The Curse of Vicarious Popularity

I had already intended for this next post to be a discussion of why people seem to suddenly disappear after they go to work for certain large companies. But then, last week, I went and made an example of myself.

Everything started out normally (the usual bit of attention on news.yc). It then progressed to a mention on Daring Fireball, which was nice, but okay, that's happened before. A few days later, though, things started going a little overboard, as my little article about human nature got a company name attached to it and ended up quoted on Business Insider and CNet.

Now don't get me wrong, I like fame and fortune as much as the next person, but those last articles crossed an awkward threshold for me. I wasn't quoted because I said something smart; I was quoted because what I said wasn't totally boring, and an interesting company name got attached. Suddenly it was news, where before it was not.

Not long after joining a big company, I asked my new manager - wow, I had a manager for once! - what would happen if I simply went and did something risky without getting a million signoffs from people first. He said something like this, which you should not quote because he was not speaking for his employer and neither am I: "Well, if it goes really bad, you'll probably get fired. If it's successful, you'll probably get a spot bonus."

Maybe that was true, and maybe he was just telling me what I, as a person arriving from the startup world, wanted to hear. I think it was the former. So far I have received some spot bonuses and no firings, but the thing about continuing to take risks is my luck could change at any time.

In today's case, the risk in question is... saying things on the Internet.

What I have observed is that the relationship between big companies and the press is rather adversarial. I used to really enjoy reading fake anecdotes about it at Fake Steve Jobs, so that's my reference point, but I'm pretty sure all those anecdotes had some basis in reality. After all, Fake Steve Jobs was a real journalist pretending to be a real tech CEO, so it was his job to know both sides.

There are endless tricks being played on everyone! PR people want a particular story to come out so they spin their press releases a particular way; reporters want more conflict so they seek it out or create it or misquote on purpose; PR people learn that this happens so they become even more absolutely iron-fisted about what they say to the press. There are classes that business people at big companies can take to learn to talk more like politicians. Ironically, if each side would relax a bit and stop trying so hard to manipulate the other, we could have much better and more interesting and less tabloid-like tech news, but that's just not how game theory works. The first person to break ranks would get too much of an unfair advantage. And that's why we can't have nice things.

Working at a startup, all publicity is good publicity, and you're the underdog anyway, and you're not publicly traded, so you can be pretty relaxed about talking to the press. Working at a big company, you are automatically the bad guy in every David and Goliath story, unless you are very lucky and there's an even bigger Goliath. There is no maliciousness in that; it's just how the story is supposed to be told, and the writers give readers what they want.

Which brings me back to me, and people like me, who just write for fun. Since I work at a big company, there are bunch of things I simply should not say, not because they're secret or there's some rule against saying them - there isn't, as far as I know - but because no matter what I say, my words are likely to be twisted and used against me, and against others. If I can write an article about Impostor Syndrome and have it quoted by big news organizations (to their credit, the people quoting it so far have done a good job), imagine the damage I might do if I told you something mean about a competitor, or a bug, or a missing feature, or an executive. Even if, or especially if, it were just my own opinion.

In the face of that risk - the risk of unintentionally doing a lot of damage to your friends and co-workers - most people just give up and stop writing externally. You may have noticed that I've greatly cut back myself. But I have a few things piling up that I've been planning to say, particularly about wifi. Hopefully it will be so technically complicated that I will scare away all those press people.

And if we're lucky, I'll get the spot bonus and not that other thing.