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Does your company have a written policy about personal (technical) blogging?

Care to share?

We encourage our developers to keep personal blogs and talk about technical problems they've encountered at work that are not core competency or core IP. We've been doing it "don't ask don't tell" style, but it's time to write something down.

Update: thank you all for your answers, we've implemented a policy for this last week - the full text is here.

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4 Answers

up vote 9 down vote

No such policy here

I do keep a personal / technical blog (more technical then personal), however it's not related in any way to companies I work for.

Publishing internal protocols, worksheets, code, or other thing would be a serious do not do in my opinion. Other then that I can see for very few reasons where keeping a technical blog would not be allowed. One might be in a case where the contract stipulates any and all material you create is owned by the company. There was an interesting article I read about someone who worked at Microsoft where this was the case. Can't find it again for the life of me though.

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Same here. I post code samples on occasion, but never copy/pasted straight from company code. I always sanitize and/or rewrite completely to remove proprietary stuff. – Anna Lear♦ Oct 15 '10 at 13:32
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@Anna: I do that for SO questions as well. It's a bit tricky to ask a question on a problem without presenting the original problem. – Josh K Oct 15 '10 at 13:45
No such policy here either, I don't keep a personal blog either, but I would keep a dev blog of a personal project I start in the future! – invert Oct 15 '10 at 14:00
up vote 6 down vote

It is encouraged

We get 1 day a week for non-invoicable stuff such as learning, reading blogs, blogging, administration, preparing presentations for the weekly devcafés*, ...

Our boss prefers that we focus on sharing knowledge in that time.

We're actually building a dashboard for our intranet that will display the ratio "knowledge sharing / non-invoicable time".


* devcafés: dev team sits together 1 hour/week and 1 team member presents a new technology, methodology, ..

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That would be really cool. maybe not for a whole day, but for a half-day. I feel like there's so many work-related things I'd like to learn about, but no time at work to do it, and my wife and kid get higher priority at home. – alesplin Oct 15 '10 at 18:15
up vote 3 down vote

I work for a Federal government agency. The overall policy on any kind of social networking and blogging is that we should present ourselves as individuals and not as employees of the agency. Pretty straightforward stuff. They don't mind the exchange of "tips and techniques" as long as some internal things are not published. That's never been a problem, as far as I know.

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up vote 2 down vote

My company is completely oblivious to this.

I do have my own website, and another colleague has one too, but I think that's all. The colleague and I are the only two people who actively seek knowledge [as far as I know, although I think there are a few more, but low profile], so that may have something to do with it.

This may also be just a side-effect of our knowledge pool being nearly non-existent..as people here still focus on "superstar"/"hotshot" developers. Which sucks big-time.

My personal advice to you is: open up as much as possible.

Feedback is useful, and you'll get plenty of it by publishing stuff.

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"My personal advice to you is: open up as much as possible" - I am not sure whether all companies will like that approach. – yasouser Aug 2 '11 at 19:35

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