7 ms·

Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the j

Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand. Quite honestly, an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place. Especially true in the realm of IT, where there just simply aren't enough solid, responsible people to fill the need. This article presents a nice thought, but on principle, I'm just gonna keep doing my thing outside of work (documenting what I want on social media), and crushing it AT work. My career should be growing based on job performance, not that one time I accidentally got too drunk at a bar.

WhompingWindows 9y ago
How would you know if a potential employer does google-fu on you?
- jiveturkey 9y ago
  Take out an ad on your own name.
  - onychomys 9y ago
    "Ask Onychomys the secret to getting hot singles in your area to date you!"
justherefortart 9y ago
What should happen and what does happen are two completely separate things in reality. If performance actually mattered I'd venture to guess 95%+ of people would be fired immediately. Maybe I'm cynical about it in my advancing years, but kissing ass pays off exponentially more than producing good work (unless you own your own business).
- scient 9y ago
  In my experience for whatever reason a lot of software engineers consider normal functional communication with their peers and managers as ass kissing. Is it because of being introverted?
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    I'd say there's a large streak of being self absorbed and thinking their shit doesn't stink. I'm likely just as guilty of this. More so in the past as I continually try to correct my behavior (not always successful but I'm trying!).
xab9 9y ago
Yet github will not let you turn off star ratings, commit history and the fancy commit graph (which I consider social features). I know it's not an indicator of how good a dev you are, but "sometimes" recruiters are clueless about this fact.
smt88 9y ago
> Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand. Yeah, but since the person hiring you hasn't worked with you yet, they're using a variety of imperfect indicators of how you'll perform. I assume most people have some embarrassing and/or drug-related stuff on their social media. To me, it would indicate a lack of maturity if I (a stranger) could still see those. Could that be dead wrong? Absolutely! But as someone who hires people, I'm trying to find ways to filter candidates who often seem almost completely the same. There's also the issue of whether your social media indicates a cultural mismatch. If someone is raging about immigrants on Twitter and our team has immigrants on it, I'm not going to hire that person.
borplk 9y ago
> an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place. Companies aren't going to ignore "free information available at your fingertips" about the candidates they hire. For example a problem candidate may have easily accessible "red flags" on their social media such as racist stuff and drug use. They could "save" themselves some costs and future problems by knowing that ahead of time. When companies are trying to optimise their hiring process they aren't going to ignore free additional information about the candidates, they want every last piece they can get their hands on so they can (at least in their mind) make the optimal decision.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Nobody cares if your SQL is written by nazis as long as nobody knows they're nazis. Nobody cares if your sales guys are alcoholics as long as they bring in busines and don't embarrass the company. By intentionally filtering on irreverent criteria (like the politics and drug habits of back-end devs) you're needlessly shrinking the talent pool. The time the average hire spends with the company is short enough that having to fire the occasional qualified employee early over "culture fit" really isn't a big deal.
  - upvotinglurker 9y ago
    > Nobody cares if your SQL is written by nazis as long as nobody knows they're nazis. If they're posting nazi stuff on Facebook, everybody knows they're nazis.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  That is why I quit LinkedIn
- Balgair 9y ago
  The issue is the false positive/false negative rate and a lack of data in general. Without any measure of how 'good' the info gained via social media is, the data is essentially useless. For large companies like Walmart, they can garner this data and see if it correlates at all. Google used to use GPA in their hiring decisions, but dropped it as it did not correlate to how good an employee is. For example: drug use. Many people use drugs, but what is the difference between them? Is one type of drug a 'good' drug, like caffeine or nicotine? Burning Man attendees may be good employees and may micro-dose with LSD while at work. Does this make them a good hire? Again, the issue is that there just isn't enough data to properly correlate.
ProAm 9y ago
You know employers perform credit checks to perform the same 'character check' on you, if you have bad credit the chance of you getting a job offer goes down dramatically. Career growth is rarely based on job performance.
- PaulStatezny 9y ago
  > Career growth is rarely based on job performance. I hear what you’re saying about credit checks. But I think the sentence I quoted is a little too extreme. Performance usually plays a significant role. It’s just not the only factor. Otherwise, (for example,) why is the careless, checked out teenager at a fast food joint not promoted to manager?
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    > Otherwise, (for example,) why is the careless, checked out teenager at a fast food joint not promoted to manager? Because managers are increasingly hired from the outside, increasingly with college degrees, and a diligent, hard-working teenager wouldn't have been promoted either? I'm with you on the broader point, things like credit checks and social media lookups are mostly disqualifiers for hiring, while performance is still a big part of career growth after being hired. But it seems a bit odd to use entry-level service work as the example, since performance often is meaningless there once you're not getting fired.
- herbst 9y ago
  This is a American only thing isn't it? Anyone knows of this in Europe?
  - ProAm 9y ago
    Oh yes, America only, at least as far as I am aware of. I should have specified that.
    - walshemj 9y ago
      I think or some finance jobs they will.
simias 9y ago
Now that most people have been taught to use their real identity on social media how can you meaningfully separate these things? The lines are even more blurred if you're applying for some social/RH position. Even for a coder you might want to google a bit to look for contributions to open source projects or mailing list posts since that can be a very good way to see how the person actually works and communicates. While I believe that the big data giants like FB and Google ought to be better regulated I also think that you have to make the users aware of their responsibility. Don't put anything publicly online that you wouldn't be comfortable seeing in the front page of a newspaper. And do the same thing when posting pictures and videos of your friends and family. If you don't value your own privacy Facebook won't do it for you.
herbst 9y ago
I think it's OK to the check Facebook profiles and look for stupidly shared information around drugs or something like this. I wouldn't want to hire a specialist who is publicly promoting drug usage. On the other hand if you Google me you find something related to me liking ganja. Which imo helps future bosses to filter me if they aren't OK with that.
- tzahola 9y ago
  Meanwhile, SV enterpreneurs take daily microdoses of LSD.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
taway123789 9y ago
On the flip side, employees can use this to their benefit also. I almost joined a company where my boss was a wildly right-wing put-up-the-wall type. Perhaps he'd be a good boss. But i'm brown. Do I want to take that chance? If he supports someone who think me and my family are all rapists, i'd like to know that.
luckydude 9y ago
I'm pretty much retired but I was an engineer and then a manager and then a CEO/VP engineering for ~20 years. If you think I'm not going to google you before I offered you a job you are mistaken. Of course I'm going to do that. Think of it this way. One of the questions we asked ourselves about every hire is "would they pass the grocery store test?" Which is: if we saw that person in the store would we go chat with them, because we thought that would be fun, or would we cringe and try and hide from them. It's a good test, work is not just cut and dried, there is a social aspect of work even if it is just you'd say hi outside of work. Your social media gives me a glimpse into the rest of your life and you'd better believe that is interesting info to a prospective employer.
- sidlls 9y ago
  What makes you think it gives an accurate or actionable glimpse?
  - luckydude 9y ago
    Man, so much of what seems defensive pushback, I don't get it. Here's the deal. I ran a small company for almost 2 decades in the valley. Everyone worked with everyone else very closely. One bad apple can screw up the whole company, make everyone miserable. So I used every chunk of info I could get to make sure that a potential hire was gonna be a fit. That's just being prudent. If you are posting on mailing lists about how you screwed your boss out of a pile of work by outsourcing it to some dude in India, yeah, not a great fit. If you are posting on facebook how you partied all week on your companies' dime while they thought you were working, yeah, not so much. Etc. If you are in to Harley-Davidson motorcycles (which I hate), well, not gonna hold that against you, though I'll let you ride my r1200gs (every Harley guy who has taken me up on that walks away looking at that GS like that's the bike he should have gotten). I'm somewhat surprised that people question a hiring manager looking around. If you were building a team that had to work together are you seriously telling me you wouldn't look? I'd like to hear that from anyone who has successfully built multiple teams and then have them explain why they wouldn't look.
    - 9y ago
nwsm 9y ago
Agreed. Luckily my employer's policy is to not look at it, and never take it into account. Although additionally, if saying 'fuck' on twitter excludes me from your selection, I probably don't want to be there anyway.
fipple 9y ago
As an anecdote, I did quite thorough background checks on candidates before I hired them, more thorough than what they expected or suspected. I get occasional texts from two former employees thanking me for the great role I gave them and the great work environment. They were happy to have the job that I had to offer, and no I had no shortage of candidates for it.

WhompingWindows 9y ago

How would you know if a potential employer does google-fu on you?

jiveturkey 9y ago
Take out an ad on your own name.
- onychomys 9y ago
  "Ask Onychomys the secret to getting hot singles in your area to date you!"

justherefortart 9y ago

What should happen and what does happen are two completely separate things in reality. If performance actually mattered I'd venture to guess 95%+ of people would be fired immediately. Maybe I'm cynical about it in my advancing years, but kissing ass pays off exponentially more than producing good work (unless you own your own business).

scient 9y ago
In my experience for whatever reason a lot of software engineers consider normal functional communication with their peers and managers as ass kissing. Is it because of being introverted?
- justherefortart 9y ago
  I'd say there's a large streak of being self absorbed and thinking their shit doesn't stink. I'm likely just as guilty of this. More so in the past as I continually try to correct my behavior (not always successful but I'm trying!).

xab9 9y ago

Yet github will not let you turn off star ratings, commit history and the fancy commit graph (which I consider social features). I know it's not an indicator of how good a dev you are, but "sometimes" recruiters are clueless about this fact.

smt88 9y ago

> Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand. Yeah, but since the person hiring you hasn't worked with you yet, they're using a variety of imperfect indicators of how you'll perform. I assume most people have some embarrassing and/or drug-related stuff on their social media. To me, it would indicate a lack of maturity if I (a stranger) could still see those. Could that be dead wrong? Absolutely! But as someone who hires people, I'm trying to find ways to filter candidates who often seem almost completely the same. There's also the issue of whether your social media indicates a cultural mismatch. If someone is raging about immigrants on Twitter and our team has immigrants on it, I'm not going to hire that person.

borplk 9y ago

> an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place. Companies aren't going to ignore "free information available at your fingertips" about the candidates they hire. For example a problem candidate may have easily accessible "red flags" on their social media such as racist stuff and drug use. They could "save" themselves some costs and future problems by knowing that ahead of time. When companies are trying to optimise their hiring process they aren't going to ignore free additional information about the candidates, they want every last piece they can get their hands on so they can (at least in their mind) make the optimal decision.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Nobody cares if your SQL is written by nazis as long as nobody knows they're nazis. Nobody cares if your sales guys are alcoholics as long as they bring in busines and don't embarrass the company. By intentionally filtering on irreverent criteria (like the politics and drug habits of back-end devs) you're needlessly shrinking the talent pool. The time the average hire spends with the company is short enough that having to fire the occasional qualified employee early over "culture fit" really isn't a big deal.
- upvotinglurker 9y ago
  > Nobody cares if your SQL is written by nazis as long as nobody knows they're nazis. If they're posting nazi stuff on Facebook, everybody knows they're nazis.
paulie_a 9y ago
That is why I quit LinkedIn
Balgair 9y ago
The issue is the false positive/false negative rate and a lack of data in general. Without any measure of how 'good' the info gained via social media is, the data is essentially useless. For large companies like Walmart, they can garner this data and see if it correlates at all. Google used to use GPA in their hiring decisions, but dropped it as it did not correlate to how good an employee is. For example: drug use. Many people use drugs, but what is the difference between them? Is one type of drug a 'good' drug, like caffeine or nicotine? Burning Man attendees may be good employees and may micro-dose with LSD while at work. Does this make them a good hire? Again, the issue is that there just isn't enough data to properly correlate.

ProAm 9y ago

You know employers perform credit checks to perform the same 'character check' on you, if you have bad credit the chance of you getting a job offer goes down dramatically. Career growth is rarely based on job performance.

PaulStatezny 9y ago
> Career growth is rarely based on job performance. I hear what you’re saying about credit checks. But I think the sentence I quoted is a little too extreme. Performance usually plays a significant role. It’s just not the only factor. Otherwise, (for example,) why is the careless, checked out teenager at a fast food joint not promoted to manager?
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > Otherwise, (for example,) why is the careless, checked out teenager at a fast food joint not promoted to manager? Because managers are increasingly hired from the outside, increasingly with college degrees, and a diligent, hard-working teenager wouldn't have been promoted either? I'm with you on the broader point, things like credit checks and social media lookups are mostly disqualifiers for hiring, while performance is still a big part of career growth after being hired. But it seems a bit odd to use entry-level service work as the example, since performance often is meaningless there once you're not getting fired.
herbst 9y ago
This is a American only thing isn't it? Anyone knows of this in Europe?
- ProAm 9y ago
  Oh yes, America only, at least as far as I am aware of. I should have specified that.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    I think or some finance jobs they will.

simias 9y ago

Now that most people have been taught to use their real identity on social media how can you meaningfully separate these things? The lines are even more blurred if you're applying for some social/RH position. Even for a coder you might want to google a bit to look for contributions to open source projects or mailing list posts since that can be a very good way to see how the person actually works and communicates. While I believe that the big data giants like FB and Google ought to be better regulated I also think that you have to make the users aware of their responsibility. Don't put anything publicly online that you wouldn't be comfortable seeing in the front page of a newspaper. And do the same thing when posting pictures and videos of your friends and family. If you don't value your own privacy Facebook won't do it for you.

herbst 9y ago

I think it's OK to the check Facebook profiles and look for stupidly shared information around drugs or something like this. I wouldn't want to hire a specialist who is publicly promoting drug usage. On the other hand if you Google me you find something related to me liking ganja. Which imo helps future bosses to filter me if they aren't OK with that.

tzahola 9y ago
Meanwhile, SV enterpreneurs take daily microdoses of LSD.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

taway123789 9y ago

On the flip side, employees can use this to their benefit also. I almost joined a company where my boss was a wildly right-wing put-up-the-wall type. Perhaps he'd be a good boss. But i'm brown. Do I want to take that chance? If he supports someone who think me and my family are all rapists, i'd like to know that.

luckydude 9y ago

I'm pretty much retired but I was an engineer and then a manager and then a CEO/VP engineering for ~20 years. If you think I'm not going to google you before I offered you a job you are mistaken. Of course I'm going to do that. Think of it this way. One of the questions we asked ourselves about every hire is "would they pass the grocery store test?" Which is: if we saw that person in the store would we go chat with them, because we thought that would be fun, or would we cringe and try and hide from them. It's a good test, work is not just cut and dried, there is a social aspect of work even if it is just you'd say hi outside of work. Your social media gives me a glimpse into the rest of your life and you'd better believe that is interesting info to a prospective employer.

sidlls 9y ago
What makes you think it gives an accurate or actionable glimpse?
- luckydude 9y ago
  Man, so much of what seems defensive pushback, I don't get it. Here's the deal. I ran a small company for almost 2 decades in the valley. Everyone worked with everyone else very closely. One bad apple can screw up the whole company, make everyone miserable. So I used every chunk of info I could get to make sure that a potential hire was gonna be a fit. That's just being prudent. If you are posting on mailing lists about how you screwed your boss out of a pile of work by outsourcing it to some dude in India, yeah, not a great fit. If you are posting on facebook how you partied all week on your companies' dime while they thought you were working, yeah, not so much. Etc. If you are in to Harley-Davidson motorcycles (which I hate), well, not gonna hold that against you, though I'll let you ride my r1200gs (every Harley guy who has taken me up on that walks away looking at that GS like that's the bike he should have gotten). I'm somewhat surprised that people question a hiring manager looking around. If you were building a team that had to work together are you seriously telling me you wouldn't look? I'd like to hear that from anyone who has successfully built multiple teams and then have them explain why they wouldn't look.
  - 9y ago

nwsm 9y ago

Agreed. Luckily my employer's policy is to not look at it, and never take it into account. Although additionally, if saying 'fuck' on twitter excludes me from your selection, I probably don't want to be there anyway.

fipple 9y ago

As an anecdote, I did quite thorough background checks on candidates before I hired them, more thorough than what they expected or suspected. I get occasional texts from two former employees thanking me for the great role I gave them and the great work environment. They were happy to have the job that I had to offer, and no I had no shortage of candidates for it.