Why I don't talk about where I work and why its important to me (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Why I don't talk about where I work and why its important to me (2015)

harthur.wordpress.com

29 pointsbrudgers27 comments

I do the same. I have to. If the wrong people find out, they’d launch a social media campaign against my employer. I had to leave a previous high profile position due fallout from allegations of harassment against me. Some vocal people think I should never hold a job of any kind. Thank you Twitter and Facebook.

Why not just go and tell everybody you work for "FooBar Solutions" one town over? They don't have a website? Well we are early stage, just gathering money, so no time yet for a website. And you should have most people off your back.

Having experienced something like this with my last SO, I feel you though, OP. It's something that can stay on your mind constantly and is very worrisome at times. Hope you hid your tracks for good or he lost interest.

There are a lot of drawbacks to lying, though.

Especially when you suck at lying..

I've had good luck with "I don't list my current employer publicly."

If people ask why... "I did a lot of open-source work and I still get the odd over-enthusiastic support request -- and this at least stops them landing in my work inbox."

Well that was disappointing. Here I thought I would get a wonderful explanation about ego and how western culture is all about work and we have no personality outside of our jobs.

But no, just a stalker. Something you can solve with a restraining order. Not something you need to move jobs for.

A restraining order is just a piece of paper. It solves very little in the face of a determined 'admirer', and stops nothing. Yes it MAY give the police/legal system recourse AFTER the subject breaches the terms, but in the meantime the terms are breached (at varying levels of severity/urgency) and the police are minutes away at the very best of times.

Not only that, but a restraining order must tell the recipient where they are required to stay away from. So it forces you to tell your stalker where you live, work, etc. That's a high price unless they already know everything and for some reason moving isn't an option.

TL;DR because of a stalker

Was expecting something a bit more profound.

Yeah me too.

What did people find interesting about this to upvote it to the front page?

It seems only relevant to this persons friends / former colleagues from ~4 years ago.

I started following HN more seriously over the past few days and I keep seeing lots of pointless and irrelevant articles make the front page. I could've sworn it was like this 4-5 years ago.

> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.[0]

"Turning into Reddit" also includes anything about quality generally decreasing over time. I have been on HN for more than 6 years on this account and another year or two longer on my previous account and while there's certainly an ebb and flow to the overall quality and the focus definitely changes, HN is not any drastically better or worse than it was half a decade ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree with this. One question though - is it impossible for HN to degrade? Would we even know if it had?

> "Turning into Reddit" also includes anything about quality generally decreasing over time.

That's not on the page you linked - is that your own interpretation of a one-liner?

It only takes a few votes to get something to the front page. Since there are no real "downvotes" for stories (although there's no consequence for heavy use of "flag"), the best cure is to go through /new and upvote stuff that looks interesting.

That this sort of harassment happens, and the practical measures taken in response, are themselves interesting to me and I think worth thinking and talking about.

+1. Regardless of the intent, and i genuinely feel for this person’s struggle, the post comes off a little narcissistic —- “let me publicly announce why I’m not publicly announcing where I work. I’d like to tell everyone why I want you to respect my privacy and leave me alone.”

Again, not saying that was the author’s intent, but it’s how it came off.

It's clearly there as something they can refer people to. Besides, it's their blog, not a full-page advert in the New York Times.

Same as John Scalzi's "How I use social media" page on his website, really. (and the various variants I've seen on that theme)

Sometimes you need to spell out "hey, these are my personal opinions, not anyone else's - and if you want to know what I meant in a particular post, just ask me for clarification".

I found this interesting because, this is a man who's left his job and went a little bit 'dark' because of a mentally-ill former colleague who got obsessed with him - how many women are out there who left jobs because of creeps or stalkers, and then went 'dark'?

Appears to be written by a female named Heather - unless I'm missing something?

(deleted)

I'm not following. Clearly the grandparent comment misconstrued the article as to have been written by a male, as did I. They are talking about the author.

For what it's worth the url and the author's handle threw me off. "harthrur", simply thought of someone named Arthur in their first name, not the last. I completely ignored the website's name as well it seems.

Hmm I'm guilty of the same mistake, seems like I read the metadata too quickly, where the author is mentioned as "harthur" and appears in the url as well as near the article's title and date, overlooking the blog's title itself where "Heather" appears. Somehow I read "harthur" as being a single word for a name derived from "arthur" (instead of, I now reckon, a concatenation of initial and last name), either as an online pseudonym or a spelling I didn't know about; and thus mistakenly inferred the author was a man.

Oh, the traps we can fall into.

...and a dozen HN readers rush off to register "harthur.com" :)

Me too indeed - I thought the first name was Arthur. That still makes the article interesting, as there's a tower of similar stories from women, very few from men.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com