Jobless Mark Jen Blogs On

Posted on February 12, 2005

As if there was ever any doubt, Google employee Mark Jen confirms that he was fired because of his blog. On his 99zeros blog Jen writes:

"on january 28th, 2005, i was terminated from google. either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason. this came as a great shock to me because two days ago we had looked at my blog and removed all inappropriate content - the comments on financial performance and future products. for my next entries, i was very cognizant of my blogging content, making sure to stay away from these topics. i mean, as much as i like to be open and honest about communicating to users and customers, i'm not insubordinate. if i was told to shut down this blog, i would have."

The strong warning sent by corporations over the past couple weeks has been that you can get yourself fired from your job if you blog about corporate secrets or use your weblog to tell everyone about how awful is to work at Company X. For more see, Blog Today, Fired Tomorrow. As for Jen, the technical project/product/program manager says he is on the market and promises to use "proper capitalization" in his specs.