Category: links and ideas

Most experienced employees know: Thou Shalt Not Blab About the Company’s Internal Business. But the line between what is public and what is private is increasingly fuzzy for young people comfortable with broadcasting nearly every aspect of their lives on the Web, posting pictures of their grandmother at graduation next to one of them eating whipped cream off a woman’s belly. For them, shifting from a like-minded audience of peers to an intergenerational, hierarchical workplace can be jarring.

from
“Interns? No bloggers need apply.”, an article by anna bahney for the new york times, on blogging about your workplace.
it’s a tricky subject. when i was at fnac, i didn’t have any trouble with that – the work was fun (at least in the beggining, but then i quit anyway) and not top-secret at all (though i did print some weird stuff…) and i even wore a tshirt saying “i’m blogging this” under the yellow-green jacket. they were ok with that.

now the situation has changed. i’ve skimmed through pages of non-disclosure information agreements in dutch that no-one really bothered to translate for me and signed them in the end. and i do realize that the information i’m dealing with is marked as confidential.
it all comes down to common sense, i think.

i wonder wether my office co-workers would mind knowing their shirt’s color is being blogged. :)

“And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do”.

Steve Jobs, at a speech in Stanford.