MS Blogger Should Have Been Fired

I don't see what the big deal is here. The guy blatantly violated MS security policies. Yes, the picture was quite innocent, but here is the deal. You can't just go around snapping photos of stuff arriving on trucks to Microsoft. If the guy had in any way been a valuble employee, he probably would have gotten away with a slap on the wrist. However, he was just a temp anyway, which means he is disposable. My question is, when the hell did a tech get the idea that he could just go around snapping photos of stuff arriving on trucks and posting them to his weblog? What if the stuff in question had been delivered under some NDA or something?

4 Comments

  • ah Jesse, Jesse, Jesse.

    I don't know if you're a curmudgeon who really believes this or if you are just stirring the pot a little.

    But if you read his post again you will see that it wasn't just because of the picture - it was because he said where the picture was taken. The picture alone "might" have been ok.

    Now I don't work there and cannot comment on Microsoft's camera policies (I know some companies prohibit them) but getting the axe because you posted your business address seems a little excessive - a lot of us we all would get fired because we have business cards.

    Now if Microsoft "does" prohibit all cameras on campus, then this guy did do bad.

  • Any company who cookes up rules such as these, that a picture of a truck with G5's is a serious issue, has something serious to hide. Firing the guy is also a stupid action. It has reached /. already, hundreds of thousands of people now know this. Would this guy be taken aside, ordered to remove the post on his blog, 10, maybe 20 people would have known about the existence of this photo.



    That's the key part here :)

    Now, I don't know but if I were Steve B. the people I WOULD FIRE were the ones in charge of the PR department, because they don't know what PR is.

  • No, the post says someone else (Microsoft Security) deemed the picture with associated text violated some unmentioned security policy.

    Mentioning that something was delivered to a specific address should not be objectionable to even the most paranoid person. There are a number of outsiders who already knows this information from the delivery truck driver to the original shipper.

    And the context of the "might" implies that security would not have objected if he had refrained from mentioning Microsoft.

    Without knowing exactly how this violated security (was it "Thou shalt not bring and use a camera on campus, period"), neither of us can comment on the validity of the firing.



    But it does have a certain "fishy" odor.

  • Just posting a picture of some boxes being pulled off a truck is a lot less harmful than posting a picture of boxes being pulled off a truck and saying, "by the way, all these boxes that I just took a picture of were being delivered today to such and such department in Microsoft." Both are bad, but I definately agree that the second is a lot worse.

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