
Why I don't talk about where I work and why its important to me (2015) - brudgers
https://harthur.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/why-i-dont-talk-about-where-i-work-and-why-its-important-to-me/
======
NormMalvo
I do the same. I have to. If the wrong people find out, they’d launch a social
media campaign against my employer. I had to leave a previous high profile
position due fallout from allegations of harassment against me. Some vocal
people think I should never hold a job of any kind. Thank you Twitter and
Facebook.

------
akuji1993
Why not just go and tell everybody you work for "FooBar Solutions" one town
over? They don't have a website? Well we are early stage, just gathering
money, so no time yet for a website. And you should have most people off your
back.

Having experienced something like this with my last SO, I feel you though, OP.
It's something that can stay on your mind constantly and is very worrisome at
times. Hope you hid your tracks for good or he lost interest.

~~~
dqh
There are a lot of drawbacks to lying, though.

~~~
scirocco
Especially when you suck at lying..

~~~
philpem
I've had good luck with "I don't list my current employer publicly."

If people ask why... "I did a lot of open-source work and I still get the odd
over-enthusiastic support request -- and this at least stops them landing in
my work inbox."

------
jbob2000
Well that was disappointing. Here I thought I would get a wonderful
explanation about ego and how western culture is all about work and we have no
personality outside of our jobs.

But no, just a stalker. Something you can solve with a restraining order. Not
something you need to move jobs for.

~~~
lwhalen
A restraining order is just a piece of paper. It solves very little in the
face of a determined 'admirer', and stops nothing. Yes it MAY give the
police/legal system recourse AFTER the subject breaches the terms, but in the
meantime the terms are breached (at varying levels of severity/urgency) and
the police are minutes away at the very best of times.

~~~
diggernet
Not only that, but a restraining order must tell the recipient where they are
required to stay away from. So it forces you to tell your stalker where you
live, work, etc. That's a high price unless they already know everything and
for some reason moving isn't an option.

------
splitbrain
TL;DR because of a stalker

~~~
matte_black
Was expecting something a bit more profound.

~~~
LandR
Yeah me too.

What did people find interesting about this to upvote it to the front page?

It seems only relevant to this persons friends / former colleagues from ~4
years ago.

~~~
preommr
I started following HN more seriously over the past few days and I keep seeing
lots of pointless and irrelevant articles make the front page. I could've
sworn it was like this 4-5 years ago.

~~~
pc86
> _Please don 't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a
> semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills._[0]

"Turning into Reddit" also includes anything about quality generally
decreasing over time. I have been on HN for more than 6 years on this account
and another year or two longer on my previous account and while there's
certainly an ebb and flow to the overall quality and the focus definitely
changes, HN is not any drastically better or worse than it was half a decade
ago.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
nindalf
I agree with this. One question though - is it impossible for HN to degrade?
Would we even know if it had?

------
a_bonobo
I found this interesting because, this is a man who's left his job and went a
little bit 'dark' because of a mentally-ill former colleague who got obsessed
with him - how many women are out there who left jobs because of creeps or
stalkers, and then went 'dark'?

~~~
brianmcc
Appears to be written by a female named Heather - unless I'm missing
something?

~~~
lloeki
Hmm I'm guilty of the same mistake, seems like I read the metadata too
quickly, where the author is mentioned as "harthur" and appears in the url as
well as near the article's title and date, overlooking the blog's title itself
where "Heather" appears. Somehow I read "harthur" as being a single word for a
name derived from "arthur" (instead of, I now reckon, a concatenation of
initial and last name), either as an online pseudonym or a spelling I didn't
know about; and thus mistakenly inferred the author was a man.

Oh, the traps we can fall into.

~~~
a_bonobo
Me too indeed - I thought the first name was Arthur. That still makes the
article interesting, as there's a tower of similar stories from women, very
few from men.

