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A similar thing happened to JWZ when he worked at Netscape; he started a private, off site mailing list where employees would say whatever they wanted. The comp

• kabdib 13y ago
  We had that in the Apple Newton group, three times. Do groups outside the US / Silly Valley engineering culture have these? First, a "slackers" Majordomo list (hosted on company hardware) that anyone could add themselves to. Plenty of relatively harmless snark and stuff about how the Death March was going. Problem: Too many managers added themselves to the list. I'm okay with managers as people on a list like slackers, but not as managers in their official capacity. It's possible that HR was involved in some of the traffic; time to go . . . Second, a hidden, invite-only list ("slackers2"). Lots more traffic, more venting, generally a place where you could let your hair down, relax, and fire off a "this totally pissed me off today" rant. Problem: Managers started to find out about it and ask too many questions. Third, an off-site invite-only list ("fyyff", ahem, you figure it out...) that was much more private, and survived most of the people leaving Newton. I'm convinced that this kind of list serves a useful purpose. It may also be necessary that it both (a) exists, and (b) be officially frowned upon. I don't think that an official venting forum (Management: "Hey, you can let off steam in this list over here and we totally won't care, honest") will work. [I still have the fyyff.com domain, though it's not doing much today because it was a bad spam and joe-job magnet]