I’m not immune from the possibility of job related issues from my public face. Neither are you.
First of all as I write this, I happen to work for Wells Fargo. And while what I do and say may reflect upon Wells Fargo, I have many personal views that are at odds with what some people, perhaps even a majority of people, at Wells Fargo may hold.
From an employee at Wells Fargo’s perspective, I am very happy that the company celebrates diversity the way it does. As it grows as a company, that diversity has given Wells Fargo the flexibility to enter new markets as a result. From an investor’s view, that is one of the reasons that Wells Fargo currently is the second largest financial institution by market cap, as well as the second largest by total deposits. Interestingly enough in those two comparisons 1 and 3 swapped.
From a personal perspective, I am not recommending that you maintain any financial association with Wells Fargo, unless you personally agree with the way the bank is run, and does business. For that matter I think you should take a look at a complete cross section of your opportunities and only bank with those institutions that you happen to agree with. If that means a local credit union, go for it. If that means Bank of America, I’m OK with that too. You should be responsible for where you put your money.
I’m also not going to tell you how to invest. I honestly don’t know what your investment goals are, and couldn’t tell you what the best strategy is to achieve those goals. Honestly even if I had some idea, I don’t know who I would recommend for you. There was a commercial for an investment firm on TV a couple of years back, where a customer was talking with a portfolio manager, and it was clear that the portfolio manager wasn’t sure that the customer knew what risk meant. So he point blank asked “Would you be OK if your investment portfolio lost half of it’s value?” For someone just starting out, that might be OK. On the other hand if you are a year or two from retirement, that might not work out so well. Or you may be more than happy to put a quarter of your portfolio in such a fund, understanding that one possible outcome would be to lose it all, and another could be to quadruple it’s value.
About the only bit of advice I can offer is that which I’m pretty sure most people are aware of. It’s the same bit of advice people get told about everything they value. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Spread out the risk across multiple investment opportunities. Sure Microsoft would have been a great place to buy stock the day after it went public. Most of us wouldn’t have been able to buy any of the stock the day it went public anyway. But today you might look at the core offerings of what Microsoft is selling, and consider the stock to be a fairly low risk place to put money, and also a place where you shouldn’t expect your money to grow wildly.
You’ll note that I’m not telling you to invest in Wells Fargo. If you do, you will be amoung many people who’s names you will recognize, but there are also names you’ll recognize that are not on that list. So I certainly wouldn’t recommend specifically investing in Wells Fargo. Do I have money invested in Wells Fargo? Yes. Whether it is a preferred place for my money to be is a different matter. For the moment I plan on keeping between 5 and 10% of my retirement funds in Wells Fargo stock. But you don’t have to. And I would honestly say that putting more than 10% of your retirement fund into any specific stock is probably not a good idea. For a short term holding when you believe the stock will grow significantly, you might put that much, or more in it, but not for the long term.
First bit of advice, find a real financial advisor to work with. That’s not me.
And that’s part of the problem with working for a company, and having a public image on the Internet. There are people who know and trust my recommendations. I don’t know how many there are, but the reason they trust my writing is that I’m not writing as a public face of Wells Fargo, or for the companies I worked for before Wells Fargo. I’m not telling people to jo sign up for jobs at Wells Fargo. If you’re interested, you’re best option is to see what’s posted. If you don’t know, the starting point is the wellsfargo.com home page, and their is a ‘jobs’ link there. If you’re not, that’s OK too.
And so it goes.
But the real point I want to make is that I write about a fairly large variety of topics, some of which are going to be very uncomfortable for potential employers. I’m not going to appologize to them for that. It’s my personal life, and asside from the fact that my personal life involves the same person as my professional life, they generally don’t have a significant overlap. I’m not writing about the latest in networking technology that I’m playing with at work, or learning for work. Office politics have no place in my personal life, and my personal life is not something I generally involve people at work with. If something happens where there becomes an overlap, perhaps I meet someone at work and we hit it off and things go great and we both have a personal life together that situation will have to be addressed by both of us.
So why all the rhetoric? It turns out that there are a lot of companies that are looking at the personal presentation people have on the Internet, and making hiring decisions based on that. Some companies are looking for things like number of friends on social websites as a sign of the prospective employee’s ability to work with others. Likewise a quick look at the pictures they post or have posted of themselves is an indication of how aware of what they are presenting they are, and whether that presentation is something they want to hire. Lots of pictures of the prospect drunk and half naked? While most of us have been there, it’s not something we felt it necessary to put someplace where just anyone could see them. Granted it wasn’t quite as easy to put those pictures out there for many of us.
Something else that comes up is the ‘what is your opinion on…?’ questions. Most of us have learned over time that our opinions change. The solid agnostic finds God in one or more of it’s myriad forms. The staunch conservative realizes that sometimes people need a bit of help and becomes a social liberal, perhaps while staying a conservative businessman. The card carrying democrat becomes disillusioned with the party and realizes that she now has a different view on politics. The social maven ends up isolated for weeks or months in some accident, and comes out of the situation unable to trust others without knowing why.
I’ve had an on line presence of one sort or another since 1988. I’d like to think that most of it reflects a person who is curious about technology and people, psychology and physiology. I’m sure that it shows a person who’s seen some rough days, and some better ones. I’m absolutely certain that some of what is out there is stuff that I no longer agree with. Either because I’ve learned better, or because it was true then, but is not now.
I’ve also written some stuff that has probably cost me either real friends, or potential friends, who have looked at my views and decided that they couldn’t accept those views in a friend. And honestly, losing friends that way doesn’t make me upset. This world contains a very wide variety of people and some are just not right for each other.
That also applies to potential employers. I don’t expect that I would be a good fit for a large number of employers. And that number will probably grow if they take into consideration my personality as presented on the Internet. And honestly I’m OK with that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s going to be a problem for me to deal with if that eventuality happens. I’ll probably be a bit upset about it then. But as I stated, my views are subject to change.
