I recently came face-to-face with the murky issues of social media and hiring in the workplace.

Days before the person’s interview, a candidate to join my organization started sending Twitter messages addressed to my username.  So I got a notification from Twitter that I was “mentioned” in someone else’s Tweet (Twitter is designed in such a way that another user cannot contact me privately unless I choose to “follow” that user explicitly.  Which I wasn’t).

What was strange was that the person was addressing questions to me about the upcoming job interviews.  Asking something about my company’s job benefit package if I recall.  In other words, questions that could, and should, have been addressed in the setting of an interview.  Even more curious is that the person sent those same Tweets to another employee with the same questions.  And that other employee didn’t even work in my department.

A flood of questions came into my mind…..

• Could I read this person’s Tweets?
• Should I read them?
• Are somebody’s Tweets in the public domain?  With over 100 million users, and the ability of any user to see the Tweets of any other, one could argue yes
• Are things in the public domain fair game for evaluation in a hiring process?  Beyond the obvious off-limits discriminators such as age, gender, sexual preference, etc.
• Even if such information wasn’t in the public domain, was it still something I could, or should, use in my evaluation?  In many parts of the world, employers are entitled to collect information about an employee beyond what is offered by the employee him/herself

I found that the answers to these questions were far from obvious.  I suspect it will be years before the law and business behavioral norms will catch up with these issues.

I won’t tell you what I did in answer to these questions, out of respect for the privacy of the individual and the fear of opening up a legal can of worms.

What I will say is that I approach online life as if everything I say can be read by others, and thus used by them to form some judgment of me: my blog, Facebook account, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  Is this a form of self-censorship?  Yes, to a degree.  I guess there’s still a role for offline communications and “antique” forms of online communication like email or SMS.

About 15 years ago (!) I worked for Reed Hastings.  He was not one for sitting pat.  At the time, he realized that the software category of Software Quality Assurance (SQA) was going to consolidate.  And that you could either embrace that eventuality,  or hold on to the past.

He embraced it, by seeking a merger between his baby Pure Software (he was the founder) and Atria.  Soon thereafter, the combined company was part of Rational and is now a product suite at IBM.

Reed is at it again.  Netflix is separating its DVD-by-mail service from its live streaming service.  I loved the quote from Engadget today:

What really happened here is quite simple: Reed Hastings just put a gun to the side of his DVD-by-mail business and pulled the trigger. Given that he aimed for the ankle, though, it’ll probably take a while for it to completely bleed out. But hey — proactively putting a fading business out of its misery sure beats bleeding for it on the balance sheet.

Joseph Schumpeter and more recently Clayton Christensen have written about creative destruction and disruptive technologies.  Reed is one a few high tech leaders that has the courage to implement what the rest of us know: do unto oneself before it’s done to you.

Here’s the bit that stops others from doing the same: Netflix’s share price, and perhaps even near-term revenue, could suffer.  For most of the industry, one can’t tolerate the thought of taking a step back to take two forward.  And hence the balk at such bold moves, fearing the reaction of others.  Like shareholders or pundits.

Perhaps the definition of “courage” is not fearing the reaction of others?  Game on, Reed.

The TED Conference is going on this week.  I wish I was there, even as I’m consoled by the fact that the weather in Tel Aviv is gorgeous during my business trip.

While I’ve never been to the TED Conference, I have adopted the habit of watching TED Talks online.  The premise of the talks is that a (presumable) expert gives the “talk of their life” in 20 minutes on their area of their expertise.

An aside: I noted that humorist John Hodgman is speaking there this week.  He wrote a wickedly funny and strange book called “Areas of My Expertise”. Maybe that’s why he was invited.  The book is highly recommended.

While TED and TED Talks have been pretty interesting stuff, I thought about the undercurrent of TED.  Which seems to be the unspoken: “let’s all get together, call each other smart, and be confident that the high cost of conference admission weeds out the others”. This type of self-referential, self-reinforcing elitism usually brings out the contrarian and cynic in me.  As in, “the really smart people probably avoid this type of conference like the plague”.

But when you look at the caliber of the speakers, you have to ask yourself: is there a still-higher caliber of people left out?  If so, what percentage of the “smart people” population are they?  Probably very small indeed.

In the end, I decided TED people are way smarter than me.  Ergo, I’ll keep watching TED Talks and wishing I was there.

From time to time, my company looks at its strategic initiatives and asks the question: “where in the world should we locate the people for this work?”  Every company does it (or should),  so what follows should in no way be construed as being about my current employer.

But these internal conversations led me to reflect on how we still don’t seem to have the formula right in high tech.  And perhaps by extension in other industries that can have globally distributed workforces.

It seems like every country in the universe of high tech choices is stereotyped and typecast.  The USA is a place to export work from.  India or Czech Republic are places to export work to.  What about the inverse options?  Or the distribution of work between two (stereotypically) low cost countries?

I hate to say it, but management consultants’ use of the term “value chain” is apropos.  We need to get better at framing our choices and thinking about the integrated whole.

Let me suggest a simple scorecard.  Maybe each element can be rated on a 5-point scale.

First is labor costs.  For a given type of work, what’s the fully burdened cost in each locale?  And what’s the rate of wage inflation that forecasts costs in 2-3 years?  For example, I think a lot of people were disappointed in their near-term return on investment in India given the wage inflation, especially in high tech.  Those who have taken a long-run view of costs in India have been rewarded with an ever-deepening talent pool.

Second is critical mass of the labor pool.  Does the locale in question have an ecosystem to tap into?  Such as large companies you can raid.  Or lots of venture-based start-ups.  Or strong universities.  Bottom line: will there be enough people to choose from?

Third is critical mass of the team. Will the work being performed reach critical mass to form a team?  When teams feel ownership over their assignment, they can accomplish great things together.  Individuals working on teams located elsewhere perhaps not so much.

Fourth is distance from dependent resources.  This could be the distance from key executives.  Or peer departments.  Or subordinate functions.  It’s a hassle for people to stay late at work, or make calls from home at night, or get up really early, all to simply interact with the rest of a team.  Hence the critical mass comment above.

But it’s also a huge tax on managers’ and executives’ time and energy to travel long distances to oversee a distant operation.  After a few trips to a new site, the number of visits from “headquarters” starts to dwindle and the sites become divergent.  I had the pleasure of working for a company that was truly committed to its global locations, and the executives traveled accordingly.  I’m not sure this is the norm.

Last is infrastructure.  What kind of communication infrastructure do you need to link these sites?  This is not trivial if you want to maximize the flow of information, as you must.  For example, Cisco’s 3-screen Telepresence is a wonderful product.  But at $100,000 per site means most people will opt for something inferior.

I’ll sum it up.  People need to feel that they belong.  That they “own” the work they do.  That they don’t have a target on their back because the company is unsure if they are good “value for money”.  That they have easy access to others on whom they depend.

If we get this right, good things will surely happen.

Maybe I’m the last to the party of prognosticators that have long predicted the emergence of multiple or private internets over time.

But it does feel like something big is brewing in the world of consumers and the internet.  Time spent online is growing, at the expense of television viewing.  Time spent online is shifting, to social media.  Big user bases of 100 million and larger are emerging, from Facebook’s nearly 600 million to Twitter to Zynga to Last.fm to LinkedIn.  And let’s not forget Yahoo’s and Google’s  hundreds of millions of monthly users that have been with them for years. Let’s call these sites the  Cabal.

And there’s the dimension of capitalism.  Today, about $30b is spent annually on online advertising.  Google earns a whopping 87% of that money.  Meanwhile, Facebook has rocketed from 9% of U.S. online advertising revenue share a year ago to 23% today, overtaking Yahoo! along the way.  The Cabal is gearing up for a fight over users money and it’s going to get nasty.

So, we’re converging as users on these social media sites.  And these sites are vying for big advertising bucks in turn.

Where does that leave the rest of the internet?   You know, the billions of other web pages.  Has it been rendered less relevant?  Or does is contain the classic “long tail” of content that makes it valuable for each of us in highly personal ways.

The idealist in me says that the Internet in whole – this embarrassment of riches – is deeply rewarding to us all and will continue.  The capitalist in me says that with so much money at stake, the Cabal will shape the future.

Where do you stand?