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Comment by chomp | Hacker News Reader

If you make posts on Twitter and social media with your personal account, but present yourself as "Employee of so-and-so" and muse about your product and engage people with that persona, you've blended your personal and work personas. Anything you do on your personal account now reflects on the company.

>I am my employer's resource from when I come into the office to when I go home, and for brief moments whilist remote-ing in to handle an issue, and outside of that I should have legal protections to do whatever the hell my heart desires, and that includes talking.

If you separate work and personal life so distinctly, then why talk about work and present your work persona on your personal accounts!

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That it's a personal account doesn't even matter, the Internet outrage machine will come for your job, this isn't limited to any specific subculture.

Oh that is such a load. Who on earth goes through twitter accounts or Facebook accounts to evaluate the employees of a company before they decide to do business with them?

I simply can't envision a scenario where Bob's Hot Dogs is going to refuse to use a payment processor like Square because one of Square's marketing people posted to twitter once like 2 years ago that hot dogs suck. And where are we drawing the line here? So you're saying by virtue I'm saying I'm an X at Y Company that I'm now representing that company 24/7 until I quit? That's insane, full bore insane.

> If you separate work and personal life so distinctly, then why talk about work and present your work persona on your personal accounts!

Because who doesn't!? I follow hundreds of people who regularly discuss their careers and what they do at work, most of them being developers and admins.

>And where are we drawing the line here?

Answering most of your questions: Causing controversy. Just faffing about on social media, even negatively, generally won't be a problem until such time as you portray your employer in a bad light (say, by shouting at their customers apropos of nothing) and cause them a PR issue.

>> I follow hundreds of people

and thousands of us post under pseudonyms, take steps to conceal our employers, or if they do speak with their employers publicly and predominately listed they

1. Have their post cleared by the company 2. Ensure they have disclaimers their thoughts are not the opinions of their employers

This new (mostly with millennial's) notion that is a good idea to mix your work life and personal life on social media is a terrible one.

I operate 2 completely separate devices, computers, everything, I NEVER login to a person account on a work system and NEVER login to a work account on a personal system. My Work phone is my work phone, my personal phone is my personal phone...

100% separation from my employment and my personal life.

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