What about security clearances for government work? You can be disqualified for a whole host of things like bad credit history and dating too many foreigners. If you accept that your personal life can disqualify you for a government job, then that should apply to the private sector, where there are a lot less legal protections when it comes to firing and hiring.
Varies from case to case, but a lot of those things are pretty retarded, too. Like bad credit history. Or having done drugs once when you were a teenager. Or dating someone with a funny sounding name at some point.
The thing is that most aspects of your personal life that can get you dis-considered for a job have nothing to do with your actual job, or at least not in a way that can be definitively ascertained from the ding in question. Unless you're actually going to be a super-spy and there's legitimate consideration that you might be a plant seeking to subvert the system from within, most of these alleged wrong-doings are completely benign.
Your wife is in PETA? And yet she's been doing her job for the last two years without a word of complaint? Then the rationale for getting her fired is "this person has been torturing animals for the last two years, in defiance of her ethics, so that she can rise to a prominent position in the company and take it all down from within." Which makes sense if your wife works in a Tom Clancy novel, but otherwise not so much.
There is a small number of things that I can see carrying over from your personal life to your work life. I've mentioned a couple of them. But the vast, vast majority of things? Completely irrelevant, and stupid as hell to fire someone (or not hire them) over.
Like you said, it depends on the job in question. However, even benign things can be exploited in creative ways through social engineering. The person being interviewed could be completely oblivious to someone trying to extract information about some product they're working on at the company.
People with debt related problems could be compromised by promising them enough money to pay off their debt in exchange for data on product X.
People with drug contacts (assuming it's recent drug use); could come in contact with or get the attention of organized criminal rings that were contracted to get more information on product X by company Y.
People who have DUIs might tend to drink a lot, thus become a target for the real spy/data miner in a bar where they're approached.
Things like this don't tend to happen too often, but they happen often enough that many companies would just rather avoid hiring someone who could be compromised/unwittingly blab about their trade secrets.
I still respectfully disagree. A background check that only focuses on criminal records and listed references will tell me practically nothing about the candidate and largely be a waste of time. It may clue you in that Applicant X is a registered sex offender, but that's pretty much it.
For a lot of companies and a lot of positions you find yourself with a stack of nearly identical resumes and qualifications. Cover letters are often a template either chockful of buzzwords or cribbed directly from the listing. As for interviews, some people are just ill at ease talking to strangers, especially when their potential livelihood is on the table.
Background checks are just a tool. Sure there are some hiring managers that refuse to hire anyone with a credit score under 700 even though the position they're hiring for is one with little responsibility. These managers are unreasonable imo and using the tool poorly.
The facebook thing is totally voluntary and up to the organization, but in general it would be pretty helpful to have to sort through the herd.
I don't think we should aim our social policy at making HR's job as easy as possible, but rather we should give individuals the freedom to largely live as they please and the privacy to do so without government or corporate interference in their personal lives. Allowing potential / current employees to be economically punished for legal acts based on mere suspicions and biases is bad policy.
If you're having problems differentiating candidates, there are solutions to that problem, many of which require no snooping into private affairs.
Like you said, it depends on the job in question. However, even benign things can be exploited in creative ways through social engineering. The person being interviewed could be completely oblivious to someone trying to extract information about some product they're working on at the company.
People with debt related problems could be compromised by promising them enough money to pay off their debt in exchange for data on product X.
People with drug contacts (assuming it's recent drug use); could come in contact with or get the attention of organized criminal rings that were contracted to get more information on product X by company Y.
People who have DUIs might tend to drink a lot, thus become a target for the real spy/data miner in a bar where they're approached.
Things like this don't tend to happen too often, but they happen often enough that many companies would just rather avoid hiring someone who could be compromised/unwittingly blab about their trade secrets.
Real life is not a Tom Clancy novel. No one's pot dealer is an international spy. All of those are almost zero risks for almost every position out there. And again, I think my proposals should be general rules with exceptions granted upon reasonable request. If you're hiring the lead of R&D for your almost complete fusion power project and China has sent over agents to steal it so as to beat us to market and usher in an economic dark age for the US, then sure, call someone's dentist and ask their opinion of the applicant's dependability. But John Smith, Payroll, is not going to be the center of a web of intrigue.
And moreover, most social engineering and intel gathering relies on simply gullibility / honesty. If you can make only the honest employees make a good effort to avoid talking about sensitive materials outside of work, you've eliminated 95% of potential leaks. Opsec isn't hard, and your greatest threat isn't the guy with the DUI, it's the guy with the Facebook account.
I think this discussion fails to acknowledge that the vast majority of jobs aren't sensitive or powerful, meaning that most of the arguments above about security threats just plain don't apply. People are being knocked back for jobs as data entry monkeys and retail slaves, not Finance CEO or whatever.
The Cat on
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thatassemblyguyJanitor of Technical Debt.Registered Userregular
Real life is not a Tom Clancy novel. No one's pot dealer is an international spy. All of those are almost zero risks for almost every position out there. And again, I think my proposals should be general rules with exceptions granted upon reasonable request. If you're hiring the lead of R&D for your almost complete fusion power project and China has sent over agents to steal it so as to beat us to market and usher in an economic dark age for the US, then sure, call someone's dentist and ask their opinion of the applicant's dependability. But John Smith, Payroll, is not going to be the center of a web of intrigue.
And moreover, most social engineering and intel gathering relies on simply gullibility / honesty. If you can make only the honest employees make a good effort to avoid talking about sensitive materials outside of work, you've eliminated 95% of potential leaks. Opsec isn't hard, and your greatest threat isn't the guy with the DUI, it's the guy with the Facebook account.
Yeah, I agree. The scenarios sound ridiculous when thought about as international conspiracies, etc, and I didn't frame my statements very well to avoid this imagery. However, when you think about these things as corporate espionage, insider trading or just plain dumb crimes of opportunity; it might not be so far fetched.
John Smith, Payroll, might be the exact guy someone would want to go after first, he's least likely to think anything he says will impact the big picture, but John Smith has names, phone numbers, salaries, etc. He makes a drunk off-handed comment about his boss being a hard-ass because he has to re-run the numbers for project xyz to see if they could improve the forecast, even though he'd run them 5 times that day. The receiver of this information coalesces this tid-bit with past filings of the company and news reports stating that the project is completely on-time and budget; realizes there is disconnect and a press release soon, and short-sells the shit out of the company before the press release.
A more real example of a more crime of opportunity. A drunk Apple Engineer loses (or has stolen/taken) a prototype phone while he's out drinking. While it wasn't a targeted scenario, if management thought that this specific engineer was a significant drinker, maybe they wouldn't have trusted him with a walk-about prototype, despite any superior engineering skills he may possess. (Please note: People who drink aren't inherently irresponsible, however, when drunk, us humans tend to lose our shit easier).
I'm not talking about end of the world stuff, just minor things that could have a meaningful impact. Statistically significant or not; right or wrong - it's the fear that some drunk/high/in-debt person could impact the companies bottom line by exposing a vulnerability that causes companies to run these background checks.
thatassemblyguy on
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MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
I think this discussion fails to acknowledge that the vast majority of jobs aren't sensitive or powerful, meaning that most of the arguments above about security threats just plain don't apply. People are being knocked back for jobs as data entry monkeys and retail slaves, not Finance CEO or whatever.
Exactly. "Actual security risk" is very different from "let's go nosing around to see if there's anything juicy about that guy we're hiring to bus tables."
And it also ignores how much non-job-related, irrelevant, not-a-security-risk information is out there that is a) none of your employer's business and b) fodder for job discrimination. You can keep your private life out of the office all you want, and it's not going to save you from a bigoted manager who sees that your least favorite cousin "tagged" you in a photo of a picnic at your mosque.
mythago on
Three lines of plaintext:
obsolete signature form
replaced by JPEGs.
At the end of the day, I think what it really comes down to is that companies are looking for examples of bad judgment when they look at your Facebook page or your general internet presence. The HR department may not have any real moral issues with the fact that you went to Hedonism and spent the week naked with people you just met. But, posting pictures of those shenanigans on your blog shows you have an utter lack of good judgment and discretion.
My wife handles employment law issues for her employer. They don't really care about a person's personal life (other than the aforementioned issue of ties to animal rights groups) unless it rises to the point where it could make the company look bad, or otherwise strongly suggests that your sense of judgment is shot.
One story: a rising young executive was away at a trade convention. One night, on her own time after work at the convention, she came down to the hotel bar dressed in a revealing outfit, ended up getting drunk and going back to her room with 2 guys she met at the bar. Now, if she had done this back home at her local bar, the company would not have cared. But, she did it at a hotel where other people in the industry were staying, so the story made the rounds pretty quickly. As you might imagine, she is no longer with the company (though they got rid of her as part of a reduction in force, so she at least got severance).
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
At the end of the day, I think what it really comes down to is that companies are looking for examples of bad judgment when they look at your Facebook page or your general internet presence. The HR department may not have any real moral issues with the fact that you went to Hedonism and spent the week naked with people you just met. But, posting pictures of those shenanigans on your blog shows you have an utter lack of good judgment and discretion.
My wife handles employment law issues for her employer. They don't really care about a person's personal life (other than the aforementioned issue of ties to animal rights groups) unless it rises to the point where it could make the company look bad, or otherwise strongly suggests that your sense of judgment is shot.
One story: a rising young executive was away at a trade convention. One night, on her own time after work at the convention, she came down to the hotel bar dressed in a revealing outfit, ended up getting drunk and going back to her room with 2 guys she met at the bar. Now, if she had done this back home at her local bar, the company would not have cared. But, she did it at a hotel where other people in the industry were staying, so the story made the rounds pretty quickly. As you might imagine, she is no longer with the company (though they got rid of her as part of a reduction in force, so she at least got severance).
Once again, what you're calling 'bad judgement' many would call perfectly acceptable behaviour. What you're talking about is companies punishing unconventional behaviour and encouraging conformity.
poshniallo on
I figure I could take a bear.
0
MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
At the end of the day, I think what it really comes down to is that companies are looking for examples of bad judgment when they look at your Facebook page or your general internet presence. The HR department may not have any real moral issues with the fact that you went to Hedonism and spent the week naked with people you just met. But, posting pictures of those shenanigans on your blog shows you have an utter lack of good judgment and discretion.
My wife handles employment law issues for her employer. They don't really care about a person's personal life (other than the aforementioned issue of ties to animal rights groups) unless it rises to the point where it could make the company look bad, or otherwise strongly suggests that your sense of judgment is shot.
One story: a rising young executive was away at a trade convention. One night, on her own time after work at the convention, she came down to the hotel bar dressed in a revealing outfit, ended up getting drunk and going back to her room with 2 guys she met at the bar. Now, if she had done this back home at her local bar, the company would not have cared. But, she did it at a hotel where other people in the industry were staying, so the story made the rounds pretty quickly. As you might imagine, she is no longer with the company (though they got rid of her as part of a reduction in force, so she at least got severance).
Once again, what you're calling 'bad judgment' many would call perfectly acceptable behaviour. What you're talking about is companies punishing unconventional behaviour and encouraging conformity.
Not when the company is paying for the hotel and trip, and when the woman is known to be with Company X. When you're on a business trip, you're representing your company, whether you're on trade floor or not. Would every company find that unacceptable? No, but obviously this one did, and she should have known it.
edit: I frequently went on business trips, both with others and by myself. I knew I could take full advantage of the free bar (hint: have your company book Embassy Suites), but any 'recreational activities' outside the gym better be away from anyone else in the company.
MichaelLC on
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
I'd go so far as to say it ought to be a misdemeanor to actively snoop on private lives for the purpose of employment related decisions. People shouldn't be economically punished for being gay, liking the Braves, thinking marginal income taxes should be increased, or anything else that is on their Facebook and does not directly affect their responsibilities. The United States has a huge problem with work / life balance, with millions of people working under conditions that would be outright illegal in Europe. And the idea that an employer can veto personal activities is one part of that problem, and one that should be addressed now, before it reaches critical levels.
An employee has a responsibility to do their job well during official work hours, and not actively sabotage their employer in off hours (i.e. I cannot be a Best Buy employee and run boycottbestbuy.com at the same time. There would be a reasonable person standard attached to this, as "Yeah, Product X has seen a lot of returns," is a legitimate statement to make), but if I want to drink irresponsibly on Friday and show up sober as a judge on Monday, that's my right*.
I disagree. Candidates lie. They lie right to your face. We already acknowledge this as most white collar jobs require a background check as a matter of course. The agency that is performing the background check is digging through your personal life and public records. As a pre-employment tool, a quick glance at someone's facebook can efficiently screen out a lot of crazy. This is a good thing.
And background checks should be limited a bit as well to criminal sanctions and listed references. Credit checks, for example, are unreasonably intrusive, not related to most jobs' responsibilities, and create a downward spiral effect (the best way to make good on debts is, unsurprisingly, gainful employment). I think certain exceptions apply, but they should need explicit prior approval from regulators.
This is doubly true as right now it is beyond trivial to fire employees and our social safety net is so amazingly piss poor in the US. Given the choice between taking away easily abusable tools and making companies suffer through rare situations of having to fire someone because they could not Facebook them, the choice is obvious.
I still respectfully disagree. A background check that only focuses on criminal records and listed references will tell me practically nothing about the candidate and largely be a waste of time. It may clue you in that Applicant X is a registered sex offender, but that's pretty much it.
For a lot of companies and a lot of positions you find yourself with a stack of nearly identical resumes and qualifications. Cover letters are often a template either chockful of buzzwords or cribbed directly from the listing. As for interviews, some people are just ill at ease talking to strangers, especially when their potential livelihood is on the table.
Background checks are just a tool. Sure there are some hiring managers that refuse to hire anyone with a credit score under 700 even though the position they're hiring for is one with little responsibility. These managers are unreasonable imo and using the tool poorly.
The facebook thing is totally voluntary and up to the organization, but in general it would be pretty helpful to have to sort through the herd.
Facebook checks, background checks, credit checks etc are either moral or immoral based on their own merits.
If your hiring practises are such that you find it hard to differentiate between employees, that isn't an excuse to do things which are wrong.
That's a reason to get different hiring practises.
I would say to this that no one has made a case that they are inherently morally wrong. Taking an applicant at his word is silly.
For example. We just hired this dude on my team. Here is something from his resume*:
Company X Technical Analyst
-maintained the in-house network
-responsible for creating reports used by Senior Management
-Implemented system to track and record trades by incurred cost
-Led a project to update DBA software
So the background check comes back. It turns out that the company no longer exists and his reference didn't check out. The investigator then asked the dude for a W2 or a paystub or something to prove he actually worked as a technical analyst for this company. It turns out that his cousin hired him for the summer as sort of an intern paid under the table and it was a small outfit. This isn't the story he told us, but ultimately fuck it, we really didn't give a shit and hired him anyway.
Without a background check, we could have very easily been sold a bill a goods.
*
Yes, I asked him if I could post this and he is fine with it.
At the end of the day, I think what it really comes down to is that companies are looking for examples of bad judgment when they look at your Facebook page or your general internet presence. The HR department may not have any real moral issues with the fact that you went to Hedonism and spent the week naked with people you just met. But, posting pictures of those shenanigans on your blog shows you have an utter lack of good judgment and discretion.
My wife handles employment law issues for her employer. They don't really care about a person's personal life (other than the aforementioned issue of ties to animal rights groups) unless it rises to the point where it could make the company look bad, or otherwise strongly suggests that your sense of judgment is shot.
One story: a rising young executive was away at a trade convention. One night, on her own time after work at the convention, she came down to the hotel bar dressed in a revealing outfit, ended up getting drunk and going back to her room with 2 guys she met at the bar. Now, if she had done this back home at her local bar, the company would not have cared. But, she did it at a hotel where other people in the industry were staying, so the story made the rounds pretty quickly. As you might imagine, she is no longer with the company (though they got rid of her as part of a reduction in force, so she at least got severance).
Once again, what you're calling 'bad judgment' many would call perfectly acceptable behaviour. What you're talking about is companies punishing unconventional behaviour and encouraging conformity.
Not when the company is paying for the hotel and trip, and when the woman is known to be with Company X. When you're on a business trip, you're representing your company, whether you're on trade floor or not. Would every company find that unacceptable? No, but obviously this one did, and she should have known it.
That's complete twaddle. Reverse the genders and you'd have something that would be either lauded or go un-noticed. That is a company enforcing traditional gender roles.
poshniallo on
I figure I could take a bear.
0
MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
For example. We just hired this dude on my team. Here is something from his resume*:
Company X Technical Analyst
-maintained the in-house network
-responsible for creating reports used by Senior Management
-Implemented system to track and record trades by incurred cost
-Led a project to update DBA software
Translation:
- I clicked the Windows Update button and plugged in some Linksys routers.
- Sent an email to the boss.
- Put receipts in an accordion folder.
- Only one who knew what DBA stood for.
That's complete twaddle. Reverse the genders and you'd have something that would be either lauded or go un-noticed. That is a company enforcing traditional gender roles.
At some companies? Maybe. Apparently not this one though.
Either way, she should have known that it was unacceptable for her to do it because a) Company policies, or b)She's a woman. In either case, she should have known not to do it, and not, or quit if she doesn't like the practices.
It's certainly something that can get you fired, and maybe it's even something that's legal, but that doesn't make it legit. If your wife shows up to work each day and does her job as required, then it shouldn't matter if she's the head of PETA, because it pretty clearly isn't affecting her work.
For a company that does some pretty unpleasant things to animals for the sake of drug safety, any connection to PETA makes you a security risk. In that case, your personal activities do impact your ability to do your job.
First of all, as a medical researcher myself this is complete bollocks, unless you view PETA as some sort of domestic terrorist front. Maybe your analogy would have worked had you used the ALF instead, as they are known to break into animal research facilities and let animals free. PETA is an activist group with a strong message; they don't advocate actions such as these.
My university has(had) research sponsored by PETA housed in the same building as animal testing.
People in my building implanted mouse brains behind their eyes for a sterile, easy to view growing environment in vivo and there are people who essentially work for PETA in the building.
As to the actual point of this thread, I find myself siding with The Cat and Poshniallo- unless the hiring managers find it acceptable for me to go through their facebook and internet presence to determine whether or not I actually want to work here, then I think it is a huge invasion of privacy and an unfortunate case of employee control.
At the end of the day, I think what it really comes down to is that companies are looking for examples of bad judgment when they look at your Facebook page or your general internet presence. The HR department may not have any real moral issues with the fact that you went to Hedonism and spent the week naked with people you just met. But, posting pictures of those shenanigans on your blog shows you have an utter lack of good judgment and discretion.
My wife handles employment law issues for her employer. They don't really care about a person's personal life (other than the aforementioned issue of ties to animal rights groups) unless it rises to the point where it could make the company look bad, or otherwise strongly suggests that your sense of judgment is shot.
One story: a rising young executive was away at a trade convention. One night, on her own time after work at the convention, she came down to the hotel bar dressed in a revealing outfit, ended up getting drunk and going back to her room with 2 guys she met at the bar. Now, if she had done this back home at her local bar, the company would not have cared. But, she did it at a hotel where other people in the industry were staying, so the story made the rounds pretty quickly. As you might imagine, she is no longer with the company (though they got rid of her as part of a reduction in force, so she at least got severance).
Once again, what you're calling 'bad judgment' many would call perfectly acceptable behaviour. What you're talking about is companies punishing unconventional behaviour and encouraging conformity.
Not when the company is paying for the hotel and trip, and when the woman is known to be with Company X. When you're on a business trip, you're representing your company, whether you're on trade floor or not. Would every company find that unacceptable? No, but obviously this one did, and she should have known it.
That's complete twaddle. Reverse the genders and you'd have something that would be either lauded or go un-noticed. That is a company enforcing traditional gender roles.
Not really. Nobody called this woman a slut or anything like that. The issue was her utter lack of judgment and making a spectacle of herself while at a trade show. The corporate world isn't like "Mad Men" anymore, where male executives can get drunk and pick up attractive waitresses in front of their co-workers and clients. There's no double standard in this regard.
Many companies like discretion and sober behavior in public from their employees, especially in the context where such behavior could make the company look bad. An executive making a fool of themself in any setting that could tie them to the company should expect negative consequences.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
At the end of the day, I think what it really comes down to is that companies are looking for examples of bad judgment when they look at your Facebook page or your general internet presence. The HR department may not have any real moral issues with the fact that you went to Hedonism and spent the week naked with people you just met. But, posting pictures of those shenanigans on your blog shows you have an utter lack of good judgment and discretion.
My wife handles employment law issues for her employer. They don't really care about a person's personal life (other than the aforementioned issue of ties to animal rights groups) unless it rises to the point where it could make the company look bad, or otherwise strongly suggests that your sense of judgment is shot.
One story: a rising young executive was away at a trade convention. One night, on her own time after work at the convention, she came down to the hotel bar dressed in a revealing outfit, ended up getting drunk and going back to her room with 2 guys she met at the bar. Now, if she had done this back home at her local bar, the company would not have cared. But, she did it at a hotel where other people in the industry were staying, so the story made the rounds pretty quickly. As you might imagine, she is no longer with the company (though they got rid of her as part of a reduction in force, so she at least got severance).
Once again, what you're calling 'bad judgment' many would call perfectly acceptable behaviour. What you're talking about is companies punishing unconventional behaviour and encouraging conformity.
Not when the company is paying for the hotel and trip, and when the woman is known to be with Company X. When you're on a business trip, you're representing your company, whether you're on trade floor or not. Would every company find that unacceptable? No, but obviously this one did, and she should have known it.
That's complete twaddle. Reverse the genders and you'd have something that would be either lauded or go un-noticed. That is a company enforcing traditional gender roles.
It goes both ways. Dudes known to be horndogs who hook up with anything that moves do not look as solid as a dude married with kids and roots down in the community. The only place it may be ignored is sales, but even then it's just if they're making the company bank, which would go for both sexes. While some companies still do have double-standards, a lot do not. I'd say the story above is "You did something monumentally stupid, and were probably unrepentant". Typically, companies like their face to be "responsible and capable" not "drunken mess" (for both sexes).
The key point here is the story made the rounds pretty quickly, with the company name attached, at a trade fair, and it was reasonable to think that would happen. Trade fairs are largely about managing your reputation and image, and she did that badly. Any double standards present in that strata of society are something a representative should be aware of, and act professionally within the expectations present - and when it comes to things like trade conventions lasting multiple days in a single hotel, you're basically at work the whole time.
The key point here is the story made the rounds pretty quickly, with the company name attached, at a trade fair, and it was reasonable to think that would happen. Trade fairs are largely about managing your reputation and image, and she did that badly. Any double standards present in that strata of society are something a representative should be aware of, and act professionally within the expectations present - and when it comes to things like trade conventions lasting multiple days in a single hotel, you're basically at work the whole time.
What the hell does this incident have to do with the company. What conclusion would any sane person come based on this that had anything to do with the company. This is nothing more than the furthering of harmful gender roles, sexual mores, etc and society and the law should bloody well be pushing back against this kind of bullshit.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
The key point here is the story made the rounds pretty quickly, with the company name attached, at a trade fair, and it was reasonable to think that would happen. Trade fairs are largely about managing your reputation and image, and she did that badly. Any double standards present in that strata of society are something a representative should be aware of, and act professionally within the expectations present - and when it comes to things like trade conventions lasting multiple days in a single hotel, you're basically at work the whole time.
What the hell does this incident have to do with the company. What conclusion would any sane person come based on this that had anything to do with the company. This is nothing more than the furthering of harmful gender roles, sexual mores, etc and society and the law should bloody well be pushing back against this kind of bullshit.
She is the company. Both as a representative of the company as a whole, and personally. If she's remembered for this incident instead of, for example, the cool collected executive who showed a remarkable insight into the potential consequences of environmental health legislation, then she's done a bad job representing the company. Same as if she got drunk and got into a huge disagreement over politics with a potential customer.
The problem here isn't what her personal life was. The problem was living her personal life in a professional context, and not drawing a line between the two. Sometimes that personal life is appropriate in a professional context, in which case great; sometimes, such as this case, it isn't.
The key point here is the story made the rounds pretty quickly, with the company name attached, at a trade fair, and it was reasonable to think that would happen. Trade fairs are largely about managing your reputation and image, and she did that badly. Any double standards present in that strata of society are something a representative should be aware of, and act professionally within the expectations present - and when it comes to things like trade conventions lasting multiple days in a single hotel, you're basically at work the whole time.
What the hell does this incident have to do with the company. What conclusion would any sane person come based on this that had anything to do with the company. This is nothing more than the furthering of harmful gender roles, sexual mores, etc and society and the law should bloody well be pushing back against this kind of bullshit.
She is the company. Both as a representative of the company as a whole, and personally. If she's remembered for this incident instead of, for example, the cool collected executive who showed a remarkable insight into the potential consequences of environmental health legislation, then she's done a bad job representing the company. Same as if she got drunk and got into a huge disagreement over politics with a potential customer.
The problem here isn't what her personal life was. The problem was living her personal life in a professional context, and not drawing a line between the two. Sometimes that personal life is appropriate in a professional context, in which case great; sometimes, such as this case, it isn't.
Yeah, it would have been fine if she had engaged in this activity at a bar far away from the conference after ensuring (to a degree) that no other trade fair people were present to pass it along. It's not about woman/man etc., it's that when you're travelling on business in view of competitors/customers/coworkers, you must conduct yourself in a manner that befits the company. I've presented at conferences before, and even just getting a bit too tipsy is frowned upon, as it's not professional behavior.
It's fine to hook up with people at a conference, but you must do so discreetly.
Of course, what makes this a reasonable thing to frown on is what also separates it from the main point of this thread: what people do on their own time is different to what they do on the company dime.
I'm pretty sure that if I got drunk at a hotel I was staying at for work and I was found cavorting with two women I'd met there, I'd be subject to disciplinary action.
Well, maybe not at my current job, but at any prior job.
I have no doubt that the disciplinary action would be worse if I were a woman, but neither do I think that I'd be off the hook just for being a man. It would be frowned upon either way.
schuss is right, time spent at a hotel for a company conference isn't really personal time. If you want to treat your evenings like a vacation, book another hotel a couple of blocks away.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
In a similar vain another expample is: My job is an office job, but I have company logo'd T-shirts to wear on casual Fridays, which is the typical dress for our field employees every day (construction company). That's all beside the point, what I'm getting at is that I have company logo'd t-shirts because of this, and if I were to wear them outside of work it is understood that I'm representing the company even on my own time so long as I have a company shirt on.
So if I'm wearing a company t-shirt on Friday and I go out that night without changing (not likely) and go to a bar and get drunk and act a fool and have some wild pictures taken of me and then someone posts said photos on facebook, then my boss sees them or hears about them, then I would expect to be admonished at the very least. Then his perception of me changes, he thinks less of me or of my judgement and that may factor into promotions or raises later on, either officially or unofficially.
Not because he disagrees with my actions directly, but that other business partners could, in their personal time, also see these photos and whether they mean to or not it could impact their image of our company negatively.
Basically, sometimes your actions outside of work can have further reaching impact than you might expect.
If you are a highly visible employee of the company such as a PR position then your actions in public even outside of trade shows or company clothing can negatively impact the company image. To grossly over exagerate an example, you don't see Steve Jobs out in public bars getting drunk and acting a fool because it would drastically affect Apple's stock price and image for a long time afterwards. So on a smaller scale a PR person for a charity probably shouldn't be doing things even in their personal time that can hurt the charity through actions that can be generally seen as undesireable.
I have a slightly different take that I only really apply to myself, and that I acknowledge could be counterproductive in some instances, which is if I'm not "on the clock", then it's not company time. I don't seek to make an ass of myself for this reason, but I find no compelling reason to pretend that I care what people think of me (usually). Not that I'm in any danger of ending up with a pair of female companions at a work conference, but I don't understand why it would matter if I did. I also have no clue why it would make a difference if the genders were reversed to anyone, but I know that I'm not aligned with the misogyny crowd on much of anything, particularly double standards related to sexual activity.
Of course if you are performing as a function of your company and there are clients around it's good to keep it professional, but then it really depends on my relationship with the specific client personnel. Some I'd be perfectly comfortable getting drunk with, others, not so much, and there are none that I would ever, ever fuck.
However, I recognize that most employers are looking for excuses to cut their labor cost, and are willing to throw you under the bus when you make them look bad. So to me, it's not a bad idea, if you like to make money, to keep your nose clean, and your junk in your pants. Particularly when you consider how much harder it is to get a new job, if you are not employed while job seeking.
In the absence of a clear strong business interest, is it ethical for a business to use the Internet to snoop into their personal lives? I think it's fine to do some basic background screening - did this person go to the school they claimed to go to, do the companies they claimed to work for exist, etc. If the employer uncovers a personal blog, or Livejournal, or forum account, are they justified in reading those posts in detail?
How does one determine if there's a business interest until they know the content of those posts/blogs/etc?
A few caveats first: As a society we have determined a few categories are out of bounds to use in hiring. You can't discriminate due to race, religion, health status, sex/gender and family status without a fairly fundamental reason (ie you can decide not to hire a white lady to play MLK Jr in your made for TV movie). We are not obligated to treating your aversion to wearing clothes or your deep seated desire to eat human feces for lunch every day are equivalent to these categories.
Other than that, its their responsibility to hire people that according to their judgment will provide the most benefit to the company. Its not even about the "most qualified" as you can be overqualified for a position. It includes not just your primary job responsibility but any secondary effects your employment will result in - anything from some attribute of yours reflecting badly on the company to a penchant for social melodrama.
Cry all you want about "reinforcing gender roles" or freedom of expression in attire or body modification, or the division between the private and public life but ultimately those divides are only as effective as they are resistant and its not their responsibility to act as if we lived in an idealized society. If you're posting something on the internet and relying solely on security through obscurity to enforce your "privacy" than those postings aren't really private. If you're applying for a company such as P-A in a visible position, then obscurity is even less of a barrier. If you're running for public office, it better be so obscure that only you and yours know what you want to keep secret.
Let's say this pleasant Child's Play applicant had a blog that lead you to locate her postings on a forum. And to take this to its inevitable-according-to-Godwin conclusion the forum was Stormfront. Or some kind of child sex fantasy site.
Can anyone honestly claim that such affiliations would and should not have any impact on whether or not you believe this person could perform their primary responsibilities without incurring significant secondary or potential secondary problems for the employer? Yeah its the Nazi and pedophile extreme, but those are two attributes that rarely appear on resumes. And there are many other lesser (or even similar) aspects of your life that don't appear on your resume. Without investigating them, you don't know what you're going to find.
An employer is hiring you, not your resume. They have to live with you around them a lot. If you're annoying as fuck, its not discrimination to not hire you. If you smell like shit, you're not being oppressed if you're unemployed. If you put stuff out on facebook, its entirely possible its going to be held against you. That's not new. Just because the internet makes it easier for you to propagate your thoughts, activities and opinions doesn't mean that the existence of consequences in terms of how people view those thoughts/activities/opinions are new.
Hell, my job involves dealing with our (large institutional) customers occasionally (thankfully not often except this week). Do you think they Google us (the individual employees)? You're damn right they do. Hell, they try to friend us sometimes (likely to get more information). When we get a new hire in our group, the first thing half the staff does is look on facebook. Its not just potential employers. Deal with it.
I have a slightly different take that I only really apply to myself, which is if I'm not "on the clock", then it's not company time.
I feel like in an ideal world, this would be the best-case scenario. But I think it's unfortunately pretty commonplace for certain situations to skirt a gray area between "company time" and "personal time." A company party, for instance. I certainly don't get paid for going to Applebees and having buffalo wings and drinks with my boss and coworkers, but I'm certainly not going to get sloshed or show up stoned.
(Honestly, I skip such social occasions most of the time, specifically because I still feel like I'm in buttoned-down professional mode when I'm there, and I find them awkward.)
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I have a slightly different take that I only really apply to myself, and that I acknowledge could be counterproductive in some instances, which is if I'm not "on the clock", then it's not company time. I don't seek to make an ass of myself for this reason, but I find no compelling reason to pretend that I care what people think of me (usually). Not that I'm in any danger of ending up with a pair of female companions at a work conference, but I don't understand why it would matter if I did. I also have no clue why it would make a difference if the genders were reversed to anyone, but I know that I'm not aligned with the misogyny crowd on much of anything, particularly double standards related to sexual activity.
Of course if you are performing as a function of your company and there are clients around it's good to keep it professional, but then it really depends on my relationship with the specific client personnel. Some I'd be perfectly comfortable getting drunk with, others, not so much, and there are none that I would ever, ever fuck.
However, I recognize that most employers are looking for excuses to cut their labor cost, and are willing to throw you under the bus when you make them look bad. So to me, it's not a bad idea, if you like to make money, to keep your nose clean, and your junk in your pants. Particularly when you consider how much harder it is to get a new job, if you are not employed while job seeking.
If you're anywhere in the capacity of the company, you're on the clock any time you're in public, simple as that, even if it's 20+ hours a day. It's not about cutting labor costs, as I know that the last thing bosses want is to have to fire a star performer for acting like a drunken retard. That said, you can get away with a lot if you're quiet about it or if there's no clear evidence. So be smart, don't leave a trail.
Let's say this pleasant Child's Play applicant had a blog that lead you to locate her postings on a forum. And to take this to its inevitable-according-to-Godwin conclusion the forum was Stormfront. Or some kind of child sex fantasy site.
Can anyone honestly claim that such affiliations would and should not have any impact on whether or not you believe this person could perform their primary responsibilities without incurring significant secondary or potential secondary problems for the employer? Yeah its the Nazi and pedophile extreme, but those are two attributes that rarely appear on resumes.
I'm sympathetic, PantsB, but let me reverse this a little. You listed protected classes (race, religion, etc.) but in most states, being gay is not a protected class. What would your reaction be if somebody weren't hired because they were gay?
I'll take it a little further. What if somebody were gay in a particularly socially conservative region, where the majority of potential employers are homophobic? In that case, the challenge isn't merely finding a workplace with compatible social values, the challenge is finding gainful employment at all.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Let's say this pleasant Child's Play applicant had a blog that lead you to locate her postings on a forum. And to take this to its inevitable-according-to-Godwin conclusion the forum was Stormfront. Or some kind of child sex fantasy site.
Can anyone honestly claim that such affiliations would and should not have any impact on whether or not you believe this person could perform their primary responsibilities without incurring significant secondary or potential secondary problems for the employer? Yeah its the Nazi and pedophile extreme, but those are two attributes that rarely appear on resumes.
I'm sympathetic, PantsB, but let me reverse this a little. You listed protected classes (race, religion, etc.) but in most states, being gay is not a protected class. What would your reaction be if somebody weren't hired because they were gay?
I'll take it a little further. What if somebody were gay in a particularly socially conservative region, where the majority of potential employers are homophobic? In that case, the challenge isn't merely finding a workplace with compatible social values, the challenge is finding gainful employment at all.
Ah but that's an argument for sexual orientation to be a protected category, not that all attributes/activities/whatever to be treated the same as a protected category.
I have a slightly different take that I only really apply to myself, and that I acknowledge could be counterproductive in some instances, which is if I'm not "on the clock", then it's not company time. I don't seek to make an ass of myself for this reason, but I find no compelling reason to pretend that I care what people think of me (usually).
If you are salary or in sales, there is no clock. You are always "on the clock". I took a cruise last year and had to mention that I had absolutely no access to email in my Outlook out of office.
Ah but that's an argument for sexual orientation to be a protected category, not that all attributes/activities/whatever to be treated the same as a protected category.
When/why do we decide for one thing to be a protected category and not another?
Should we literally require an act of Congress for every conceivable form of undesirable discrimination... or is there a fundamental guiding principle at work here that guides the notion of "protected class" in general?
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Thanks Feral. Mine is a ridiculously ideal viewpoint, but I try to work from it as much as possible within practical limits.
I also much prefer to get out of the formal events and meet up with my friends from work or client friends have our own informal party somewhere where superiors are not.
Let me also admit, that I'm having a hard time with people objecting to the Facebook, and etc research, based on privacy claims (I really like privacy, don't get me wrong). I've never met a hiring person who really has the time for that, but say they did, what can your defense be when they find your drug use pictures? This is where I kinda agree with our stupid-ass supreme court, because there has to be an expectation of privacy for something to be validly protected by privacy right claims. I translate this for myself as, if you can't keep your secrets secret, the you shouldn't expect them to be secret. You should at least make the effort to hide the porn when your mother comes to visit, etc, and it's not unethical for her to embarrass you by pointing it out to you significant other over dinner, just as its not unethical for disturbing TMI personal shit to prevent you from getting a job. You have my sympathies for living in our idiotic reality where that shit matters, particularly if someone else is posting your disturbing side, but people must be responsible for maintaining their own privacy, and if they fail then they should pay the price for too much candor.
I also think a better mechanism for testing whether hiring and firing decisions are based on illegal criteria needs to be created. If someone doesn't want to hire me, because I'm gay and I say so on my Facebook, how can you ever prove that. Homosexuals are regularly harassed, passed over for jobs, fired, held back from promotions, because of their sexuality, and none of that is illegal in most states. Being gay is not a federally protected minority status either, so these people are literally at the bigots' mercy and I find that to be extremely fucked. That kind of intolerance should not be allowed to crush perfectly wonderful people without normal people noticing and saying "that is fucking wrong", but most people aren't aware that being gay alone could lose you your job in most states. That's the kind of shit I find unethical and frankly, as a married heterosexual, I'm tired of putting up with this hatred of homosexuals. Where's our fucking MORAL OUTRAGE that this continues in America in 2011?!?!?
Ah but that's an argument for sexual orientation to be a protected category, not that all attributes/activities/whatever to be treated the same as a protected category.
When/why do we decide for one thing to be a protected category and not another?
Should we literally require an act of Congress for every conceivable form of undesirable discrimination... or is there a fundamental guiding principle at work here that guides the notion of "protected class" in general?
The fundamental guiding principle I see is: Stop The Bullying. In my opinion, at root most of the intolerant behavior out there is just extreme forms of socially encouraged (in some cases) bullying.
From a broad perspective, as best as I can tell, these sorts of issues aren't solvable with current/historical societal attitudes. One potential course we're on is the dissolution of the necessity or value of privacy, coinciding with a much more practical attitude towards a person's life transcript.
I mean, really, among our heroes and successes of today, among our best employees or our best leaders, do you think any of them haven't ever said, in a moment of weakness or youth or emotion or whatever, something that might reflect horribly upon them now? Don't we already sort of know that we relish the abuse and neglect of context a little too much? Do we really want the future generation to be topped only by those who are the best at hiding their humanity and common faults? I think that Khoo could be right that there are people who will find the information he's talking about and make an issue out of it, but I suspect that in the future most people will look poorly on that sort of thing and will be much more forgiving of what someone might or might not have posted once, regardless of any archaic notion of it being a matter of "privacy."
Because otherwise I'm not sure we'll be able to function well as a society on certain things.
Yar on
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MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
If you are salary or in sales, there is no clock. You are always "on the clock". I took a cruise last year and had to mention that I had absolutely no access to email in my Outlook out of office.
This is your boss, Michael.
Please complete and submit an RFP for one of these before your next trip.
I have a slightly different take that I only really apply to myself, and that I acknowledge could be counterproductive in some instances, which is if I'm not "on the clock", then it's not company time. I don't seek to make an ass of myself for this reason, but I find no compelling reason to pretend that I care what people think of me (usually).
If you are salary or in sales, there is no clock. You are always "on the clock". I took a cruise last year and had to mention that I had absolutely no access to email in my Outlook out of office.
Yes, but I think that is terribly wrong and evil of your company to do that to you. I'm salaried myself, so I'm in similar situations sometimes, but I try to make it pretty clear that my time off is exactly that, mine.
IMO "Salaried" is a bullshit category so companies don't have to pay overtime, which I therefore loathe. Here's the thing, I do contract labor (as a programmer), so every hour I work is billable and in my industry when I work overtime I get paid for it because our clients pay for my time. My take is that, we should be able to work as little time as we want as salaried employees, since we're not hourly, but no, the shit only flows downhill.
IMO "Salaried" is a bullshit category so companies don't have to pay overtime, which I therefore loathe. Here's the thing, I do contract labor (as a programmer), so every hour I work is billable and in my industry when I work overtime I get paid for it because our clients pay for my time. My take is that, we should be able to work as little time as we want as salaried employees, since we're not hourly, but no, the shit only flows downhill.
Salary and overtime-exempt are actually two separate legal ideas. It varies from state to state, but in most places in the US, you can be salaried even if you're not overtime-exempt, or vice-versa.
They just happen to go together for convenience sake. It makes more sense that way.
That said, in my experience, a company who really wants to make people work unpaid overtime will find a way to do it, even if it means loading you down with more work you can possibly get through in an 8-hour shift but refusing to approve any overtime. In fact, I strongly prefer being on salary, because it means my boss isn't breathing down the back of my neck about my schedule.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
I have a slightly different take that I only really apply to myself, and that I acknowledge could be counterproductive in some instances, which is if I'm not "on the clock", then it's not company time. I don't seek to make an ass of myself for this reason, but I find no compelling reason to pretend that I care what people think of me (usually).
If you are salary or in sales, there is no clock. You are always "on the clock". I took a cruise last year and had to mention that I had absolutely no access to email in my Outlook out of office.
Yes, but I think that is terribly wrong and evil of your company to do that to you. I'm salaried myself, so I'm in similar situations sometimes, but I try to make it pretty clear that my time off is exactly that, mine.
IMO "Salaried" is a bullshit category so companies don't have to pay overtime, which I therefore loathe. Here's the thing, I do contract labor (as a programmer), so every hour I work is billable and in my industry when I work overtime I get paid for it because our clients pay for my time. My take is that, we should be able to work as little time as we want as salaried employees, since we're not hourly, but no, the shit only flows downhill.
It's not really that black and white. I've worked for a company that instituted a bullshit rule that everything needed a turn around time of five calendar days (changed from business days for no fucking reason) and that resulted in most of the department staying late on Friday. We we we were not excited about the change.
On the other hand at my current company if tsomeone needs to contact me off hours or on the weekend it's because something is either critically important, I know the answer, or I can tell them who to contact to get the shit donw; not because they are mustache twirling villians that have no respect for work life balance.
I have a slightly different take that I only really apply to myself, and that I acknowledge could be counterproductive in some instances, which is if I'm not "on the clock", then it's not company time. I don't seek to make an ass of myself for this reason, but I find no compelling reason to pretend that I care what people think of me (usually). Not that I'm in any danger of ending up with a pair of female companions at a work conference, but I don't understand why it would matter if I did.
The trouble here being... it's not up to you whether it matters or not, it's up to your employer. As in: if they can act based on it, then it's something to be aware of.
From a broad perspective, as best as I can tell, these sorts of issues aren't solvable with current/historical societal attitudes. One potential course we're on is the dissolution of the necessity or value of privacy, coinciding with a much more practical attitude towards a person's life transcript.
I mean, really, among our heroes and successes of today, among our best employees or our best leaders, do you think any of them haven't ever said, in a moment of weakness or youth or emotion or whatever, something that might reflect horribly upon them now? Don't we already sort of know that we relish the abuse and neglect of context a little too much? Do we really want the future generation to be topped only by those who are the best at hiding their humanity and common faults? I think that Khoo could be right that there are people who will find the information he's talking about and make an issue out of it, but I suspect that in the future most people will look poorly on that sort of thing and will be much more forgiving of what someone might or might not have posted once, regardless of any archaic notion of it being a matter of "privacy."
Because otherwise I'm not sure we'll be able to function well as a society on certain things.
I think I agree with this, for the most part. The problem as I see it is that it assumes either a plurality of social value systems or an ability to compartmentalize our opinions in a way that I'm not sure humans are innately capable of.
In other words, let's say I'm a hiring manager in this low-privacy future. I find out that one of my interviewees is a Westboro First Baptist Church of Space activist when I see a picture online of him holding a sign saying God Hates Quarians. For the sake of argument, let's say that I fucking love Quarians, I'm a member of PFLAQ and I go to the Quarian Musical Revue on the Quarian flotilla every Friday night. That's going to color my judgment of him, possibly in ways that I'm not entirely conscious of.
So either I have to be really good at lot letting my love of Quarians color my hiring decisions, which as a human being I'm not sure that I can objectively do that, or there has to be another employer close-by in the solar system who is anti-Quarian and needs somebody with his skills.
I'm not convinced that this would be a desirable state of affairs, nor am I convinced that the solution is to except Congress to pass a law saying that proquarianism or antiquarianism is a protected class.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Here's what I see as fairly problematic with the idea of hiring/firing people based on "they won't fit in" trope. How can any reasonable person tell if you don't hire someone because of race, or some other bigotry, and not because "they won't fit in"? I mean, you as an employer decide that they "just wouldn't fit in, because they're black", and just drop the "because they're black" part, and you're immune from legal culpability.
How is that ever right?
Yet here we are where that is perfectly acceptable practice, and goes on all the time. Not suggesting it is a universal practice, but it's easy to use illegal hiring discrimination and not get caught, and I don't think it should be.
Edit: Thanks Feral for your viewpoint. I lost track of the fact that the whole salaried/hourly thingy also has the exempt/non-exempt bit which actually determines whether overtime is paid or not. There are some things I don't mind about being salaried too.
Posts
Like you said, it depends on the job in question. However, even benign things can be exploited in creative ways through social engineering. The person being interviewed could be completely oblivious to someone trying to extract information about some product they're working on at the company.
People with debt related problems could be compromised by promising them enough money to pay off their debt in exchange for data on product X.
People with drug contacts (assuming it's recent drug use); could come in contact with or get the attention of organized criminal rings that were contracted to get more information on product X by company Y.
People who have DUIs might tend to drink a lot, thus become a target for the real spy/data miner in a bar where they're approached.
Things like this don't tend to happen too often, but they happen often enough that many companies would just rather avoid hiring someone who could be compromised/unwittingly blab about their trade secrets.
I don't think we should aim our social policy at making HR's job as easy as possible, but rather we should give individuals the freedom to largely live as they please and the privacy to do so without government or corporate interference in their personal lives. Allowing potential / current employees to be economically punished for legal acts based on mere suspicions and biases is bad policy.
If you're having problems differentiating candidates, there are solutions to that problem, many of which require no snooping into private affairs.
Real life is not a Tom Clancy novel. No one's pot dealer is an international spy. All of those are almost zero risks for almost every position out there. And again, I think my proposals should be general rules with exceptions granted upon reasonable request. If you're hiring the lead of R&D for your almost complete fusion power project and China has sent over agents to steal it so as to beat us to market and usher in an economic dark age for the US, then sure, call someone's dentist and ask their opinion of the applicant's dependability. But John Smith, Payroll, is not going to be the center of a web of intrigue.
And moreover, most social engineering and intel gathering relies on simply gullibility / honesty. If you can make only the honest employees make a good effort to avoid talking about sensitive materials outside of work, you've eliminated 95% of potential leaks. Opsec isn't hard, and your greatest threat isn't the guy with the DUI, it's the guy with the Facebook account.
Yeah, I agree. The scenarios sound ridiculous when thought about as international conspiracies, etc, and I didn't frame my statements very well to avoid this imagery. However, when you think about these things as corporate espionage, insider trading or just plain dumb crimes of opportunity; it might not be so far fetched.
John Smith, Payroll, might be the exact guy someone would want to go after first, he's least likely to think anything he says will impact the big picture, but John Smith has names, phone numbers, salaries, etc. He makes a drunk off-handed comment about his boss being a hard-ass because he has to re-run the numbers for project xyz to see if they could improve the forecast, even though he'd run them 5 times that day. The receiver of this information coalesces this tid-bit with past filings of the company and news reports stating that the project is completely on-time and budget; realizes there is disconnect and a press release soon, and short-sells the shit out of the company before the press release.
A more real example of a more crime of opportunity. A drunk Apple Engineer loses (or has stolen/taken) a prototype phone while he's out drinking. While it wasn't a targeted scenario, if management thought that this specific engineer was a significant drinker, maybe they wouldn't have trusted him with a walk-about prototype, despite any superior engineering skills he may possess. (Please note: People who drink aren't inherently irresponsible, however, when drunk, us humans tend to lose our shit easier).
I'm not talking about end of the world stuff, just minor things that could have a meaningful impact. Statistically significant or not; right or wrong - it's the fear that some drunk/high/in-debt person could impact the companies bottom line by exposing a vulnerability that causes companies to run these background checks.
And it might end up in the hands of a very goosey editor of an on-line tech site.
They are far-fetched scenarios, but they do happen.
Exactly. "Actual security risk" is very different from "let's go nosing around to see if there's anything juicy about that guy we're hiring to bus tables."
And it also ignores how much non-job-related, irrelevant, not-a-security-risk information is out there that is a) none of your employer's business and b) fodder for job discrimination. You can keep your private life out of the office all you want, and it's not going to save you from a bigoted manager who sees that your least favorite cousin "tagged" you in a photo of a picnic at your mosque.
obsolete signature form
replaced by JPEGs.
My wife handles employment law issues for her employer. They don't really care about a person's personal life (other than the aforementioned issue of ties to animal rights groups) unless it rises to the point where it could make the company look bad, or otherwise strongly suggests that your sense of judgment is shot.
One story: a rising young executive was away at a trade convention. One night, on her own time after work at the convention, she came down to the hotel bar dressed in a revealing outfit, ended up getting drunk and going back to her room with 2 guys she met at the bar. Now, if she had done this back home at her local bar, the company would not have cared. But, she did it at a hotel where other people in the industry were staying, so the story made the rounds pretty quickly. As you might imagine, she is no longer with the company (though they got rid of her as part of a reduction in force, so she at least got severance).
Rigorous Scholarship
Once again, what you're calling 'bad judgement' many would call perfectly acceptable behaviour. What you're talking about is companies punishing unconventional behaviour and encouraging conformity.
Not when the company is paying for the hotel and trip, and when the woman is known to be with Company X. When you're on a business trip, you're representing your company, whether you're on trade floor or not. Would every company find that unacceptable? No, but obviously this one did, and she should have known it.
edit: I frequently went on business trips, both with others and by myself. I knew I could take full advantage of the free bar (hint: have your company book Embassy Suites), but any 'recreational activities' outside the gym better be away from anyone else in the company.
I would say to this that no one has made a case that they are inherently morally wrong. Taking an applicant at his word is silly.
For example. We just hired this dude on my team. Here is something from his resume*:
Company X Technical Analyst
-maintained the in-house network
-responsible for creating reports used by Senior Management
-Implemented system to track and record trades by incurred cost
-Led a project to update DBA software
So the background check comes back. It turns out that the company no longer exists and his reference didn't check out. The investigator then asked the dude for a W2 or a paystub or something to prove he actually worked as a technical analyst for this company. It turns out that his cousin hired him for the summer as sort of an intern paid under the table and it was a small outfit. This isn't the story he told us, but ultimately fuck it, we really didn't give a shit and hired him anyway.
Without a background check, we could have very easily been sold a bill a goods.
*
That's complete twaddle. Reverse the genders and you'd have something that would be either lauded or go un-noticed. That is a company enforcing traditional gender roles.
Translation:
- I clicked the Windows Update button and plugged in some Linksys routers.
- Sent an email to the boss.
- Put receipts in an accordion folder.
- Only one who knew what DBA stood for.
At some companies? Maybe. Apparently not this one though.
Either way, she should have known that it was unacceptable for her to do it because a) Company policies, or b)She's a woman. In either case, she should have known not to do it, and not, or quit if she doesn't like the practices.
First of all, as a medical researcher myself this is complete bollocks, unless you view PETA as some sort of domestic terrorist front. Maybe your analogy would have worked had you used the ALF instead, as they are known to break into animal research facilities and let animals free. PETA is an activist group with a strong message; they don't advocate actions such as these.
My university has(had) research sponsored by PETA housed in the same building as animal testing.
People in my building implanted mouse brains behind their eyes for a sterile, easy to view growing environment in vivo and there are people who essentially work for PETA in the building.
As to the actual point of this thread, I find myself siding with The Cat and Poshniallo- unless the hiring managers find it acceptable for me to go through their facebook and internet presence to determine whether or not I actually want to work here, then I think it is a huge invasion of privacy and an unfortunate case of employee control.
Many companies like discretion and sober behavior in public from their employees, especially in the context where such behavior could make the company look bad. An executive making a fool of themself in any setting that could tie them to the company should expect negative consequences.
Rigorous Scholarship
It goes both ways. Dudes known to be horndogs who hook up with anything that moves do not look as solid as a dude married with kids and roots down in the community. The only place it may be ignored is sales, but even then it's just if they're making the company bank, which would go for both sexes. While some companies still do have double-standards, a lot do not. I'd say the story above is "You did something monumentally stupid, and were probably unrepentant". Typically, companies like their face to be "responsible and capable" not "drunken mess" (for both sexes).
What the hell does this incident have to do with the company. What conclusion would any sane person come based on this that had anything to do with the company. This is nothing more than the furthering of harmful gender roles, sexual mores, etc and society and the law should bloody well be pushing back against this kind of bullshit.
The problem here isn't what her personal life was. The problem was living her personal life in a professional context, and not drawing a line between the two. Sometimes that personal life is appropriate in a professional context, in which case great; sometimes, such as this case, it isn't.
Yeah, it would have been fine if she had engaged in this activity at a bar far away from the conference after ensuring (to a degree) that no other trade fair people were present to pass it along. It's not about woman/man etc., it's that when you're travelling on business in view of competitors/customers/coworkers, you must conduct yourself in a manner that befits the company. I've presented at conferences before, and even just getting a bit too tipsy is frowned upon, as it's not professional behavior.
It's fine to hook up with people at a conference, but you must do so discreetly.
Well, maybe not at my current job, but at any prior job.
I have no doubt that the disciplinary action would be worse if I were a woman, but neither do I think that I'd be off the hook just for being a man. It would be frowned upon either way.
schuss is right, time spent at a hotel for a company conference isn't really personal time. If you want to treat your evenings like a vacation, book another hotel a couple of blocks away.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So if I'm wearing a company t-shirt on Friday and I go out that night without changing (not likely) and go to a bar and get drunk and act a fool and have some wild pictures taken of me and then someone posts said photos on facebook, then my boss sees them or hears about them, then I would expect to be admonished at the very least. Then his perception of me changes, he thinks less of me or of my judgement and that may factor into promotions or raises later on, either officially or unofficially.
Not because he disagrees with my actions directly, but that other business partners could, in their personal time, also see these photos and whether they mean to or not it could impact their image of our company negatively.
Basically, sometimes your actions outside of work can have further reaching impact than you might expect.
If you are a highly visible employee of the company such as a PR position then your actions in public even outside of trade shows or company clothing can negatively impact the company image. To grossly over exagerate an example, you don't see Steve Jobs out in public bars getting drunk and acting a fool because it would drastically affect Apple's stock price and image for a long time afterwards. So on a smaller scale a PR person for a charity probably shouldn't be doing things even in their personal time that can hurt the charity through actions that can be generally seen as undesireable.
Of course if you are performing as a function of your company and there are clients around it's good to keep it professional, but then it really depends on my relationship with the specific client personnel. Some I'd be perfectly comfortable getting drunk with, others, not so much, and there are none that I would ever, ever fuck.
However, I recognize that most employers are looking for excuses to cut their labor cost, and are willing to throw you under the bus when you make them look bad. So to me, it's not a bad idea, if you like to make money, to keep your nose clean, and your junk in your pants. Particularly when you consider how much harder it is to get a new job, if you are not employed while job seeking.
A few caveats first: As a society we have determined a few categories are out of bounds to use in hiring. You can't discriminate due to race, religion, health status, sex/gender and family status without a fairly fundamental reason (ie you can decide not to hire a white lady to play MLK Jr in your made for TV movie). We are not obligated to treating your aversion to wearing clothes or your deep seated desire to eat human feces for lunch every day are equivalent to these categories.
Other than that, its their responsibility to hire people that according to their judgment will provide the most benefit to the company. Its not even about the "most qualified" as you can be overqualified for a position. It includes not just your primary job responsibility but any secondary effects your employment will result in - anything from some attribute of yours reflecting badly on the company to a penchant for social melodrama.
Cry all you want about "reinforcing gender roles" or freedom of expression in attire or body modification, or the division between the private and public life but ultimately those divides are only as effective as they are resistant and its not their responsibility to act as if we lived in an idealized society. If you're posting something on the internet and relying solely on security through obscurity to enforce your "privacy" than those postings aren't really private. If you're applying for a company such as P-A in a visible position, then obscurity is even less of a barrier. If you're running for public office, it better be so obscure that only you and yours know what you want to keep secret.
Let's say this pleasant Child's Play applicant had a blog that lead you to locate her postings on a forum. And to take this to its inevitable-according-to-Godwin conclusion the forum was Stormfront. Or some kind of child sex fantasy site.
Can anyone honestly claim that such affiliations would and should not have any impact on whether or not you believe this person could perform their primary responsibilities without incurring significant secondary or potential secondary problems for the employer? Yeah its the Nazi and pedophile extreme, but those are two attributes that rarely appear on resumes. And there are many other lesser (or even similar) aspects of your life that don't appear on your resume. Without investigating them, you don't know what you're going to find.
An employer is hiring you, not your resume. They have to live with you around them a lot. If you're annoying as fuck, its not discrimination to not hire you. If you smell like shit, you're not being oppressed if you're unemployed. If you put stuff out on facebook, its entirely possible its going to be held against you. That's not new. Just because the internet makes it easier for you to propagate your thoughts, activities and opinions doesn't mean that the existence of consequences in terms of how people view those thoughts/activities/opinions are new.
Hell, my job involves dealing with our (large institutional) customers occasionally (thankfully not often except this week). Do you think they Google us (the individual employees)? You're damn right they do. Hell, they try to friend us sometimes (likely to get more information). When we get a new hire in our group, the first thing half the staff does is look on facebook. Its not just potential employers. Deal with it.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I feel like in an ideal world, this would be the best-case scenario. But I think it's unfortunately pretty commonplace for certain situations to skirt a gray area between "company time" and "personal time." A company party, for instance. I certainly don't get paid for going to Applebees and having buffalo wings and drinks with my boss and coworkers, but I'm certainly not going to get sloshed or show up stoned.
(Honestly, I skip such social occasions most of the time, specifically because I still feel like I'm in buttoned-down professional mode when I'm there, and I find them awkward.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If you're anywhere in the capacity of the company, you're on the clock any time you're in public, simple as that, even if it's 20+ hours a day. It's not about cutting labor costs, as I know that the last thing bosses want is to have to fire a star performer for acting like a drunken retard. That said, you can get away with a lot if you're quiet about it or if there's no clear evidence. So be smart, don't leave a trail.
I'm sympathetic, PantsB, but let me reverse this a little. You listed protected classes (race, religion, etc.) but in most states, being gay is not a protected class. What would your reaction be if somebody weren't hired because they were gay?
I'll take it a little further. What if somebody were gay in a particularly socially conservative region, where the majority of potential employers are homophobic? In that case, the challenge isn't merely finding a workplace with compatible social values, the challenge is finding gainful employment at all.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Ah but that's an argument for sexual orientation to be a protected category, not that all attributes/activities/whatever to be treated the same as a protected category.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
If you are salary or in sales, there is no clock. You are always "on the clock". I took a cruise last year and had to mention that I had absolutely no access to email in my Outlook out of office.
When/why do we decide for one thing to be a protected category and not another?
Should we literally require an act of Congress for every conceivable form of undesirable discrimination... or is there a fundamental guiding principle at work here that guides the notion of "protected class" in general?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I also much prefer to get out of the formal events and meet up with my friends from work or client friends have our own informal party somewhere where superiors are not.
Let me also admit, that I'm having a hard time with people objecting to the Facebook, and etc research, based on privacy claims (I really like privacy, don't get me wrong). I've never met a hiring person who really has the time for that, but say they did, what can your defense be when they find your drug use pictures? This is where I kinda agree with our stupid-ass supreme court, because there has to be an expectation of privacy for something to be validly protected by privacy right claims. I translate this for myself as, if you can't keep your secrets secret, the you shouldn't expect them to be secret. You should at least make the effort to hide the porn when your mother comes to visit, etc, and it's not unethical for her to embarrass you by pointing it out to you significant other over dinner, just as its not unethical for disturbing TMI personal shit to prevent you from getting a job. You have my sympathies for living in our idiotic reality where that shit matters, particularly if someone else is posting your disturbing side, but people must be responsible for maintaining their own privacy, and if they fail then they should pay the price for too much candor.
I also think a better mechanism for testing whether hiring and firing decisions are based on illegal criteria needs to be created. If someone doesn't want to hire me, because I'm gay and I say so on my Facebook, how can you ever prove that. Homosexuals are regularly harassed, passed over for jobs, fired, held back from promotions, because of their sexuality, and none of that is illegal in most states. Being gay is not a federally protected minority status either, so these people are literally at the bigots' mercy and I find that to be extremely fucked. That kind of intolerance should not be allowed to crush perfectly wonderful people without normal people noticing and saying "that is fucking wrong", but most people aren't aware that being gay alone could lose you your job in most states. That's the kind of shit I find unethical and frankly, as a married heterosexual, I'm tired of putting up with this hatred of homosexuals. Where's our fucking MORAL OUTRAGE that this continues in America in 2011?!?!?
I mean, really, among our heroes and successes of today, among our best employees or our best leaders, do you think any of them haven't ever said, in a moment of weakness or youth or emotion or whatever, something that might reflect horribly upon them now? Don't we already sort of know that we relish the abuse and neglect of context a little too much? Do we really want the future generation to be topped only by those who are the best at hiding their humanity and common faults? I think that Khoo could be right that there are people who will find the information he's talking about and make an issue out of it, but I suspect that in the future most people will look poorly on that sort of thing and will be much more forgiving of what someone might or might not have posted once, regardless of any archaic notion of it being a matter of "privacy."
Because otherwise I'm not sure we'll be able to function well as a society on certain things.
This is your boss, Michael.
Please complete and submit an RFP for one of these before your next trip.
edit: Use the green form, not the blue one.
IMO "Salaried" is a bullshit category so companies don't have to pay overtime, which I therefore loathe. Here's the thing, I do contract labor (as a programmer), so every hour I work is billable and in my industry when I work overtime I get paid for it because our clients pay for my time. My take is that, we should be able to work as little time as we want as salaried employees, since we're not hourly, but no, the shit only flows downhill.
Salary and overtime-exempt are actually two separate legal ideas. It varies from state to state, but in most places in the US, you can be salaried even if you're not overtime-exempt, or vice-versa.
They just happen to go together for convenience sake. It makes more sense that way.
That said, in my experience, a company who really wants to make people work unpaid overtime will find a way to do it, even if it means loading you down with more work you can possibly get through in an 8-hour shift but refusing to approve any overtime. In fact, I strongly prefer being on salary, because it means my boss isn't breathing down the back of my neck about my schedule.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It's not really that black and white. I've worked for a company that instituted a bullshit rule that everything needed a turn around time of five calendar days (changed from business days for no fucking reason) and that resulted in most of the department staying late on Friday. We we we were not excited about the change.
On the other hand at my current company if tsomeone needs to contact me off hours or on the weekend it's because something is either critically important, I know the answer, or I can tell them who to contact to get the shit donw; not because they are mustache twirling villians that have no respect for work life balance.
I think I agree with this, for the most part. The problem as I see it is that it assumes either a plurality of social value systems or an ability to compartmentalize our opinions in a way that I'm not sure humans are innately capable of.
In other words, let's say I'm a hiring manager in this low-privacy future. I find out that one of my interviewees is a Westboro First Baptist Church of Space activist when I see a picture online of him holding a sign saying God Hates Quarians. For the sake of argument, let's say that I fucking love Quarians, I'm a member of PFLAQ and I go to the Quarian Musical Revue on the Quarian flotilla every Friday night. That's going to color my judgment of him, possibly in ways that I'm not entirely conscious of.
So either I have to be really good at lot letting my love of Quarians color my hiring decisions, which as a human being I'm not sure that I can objectively do that, or there has to be another employer close-by in the solar system who is anti-Quarian and needs somebody with his skills.
I'm not convinced that this would be a desirable state of affairs, nor am I convinced that the solution is to except Congress to pass a law saying that proquarianism or antiquarianism is a protected class.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
How is that ever right?
Yet here we are where that is perfectly acceptable practice, and goes on all the time. Not suggesting it is a universal practice, but it's easy to use illegal hiring discrimination and not get caught, and I don't think it should be.
Edit: Thanks Feral for your viewpoint. I lost track of the fact that the whole salaried/hourly thingy also has the exempt/non-exempt bit which actually determines whether overtime is paid or not. There are some things I don't mind about being salaried too.