How To Not Get Fired For Blogging

Wizbang pointed me to a story of a Google employee who got fired for blogging. It seems the company that "does no evil" (and the owner of the blogging service this post is on) didn't like the benefits package details and vague financial info he posted.

The original blog, which has the offending posts removed, is here. The offending posts are saved for posterity here. Reading through the offending posts I found nothing I would fire anyone about (I found the blog rather entertaining, actually), so I guess am not as much as an ass-hat as the people at Google.

That being said, I have to lay the blame on the employee. If you are going to blog on work details, you don't know if you are going to get an understanding Director Mitch or a "I know we say we don't do evil, but we are evil so that is a lie" Google manager. This is why I stick to these rules of blogging:

o Don't blog under my full name - I've posted on managing your digital trail before, and just have a different philosophy than Jim and Michael who blog under their full names (Mitch is my real first name, but a web search under "Mitch" doesn't pull up this blog in the first 100 entries. My real full name pulls up some professional articles I've written).

o Don't Reveal Too Many Work Details - I blog about work from time to time, but in a general way that could be from almost any company. The best a reader might glean is that I work in tech in something related to cellphones and my company has factories in Asia. That narrows it down to about 1000 companies.

o Never Use Real Names - If I blog about my boss, management or customers, I use pseudonyms or initials (like calling my Executive VP just EVP).

So if someone who knew me (like my boss) ran across this blog, could they figure out this was mine? Absolutely. But the chances of my boss or someone at my company doing it are pretty slim, and there is nothing in here that identifies or defames my company.

In this guys case, however, what makes his blog interesting is that it was about the inside workings of GOOGLE. If he had just blogged about a "major tech company in the Bay Area", his blog would not have gotten as much traffic, but he would probably still be employed.