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From Slashdot – Conspiring Against Your Employer? Watch What You Email

I have seen other people do this several times, with varying degrees of success. I think this basically boils down to “deal honestly”, “deal legally”, and “don’t use work resources”. But here is the snippet I found interesting anyway.

How to Get Away With It(Score:5, Interesting)
by lukewarmfusion (726141) on Thursday January 06, @10:28AM (#11275587)
(Last Journal: Friday December 31, @11:55AM)

I just started my own company, directly competing with my previous employer. I spent nearly eight months on their payroll while I began up my own business and sought projects of my own. Here’s what I learned:

1. Don’t stab anyone in the back (burned bridges, insert your favorite cliche). It can come back to hurt you.

2. Don’t give your bosses a reason to be unhappy with you. Work just as hard – or harder. If you’re valuable to the company, leaving them will be more painful (and can produce a more profitable situation for you).

3. Encrypt every email, instant message, and web transaction that deals with your activities. Don’t assume anything is safe unless you’re actively doing something to ensure its security or you can verify it easily (SSL, for instance).

4. Regularly scan your machine for viruses and spyware. Use a packet sniffer to see if you’re sending anything unexpected. Look through your machine to see if there are programs installed that shouldn’t be there… is your company spying on you?

5. Don’t use their phones. Upgrade your damn cell plan and use that.

6. Take advantage of non-company resources for communication and whatnot. Find a decent webmail provider with SSL enabled.

7. Make sure any contract or agreement you signed isn’t going to come back to bite you. If you signed a non-compete agreement or whatever, don’t assume it’s invalid or that they won’t pursue it. See a lawyer BEFORE you have legal troubles in this area.

As others have complained, there are loyalty problems in this country. I used to love my job, love my work, and love the company. Some things changed, and while I still love the work I no longer enjoyed anything about the company. Many attempts to change it from within failed. When your boss is taking advantage of you, you need to re-evaluate. When you’re stuck in a dead-end, you need to re-evaluate. When you get the line, “if you don’t like it, then find somewhere else to work,” the time for re-evaluation has passed and it’s time to end that part of your life.

Employers aren’t loyal to employees any more than we are to them. I heard stories of pre-1980s-boom-and-crash Japan, where a failing company’s president would give everything he had back into the company to keep it going as long as possible…and if it wouldn’t work, he’d split the cash from his shares, pay, etc. among the employees. This was in return for the lifetime loyalty you gave to the company.

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