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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> I’m kind of surprised so many people are shocked by this. I know of one company where dozens of people were fired because their email was scanned for external job interviews and the CIO had a report, which he used to prematurely cut staff when he needed to save budget.

On a related note, if you were a Microsoft employee, how comfortable would you be talking with recruiters on LinkedIn?

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Was Microsoft employee. Did not worry one bit about talking to a recruiter on LinkedIn. Your immediate management is unable to see or even get that data. You would have to trip an alarm elsewhere, trigger a major investigation, get legal sign-off and then maybe Microsoft would ask LinkedIn to pull that data. Even though MS owns LinkedIn, they are treated as a separate business entity. LinkedIn has its own security team etc.

Even MS's own recruiters will use LinkedIn to contact current MS employees for internal positions.

Tech is a double sided coin. Things like this have the power to be abused, even easily at times, but that doesn't mean they always will be.

I’d have no problems with it. If they were going to fire me over that, it’s their loss. And it’s not generally in Microsoft’s culture these days to be that petty.

My worry in that position wouldn't be getting fired, it would be getting the conversation (or, if it's got that far, the offer) spiked because someone in HR thinks they can either keep me in my current role by scaring off anyone I might talk to, or share my salary information so they can low-ball me, thereby stopping me from getting a pay bump.

I don't think you need to work at Microsoft to be nervous about that. I've had recruiters offer to sell me information on who here is communicating with them on LinkedIn, without even being in a management or hiring position myself.

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