No Hire
github.com
github.com
Is this allegation backed up by any fact? Besides that one town in Montana which got in trouble for doing this and has since stopped (I believe this was posted a few days ago).
I may be naive but I really can't imagine this practice being all that widespread - if it's not more than a myth spawned by one or two idiotic hiring managers.
Seems like a lot of passion spawned by not a whole lot of fact.
But asking for or expecting access to private websites like facebook? No way. The OP looks to me like someone looking for something to rant about.
Of course, it's absurd to suggest companies make sure every worker isn't high on the job every single day, but that doesn't change the fact that it's judging someone based on something which could have absolutely no bearing on their work.
But programmers? If Google drug tests people I'm sure they do so for liability reasons, not because they care what Johnny Genius does in his free time.
They're not allowed to discriminate based on these things, but it doesn't mean they can't know them (though obviously they probably won't ask you as that's asking for trouble).
You can't discriminate based on age or gender in the UK (amongst many other things). But if they interview you (face to face at least), I think they'd probably have a fairly good idea of those, without asking you (or looking at your facebook profile).
Posting things on the public Internet that reflects poorly on the candidate shows a judgment issue that is a valid reason for rejecting a candidate.
In the case I'm thinking of, a cursory Google search on a candidate I would otherwise have hired showed that he had at least one job that he had quit without notice; this job was not listed on his resume. In addition, this first-person blog stated that he had shown up to work so hungover he could barely see, on more than one occasion.
Should I have hired this person, given the red flags I found via Google and that there were other equally-qualified candidates who did not have those red flags?
For example, does posting something about anti-semitism reflect poorly on a candidate? How about a candidate that makes strong statements about the correlation between race and IQ?
1) If the candidate has to work on a team with others, then he has to get along with the team - or at the very least, the chemistry shouldn't be bad enough to affect performance.
2)I think it's perfectly acceptable to reject someone because you don't consider him to be morally upstanding. The second statement about correlating race and IQ is a bit ambiguous and subjective, but if, say the candidate was philosophically in favor of lynching and ethnic genocide, then I wouldn't care how good a hacker he is, I wouldn't feel right hiring him.
Posting race\IQ issue wouldn't, in my opinion, reflect poorly on the candidate even though I don't necessarily agree with it. On the other hand, posting anti-semitic remarks probably would reflect poorly, depending on how they were phrased and the context (is it just pure hate or mere opposition to certain political stances...)
That said, the real peril is that of mistaken identity. I almost missed out on a (mostly) enjoyable 2+ year relationship because my Google search revealed that the woman I was chatting with was an activist for various evangelical Christian causes. Fortunately, before breaking contact with her, I asked her about it, and soon realized that Google was leading me astray.
And frankly, the reason and manner in which someone left their last job is a piss-poor reason for not hiring someone. What if there was sexual harassment? Stuff like that you can't know from a google search or even an interview.
I Google candidates for their professional opinions and activities. But what do I do if I find their profile on a public site like HN? Some of the comments are going to be useful fodder for an interview I noticed you posted a comment on HN suggesting OOP has had its fifteen minutes of fame. What do you see replacing it? ... But I might also read opinions about politics. What if the same person has posted HN comments about Obama the Magic Negro? I really don't want to know what they think and why in the context of hiring them.
Worse, what if I see a comment from the same person saying one of my posts is absolute garbage and that I'm an idiot? Now I may have compromised my impartiality.
I don't know the answer. I wouldn't look up a candidate in something obviously personal like Facebook or MySpace, but I have no idea how to handle stuff like HN that contains what I perceive to be a mix of relevant technical opinions and personal, wrong-side-of-the-privacy-line stuff.
I don't know.
If you're a good manager, you should be able to stomach having an employee tell you that. After all, what if your opinion is absolute garbage and you're an idiot? Do you want people working for you who won't call you out when you're wrong?
The right question to ask there is why your posts is garbage and you're an idiot. See if they can defend it. And if they can, and can convince you that your own post is garbage, that's someone worth hiring. If they're just ranting, maybe it's time to look at another candidate.
I wonder if my descendants will consider this kind of behavior quaint if not dangerously naïve. Of course, they might say (might will say?), you maintain multiple online identities and even if everything posted under them is publically readable, you give one URL to the guy interviewing you, and then a different one to the officemate who has become your friend, and maybe you keep your really emotionally sticky stuff on a third site that only two or three people know is connected to your true identity. And it would be an extreme social gaffe--a sort of electronic peeping-tom-ism--for anyone to reveal "the guy who posts here also writes this blog" to an unauthorized party.
This is true, but it misses the point. Keeping your online identities separate isn't a security measure. (And when it is -- when you're a political dissident facing imprisonment or torture -- it's very very risky.)
You maintain separate identities because it sends a social signal. The signal is "I recognize the distinction between professional and casual behavior; between public and private behavior; between an artistic pose and heartfelt sincerity. I understand basic social and literary conventions and I know how to use them."
A classic example: Fake Steve Jobs, who I think is a pretty good model of proper literary behavior. Daniel Lyons wanted to have some fun, so he concocted a persona and started a blog under that persona's name. The persona's voice is distinct from that of Daniel Lyons, the journalist (which is why so many people say things like "man, he was so good as Fake Steve; why are his Newsweek articles so uninspiring?"), which in turn is almost certainly distinct from Mr. Lyons the person, Mr. Lyons the family member, and Mr. Lyons the party animal. But Lyons obeys the conventions. He doesn't just type everything that comes into his head into one blog.
Obviously you should expect your prospective employers to Google you and read your public writing, particularly that which might pertain to your field. (I told my new employer all about my writing on HN, for example.) But just as it is your responsibility to observe proper social and literary convention, it is also your employer's responsibility: Just because it's easy to riffle through Facebook and MySpace (the online equivalent of following your prospective employee around at night, peeking into his or her windows) doesn't mean that employers are ethical when they do so.
But Google makes window-peering so easy that it's sometimes hard to avoid. So: Pseudonyms, my friend, pseudonyms. Not to mention Pepys' brilliant invention: the posthumous diary. (I sometimes wonder if I should start a web service for writing posthumously-published blog posts. But it's kind of the anti-viable online business: It has negative word of mouth (your customers would prefer that their friends and family don't know about it), and the writers have pretty poor interaction with the audience, and nobody will ever have enough faith in your privacy policy or performance warranty.)
One thing about pseudonyms - it is in your audience's interest to maintain the ruse as they benifit from it's existence.
PS: Posthumous diary service - if someone can create a trusted service that provides timed key release - so many services can be hung from it.
The off chance that you could read about someone's pregnancy (something that you should not ask in a interview) was enough for them to ban the practice.
I don't agree, but it's a good argument. Very protective of the lawyers.
Although this hasn't come up when I've been on hiring committees, I would want to avoid hiring people who are unusually racist; it's likely to make it hard for them to work with their co-workers down the line, and if they end up making hiring decisions, it might result in racist hiring decisions.
(I say "unusually racist" because people who are completely non-racist are pretty rare, at least in the US. I wouldn't want to be Diogenes the Hiring Manager.)
Uh, would you also favor giving them separate seats in the back of the bus?
And what would you say about a manager that avoided hiring followers of some other ideology, e.g. Communism?
I'd rather they stayed off the bus entirely.
And what would you say about a manager that avoided hiring followers of some other ideology, e.g. Communism?
I guess it depends on the ideology, doesn't it?
First, you are already supposed to ignore facts that you can see when hiring. For example, you are supposed to ignore that you are interviewing a person in a wheelchair, or that is of a different race/age/gender than you, and focus on their ability to meet your requirements. So, when I google (which as others have said, I do to check out open source activity - something I rate highly) I just try not to read personal stuff, and if I can't avoid it I do my best not to let it affect my decisions.
But...
Secondly: if you post content that is inappropriate under most social and professional circumstances under your own name, even if it personally does not ick me, then you show distinct lack of judgement. I quite like my people to show good judgement.
There are a myriad of ways to express yourself online without it ending up in the face of someone casually googling you. Certainly for a technical job, I would be perturbed if you showed blatant ignorance on how to do it.
If you're going to have a presence online, you're going to have to have a public presence. I know lots of people would like for it to be the other way around, but I honestly just don't see that happening.
META: I'd love to upvote this article for the comments, but the article itself isn't that good. So no upvote.
I get that its an experiment; and I think it's a moderately clever idea... I just like that github is all about the code. If this becomes popular, I think github needs to roll blogging into their site as a feature so that it can sit in a separate namespace than code projects.
Also, raganwald's blog is usually all about code, which is why he set it up on GitHub to begin with. This seems to be a deviation from the norm.
I thought that the prevailing view around here was that, when applying for a job, you are interviewing the company as much (and if you're talented, even more) than they are interviewing you.
To me, if an employer asked me anything about my HN, or Slashdot, or reddit, or gibsonandlily, or facebook, or myspace, or whatever other silly social network I had signed up for in the past profile, it would be a "thank you for your time, but I'm not interested" response from me.
I suspect that the type of employer that has issues with boundaries like facebook and myspace is also going to have issues with boundaries like "I am using the two weeks allowed per year of vacation to go to the lake with my family. I am not on call right now, do not get angry if I don't respond to your emails immediately".
In other words, them even asking about your profile should be a major red flag.
If they don't like it, they don't necessarily need to talk to you about it. You just might end up not being considered.
The signing in in front of them thing is an exception but it doesn't seem to actually happen anyway, so that's a red herring.
However, I disagree than a potential employer looking over our online persona is necessarily a negative thing. In fact, I think it can be positive in that it suggested the hiring manager is doing some real work to check out their candidates. Just like anything there are lines you can cross, but that's just common sense.
Asking for a potential hire to login into their FB and show their world shows a complete lack of common sense in almost any context.
Checking out a potential hire's technical background for a technical position is certainly within the realm of common sense, and I think it would be negligent not to. There may be a wealth of relevant information available online about the candidate, and this shouldn't be ignored.
Likewise, I would recommend putting in the effort to check out the employer's history too. Using google, wayback machine, chief staff members, etc. It doesn't take long and give's you a much better idea about the opportunity. Most employer's would find that kind of research shows commitment to finding a good fit.
The overall gist of the encounter was an attempt on the part of my friends manager to scare him into closing down his accounts (The employer was afraid of my friend talking about the company he works for online.)
http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/19/want-a-job-hand-over...
My take on the situation though after reading the article is just a case of understandable incompetence. They just didn't realize what a big deal it was. They were looking for a limited number of bad flags and didn't really think it through. Someone with very little social networking experience, read some nightmare accounts in some FUD article and made a really dumb decision.
At the same time I have over a thousand helpful, hopefully well-written posts on message boards that I'll be happy to direct any employers to. They're a better resume than my actual resume, and harder to fake.
Sure, it's a shame they won't carry the family name, but they'll thank you in 20 years.
The only exception I can think of would be a job in which maintaining a highly public Facebook or MySpace page was itself an essential function.
Two days ago I made one of the bigger decisions of my life: I decided to abandon any attempt to salvage a bio-tech company I co-founded ten years ago. One of the other founders had a quite brilliant invention that I'm more convinced than ever will work. Yet, after ten years, I finally realized that a company is fundamentally its people and how they interact. His performance (narrow sense) as a scientist was tremendous. As a human being? Well, there's the fact that he's been in and out of jail several times for assault and battery as well as drunk and disorderly. And the fact that every time we get close to making a major advance he steps in to sabotage it, which he has done several times by calling customers, vendors and big investors and screaming at them. And the fact that he takes absolutely no responsibility for his actions.
Some of his craziness is apparent from his web page. If he'd had a web page ten years ago I might never have gotten involved and wasted ten years and a lot of money pursuing a dream that depends on someone who has failed at everything in his life and is absolutely intent on making sure he fails at this.
So, raganwald, it all depends on what you mean by "performance". One thing that I am 100% certain of, how someone treats other people, how much they complain instead of take action, etc., is largely what I mean by performance. One dirt bag can make everyone else on the team miserable, and drive the good people away.
I would never ask to log into anyone's social web page. I will always check on their background, including using search engines.
What about previous job experiences?
Is it acceptable for an employer to query previous employers/coworkers as to how effective they were in related jobs? Let us say you are coming into a company applying for the position of a kernel developer, and your last two positions at companies were doing the same job. Is it okay for the hiring manager to talk to your previous managers and coworkers to see how good you were at your Job, how effective a developer you were?
Or is it the case that all screening outside of A) the interview and B) the references that the candidate hands over, are off limits?
In silicon valley it's a pretty common procedure to ask for internal suggestions when a position comes up, and people think of who they've worked with over the last 10 years that might be suitable for a position - to some degree that's an "off-the-books" reference check, and I'm wondering if people feel that's an acceptable thing to do when hiring?
Of course. This is called "checking references" and is standard practice that nobody disagrees with. The key words here are "employers/coworkers" and "related jobs", which are distinct from "high school friends" and "church socials".
People who frequent HN may not be subject to this problem as much, but in general, most of the power in an interview is concentrated at the employer's side of the table, rather than the applicant's. For them to abuse that power by prying into people's personal lives is unethical and unfair.
Hiring managers should know better, but it sometimes takes push-back from the community to help them see the issues involved. The recent change in policy in Bozeman shows that such feedback can be effective.
The internet has definitely changed our views on privacy. Overall, I think this is a good thing. But it can be disturbing when you realize how much information a 10 minute search can pull up. For example, I just found out that googling my name turns up a page on whitehouse2.org where I listed several political positions. I generally try to keep anything associated with my full name fairly neutral and professional, though I hadn't even considered Google when signing up for that site.
I've looked at Facebook profiles when judging potential employees. I've never ruled anyone out because of it, but one person got a lot closer to the job when I saw that that he spent his off hours talking about what he'd spend his work hours doing.
Basically, there are three possibilities when an employer looks at your Facebook: a) they like what they see (so they have better information, and you're more likely to get a job, b) they are neutral (nobody loses), or c) they dislike it (so by denying them access, you're artificially boosting your prospects -- cheating them out of the employee they want, and cheating that employee out of a job).
It's good to be suspicious of people trolling for personal data -- but I'm much more suspicious of efforts to hide information.
It's not fair for an employer to look in your private life; any more than it is fair for the potential employee to look at confidential company data. How would you like that? The company is hiding information, thereby cheating you into a job.
Information in negotiations works two ways: oftentimes, it's prudent to release a bit of information as a signaling device, because it shows that you're confident the information will work in your favor.
Can I be any more clear than that?
It stops being private when you publish it to the world. It doesn't stop being personal. Some public, personal details cannot lawfully be considered in a hiring decision. But most can. It is your responsibility to guard your privacy. It isn't your prospective employer's.
Every time I interview for a job, I try to find out information from the company, particularly information they don't want released. Maybe I'm weird, but I get burned less because of it.
To me a principle is something that is so important I am willing to make sacrifices and suffer indignities to protect it. It isn't a "nice-to-have," it's a non-negotiable. In fact, I would say that you don't know whether something is a principle or not until you are looking at having to sell your home to avoid foreclosure because you won't compromise it.
JM2C on the word...
I also think the best point the author makes is that he'd be culturally incompatible with anyone who pulls this sort of nonsense anyway. I'm a big advocate of transparency for cooperation.
I completely agree that the practice is wrong, but I don't think that "fine, don't hire me, I don't want to work there anyway" (with the implied "because I have choices") is the most constructive approach.
Now I have kids and a mortgage, but let me look you (virtually) straight in the eye and tell you: No way am I ever going to tell them that I got down on my knees and sold my dignity as a human being "for their sake." That isn't a value I want to pass on to the next generation.
My rant is definitely not constructive, I agree with you there. But it is passionate, and I am far more interested in persuading fellow hackers to start their own businesses or seek more enlightened employers than I am in persuading employers to change their ways.
The US Networks didn't "ban" it, they weren't offered it in the first place, so their hands are clean of censorship. Did they tell the producers that the episode was unacceptable? I don't know. Since they didn't receive it, it never went as far as the FCC or whomever issuing a ruling against it.
The video lined in the post gives an account using the verb "ban" and I went along with that.
(an absolutely beautiful casting decision)
Would your manager allow you to look through every photograph ever taken in their life?
Being as deeply connected in social media as I am, I feel awkward being at a job which doesn't have one of these.
One case that might not have happened is the Australian worker who called in sick, then wrote on Facebook that they're still trashed:
http://www.hrblunders.com/was-facebook-sick-day-star-framed/
Swiss worker says: I can't come to work because I'm too sick to use a computer, then logs into Facebook. Result: fired.
As for reflecting badly on an organization... this is something society needs to get over. Why would you judge an entire organization based on the actions of one person? And, where do you draw the line? Is it OK to discriminate against someone who blogs frequently? (Their poor grammar and tired ideas makes your organization look bad.) Is it OK to discriminate against someone who likes to hang out in the pub with friends. (Those pictures make your employees look like a bunch of lazy drunks.) Is it OK to discriminate against gay people? ("God says being gay is wrong," so that's got to make your organization look bad.)
My point is, everything makes your organization look bad. But when you hire someone, you are trading money for work, you aren't purchasing a slave. So anything that an employee does that's not on behalf of the company should not reflect on the company in any way (negatively OR positively). It should only reflect on that individual.