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Comment by h2s | Hacker News Reader

    > Co-branded employees should get some workday time for
    > activities that support the company's goals. But
    > setting limits on those activities, along with clear
    > expectations for what else these employees need to
    > accomplish, can help ensure that they complete their
    > primary work and avoid resentment from their
    > nonblogging, nontweeting colleagues.

The paternalism of this remark is mindblowing. It reads like advice for parents whose children like videogames. Nobody in any job I've ever had has had to explicitly "set limits" on things because part of the point of hiring somebody is that you ensure that you think they're a responsible grown-up who can be trusted to work hard. I don't see why that would suddenly change if I happened to have a blog with thousands of readers.

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The entire article reads like a howto manual for parenting.

It's articles like these that remind me why I hate working with BigCo. This kind of crap never happens at a small company. Sure, you have problems and clashes, but they're resolved ad hoc by humans, rather than by policies designed to align drones with the corporate culture.

I would have to disagree that, this sort of crap is exactly what happens at small companies.

When the person who manages a small company and is also a sole owner of it; its pretty common that they look at employees successfully blogging as at least partly, as a result of the business's (i e their) efforts. Conflicts also have a tendency to be arbitrated by the owner, not resoled ad hoc by humans.

I don't agree with this mindset, but I have seen this sort of behavior personally from small employers. I don't think my experiences are rare by any means.

As far as the article goes, I do think its rather over the top.

Absolutely true. But equally, don't expect special treatment if you are blogging instead of producing. If your blogging overlaps with work interests, it becomes even more complicated, especially if part of your job becomes blogging for work.

All this paragraph means is that if you put your blogging ahead of your job, you shouldn't be too surprised by pushback or even being let go. Every relationship is two ways, and if you honour your employment agreement you should be fine. Though I understand not all employers may think that way.

Over the last few years I've seen friends who blog (admittedly the subject matter being close to that of their work) being encouraged by their managers and bosses to do so - sometimes scheduling days into their working week just to blog.

Whilst their regular 'work' may need to be covered, often the blog brings opportunities for guest posts on other sites and invitations to conference panels or speaking. This is turn is bringing in enough new business to justify and encourage their 'online celebrity'.

Ugh, I really hope you're not a manager. This sort of infantile world view is why I'm so glad I'm self-employed now.

Let your employees determine their own work.

This is a pretty naive worldview. Yes it would be grand if we all just magically got everything done.

For the vast majority of companies in the real world, someone has to watch deadlines motivate employees and make sure things ship. If an employee is writing a personal blog instead of doing there work, something will give.

And if they're not working because all they do is blog?

Then you fire them for the cause of not doing their work. You don't fire them because they were blogging.

See comment above - 'if they are blogging instead of producing' being the premise here.

I don't think that was the point made by anyone above.

Or if appropriate, change the role of the employee.

The subtext here is that companies are afraid of employees becoming hard-to-fire based on out-of-job credibility. We could see 6-month severances being the norm (at least for so-called "co-branded" people) in a few years.

Credibility used to come from job titles, references, and performance reviews. It came only from people that companies hand-picked to be "managers". This meant that a person could be fired for any reason and the company could call it "performance" and that person had zero credibility. They held all the cards. The result was that companies could treat people (not only those they fired, but those they kept but could threaten with termination) badly.

That era's ending, and good riddance.

Actually there are a number of subtexts here, I can think of several which are less cut and dried -

  - Employee wasting company time.
  - Employee divulging too much about company mechanisms and/or IP.
  - Ownership of IP (content) created during company time.
  - Ownership of blog/tweet followings gathered on company time.

These are real issues for a company and some bring up big questions about who owns an employee's paid output.

Employees shouldn't be blogging on company time (except on a company blog, where the IP issues are unambiguous). I don't think it's unethical, because most companies no longer seriously invest in employees' career advancement, so employees have to sneak away time for that, and everyone successful "steals" a lot of education. I do think it's sloppy and reckless to perform side work you actually intend to use on company time. If you are going to go ahead and do it, at least show you're not a total fucking moron by turning off timestamps.

I understand that it's annoying if you suspect someone's "wasting company time", but I the larger issue that people have with this is mostly irrespective of whether the blogging happens during work hours, especially as those become increasingly vague in definition. The issue, for the Baby Boomer clientele of WSJ, is that it punctures the illusion that people are supposed to keep that they're 100% dedicated to the corporate goals and working as hard as they can. (If you have side projects, even if they occur outside of work, they will decrease short-term work performance from a manager's perspective. If you work 80 hours per week in total and give your boss 40, what you're actually giving is worth 25-30, tops, because of the per-hour productivity slide.)

Baby Boomers had to put forward an image of total loyalty: no side projects, no interest in independent credibility, happy to work on whatever they were assigned to do. Millennials don't buy into that, not in the least. They put their careers ahead of management's objectives and it shows, and it's making a lot of people angry, but it's a rational response to a new economic reality.

"Employees shouldn't be blogging on company time (except on a company blog, where the IP issues are unambiguous). "

Of course, that is only a workaround. As you described later, the issues in the long term need to be resolved properly.

Absolutely true... for professionals.

(I think that's pretty clear from the context of the article though.)

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