
Ask HN: What are your companies Engineering Blogging Guidelines? - streakofhope
A lot of people write blogs and a lot of companies have blogs. Do people who work at said companies, have a list of guidelines about this - things they can&#x2F;cannot write about both internally and on their personal website? My company is trying to formalize their blogging guidelines and what engineers should not write about. I am trying to understand what industry standard is to give them feedback. If you have a company policy regarding blogging, I would appreciate it if you could share it.
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WaxProlix
I'm interested in this too - as a consultant, there are a lot of cool problems
that could make solid technical/architectural blog posts, but the issues of
exposing client incompetence (real or perceived), or simply mentioning people
who don't want to be mentioned keep me from doing it. Sort of a shame. We've
solved some fun issues and it'd be great to get some comments on how other
folks solved similar ones.

At the end of the day, unless your company is the kind that's desperate for
'thought leadership' style attention, it's not likely you'll get the OK to do
much under official auspices.

~~~
nunez
Review your NDA. You might be able to talk about your work as long as you
don't mention the company for whom the work was performed.

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nunez
Depends on what your company is trying to achieve with the blog.

Are they trying to use it as a inbound sales funnel? Are they using it for
recruiting talent? If so, what talent pool are they trying to draw from? Is
your product highly technical?

If this blog is meant to be a sales funnel ("this product is amazing; look at
how invested our engineers are!"), then the content will need to be specific
enough to demonstrate your product's engineering quality while being buzzwordy
enough to identify with your audience. Ex: If you work for a company that
builds insulin pumps and are trying to blog about the software powering those
pumps from a sales context, you might talk about testing strategies your team
employs on the RTOS powering the pump but not about how you mocked a subset of
the CPU's instruction set to fully unit test it. _That_ content might be more
appropriate for recruiting embedded engineers ("that's a cool tech stack! how
can I apply") --- it's all about capturing your audience.

An important thing to keep in mind is that your blog should be _consistent_
with its messaging. If you're creating a highly-technical engineering blog,
keep it highly-technical. If you're writing an engineering blog meant for
sales, keep it focussed on sales. Readers are flighty, and one way to get them
to unsub really quickly is to write content that isn't relevant to them.

Good luck!

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ZanrielJames
I started to post a detailed 6-part how-to guide on Linkedin. The topic was
using pyvmomi, Redis, vROPS API, and Pandas to collect VMware capacity data
for intelligent VM placement. My company asked me to take it down halfway
through. It shook me up pretty bad for a couple days, even though I halfway
expected it.

It contained no data specific to the customer but they said they were worried
someone might get the wrong idea. They're not allowed to even disclose who
their customer is per their contract.

They said I could post it on a tech blog but just not there. I thought about
posting it here but I don't know what to do since I don't have much of a
social media presence. All my techie friends are on LinkedIn.

~~~
sharmi
Why not post it on your blog and share on facebook/twitter etc?

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type0
Don't forbid your employees to write about obscure implementations. Every time
management thinks that security by obscurity is just enough - there needs to
be someone who can tell them otherwise and nothing cures it better than a
public blog post on a technical subject. Think about it this way: you might
get some feedback from people all over the world that can guide you with all
sorts of valuable information for free.

