Weeks after a teen was fired for posting on her Facebook page that she was bored at work, another sap might have Twittered away a job offer from a major company during tough times.
The latest example of folks publicly posting too much personal information came last week when someone known as “theoconnor” used the microblogging tool Twitter to commit this bit of job-search suicide: “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”
Cisco, being the kind of high-tech company that knows all about Twittering and the such, quickly caught on to the griping by “theocconor.” A Twitterer named Tim Levad, who presumably works for Cisco and has a search set up for any references to company, tweeted back: “Who is the hiring manager. I'm sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”
It’s unclear if the job offer still stands. What is known is that theoconnors’ Twitter page is now private. But the humiliation lives on: the exchange quickly went viral and even spawned a mocking webpage named ciscofatty.com.
Twitter is a powerful communications tool, and is helping shape the way we interact in the Internet age, where old boundaries of privacy are fading. But there’s such a thing as thinking before hitting that send button – your job may depend upon it.
Hester is founding director of the award-winning, multi-media NYCity News Service at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is the former City Editor of the New York Daily News, where he started as a reporter in 1992.
