Employers and bloggers
Troy Brumley points to some discussions of employers and bloggers. As someone who is both an employee of a company and a blogger, I wanted to express my personal thoughts on this in the form of some guidelines.
- You can not violate policies which do not exist. This means companies need to set policies, and in a reasonable way. “Thou shall never blog about anything” is both irrational and likely as illegal as “thou shall never quit and go to work for anyone else in this industry” has been found to be.
- Don’t be an idiot. Don’t bad mouth people in your office, and don’t discuss non-public information. Violating an NDA (which almost all of us are under with our companies) is violating an NDA, whether it’s at a coffee shop or published online.
This means don’t say something on your blog which would be inappropriate if said in a public context in general. Blogs are public forums, and must be treated as such. For those who want to break these rules, you should see the blogging in secret information I referenced earlier.
This entry was posted at 6:40 pm on 20 April 2005 and is filed under Meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Actually from talking with my mom, who ran HR for several large companies, while it is “at will,” it has to be shown that it’s actually not discriminatory none-the-less. Also, the simple fact of publishing a blog would likely violate First Amendment protections and so it would have to be shown that it somehow negatively impacted your job.
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“You can not violate policies which do not exist.”
Yeah, but lots of companies have clauses about being an “at will” employer and how they unethical behavior “including, but not limited to …” is reason for termination.