Author Archives: Jeremy Cole

Stealing from People

Christy and Greg have been performing a very interesting social experiment in deviant behaviour: What would someone do if you just took something from their shopping cart?

This fascinates me, as I’m always up for a good-natured social experiment. When I was in high school, I tried one of my own: I did not shave for about three weeks. During the latter half of the three weeks, I looked completely homeless and ragged. I made mental notes about the differences in the way teachers and students acted towards me, using my “old self” as a baseline. The reality was, regardless of what people say, and how much they think they don’t pre-judge people, they do.

Everyone acted completely different around me, not being nice to me, being very short with me, not wanting to be seen with me, etc. Fascinating. Oh well, back to the story at hand: Read all about Christy and Greg’s findings.

On Employee Blogging

Jeremy Zawodny recently wrote a pretty good summary about employee blogging. A few people have asked me why I haven’t blogged more about working at Yahoo!, and what it is that I do there. Basically, I always follow these basic criteria when I blog about work:

  • Is it about anything sensitive in any way?
  • Is it disrespectful to either your employer or any coworkers?
  • Would you flinch in the slightest if your boss, his boss, all the way up to the CEO and the board of directors read it?

Does that leave you with anything? Is what you have left interesting? No, I mean interesting to other people. Yes, that’s what I thought. You’re not left with much.

Hey, it sucks that Mark Jen got fired from Google, but it looks like he pretty consistently violated my three rules above, and apparently posted something that in itself pushed it over the top, since he was forced to remove it. There’s a huge difference between writing an occasional blog about your employer (as Jeremy Zawodny often does, and is fine!) and blogging about your employer as though the whole exercise of working there was a documentary writing project.

Let’s move on, guys!