Ask HN: How to separate work / personal profiles online, keep privacy, and post? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to separate work / personal profiles online, keep privacy, and post?

5 pointspoppy-easypost10 comments

Generally, I don't care about karma on this site or any other. I tend to make accounts when I need to comment or post, and generally try to avoid it. In the case I am using the site at work, I will have my company name in the profile. This is both to indicate to myself that I'm on company time and this better be material to my work, and to promote the company - I'm using their time to post, at least get a little juice on it, no?

But! Things talked about on this very site! Avoiding distractions, focus. Not feeding other "silos" and being a part of the indieweb / federated web instead of putting content on someone else's site. Privacy, anonymity, good opsec of separating profiles. Etc.

But now I'm hiring, and my post isn't visible on the "Who is hiring" thread because I don't have karma. (I even work at a YC company, but that's beside the point.) I feel like it's not a bad thing that I don't have karma? I'm not a spammer? But I can't do the thing. Maybe that's the way things are supposed to be, but I sense probably not?

Am I doing it wrong? What works?

You don't personally need karma for your post to have visibility. I found your post on the hiring thread and for some reason it had been downvoted once. I upvoted it once just to counter that.

There were actually a few downvoted posts in the hiring thread, which seemed weird to me. None of them seemed to violate thread norms or otherwise be objectionable. I upvoted those too.

Dang has stated before that they are working on trying to improve the HN software so all comments show on a single page, but currently comments get paginated when there are a lot of them. That includes the current hiring discussion. You need to click the "more" link to see comments that don't fit on the first page.

What fear causes you to separate your online presence between work and personal? I used to think others would assume I was on company time working on side projects but the reality is that I don't even hire people who don't work on side projects. Our CEO is subscribed to my newsletter, my colleagues and I send our executive team posts we write publicly to frame conversations. Any good leadership is going to approve of people being out there learning, growing and representing themselves because it is good for business.

You wouldn’t hire someone who pours 100% of their technical efforts into the job you’re paying them for?

Nope. For lots of reasons.

No definitely not, the most popularized example of this is the 20 percent rule. I like people who like to learn. I want people to "graduate" from my company when they're ready, not quit.

Great question, all sorts of things. That I would feel comfortable with at this employer, for the moment, is disclosing historical involvement in 2600 at a very bad time, let's say. This goes both directions; my current employer has been on the receiving end of protest before. I'm already hesitant to have my personal identity associated for that reason, but am doing so in the interest of others finding my resume, hosted on my website.

I don't think it takes long to imagine personal / work boundaries being crossed that are undesirable in the current western world. I think HN has a lot of articles about just that.

My bigger curiosity - is it supposed to work this way?

I do reverse engineering for fun; it was how I got into programming in the first place. Considering that breaking or replaying an authentication handshake is effectively a felony in the US (or breaking any form of DRM or authorisation), I can immediately see why separation is desirable for some types.

I wasn't really thinking people would read into what I said as advice to openly post about the felonies they're committing on the internet.

> I don't even hire people who don't work on side projects.

And there, folks, lays one of the reasons why the IT industry is so broken.

"Are you a lawyer? Nice! We are looking for lawyers! Show me your side projects... Wait, no side projects? Next!"

Nonsense.

Why is that nonsense? If I'm looking to hire a lawyer I would want to know what pro bono work they've done in the past. In fact, this is all but required by the American Bar Association. It's for altruism, sure, but it's also an opportunity to understand more about them. Whether they're really passionate, etc.

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