Good luck and much happiness on the new job.

So are you on permanent NDA?

Come on you gotta tell us where you got hired! :D

Oh I may as well let you in on my recent job hunt success…

Last year my internship was at the game developer Stardock and this year it’s… DUN DUN DUN

Financial investment firm Raymond James in Southfield!

Not only am I still under the NDA I’ve already signed, but I have to go in early on Monday and sign a second one. I don’t know that either NDA forbids me from mentioning the company I’m contracted to, but I’m playing it safe just in case.

The truth is, though, that I try to avoid directly mentioning my employers while I’m working for them. Considering the number of bloggers that have been fired for talking about their jobs and naming names I figure it’s probably better to be safe than sorry.

Good luck with your new job.  Your blog/writing is fantastic I’m sure we’ll keep reading!

The truth is, though, that I try to avoid directly mentioning my employers while I’m working for them. Considering the number of bloggers that have been fired for talking about their jobs and naming names I figure it’s probably better to be safe than sorry.

Sad, isn’t it? Aaaaah, freedom of speech....

Sad, isn’t it? Aaaaah, freedom of speech....

No, it’s quite smart, actually. He and his company can have a good working relationship and he gets to tell us all about his good and bad days at work without having to fear he might be shooting himself in the foot.

I’m glad you got the job, Les. You really deserve to have a good turn right about a few years ago.

Very best of luck at the new job. My your bosses’ hair be less pointy and your co-workers sharper.

The truth is, though, that I try to avoid directly mentioning my employers while I’m working for them. Considering the number of bloggers that have been fired for talking about their jobs and naming names I figure it’s probably better to be safe than sorry.

In this day and age, employers are likely to vet candidates by looking them up on the web and to state the obvious, what they can’t find won’t get you into trouble.

As a rule, GM and I maintain separate personal and professional blogs. We also have a distinct and tightly locked family site. We don’t post who we work for and excepting the actual family site, we use pseudonyms rather than our real names.

Anybody sufficiently diligent could probably figure out personal information, but why make it easy?

heck, i’ve told potential employers - after an interview - that i am not interested in the position, then, after a week or three gotten a letter in the mail similar to the one you received.

i don’t know if it was incompetence or their ego that got the letter to me.

congrats on the new job.

I think I’ve also said this before, but had I realized how popular SEB would someday be I probably would have opted to use a pseudonym myself. This blog is the number one link when you do a Google search for Les Jenkins, beating out a rather famous jazz musician and a Colorado mortgage broker. In fact, of the top 10 links returned for that search, seven of them are directly about me. I am not hard to find at all on the world wide web. But the milk is already spilled and there’s no sense in crying over it.

The new boss I’ll be working for has already found this blog, it was one of the first things he did, and fortunately he doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. I’ve no doubts that it’s probably cost me a couple of jobs along the way though. Potential employers will find it at some point and they’ll either see it for what it is or they’ll jump to conclusions. I’d rather work for the former than the latter anyway even if it means taking a bit longer to land a job.

I’ve no doubts that it’s probably cost me a couple of jobs along the way though.

I’m afraid that you’d have a hard time getting a job deep in the Bible Belt.

Are you kidding me? This blog would preclude his employment from anything but a fast food or .gov job anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line and points West until Phoenix. Oh, and anywhere in Utah is right out as well. Not that I would recommend moving to Utah for any sane member of the human race.

I’ve lost more than a few jobs down south due to my anti-organized religion stances. Unfortunately, in this day and age, religious discrimination against non-Christians is alive and well in the southern part of the USA. The only cities it was never a problem in for me, were Richmond, and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill research triangle. Well, I don’t count Baltimore or DC, there are more Catholics there than anything else anyways.

The sad thing is, you can’t even get judicial relief, because the benches are also stacked with the religious right. I don’t think I’ll go into more details about my particular case, but believe you me, it’s pretty much not worth the effort unless you can get a fed court involved. Local/State courts are right out.

This blog would preclude his employment from anything but a fast food or .gov job anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line and points West until Phoenix.

I’d except Austin, TX. It’s Blue enough, not that you could tell after all the gerrymandering.

TheJynXeD - your comments hit what I mean right on the head. Why does one HAVE to use a pseudonyme when one is discussing stuff not related to work? I could understand that employers don’t want you to slam their companies or talk trade secrets.

But this is a bad form of self-censorship we have, right here in our 21st century democracies. Even if it may not have been his considered intention, kudos to Les for not backing down and becoming all bland and polite.

Why does one HAVE to use a pseudonyme when one is discussing stuff not related to work?

I think you have it backwards. Can you give us a compelling reason why we should use our real names for online postings?

Self-censorship happens when somebody is afraid to speak his or her mind, not when somebody choses not to put their real names to it.

But this is a bad form of self-censorship we have, right here in our 21st century democracies. Even if it may not have been his considered intention, kudos to Les for not backing down and becoming all bland and polite.

Well, in Les’s own words:

I think I’ve also said this before, but had I realized how popular SEB would someday be I probably would have opted to use a pseudonym myself.

Note what I said about self-censorship above.

My habit of using my real name is left over from when I used to run a BBS. I prefer to use my real name and always have and I agree that using a pseudonym is a form of self-censorship.

In my youth I’d have proudly declared that I’d use my real name consequences be damned, but I’m older and the consequences not only affect me at this point but my wife and daughter as well. The fact that there are jobs I’ve probably not gotten because I had the audacity to speak my mind does have a chilling effect.

I picked my pseudonym while recovering from a head injury & wasn’t thinking too clearly.  At minimum I should have named my blog something different from my pseudonym but the thought of co-authors never occurred to me at the time (along with a lot of other things that didn’t occur to me at the time) If I had it to do over again I’d probably just skip the pseudonym and use my real name, which is carefully hidden on my sidebar where no one will ever find it…

(Les) I prefer to use my real name and always have and I agree that using a pseudonym is a form of self-censorship.

I very rarely use my real name online since USENET went out of fashion. With regards to self-censorship, we’ll have to agree to disagree. As far as I’m concerned, censorship concerns the expression of ideas and not the volunteering or withholding of personal information.

The chilling effects are there, though. For a while, some open-source intelligence outfit from the military monitored my RSS feed. As best as I can tell, they took note about an article about the draft I wrote way back when.

I always use my real name online, but as someone who intends to eventually make a living with my words, that probably falls more into the category of establishing a brand name rather than preventing self censorship.