Comment by lightveil

Depends a lot on the context.

I mostly post tech things, but at some point I wanted to share a few thoughts about a touchy subject like dating. I had the same dilemma - the last thing I wanted was for it to backfire professionally. At that time I was a consultant and freelancer, so looking for a job wasn’t something I did every few years, but more on a continuous basis.

My girlfriend back then encouraged me to post under my name, as long as I was comfortable being asked about it and defending my words (I was, so I did).

The reception from friends was positive. To my surprise, it had a neutral to mildly positive professional impact, "this is a tech guy, but he has soft skills".

And as you can see, there are quite a few posts like that (side ideas, physical and mental health, relationships).

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Of course, your mileage may vary. Tech is one thing, but for many jobs (especially government, public service, primary education) it might be different.

It also depends on the general norms within a country—what’s taboo, and how far you’re willing to cross it.

At the same time, when I’ve heard of someone being rejected due to their online presence, it was mostly not about the views themselves, but about how they were expressed. Raging hate might be off-putting—even to those who share a similar bias.

My two cents: if you're not doing anything too political or controversial, it's fine or even beneficial to mix in the occasional personal essay with the professional.

After all, many of your readers are also human beings with lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up to.

I have both types of blog post on my site - deeply personal like talking about my ADHD (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/10/04/adhd/) or salary history (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2022/09/21/year-later-salary-histor...) and weekly notes, but also a lot of tech stuff. And as an IndieWeb website, I use it as my social media too, so people can read posts/replies to social media all in one place!

I don't feel like I've had any negative impact from that, or I'm very privileged to be able to say I don't care if I have had any impact from that - I've done fairly well for myself, and I can remind people I'm a full human being!

Start with two, you can always merge them later.

> This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice?

Once you've finished procrastinating on your perfect stack to run/generate the blog, it's easy to set up a second.

If you're working as an individual contributor, I'm sure it can matter, but usually doesn't. It's widely accepted that people have personal opinions and politics, and that it can even extend to not liking some of the decisions made by the company you're applying to. There are workplaces that might screen for ideological purity, but it's rare. Both because it's illegal and because hiring is hard even without additional self-imposed constraints.

I think the only thing that can derail a job application is if your personal blog makes you look patently unreasonable, either by supporting causes that are socially unacceptable ("it's OK to hit women") or getting way too angry over mundane stuff ("everyone working at Microsoft should be shot"). But if you just happen to have an opinion about a politician, whatever.

Where it gets dicey is if you're in a leadership position, especially director and above. Then, you're sort of paid to keep your opinions to yourself, because when you have an organization of 100 people or more, at least several will disagree with your politics and will then judge your actions through that prism, leading to drama and possible HR fights.

> I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead.

That's the route I decided to choose when I started my professional career. I already had a personal (pseudonymous) blog. And that's where I put the stuff around work.

I decided to go this way for many reasons.

First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.

Second, because I want to share things for free and to help others first, not to help myself/my career.

Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media, I would focus on things that would help my career, not on things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else. So it would BE work. And it would only take a few months before I would be tired of it.

Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.

Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about how or what or when I should write about anything.

I feel similarly. Sometimes I feel like spinning up an anonymous account on bearblog.dev or matatora.blog where I can write freely without any hassle. For now, though, I have a microblog section as a secondary stream that mixes tech with low-stakes, personal, non-tech bits (music, pictures, showerthoughts, etc).

I have done the second way. I have split it up in categories, so people can subscribe to different categories rss feeds if they don't want the whole feed. I have ~1000 daily readers now. With all kinds of interests.