It's a nice sentiment, but I'd guess most people looking for a job right now can't afford that sort of... principled stand. Job seeking is nearly always a position of weakness.
If you are mixing money and principles, we have different definitions of the word "principle."
To me a principle is something that is so important I am willing to make sacrifices and suffer indignities to protect it. It isn't a "nice-to-have," it's a non-negotiable. In fact, I would say that you don't know whether something is a principle or not until you are looking at having to sell your home to avoid foreclosure because you won't compromise it.
I also think the best point the author makes is that he'd be culturally incompatible with anyone who pulls this sort of nonsense anyway. I'm a big advocate of transparency for cooperation.
I actually agree with the grandparent comment, while reading your essay I was thinking very much the same. You - and many people on HN, I suspect - have the luxury of turning down job offers you don't like, because you know you have other options. What happens when you DON'T have options? What happens when not only your house but your ability to support your kids is on the line, you've applied to hundreds of jobs with no responses, and this is the first solid lead? What happens when you're NOT a highly competent IT professional in a position of strength?
I completely agree that the practice is wrong, but I don't think that "fine, don't hire me, I don't want to work there anyway" (with the implied "because I have choices") is the most constructive approach.
I always had this attitude about certain things, even when I was much younger and had far fewer options. For example, although it is far less of an issue today, when I started in my career there was a lot more overt racism in play. I refused to work in places that had a racist culture, and in fact I did quit at least two jobs I can recall over this, and at that time quitting cost me serious money and security.
Now I have kids and a mortgage, but let me look you (virtually) straight in the eye and tell you: No way am I ever going to tell them that I got down on my knees and sold my dignity as a human being "for their sake." That isn't a value I want to pass on to the next generation.
My rant is definitely not constructive, I agree with you there. But it is passionate, and I am far more interested in persuading fellow hackers to start their own businesses or seek more enlightened employers than I am in persuading employers to change their ways.
I agree that your premise is important to consider, but I come to the opposite conclusion. I think that if you have the power to push back against unethical practices (because you have the good fortune to have other options available) then it's your moral responsibility to push back, since others are unable to do so.
"I have just read that companies routinely review Facebook and MySpace activity when screening prospective candidates. One allegation is that if your profile is blocked to non-friends, they may ask you to log in in front of them to let them have a look."
Is this allegation backed up by any fact? Besides that one town in Montana which got in trouble for doing this and has since stopped (I believe this was posted a few days ago).
I may be naive but I really can't imagine this practice being all that widespread - if it's not more than a myth spawned by one or two idiotic hiring managers.
Seems like a lot of passion spawned by not a whole lot of fact.
Googling someone and checking out their Facebook and MySpace? Yeah, it's common. I've seen surveys that put it at about 1/3 of hiring managers doing it. Is it common for them to make you log in? Probably not, but he didn't say it was.
I'm not in management, but have been asked to help out reviewing candidates before. I always google them, but not to look for dirt. I'm interested in how active they are in the open source community. What kinds of projects have they helped out with, etc. I expect any company hiring me to have done the same.
But asking for or expecting access to private websites like facebook? No way. The OP looks to me like someone looking for something to rant about.
He's talking about the practice of combing through personal online activity in general and only mentioned the log in issue as an "allegation" that provided an extreme example.
I'm not interested in a candidate's personal life, but I am interested in development experience. So I run a web search too, but it can be noisy. Lately I've found mailing list activity is more relevant. For example, http://markmail.org/search/?q=from%3A%22Linus+Torvalds%22
I get the impression that most of it would be written the same with or without that bit. He mentions Google, which will only reveal public information, in the same manner.
Some organisations make you take a drug test and a medical exam. I think this is scandalous, but looking at someone's Facebook is unobstusive in comparison.
But at least the drug testing is about you as an employee. Some of the data that might be revealed in viewing a Facebook profile is illegal for interviewers to ask about (for example, religious affiliation and marital status).
How is it more about you as an employee than anything else? A positive drug test merely indicates that one has done drugs in some capacity over some recent span of time. It gives no indication if one would engage in illegal activity on company time.
Of course, it's absurd to suggest companies make sure every worker isn't high on the job every single day, but that doesn't change the fact that it's judging someone based on something which could have absolutely no bearing on their work.
But its possible that it has an immense bearing on their work. Likewise having 10 years experience doing one thing could have either incredible relevance or none at all. Its a matter of likelihoods and what society has deemed acceptable for making hiring decisions.
Well, almost anything is possible; your argument is specious. Drug tests shouldn't rationally tell you anything more than marital status because any reasonably intelligent drug user can beat a simple piss test. If anything, a drug test is testing for stupidity more than drug use, it just so happens that those have a tendency to go hand-in-hand with respect to low-wage workers.
But programmers? If Google drug tests people I'm sure they do so for liability reasons, not because they care what Johnny Genius does in his free time.
Big difference between "I don't think has bearing on the job" and "is illegal to ask about". I wouldn't work for a company that wanted to drug test me either, out of principle. On the other hand, if I'm an EMT, it would be arguably reasonable to drug test me, but still illegal to ask if I'm married.
In theory, yes. In practice, they never seem to test people for alcoholism even though that's likely to be more highly correlated to job performance than recreational use of cannabis. It's mostly an exercise in, "we are a government contractor at some point in our business, and some regulation requires us to help enforce anti-drug laws".
That's an excellent point. I have both listed on my FB (along with sexual alignment). In the UK the first company to try this is going to get their arses handed to them by the courts.
They're not allowed to discriminate based on these things, but it doesn't mean they can't know them (though obviously they probably won't ask you as that's asking for trouble).
You can't discriminate based on age or gender in the UK (amongst many other things). But if they interview you (face to face at least), I think they'd probably have a fairly good idea of those, without asking you (or looking at your facebook profile).
I interview people for my employer, and we're not even allowed to ask. It's impossible to tell - if you do ask someone their religion and then don't hire them, you'd better have some rock-solid paperwork to back you up (e.g. show their score on a standard list of questions is less than the candidate you did hire). That's just how it is.
I don't think I've ever hired anyone without first Googling their name, if for no other reason than curiosity. That said, I've never not hired, or not interviewed based on something I've seen in the SERPs.
I have never (and would never) ask a candidate to allow me access to a private profile. However, I have rejected a candidate for what they posted on their blog.
Posting things on the public Internet that reflects poorly on the candidate shows a judgment issue that is a valid reason for rejecting a candidate.
In the case I'm thinking of, a cursory Google search on a candidate I would otherwise have hired showed that he had at least one job that he had quit without notice; this job was not listed on his resume. In addition, this first-person blog stated that he had shown up to work so hungover he could barely see, on more than one occasion.
Should I have hired this person, given the red flags I found via Google and that there were other equally-qualified candidates who did not have those red flags?
Both of the things you mention are directly work-related. Can you give some other examples of " things on the public Internet that reflects poorly on the candidate?"
For example, does posting something about anti-semitism reflect poorly on a candidate? How about a candidate that makes strong statements about the correlation between race and IQ?
Whether they reflect poorly or not is a matter of personal philosophy. If I was face with someone who was blatantly racist, it would reflect poorly on their suitability for a job where they to interact with people who would take offense to such views. For such things, a decision would depend on how negative I anticipated that interaction to be. This is no different from not hiring someone based on their poor social skills during an interview. It is in public and they must expect it to be scrutinized and associated with them.
Those kinds of social issues are relevant for two reasons.
1) If the candidate has to work on a team with others, then he has to get along with the team - or at the very least, the chemistry shouldn't be bad enough to affect performance.
2)I think it's perfectly acceptable to reject someone because you don't consider him to be morally upstanding. The second statement about correlating race and IQ is a bit ambiguous and subjective, but if, say the candidate was philosophically in favor of lynching and ethnic genocide, then I wouldn't care how good a hacker he is, I wouldn't feel right hiring him.
Posting race\IQ issue wouldn't, in my opinion, reflect poorly on the candidate even though I don't necessarily agree with it.
On the other hand, posting anti-semitic remarks probably would reflect poorly, depending on how they were phrased and the context (is it just pure hate or mere opposition to certain political stances...)
As an employer, I reserve the right to use any public data obtained from web/Usenet searches to understand where a candidate is coming from in his/her professional life. It's basic due diligence, whether legal or ethical or not, and I expect prospective co-workers to do the same to me. Moral: don't be a dick or a moron online, at least not in connection with your real name.
That said, the real peril is that of mistaken identity. I almost missed out on a (mostly) enjoyable 2+ year relationship because my Google search revealed that the woman I was chatting with was an activist for various evangelical Christian causes. Fortunately, before breaking contact with her, I asked her about it, and soon realized that Google was leading me astray.
Eh, I'd say you aren't being fair, no. Not that any interview process is really fair. I once worked with a guy who told me stories about waking up at work at his desk, not remembering how he got there. He never did anything remotely like that working with me. For 3 years he was sharp, punctual, and competent.
And frankly, the reason and manner in which someone left their last job is a piss-poor reason for not hiring someone. What if there was sexual harassment? Stuff like that you can't know from a google search or even an interview.
There may be some good points in here, but it strikes entirely the wrong tone. This kind of in-your-face attitude is just going to harden everyone's existing positions.
I whole-heartedly disagree. It's important to take a stand against ineffective, borderline-illegal screening processes used by employers.
People who frequent HN may not be subject to this problem as much, but in general, most of the power in an interview is concentrated at the employer's side of the table, rather than the applicant's. For them to abuse that power by prying into people's personal lives is unethical and unfair.
Hiring managers should know better, but it sometimes takes push-back from the community to help them see the issues involved. The recent change in policy in Bozeman shows that such feedback can be effective.
"taking a stand" is not the same thing as causing a scene. i personally stopped reading this rant after a paragraph or so, because of the author's poor attitude. i doubt i'm the only one.
Where is this "one allegation" coming from? To me, this sounds like a righteous rant against something that didn't happen to the author or anyone he knew, and rarely happens at all.
What I find really unusual is this happened in Bozeman. I spent a couple weeks there an a ski/backpack trip and the culture was extremely liberal.
My take on the situation though after reading the article is just a case of understandable incompetence. They just didn't realize what a big deal it was. They were looking for a limited number of bad flags and didn't really think it through. Someone with very little social networking experience, read some nightmare accounts in some FUD article and made a really dumb decision.
Rather than force employees or potential employees to show you their Facebook profiles, what the company SHOULD do is make it clear, at the time of hiring, what your company's rules are for social media. Have a clear, concise, no grey area, document which explains their stance on it.
Being as deeply connected in social media as I am, I feel awkward being at a job which doesn't have one of these.
When it becomes a public issue, such as a teacher or CEO with naughty pictures, then it reflects real badly on the organization. Facebook and other sites become a public record of you and your activities.
One case that might not have happened is the Australian worker who called in sick, then wrote on Facebook that they're still trashed:
Those are underlying problems that are unrelated to social media. Everywhere I've worked, it doesn't matter why you don't come to work, vacation and sick days come from the same "bank". So there would never be a reason to lie if you just wanted to stay home and watch TV all day.
As for reflecting badly on an organization... this is something society needs to get over. Why would you judge an entire organization based on the actions of one person? And, where do you draw the line? Is it OK to discriminate against someone who blogs frequently? (Their poor grammar and tired ideas makes your organization look bad.) Is it OK to discriminate against someone who likes to hang out in the pub with friends. (Those pictures make your employees look like a bunch of lazy drunks.) Is it OK to discriminate against gay people? ("God says being gay is wrong," so that's got to make your organization look bad.)
My point is, everything makes your organization look bad. But when you hire someone, you are trading money for work, you aren't purchasing a slave. So anything that an employee does that's not on behalf of the company should not reflect on the company in any way (negatively OR positively). It should only reflect on that individual.
All the more reason to appreciate the trend towards starting your own company.
The internet has definitely changed our views on privacy. Overall, I think this is a good thing. But it can be disturbing when you realize how much information a 10 minute search can pull up. For example, I just found out that googling my name turns up a page on whitehouse2.org where I listed several political positions. I generally try to keep anything associated with my full name fairly neutral and professional, though I hadn't even considered Google when signing up for that site.
As someone who screens candidates where I work, I often check if a particularly worthwhile candidate is registered on LinkedIn in part to cross check details they provide on their resume and occasionally add them as a "connection". I think this is the limit of acceptable behavior, in part because LinkedIn's focus is professional.
The only exception I can think of would be a job in which maintaining a highly public Facebook or MySpace page was itself an essential function.
I thought that the prevailing view around here was that, when applying for a job, you are interviewing the company as much (and if you're talented, even more) than they are interviewing you.
To me, if an employer asked me anything about my HN, or Slashdot, or reddit, or gibsonandlily, or facebook, or myspace, or whatever other silly social network I had signed up for in the past profile, it would be a "thank you for your time, but I'm not interested" response from me.
I suspect that the type of employer that has issues with boundaries like facebook and myspace is also going to have issues with boundaries like "I am using the two weeks allowed per year of vacation to go to the lake with my family. I am not on call right now, do not get angry if I don't respond to your emails immediately".
In other words, them even asking about your profile should be a major red flag.
I agree that it's a two-way interview, and that's really the only way to look at it. Even if you really need a job, you're better off waiting to find a good fit.
However, I disagree than a potential employer looking over our online persona is necessarily a negative thing. In fact, I think it can be positive in that it suggested the hiring manager is doing some real work to check out their candidates. Just like anything there are lines you can cross, but that's just common sense.
Asking for a potential hire to login into their FB and show their world shows a complete lack of common sense in almost any context.
Checking out a potential hire's technical background for a technical position is certainly within the realm of common sense, and I think it would be negligent not to. There may be a wealth of relevant information available online about the candidate, and this shouldn't be ignored.
Likewise, I would recommend putting in the effort to check out the employer's history too. Using google, wayback machine, chief staff members, etc. It doesn't take long and give's you a much better idea about the opportunity. Most employer's would find that kind of research shows commitment to finding a good fit.
re: The Prisoner, by banned in the US, do you mean "the network chose not to show it because their audience probably wouldn't like it"? Or banned as in actually banned?
Somebody or somebodies chose not to show it in the US for a decade. The episode was not offered to US networks at all. The official reason given was the presence of hallucinogenic drugs, even though four or more other episodes featured drugs. I doubt it had anything to do with the audience, it was likely backroom manoevering.
The US Networks didn't "ban" it, they weren't offered it in the first place, so their hands are clean of censorship. Did they tell the producers that the episode was unacceptable? I don't know. Since they didn't receive it, it never went as far as the FCC or whomever issuing a ruling against it.
The video lined in the post gives an account using the verb "ban" and I went along with that.
What's up with using github as a blog? Now when I see a link that says github, instead of classifying as "might be interesting code" I have to think "might be a personal rant"?
I get that its an experiment; and I think it's a moderately clever idea... I just like that github is all about the code. If this becomes popular, I think github needs to roll blogging into their site as a feature so that it can sit in a separate namespace than code projects.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Personally, raganwald is a much better writer than me, so I look forward to the opportunity to fork his blog and claim it under my own namespace.
This is very one-sided. Hiring someone is a big investment (spending time and risking company culture, in addition to the money). Having more information is always useful.
I've looked at Facebook profiles when judging potential employees. I've never ruled anyone out because of it, but one person got a lot closer to the job when I saw that that he spent his off hours talking about what he'd spend his work hours doing.
Basically, there are three possibilities when an employer looks at your Facebook: a) they like what they see (so they have better information, and you're more likely to get a job, b) they are neutral (nobody loses), or c) they dislike it (so by denying them access, you're artificially boosting your prospects -- cheating them out of the employee they want, and cheating that employee out of a job).
It's good to be suspicious of people trolling for personal data -- but I'm much more suspicious of efforts to hide information.
The hiring process is a negotiation between two sides. The more information you have, the better you'll do.
It's not fair for an employer to look in your private life; any more than it is fair for the potential employee to look at confidential company data. How would you like that? The company is hiding information, thereby cheating you into a job.
Many companies I've interviewed at have shared confidential company data with me so that I have more information to make my decision. # of shares outstanding, expected future rounds of funding, development practices, upcoming projects I might be working on.
Information in negotiations works two ways: oftentimes, it's prudent to release a bit of information as a signaling device, because it shows that you're confident the information will work in your favor.
And? The word "personal" is pretty subjective. It's a personal detail that I know the words to several Death Cab For Cutie songs. An embarassing personal detail, at that. But it is not unlawful for a company to not hire me over it.
Dude, you have your ethics, I'll have mine. Let's not split hairs. If a company wants to hire or not hire you as a programmer over the type of music you like, I don't want to work there and I don't care how they found out.
Hey, raganwald, you jumped on my comment, not the other way around. I said, "it's not public if you publish it". You said, "it's personal, though". I'm not sure the hair-splitting card is in your hand to play.
Triple negation in the last sentence really helps with understanding. That being said, you should probably keep embarrassing personal details to yourself (and maybe your friends). Why would you want the company to know the embarrassing thing (since it doesn't affect work performance significantly)?
I agree with you completely. If I wanted to get self-righteous about being passed over for a job for knowing the words to "Title and Registration", I lost my leg to stand on when I posted it here.
I think it's a positive good that the Internet allows me to hear about the private lives of people who are otherwise (and may forever be) strangers to me. If for example I was struggling with depression or alcoholism or some other issue that I didn't want known to the public, it might help me to read blogs by other people who are dealing with the same problems. In order for such communication to happen, though, people need to feel free to publish private stuff anonymously and rely on a social norm that discourages potential employers from snooping.
Here you have conflated the concept of "private" with the concept of "personal", and then built an argument on the resulting misconception.
It stops being private when you publish it to the world. It doesn't stop being personal. Some public, personal details cannot lawfully be considered in a hiring decision. But most can. It is your responsibility to guard your privacy. It isn't your prospective employer's.
I didn't publish it. I merely shared it with friends. The publishing was simply a side effect (the information society equivalent of pollution, as Bruce Schneier puts it).
It's not fair for an employer to look in your private life; any more than it is fair for the potential employee to look at confidential company data.
Every time I interview for a job, I try to find out information from the company, particularly information they don't want released. Maybe I'm weird, but I get burned less because of it.
So, let us assume that facebook/linkedin/twitter/livejournal postings are completely irrelevant to an individuals suitability for a job.
What about previous job experiences?
Is it acceptable for an employer to query previous employers/coworkers as to how effective they were in related jobs? Let us say you are coming into a company applying for the position of a kernel developer, and your last two positions at companies were doing the same job. Is it okay for the hiring manager to talk to your previous managers and coworkers to see how good you were at your Job, how effective a developer you were?
Or is it the case that all screening outside of A) the interview and B) the references that the candidate hands over, are off limits?
In silicon valley it's a pretty common procedure to ask for internal suggestions when a position comes up, and people think of who they've worked with over the last 10 years that might be suitable for a position - to some degree that's an "off-the-books" reference check, and I'm wondering if people feel that's an acceptable thing to do when hiring?
Is it acceptable for an employer to query previous employers/coworkers as to how effective they were in related jobs?
Of course. This is called "checking references" and is standard practice that nobody disagrees with. The key words here are "employers/coworkers" and "related jobs", which are distinct from "high school friends" and "church socials".
A personal observation: I'm also a hiring manager, and I struggle with this problem on both sides of the table.
I Google candidates for their professional opinions and activities. But what do I do if I find their profile on a public site like HN? Some of the comments are going to be useful fodder for an interview I noticed you posted a comment on HN suggesting OOP has had its fifteen minutes of fame. What do you see replacing it? ... But I might also read opinions about politics. What if the same person has posted HN comments about Obama the Magic Negro? I really don't want to know what they think and why in the context of hiring them.
Worse, what if I see a comment from the same person saying one of my posts is absolute garbage and that I'm an idiot? Now I may have compromised my impartiality.
I don't know the answer. I wouldn't look up a candidate in something obviously personal like Facebook or MySpace, but I have no idea how to handle stuff like HN that contains what I perceive to be a mix of relevant technical opinions and personal, wrong-side-of-the-privacy-line stuff.
"Worse, what if I see a comment from the same person saying one of my posts is absolute garbage and that I'm an idiot? Now I may have compromised my impartiality."
If you're a good manager, you should be able to stomach having an employee tell you that. After all, what if your opinion is absolute garbage and you're an idiot? Do you want people working for you who won't call you out when you're wrong?
The right question to ask there is why your posts is garbage and you're an idiot. See if they can defend it. And if they can, and can convince you that your own post is garbage, that's someone worth hiring. If they're just ranting, maybe it's time to look at another candidate.
When I started blogging I made a conscious decision to make everything public and put everything in one place. You go to my blog and you see my opinions about computer programming, Judaism, economics, sex, whatever.
I wonder if my descendants will consider this kind of behavior quaint if not dangerously naïve. Of course, they might say (might will say?), you maintain multiple online identities and even if everything posted under them is publically readable, you give one URL to the guy interviewing you, and then a different one to the officemate who has become your friend, and maybe you keep your really emotionally sticky stuff on a third site that only two or three people know is connected to your true identity. And it would be an extreme social gaffe--a sort of electronic peeping-tom-ism--for anyone to reveal "the guy who posts here also writes this blog" to an unauthorized party.
On the contrary - you are now actively aware of and can manage your online "persona." (I do this to an extent, but I'm not very prolific). I think too many people think: "I'm going to post this on the Internet and then hide it." Sorry, folks, if it's on the Internet there's a pretty good chance you won't be able to control it.
Stay that way, unless you are prepared to go to extremes to maintain separate identities (physical, temporal, financial). Anything casual will crumble under pressure, so it's best not to have the false sense of security.
This is true, but it misses the point. Keeping your online identities separate isn't a security measure. (And when it is -- when you're a political dissident facing imprisonment or torture -- it's very very risky.)
You maintain separate identities because it sends a social signal. The signal is "I recognize the distinction between professional and casual behavior; between public and private behavior; between an artistic pose and heartfelt sincerity. I understand basic social and literary conventions and I know how to use them."
A classic example: Fake Steve Jobs, who I think is a pretty good model of proper literary behavior. Daniel Lyons wanted to have some fun, so he concocted a persona and started a blog under that persona's name. The persona's voice is distinct from that of Daniel Lyons, the journalist (which is why so many people say things like "man, he was so good as Fake Steve; why are his Newsweek articles so uninspiring?"), which in turn is almost certainly distinct from Mr. Lyons the person, Mr. Lyons the family member, and Mr. Lyons the party animal. But Lyons obeys the conventions. He doesn't just type everything that comes into his head into one blog.
Obviously you should expect your prospective employers to Google you and read your public writing, particularly that which might pertain to your field. (I told my new employer all about my writing on HN, for example.) But just as it is your responsibility to observe proper social and literary convention, it is also your employer's responsibility: Just because it's easy to riffle through Facebook and MySpace (the online equivalent of following your prospective employee around at night, peeking into his or her windows) doesn't mean that employers are ethical when they do so.
But Google makes window-peering so easy that it's sometimes hard to avoid. So: Pseudonyms, my friend, pseudonyms. Not to mention Pepys' brilliant invention: the posthumous diary. (I sometimes wonder if I should start a web service for writing posthumously-published blog posts. But it's kind of the anti-viable online business: It has negative word of mouth (your customers would prefer that their friends and family don't know about it), and the writers have pretty poor interaction with the audience, and nobody will ever have enough faith in your privacy policy or performance warranty.)
Fair call - I had various friends and acquaintances in mind who use separate identities to behave in ways that would have unwanted repercussions if those identities were ever reunited. Some examples are moonlighting, sock puppetry, and whistle blowing.
One thing about pseudonyms - it is in your audience's interest to maintain the ruse as they benifit from it's existence.
PS: Posthumous diary service - if someone can create a trusted service that provides timed key release - so many services can be hung from it.
I hope not. Our descendants should hopefully live in a world where everyone recognizes that we are all human beings. I don't think it will ever be prudent to say What You Can't Say publicly, but a little bit of humanity will be allowed.
I remember reading a story about a company who was advised by its lawyers to simply never look for stuff online, for reasons close to yours.
The off chance that you could read about someone's pregnancy (something that you should not ask in a interview) was enough for them to ban the practice.
I don't agree, but it's a good argument. Very protective of the lawyers.
What if the same person has posted HN comments about Obama the Magic Negro? I really don't want to know what they think and why in the context of hiring them.
Although this hasn't come up when I've been on hiring committees, I would want to avoid hiring people who are unusually racist; it's likely to make it hard for them to work with their co-workers down the line, and if they end up making hiring decisions, it might result in racist hiring decisions.
(I say "unusually racist" because people who are completely non-racist are pretty rare, at least in the US. I wouldn't want to be Diogenes the Hiring Manager.)
I agree that you can discuss the archetype without being racist, but I think such a discussion is likely to reveal the degree of someone's racism. Why is that something you'd prefer to find out after hiring them rather than before?
My guess is that I don't ever want to know your attitude about that if we work together. I want to know your attitude towards things like continuous integration :-)
I'm surprised that you are asserting that it's possible to remain ignorant of whether your coworkers are unusually racist, but I guess you probably know a lot more about that than I do.
I'll post there again. I just have to get unblocked a bit. Glad you enjoyed it! I hope my ideology doesn't prevent you from enjoying it in the future :)
I think googling someone's name is fair game. You get to see what projects they work on, what communities (i.e. job related) they are part of etc. By yes, there is a line to draw. And definitely facebook and myspace are on the other side.
First, you are already supposed to ignore facts that you can see when hiring. For example, you are supposed to ignore that you are interviewing a person in a wheelchair, or that is of a different race/age/gender than you, and focus on their ability to meet your requirements. So, when I google (which as others have said, I do to check out open source activity - something I rate highly) I just try not to read personal stuff, and if I can't avoid it I do my best not to let it affect my decisions.
But...
Secondly: if you post content that is inappropriate under most social and professional circumstances under your own name, even if it personally does not ick me, then you show distinct lack of judgement. I quite like my people to show good judgement.
There are a myriad of ways to express yourself online without it ending up in the face of someone casually googling you. Certainly for a technical job, I would be perturbed if you showed blatant ignorance on how to do it.
Sounds like a great accidental pre-interview question: how is this person at disagreeing with people online?
If you're going to have a presence online, you're going to have to have a public presence. I know lots of people would like for it to be the other way around, but I honestly just don't see that happening.
META: I'd love to upvote this article for the comments, but the article itself isn't that good. So no upvote.
I have a personal friend who was called into his manager's office one day. The manager had my friends' myspace page open and was browsing through pictures of him and his girlfriend. This apparently went on for a couple minute with my friend standing there.
The overall gist of the encounter was an attempt on the part of my friends manager to scare him into closing down his accounts (The employer was afraid of my friend talking about the company he works for online.)
The proper response if a potential employer wants to see a private profile is something like, "Oh of course, I imagine you want to verify my religion, you don't want any of those dirty (jews|christians|muslims) in here." And then you leave.
Your Facebook page shows all sorts of information that should not affect the hiring process - like your race, religion, marital status, number of children, and sexual orientation. I can't imagine anyone who thinks it would improve the hiring practice.
At the same time I have over a thousand helpful, hopefully well-written posts on message boards that I'll be happy to direct any employers to. They're a better resume than my actual resume, and harder to fake.
I think there's only one suitable name these days for your child: John (or Jennifer) Smith. Or whatever Wolfram says is best for hiding amongst the chaff.
Sure, it's a shame they won't carry the family name, but they'll thank you in 20 years.
>> So what do I think of sifting through the internet for personal information about candidates? It isn't performance-based.
Two days ago I made one of the bigger decisions of my life: I decided to abandon any attempt to salvage a bio-tech company I co-founded ten years ago. One of the other founders had a quite brilliant invention that I'm more convinced than ever will work. Yet, after ten years, I finally realized that a company is fundamentally its people and how they interact. His performance (narrow sense) as a scientist was tremendous. As a human being? Well, there's the fact that he's been in and out of jail several times for assault and battery as well as drunk and disorderly. And the fact that every time we get close to making a major advance he steps in to sabotage it, which he has done several times by calling customers, vendors and big investors and screaming at them. And the fact that he takes absolutely no responsibility for his actions.
Some of his craziness is apparent from his web page. If he'd had a web page ten years ago I might never have gotten involved and wasted ten years and a lot of money pursuing a dream that depends on someone who has failed at everything in his life and is absolutely intent on making sure he fails at this.
So, raganwald, it all depends on what you mean by "performance". One thing that I am 100% certain of, how someone treats other people, how much they complain instead of take action, etc., is largely what I mean by performance. One dirt bag can make everyone else on the team miserable, and drive the good people away.
I would never ask to log into anyone's social web page. I will always check on their background, including using search engines.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadTo me a principle is something that is so important I am willing to make sacrifices and suffer indignities to protect it. It isn't a "nice-to-have," it's a non-negotiable. In fact, I would say that you don't know whether something is a principle or not until you are looking at having to sell your home to avoid foreclosure because you won't compromise it.
JM2C on the word...
I also think the best point the author makes is that he'd be culturally incompatible with anyone who pulls this sort of nonsense anyway. I'm a big advocate of transparency for cooperation.
I completely agree that the practice is wrong, but I don't think that "fine, don't hire me, I don't want to work there anyway" (with the implied "because I have choices") is the most constructive approach.
Now I have kids and a mortgage, but let me look you (virtually) straight in the eye and tell you: No way am I ever going to tell them that I got down on my knees and sold my dignity as a human being "for their sake." That isn't a value I want to pass on to the next generation.
My rant is definitely not constructive, I agree with you there. But it is passionate, and I am far more interested in persuading fellow hackers to start their own businesses or seek more enlightened employers than I am in persuading employers to change their ways.
Is this allegation backed up by any fact? Besides that one town in Montana which got in trouble for doing this and has since stopped (I believe this was posted a few days ago).
I may be naive but I really can't imagine this practice being all that widespread - if it's not more than a myth spawned by one or two idiotic hiring managers.
Seems like a lot of passion spawned by not a whole lot of fact.
But asking for or expecting access to private websites like facebook? No way. The OP looks to me like someone looking for something to rant about.
Of course, it's absurd to suggest companies make sure every worker isn't high on the job every single day, but that doesn't change the fact that it's judging someone based on something which could have absolutely no bearing on their work.
But programmers? If Google drug tests people I'm sure they do so for liability reasons, not because they care what Johnny Genius does in his free time.
They're not allowed to discriminate based on these things, but it doesn't mean they can't know them (though obviously they probably won't ask you as that's asking for trouble).
You can't discriminate based on age or gender in the UK (amongst many other things). But if they interview you (face to face at least), I think they'd probably have a fairly good idea of those, without asking you (or looking at your facebook profile).
Posting things on the public Internet that reflects poorly on the candidate shows a judgment issue that is a valid reason for rejecting a candidate.
In the case I'm thinking of, a cursory Google search on a candidate I would otherwise have hired showed that he had at least one job that he had quit without notice; this job was not listed on his resume. In addition, this first-person blog stated that he had shown up to work so hungover he could barely see, on more than one occasion.
Should I have hired this person, given the red flags I found via Google and that there were other equally-qualified candidates who did not have those red flags?
For example, does posting something about anti-semitism reflect poorly on a candidate? How about a candidate that makes strong statements about the correlation between race and IQ?
1) If the candidate has to work on a team with others, then he has to get along with the team - or at the very least, the chemistry shouldn't be bad enough to affect performance.
2)I think it's perfectly acceptable to reject someone because you don't consider him to be morally upstanding. The second statement about correlating race and IQ is a bit ambiguous and subjective, but if, say the candidate was philosophically in favor of lynching and ethnic genocide, then I wouldn't care how good a hacker he is, I wouldn't feel right hiring him.
Posting race\IQ issue wouldn't, in my opinion, reflect poorly on the candidate even though I don't necessarily agree with it. On the other hand, posting anti-semitic remarks probably would reflect poorly, depending on how they were phrased and the context (is it just pure hate or mere opposition to certain political stances...)
That said, the real peril is that of mistaken identity. I almost missed out on a (mostly) enjoyable 2+ year relationship because my Google search revealed that the woman I was chatting with was an activist for various evangelical Christian causes. Fortunately, before breaking contact with her, I asked her about it, and soon realized that Google was leading me astray.
And frankly, the reason and manner in which someone left their last job is a piss-poor reason for not hiring someone. What if there was sexual harassment? Stuff like that you can't know from a google search or even an interview.
People who frequent HN may not be subject to this problem as much, but in general, most of the power in an interview is concentrated at the employer's side of the table, rather than the applicant's. For them to abuse that power by prying into people's personal lives is unethical and unfair.
Hiring managers should know better, but it sometimes takes push-back from the community to help them see the issues involved. The recent change in policy in Bozeman shows that such feedback can be effective.
http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/19/want-a-job-hand-over...
My take on the situation though after reading the article is just a case of understandable incompetence. They just didn't realize what a big deal it was. They were looking for a limited number of bad flags and didn't really think it through. Someone with very little social networking experience, read some nightmare accounts in some FUD article and made a really dumb decision.
Being as deeply connected in social media as I am, I feel awkward being at a job which doesn't have one of these.
One case that might not have happened is the Australian worker who called in sick, then wrote on Facebook that they're still trashed:
http://www.hrblunders.com/was-facebook-sick-day-star-framed/
Swiss worker says: I can't come to work because I'm too sick to use a computer, then logs into Facebook. Result: fired.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090428/1140394681.shtml
As for reflecting badly on an organization... this is something society needs to get over. Why would you judge an entire organization based on the actions of one person? And, where do you draw the line? Is it OK to discriminate against someone who blogs frequently? (Their poor grammar and tired ideas makes your organization look bad.) Is it OK to discriminate against someone who likes to hang out in the pub with friends. (Those pictures make your employees look like a bunch of lazy drunks.) Is it OK to discriminate against gay people? ("God says being gay is wrong," so that's got to make your organization look bad.)
My point is, everything makes your organization look bad. But when you hire someone, you are trading money for work, you aren't purchasing a slave. So anything that an employee does that's not on behalf of the company should not reflect on the company in any way (negatively OR positively). It should only reflect on that individual.
The internet has definitely changed our views on privacy. Overall, I think this is a good thing. But it can be disturbing when you realize how much information a 10 minute search can pull up. For example, I just found out that googling my name turns up a page on whitehouse2.org where I listed several political positions. I generally try to keep anything associated with my full name fairly neutral and professional, though I hadn't even considered Google when signing up for that site.
The only exception I can think of would be a job in which maintaining a highly public Facebook or MySpace page was itself an essential function.
I thought that the prevailing view around here was that, when applying for a job, you are interviewing the company as much (and if you're talented, even more) than they are interviewing you.
To me, if an employer asked me anything about my HN, or Slashdot, or reddit, or gibsonandlily, or facebook, or myspace, or whatever other silly social network I had signed up for in the past profile, it would be a "thank you for your time, but I'm not interested" response from me.
I suspect that the type of employer that has issues with boundaries like facebook and myspace is also going to have issues with boundaries like "I am using the two weeks allowed per year of vacation to go to the lake with my family. I am not on call right now, do not get angry if I don't respond to your emails immediately".
In other words, them even asking about your profile should be a major red flag.
If they don't like it, they don't necessarily need to talk to you about it. You just might end up not being considered.
The signing in in front of them thing is an exception but it doesn't seem to actually happen anyway, so that's a red herring.
However, I disagree than a potential employer looking over our online persona is necessarily a negative thing. In fact, I think it can be positive in that it suggested the hiring manager is doing some real work to check out their candidates. Just like anything there are lines you can cross, but that's just common sense.
Asking for a potential hire to login into their FB and show their world shows a complete lack of common sense in almost any context.
Checking out a potential hire's technical background for a technical position is certainly within the realm of common sense, and I think it would be negligent not to. There may be a wealth of relevant information available online about the candidate, and this shouldn't be ignored.
Likewise, I would recommend putting in the effort to check out the employer's history too. Using google, wayback machine, chief staff members, etc. It doesn't take long and give's you a much better idea about the opportunity. Most employer's would find that kind of research shows commitment to finding a good fit.
The US Networks didn't "ban" it, they weren't offered it in the first place, so their hands are clean of censorship. Did they tell the producers that the episode was unacceptable? I don't know. Since they didn't receive it, it never went as far as the FCC or whomever issuing a ruling against it.
The video lined in the post gives an account using the verb "ban" and I went along with that.
I get that its an experiment; and I think it's a moderately clever idea... I just like that github is all about the code. If this becomes popular, I think github needs to roll blogging into their site as a feature so that it can sit in a separate namespace than code projects.
Also, raganwald's blog is usually all about code, which is why he set it up on GitHub to begin with. This seems to be a deviation from the norm.
I've looked at Facebook profiles when judging potential employees. I've never ruled anyone out because of it, but one person got a lot closer to the job when I saw that that he spent his off hours talking about what he'd spend his work hours doing.
Basically, there are three possibilities when an employer looks at your Facebook: a) they like what they see (so they have better information, and you're more likely to get a job, b) they are neutral (nobody loses), or c) they dislike it (so by denying them access, you're artificially boosting your prospects -- cheating them out of the employee they want, and cheating that employee out of a job).
It's good to be suspicious of people trolling for personal data -- but I'm much more suspicious of efforts to hide information.
It's not fair for an employer to look in your private life; any more than it is fair for the potential employee to look at confidential company data. How would you like that? The company is hiding information, thereby cheating you into a job.
Information in negotiations works two ways: oftentimes, it's prudent to release a bit of information as a signaling device, because it shows that you're confident the information will work in your favor.
Can I be any more clear than that?
It stops being private when you publish it to the world. It doesn't stop being personal. Some public, personal details cannot lawfully be considered in a hiring decision. But most can. It is your responsibility to guard your privacy. It isn't your prospective employer's.
Every time I interview for a job, I try to find out information from the company, particularly information they don't want released. Maybe I'm weird, but I get burned less because of it.
What about previous job experiences?
Is it acceptable for an employer to query previous employers/coworkers as to how effective they were in related jobs? Let us say you are coming into a company applying for the position of a kernel developer, and your last two positions at companies were doing the same job. Is it okay for the hiring manager to talk to your previous managers and coworkers to see how good you were at your Job, how effective a developer you were?
Or is it the case that all screening outside of A) the interview and B) the references that the candidate hands over, are off limits?
In silicon valley it's a pretty common procedure to ask for internal suggestions when a position comes up, and people think of who they've worked with over the last 10 years that might be suitable for a position - to some degree that's an "off-the-books" reference check, and I'm wondering if people feel that's an acceptable thing to do when hiring?
Of course. This is called "checking references" and is standard practice that nobody disagrees with. The key words here are "employers/coworkers" and "related jobs", which are distinct from "high school friends" and "church socials".
I Google candidates for their professional opinions and activities. But what do I do if I find their profile on a public site like HN? Some of the comments are going to be useful fodder for an interview I noticed you posted a comment on HN suggesting OOP has had its fifteen minutes of fame. What do you see replacing it? ... But I might also read opinions about politics. What if the same person has posted HN comments about Obama the Magic Negro? I really don't want to know what they think and why in the context of hiring them.
Worse, what if I see a comment from the same person saying one of my posts is absolute garbage and that I'm an idiot? Now I may have compromised my impartiality.
I don't know the answer. I wouldn't look up a candidate in something obviously personal like Facebook or MySpace, but I have no idea how to handle stuff like HN that contains what I perceive to be a mix of relevant technical opinions and personal, wrong-side-of-the-privacy-line stuff.
I don't know.
If you're a good manager, you should be able to stomach having an employee tell you that. After all, what if your opinion is absolute garbage and you're an idiot? Do you want people working for you who won't call you out when you're wrong?
The right question to ask there is why your posts is garbage and you're an idiot. See if they can defend it. And if they can, and can convince you that your own post is garbage, that's someone worth hiring. If they're just ranting, maybe it's time to look at another candidate.
I wonder if my descendants will consider this kind of behavior quaint if not dangerously naïve. Of course, they might say (might will say?), you maintain multiple online identities and even if everything posted under them is publically readable, you give one URL to the guy interviewing you, and then a different one to the officemate who has become your friend, and maybe you keep your really emotionally sticky stuff on a third site that only two or three people know is connected to your true identity. And it would be an extreme social gaffe--a sort of electronic peeping-tom-ism--for anyone to reveal "the guy who posts here also writes this blog" to an unauthorized party.
This is true, but it misses the point. Keeping your online identities separate isn't a security measure. (And when it is -- when you're a political dissident facing imprisonment or torture -- it's very very risky.)
You maintain separate identities because it sends a social signal. The signal is "I recognize the distinction between professional and casual behavior; between public and private behavior; between an artistic pose and heartfelt sincerity. I understand basic social and literary conventions and I know how to use them."
A classic example: Fake Steve Jobs, who I think is a pretty good model of proper literary behavior. Daniel Lyons wanted to have some fun, so he concocted a persona and started a blog under that persona's name. The persona's voice is distinct from that of Daniel Lyons, the journalist (which is why so many people say things like "man, he was so good as Fake Steve; why are his Newsweek articles so uninspiring?"), which in turn is almost certainly distinct from Mr. Lyons the person, Mr. Lyons the family member, and Mr. Lyons the party animal. But Lyons obeys the conventions. He doesn't just type everything that comes into his head into one blog.
Obviously you should expect your prospective employers to Google you and read your public writing, particularly that which might pertain to your field. (I told my new employer all about my writing on HN, for example.) But just as it is your responsibility to observe proper social and literary convention, it is also your employer's responsibility: Just because it's easy to riffle through Facebook and MySpace (the online equivalent of following your prospective employee around at night, peeking into his or her windows) doesn't mean that employers are ethical when they do so.
But Google makes window-peering so easy that it's sometimes hard to avoid. So: Pseudonyms, my friend, pseudonyms. Not to mention Pepys' brilliant invention: the posthumous diary. (I sometimes wonder if I should start a web service for writing posthumously-published blog posts. But it's kind of the anti-viable online business: It has negative word of mouth (your customers would prefer that their friends and family don't know about it), and the writers have pretty poor interaction with the audience, and nobody will ever have enough faith in your privacy policy or performance warranty.)
One thing about pseudonyms - it is in your audience's interest to maintain the ruse as they benifit from it's existence.
PS: Posthumous diary service - if someone can create a trusted service that provides timed key release - so many services can be hung from it.
The off chance that you could read about someone's pregnancy (something that you should not ask in a interview) was enough for them to ban the practice.
I don't agree, but it's a good argument. Very protective of the lawyers.
Although this hasn't come up when I've been on hiring committees, I would want to avoid hiring people who are unusually racist; it's likely to make it hard for them to work with their co-workers down the line, and if they end up making hiring decisions, it might result in racist hiring decisions.
(I say "unusually racist" because people who are completely non-racist are pretty rare, at least in the US. I wouldn't want to be Diogenes the Hiring Manager.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_negro
Uh, would you also favor giving them separate seats in the back of the bus?
And what would you say about a manager that avoided hiring followers of some other ideology, e.g. Communism?
I'd rather they stayed off the bus entirely.
And what would you say about a manager that avoided hiring followers of some other ideology, e.g. Communism?
I guess it depends on the ideology, doesn't it?
First, you are already supposed to ignore facts that you can see when hiring. For example, you are supposed to ignore that you are interviewing a person in a wheelchair, or that is of a different race/age/gender than you, and focus on their ability to meet your requirements. So, when I google (which as others have said, I do to check out open source activity - something I rate highly) I just try not to read personal stuff, and if I can't avoid it I do my best not to let it affect my decisions.
But...
Secondly: if you post content that is inappropriate under most social and professional circumstances under your own name, even if it personally does not ick me, then you show distinct lack of judgement. I quite like my people to show good judgement.
There are a myriad of ways to express yourself online without it ending up in the face of someone casually googling you. Certainly for a technical job, I would be perturbed if you showed blatant ignorance on how to do it.
If you're going to have a presence online, you're going to have to have a public presence. I know lots of people would like for it to be the other way around, but I honestly just don't see that happening.
META: I'd love to upvote this article for the comments, but the article itself isn't that good. So no upvote.
Would your manager allow you to look through every photograph ever taken in their life?
The overall gist of the encounter was an attempt on the part of my friends manager to scare him into closing down his accounts (The employer was afraid of my friend talking about the company he works for online.)
(an absolutely beautiful casting decision)
At the same time I have over a thousand helpful, hopefully well-written posts on message boards that I'll be happy to direct any employers to. They're a better resume than my actual resume, and harder to fake.
Sure, it's a shame they won't carry the family name, but they'll thank you in 20 years.
Two days ago I made one of the bigger decisions of my life: I decided to abandon any attempt to salvage a bio-tech company I co-founded ten years ago. One of the other founders had a quite brilliant invention that I'm more convinced than ever will work. Yet, after ten years, I finally realized that a company is fundamentally its people and how they interact. His performance (narrow sense) as a scientist was tremendous. As a human being? Well, there's the fact that he's been in and out of jail several times for assault and battery as well as drunk and disorderly. And the fact that every time we get close to making a major advance he steps in to sabotage it, which he has done several times by calling customers, vendors and big investors and screaming at them. And the fact that he takes absolutely no responsibility for his actions.
Some of his craziness is apparent from his web page. If he'd had a web page ten years ago I might never have gotten involved and wasted ten years and a lot of money pursuing a dream that depends on someone who has failed at everything in his life and is absolutely intent on making sure he fails at this.
So, raganwald, it all depends on what you mean by "performance". One thing that I am 100% certain of, how someone treats other people, how much they complain instead of take action, etc., is largely what I mean by performance. One dirt bag can make everyone else on the team miserable, and drive the good people away.
I would never ask to log into anyone's social web page. I will always check on their background, including using search engines.