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Comment by xcambar | Hacker News Reader

> Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own

Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance.

It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything with regards to the company's PR?

Is there an actual risk in the US? Have there been trials or anything that push people to add such statements?

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Can't speak for other companies, but this is covered in basic training at Google - if you're not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, you must make it clear when your writings may be mistaken or constructed to represent the company.

Basically the company has specially trained people that speak on behalf of the company, and that message should not be confounded by personal opinions of other employees. For example, on the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage.

I'm not aware of any actual risks in the US, but then again I'm not in the US. For me this seems a minor point, and I actually enjoy separating my public persona from the company for which I work, being it Google or a small startup.

> On the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage.

To be fair, I think the media would have done that even with a "speaking only for myself" disclaimer.

Would you say: "I live in [city], opinions are my own", or "I am married to [person], opinions are my own"?

If no, why are you doing this for the company you're trading skills and time against money?

It's the same at all large companies - its CYA boiler plate.

Though I almost got to be the official spokesperson for British Telecom responding on the alt.2600 news group about the the Met police VMB hack - press office was cool but the internal security was not.

Every company says that, the obvious solution is to never name it when you speak. Why do these people need to say "Im a googler" and then immediately "but forget it, I speak on my own"... obviously there s value in the fact they re at Google and it will color their discourse which is already probably forbidden.

Dont name your company if you intend to speak for yourself.

I work at a large tech company, and they do mention in the on boarding materials that we represent the company, so we should be careful in our social media profiles. My solution to this is to not associate my social media profiles with my employer. This is technically not really what we’re supposed to do, and I might have to change that approach at some point if I move high enough in the org to start getting attention from people, but this works for me better than disclaimers on all my posts.

if they wanted to control this so bad they'd provision you a managed account like how email addresses are managed.

Yet all these googlers breached it immediately in the first sentence by naming their company...

Sarcastically, "I'm a googler, opinions my own" reads a lot like "I'm a googler, just so you know".

I didn't want to emphasize on that on the first comment yet to be honest, I find it pedantic because it's pointless, legally speaking.

> Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere?

This isn’t just ‘big tech’ - I work at a relatively small tech company, but I’d never want anything I say about the company to be mistaken as some sort of ‘official statement’ especially if it related to an incident that possibly had a financial impact on external parties, and could conceivably be misused in that context in the future.

I go as far as never writing private emails from my work mail for the same sort of reasons - although that is from a possibly over-abundance of caution.

It's in the spirit of full disclosure, which some, including me, appreciate.

Part of it is because the company asks us to. Part of it is because I think it's reasonable to tell people your biases, and it can avoid the situation where substantive conversation gets derailed by "gotchas". If I make a comment about how I think Google Meet has the best noise cancellation of any video chat software, even though I don't work on Meet or anything adjacent to it, it's still a bad look if someone can dig through my comment history and pull out a previous comment about how I work for Google.

> It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more?

Rumor mill journalists will mine social media and forum comments and write entire articles about "so and so FAANG employee gives hint at future merger" when some dev comments how much they've enjoyed using some library recently.

They want to mention their employer to gain authority in the discussion, but since mentioning their employer is a legal/PR risk, they need to follow it up with a disclaimer (this only partially mitigates the risk, but it’s worth it to get the brag in).

It s because they only hire idiots at Google. Im from a big company, I just dont name it and assume humans understand my opinions are my own :D

Especially when it's not an opinion.

In fairness, 'opinion' is a horrendously vague and ill-defined word. It does double duty as (i) 'normative value' and (ii) 'personal understanding of the descriptive facts', which two senses are constantly confused - for example right here.

That's why we constantly get "it's just my opinion" used in reference to type-ii opinions (personal understanding of descriptive fact), when it's only really appropriate to type-i opinions (normative value).

Many conversations would be far clearer if it were abandoned in favour of more precise language, IMPUOTDF.

"Many conversations would be far clearer if it were abandoned in favour of more precise language, IMPUOTDF"... um whats IMPUOTDF? I did try to google it, but only this post was found.

Sorry, I was joking: 'in my personal understanding of the descriptive facts', referring back to that second definition of 'opinion' earlier in the comment.

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