C*ns*r*d

Fucking hell. Wow.

I dunno quite how to react to this one. A certain IT company has, at a stroke, blocked all personal, social networking, blogging, and pretty well anything else sites from within. This includes the Yammer site that its employees set up in order to facilitate networking within the company.

Now, I've said this before I'm sure - I don't much like censorship at all. I can see the kind of thinking that leads to a decision like this, but I don't agree with it at all. See, on one hand, we have studies claiming that such sites waste valuable time that could be spent working, and that they're a security risk. But then, so are personal mobile telephones. If you trust your employees to have their best interests and the company's at heart, and you accept that you employ intelligent adults, then you have to see that most employees won't use 3rd party apps once informed of the risks. You have to see that these intelligent people that you employed because they are self starters that know how to manage their time and get their work done, are indeed able to manage their time & get their work done. You have to see that they're able to keep their traps shut & not go spouting company info anywhere they shouldn't unless they're seriously disgruntled, in which case blocking access via the internet to these sites is like wearing a handkerchief on your head in a typhoon: it ain't gonna keep you dry & it Just Won't Work.
On the other hand, if you stopped & looked for a bit you might see people networking with other people in the industry, sharing ideas & researching techniques on how to do their jobs better. You might see them finding out about the latest programming languages or design patterns. Maybe you'll get someone to fill that vacancy HR can't seem to find anyone for because they've outsourced hiring to some god-awful agency who know zip about IT and computing, because you notice on Facebook that an old mate is looking for work & you know from reading her blog that she's a world authority on the thing you want done. But no. Let's block the net. Let's tell our employees "Hey, you know what we said about being a self-starter? Well, that doesn't extend to curiosity. We don't want curious people here. We want you to stop asking questions & just do things how they've always been done. Because our competitors don't read up on new tech. Our competitors don't learn new things. Our competitors are so inferior we can rest on our laurels."

Yeah, right. China had one of the most powerful empires in the world, once, but then for centuries they closed themselves off from the outside world, and refused to adapt and change. They refused to allow curiosity & networking. After a while, they were overrun by European colonialists, and it took them about a century to recover. No names mentioned, but you know who you are. Fix it.