On Losing Anonymity

Becker has a good write up on Recruiting Bloggers about the discontinuation of the Workfarce blog which I had just started reading regularly (with a bit of pleasure of course).

I cherish my anonymity to a certain extent. Yes, if you want to find out who I am (i.e. my real name, my position, my company), you can do it. But full out anonymity wasn’t ever my purpose (and it never was for WorkFarce either). It was a way to vent, to talk about issues, without having them permanently associated with the companies I work for or to my name. I wrote for a political blog during the election cycle in 2004 and now I see my full name out there saying some things I don’t really believe now. People might go back to my first entries and say “This guy doesn’t know anything!” They might be true.

If this was a recruiting blog for our company, I’d be writing it differently. It would probably be less relevant because I’d be talking about specific things that I like or that I want to have at my company. It would be super relevant for those people that were interested in applying but we haven’t achieved world dominance quite yet. In any case, it would be less interesting to me.

Some people do know my name. I haven’t grilled them to keep a secret oath but I wasn’t making the same types of friends that WorkFarce was making. Though I think it was a little silly to go overboard on WorkFarce. Do I worry personally? Not really. If worse came to worse, I could continue blogging with some minor inconvenience.

I will say there is a downside to anonymity though. There was a great article in the WSJ Career Journal about this and a few other blogs. I was humbled and then realized that would be permanent since this thing is anonymous and all.