A Personal Blog
Yes, People ARE Fired for Blogging
Someone (Anil) proposed the statement: “nobody was ever fired for blogging.”
This statement is a great meme: everyone gets to apply their own filter to it, in order to prove their point.
Here’s one example: “people don’t get fired for blogging, they get fired for poor judgement.”
This statement is true. It’s also false. It’s true if you abstract the action into an attitude or perception. That’s also like saying you don’t go to jail for driving drunk, you go to jail for having poor judgement. Nor do you get fired for surfing porn, you just get fired for poor judgement AND getting caught.
This is the glory of abstraction. Whenever you try and find meaning from an action, you get the privilege of finding “principles” (ie: “nobody is ever fired for blogging”).
My point?
You get fired for the action, you get fired for the location the action happens in, and you get fired for the things leading up to the action. It’s like auto accidents. Auto accidents are NEVER accidents. Same abstraction. But we still do things to avoid accidents, we still do things try and protect people if they get into an accident. And you still do your damndest to avoid getting into an accident.
So it is in my mind. You don’t stop blogging because of the potential for getting into an accident. You protect yourself ahead of time (you talk about things you are prepared to talk about, if you’re takling about work you get permission, etc). You try and avoid writing stupid things at stupid times that are available to stupid people.
Again, my point?
Yes, you get fired for the action of blogging. You also get fired for the poor judgement, crappy attitude, etc. But you are still fired for blogging. If you’d said the same thing in an email to an external source, you’d still get fired. The problem is that there are guidelines and policies for that external email. There is none for blogging. As long as there isn’t, you’ll still get fired for doing something nobody’s told you not to do and therefore you’re getting fired for the abstraction as much as for the action.
Fun.
My question: what happens if you’re banned from blogging, and you still do? Are you fired for blogging then, or are you fired for being a dumbass? Maybe you don’t get AIDS from having sex, but from not killing off every monkey in the world in the 20s. Just maybe. Think about that, it’s probably deeper than it looks on first read. And I’ll probably sound like a dumbass on the third read. So don’t read it more than twice ;-)
ps: This is mainly for Tim Bray, who made the statement today at Northern Voice.
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Jeremy Wright on February 19, 2005 at 2:06 pm, and is filed under Blogging, From My Life. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
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about 6 years ago
What Anil is saying is that people get fired for blogging about the wrong things.
If Dooce never mentioned work and if the fired Google blogger never talked about Google, they would not have been fired. What does an employer care that you have a website about a hobby? An employer only cares when you have a website talking about them.
about 6 years ago
I know what Anil was saying. One sentence I missed in this post: Anil is right, the problem is that people are abstracting the one statement to mean what they want it to mean.
At the same time, it’s not that simple. If you never drive a car, you’ll never get into an accident either. It’s the dozens of choices, attitudes, people and actions leading up to the “event” which cause an accident.
Saying “don’t blog about Google” is the same (to me) as saying “always use your turn signal” or “always come to a full stop at the stop sign”.
Sure, that’s “safest”, but we always compromise.
In blogging, it’s “safety” vs “value”.
about 6 years ago
Agree with Jon, one can blog about their Hello Kitty passion or whatever on non-employer time, and I doubt that will ever come under the radar. Coming into employer’s office and starting publishing a newspaper dedicated to employer’s internals won’t earn too many fans.
Also have to ask what value the employee brought to the organization. Last time I’ve heard GOOG didn’t go down after Mark Jen left, and that airline that had the other blog firing seems to have the planes flying from point A to point B just as well. But I seriously doubt Microsoft would fire Eric Rudder or Yahoo! would fire some star developer guru even if they did occasionally spill some beans in the blog.
about 6 years ago
Jeremy: ‘Saying “don’t blog about Google” is the same (to me) as saying “always use your turn signal” or “always come to a full stop at the stop sign”‘
If you don’t follow the rules, you’re going to get burned. If you run a red light and get in an accident, driving didn’t get you in trouble, the act of running a read light did. It won’t get you in an accident every time, but sooner or later it will.
I’ve known people that got fired for complaining about a company to people outside the co. It’s not the way the message is delivered, it’s simply the message. If you don’t agree then find an employer that has a different view, it’s as simple as that.
about 6 years ago
Alex: Who said anything about blogging on company time? Doing personal activities on company time is always a no-no.
Jon: What if there are no rules?
about 6 years ago
Jeremy, there are always rules. Hell, unwritten rules exist, and if people can’t pick up on them, or choose to ignore them, they’re going to get burned in some manner – whether it’s for blogging about things they shouldn’t, or saying something to a co-worker or client that they shouldn’t.
about 6 years ago
Still, you have to agree that blogging about company is asking for trouble. What Anil said is analogous to the saying “Guns don’t kill people, people do”.
Basically, do not blame the tool for the trouble, blame the motivation behind it. What you were saying is that the tool (blog) was still to blame.
But yes, you were right, neither of the 2 blog-related firings was due to the fact that they did on the company time.
about 6 years ago
David: Agreed. But for a company such as Google to not publish some kind of guideline, considering they own Blogger and everything. And the background is that he actually did everything they asked and they still fired him. Odd, but it’s ultimately their decision.
Alex: I’m Canadian. I don’t buy the “guns don’t kill people” thing either ;-)
about 6 years ago
A company should be able to fire someone for its own reasons. If I hire you and I hear you are talking about the company to outsiders, and I don’t like that, I’m going to fire you (even if it wasn’t explicity stated what you can and cannot say).
If everything you as an employee can and cannot do has to be written out to the letter, no one would be able to read the rule book.
Unless you have written expressed permission to blog about your company, it’s risky. That’s just business.
about 6 years ago
a friend of mine was fired for bloggin’ shit about his workplace
about 6 years ago
Jon Gales says: “If I hire you and I hear you are talking about the company to outsiders, and I don’t like that, I’m going to fire you.”
You may have the right to fire someone under those conditions, Jon, but don’t be surprised if you end up paying through the nose. It’s called “wrongful dismissal”, unless you hire perma-temps under short-term contracts, or something like that.
about 6 years ago
A person who is murdered still dies. So, you could say “he was murdered,” or you could say, “he died.” One statement explains how “he” died, while the other one states the end result.
So, you can use poor judgement and say something on your blog that leads to your being fired and it can be described many ways. For the sake of a descriptive conversation I’d prefer hearing that someone was fired for blogging. Right off the bat it tells me more about what happened than “he was fired for poor judgement,” because the natural next question would be, “what did he do?”