhat related to my job. That was how I got around the Internet usage policy. That and using a text only browser.
I actually learned a tremendous amount and was very thankful for the opportunity.
My first "real" job was on a government software project, where I guess I was deemed too junior to actually do anything important. I spent time reading, exploring the computers, sending email, etc. But we had to precisely record how our time was spent so it could be billed back to the government correctly, and they were extremely serious about utmost honesty in recording time. Nothing I did pertained to any particular project, so I used the "general" time charging code.
Management repeatedly got upset at me for billing so much to the general time code. I kept asking for work to do. Nobody gave me any work to do. So I kept billing my time to the general time code. And they kept getting upset at me for billing my time to the general time code.
Tell your friend to figure out how to bring his own internet into work. Turn his phone into a usb-hotspot and plug it into his work computer or bring in his own laptop / mini-pc (size of a raspberry pi, there are plenty of options) and plug it into the monitor and keyboard of his work computer.
One way or another, get access to the net and if he doesn't want to do something productive at least he can read Hacker News all day long. Just stay off facebook in case that CTO looks over his shoulder. That would be too easily recognized.
299 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 78.0 ms ] threadThis was originally posted on the Something Awful forums in 2002 by user Moonshine. Here are links to the original threads.
Part 5: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=332... Part 4: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=306... Part 3: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=260... Parts 2 and 1 are gone.
Talk about a lack of imagination! Just think of all the dinky hacking projects you could do with a guaranteed paycheck and no responsibilities. I'd probably spend 12 hours a day writing qml.
It was painfully boring. I wrote a lot of hobby code. Learned a couple of programming languages. Read a few good books. Helped people with their resumes. Had some nice long lunches. Volunteered to fix everything that broke during business hours so that I could feel like I'd at least done something useful.
I wish I'd produced something more useful during those slack 3 months, but I was afraid that if I did, the big company would claim ownership of it.
I remember wondering then just how long I'd be able to take a job that paid relatively well but offered no... accomplishment.
Well fortunately for me, that opportunity came a few years later while working for one of the large banks! The answer to my earlier question was six months; I had worked a few years through various positions into operations, only to fall into a role with little managerial oversight and no responsibility, it got boring so fast...
Welcome to most jobs, ever, in every historical period and culture, ever since humans have had jobs distinct from whatever else they did with their lives.
Progress seems to consist of reducing the number of those kinds of jobs and, eventually, finding other things to do for the people who aren't suited to anything else.
Consume minglings!
please define
Many jobs were probably quite fulfilling. A cobbler, for example, who produced a pair of shoes before this task could be automated or split Taylor-style.
Engrossing read.
EDIT: >I placed a sign on the wall next to the bumper, seen below.
Does anybody have a backup of the picture?
The only thing that doomed me was when I eventually found myself unable to keep from falling asleep and snoring in meetings. Tried everything I could think of... chewing gum, drinking water, screaming inside my head. No use; the dozing and snoring in plain view of everyone else continued. I think that clued them off that something was amiss, and I started being told I didn't need to come to meetings anymore... and was gone a few months after that.
Lucky thing, too... my teammate on our initial assignment there is still on that same contract, 6 years later... getting annual raises and the odd promotion here and there.. still doing nothing. He still gets that panicky look in his eyes and starts rambling on nonsensically when you ask him what exactly he does there. He was a lot better at pretending to be busy than I was, and wasn't as gung-ho about wanting to be let go if they couldn't find anything useful or challenging for him to do than I was.
Took a year for my productivity levels to bounce back after leaving that project. Was just really hard to do any work for a while... 2 years of nothing makes you quite lethargic being used to napping and web-surfing all day. Took me all day to answer the 1 email or so I'd get in the morning. Most productive things I did then were read classic literature and hone my chess skills against the computer. I play a mean game of chess vs. computer these days because of my time with the DoD.
The down side is that it really damaged my ability to work productively when I finally left there. I had to re-learn how to actually work (as opposed to 6 hours of surfing and noodling about).
I got it back, but not before I almost came into trouble at my next job. It did indeed take close to a year to recover.
That goes on the CV as "researched military strategy at the DoD".
No, they wouldn't. You could do so much, but we live in a world where people spend 7 hours a month on Facebook and a game called Candy Crush makes over $600,000 per day.
I guess there is a subset of people who may still be fooled.
It is one thing to build up enough savings such that you can live off the 4% annual draw down stipend like MMM advocates, and then wasting your time. It is something else completely to be depending on someone else to pay you a salary.
He also reportedly claims to have made it all up but I couldn't find the source.
edit: Actually working in corporate America I can believe this is real aside from the nobody knowing you. You can have a manager and they can know you do nothing but they can't get rid of you.
I'll see if I still have those bookmarks at home and throw them in a website archivist.
[1] - http://www.pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf
They wound up with nearly zero responsibilities. Same as this story, they were relocated to a remote office and never assigned a new manager.
Once a month, they received an email from someone on the QA team with updated i18n strings for the latest software update. Their sole duty was to append the strings, commit, and verify the build wasn't broken. They replied to QA with a single word: "Done!", and that was all they did.
In their free time (as I recall) they made mobile games and about three years in, the company went into Chapter 11 and seeing the writing on the wall, they turned in their resignation... to whom, I don't know.
It's interesting how similar the comments are.
Recently the CTO has begun roaming the halls in his department. The CTO gets upset upon seeing my friend doing nothing. So he has to look busy all the time. He spends hours of his day typing nonsense into Word.
I told him he could be doing any number of things to improve his skills (which are lacking already). He is disillusioned with the corporate world at this point, his previous two jobs not being much better. Instead he applied and was accepted to the master's program this fall. My hopes for him are not high, but I don't know how to encourage him.
EDIT: Alternatively he could have even created his own internal company project for work. Whether or not they liked enough to keep is another story but at the very least it shows he has initiative, creativity, and he can learn something from his work.
Unless your job has a lot of manual, physical labor; I really find it hard to see how anyone can get bored and do nothing at work especially if you can program.
Then, assign all copyright to your opensource work to the FSF, which is a 501c organization.
Not every company can afford to let employees "self-improve" on the latter level.
I'm sure others can provide better examples than I can.
1) to avoid boredom
2) to do something constructive
3) to learn
4) to show your value to the company
That will be a minor problem, especially if someone like that just decided to do a project from scratch.
Plus, what if the project got bug? How can you base something on shaky legal grounds?
At my last job, I kept a few programming books at my desk, and during slow periods would crack those open and do some self-learning. It was a consulting job though, so those moments were few and far between (as much as I hated having to fill out timecards, billable rates were a good approximation of employee productivity, if you weren't billable, you needed a really good excuse).
Instead of sitting there doing nothing, he applied and sharpened his skills in a way that was productive for someone. His first response should be, "Can the company take credit for my time on this open-source project?" and "If this internal project is useful, can I use these skills to make anything else easier in our department?"
The risk is that he'll violate the "don't rock the boat" principle that is the bedrock of CYA. The possible benefit is that if you have two employees, and one is creatively loafing while the other is creatively applying himself or herself, you know which one will offer long-term value (and be easier on a manager, who won't have to constantly nag the person to keep them from screwing off for 40 hours a week).
I feel for him. Likely, he should try to escalate it higher up so that he gets moved to another project. But I understand his reluctance too, as they could decide he should not be working at the company at all.
And what bugs me as strange is that the CTO knows that he's doing nothing and still not doing anything about it.
What bothers me is that this was a large hospital. The amount of moneywasting I've seen is mindboggling. Nurses get laid off due to budget cuts, the quality of health care declines, but you still see this kind of shit happening.
Ahh, and I never wanted to become a cynic...
That pallet of iPads might as well be a pallet of stationary supplies.
Hire random candidates, they may or may not have potential as the interview/hiring process is broken/exploited anyway, then do this to them, break their spirits, make them believe corporate world is like this, they are serfs at the mercy of their company, stiffle their learning and desire to improve by not letting them to anything, not even browse randomly, give them donkey work to do.
Result is that potential competitors are denied a great candidate, they too get broken spirits and a weak workforce. But then, you take new hires and treat them good.
Evil but could work on local markets.
I actually learned a tremendous amount and was very thankful for the opportunity.
Management repeatedly got upset at me for billing so much to the general time code. I kept asking for work to do. Nobody gave me any work to do. So I kept billing my time to the general time code. And they kept getting upset at me for billing my time to the general time code.
* make a list of technologies/skills that he would like to learn;
* make a list of technologies/skills needed in his job, and in his upcoming project;
* look for any conceivable overlap in those two lists, and spend his time doing that - justify it as "prepping for the project".
One way or another, get access to the net and if he doesn't want to do something productive at least he can read Hacker News all day long. Just stay off facebook in case that CTO looks over his shoulder. That would be too easily recognized.