The year was 2019, the place San Diego. I was attending KubeCon on behalf of my then-employer, VMware. Kubecon is the Kubernetes Conference; If you don’t know what Kubernetes is don’t worry about it. It’s just a computers.
I tended to tweet a lot at conferences, as was the style at the time. Any particularly interesting talks I’d live-tweet, and generally I took a lot of photos around the event.
Most of the tweets were pretty neutral, but some were a little more pointed.
And follewed it up with
I think absolutely nothing of this. It was a tweet-heavy day! My thumbs were sore at the end of it!
But the next day, right before my flight home, I get a DM from a helpful colleague:
And then after I landed, who should slide into my DMs but a VMware Vice President, my grand boss of a large number of levels, requested a quick chat with him and an HR representative.
Being as I’m not an idiot, I elect to bring a witness of my own (@lizthegrey ). She slightly livetweeted that conversation until VP VMware tells her to stop. The two VMwares mention the social media guidelines. I hadn’t seen them, but they contain gems like “Avoid topics involving age, sex, race, religion, ethnicity, politics or disabilities.”
I’ll get right on that.
On the 24th, my first normal day back at work, I got another meeting request from Vice President VMware. Having learned their lesson they tell me not to bring in external witnesses. I instead invited a colleague of mine to be my witness.
We talked a little more about the social media guidelines, and I reiterated the impossibility of complying with how the guidelines were written. I mentioned I’d be willing to help improve them, and the guy seemed to be pretty happy with that. A few hours later I got an email from HR saying they didn’t need any more information from them.
At this point I’m feeling pretty
