Thank You (Sort of) to the Guy Who Hacked My Blog

Thank You (Sort of) to the Guy Who Hacked My Blog I was thinking about blogging about job hunts today. Or managing up. Or one of the hundred or so topics that are always safe to go to if you blog about careers. But I decided that I cant ignore the fact that someone hacked into my RSS feed and put a bazillion porn links at the bottom of my post about taking notes. It would be too weird that 20,000 people received the list of porn sites and Im not saying anything about it. So, here I am, saying something: Im really sorry for the problem. I want to tell you that this is the first time my blog has been hacked. But its not. I havent written about the hackers because I didnt want to encourage them. Its amazing to me that people take the time to mess with this blog. But things got a little clearer now that theres porn involved. The hacking starts looking a little too close to the types of comments that I used to get on Yahoo Finance. The kind that started with the fact that I was a woman and then went on to say how stupid I am and eventually came to outrageous sexist slurs that Yahoo had to pay someone to monitor and remove. I get asked a lot about the disparity between men and women in the workplace. In fact, just today I did an interview where I said that I do not think there is disparity. There is not disparity in paychecks. (In fact, in big cities young women make more than young men for the same work.) And the disparity that comes later in life is the result of women choosing to spend more time with their kids than the men do. So you wont find me complaining about gender in the workplace. But I do think that the web is a different story. The anonymity brings out the sexist behavior that men know very well to hide at work. So youd think Id be angry, right? But Im not. The only time I got angry was when I couldnt find my IT guy to tell me how to fix the problem. But beyond that, I believe that most people are good and that holding grudges gets me nowhere. So much of the career advice I give is based on the idea that you can teach yourself to be niceeven to people who hate youand being nice is an end in itself. I really believe that. And I am not angry with the person who messed up my feed. I am mostly blown away that he would take the time to do it. I also write a lot about community. The reason I blog is because I love the conversation, and I love how we depend on each other to show up regularly, ask good questions, and provide a reality check when it comes to the absurdities of life at work. So it shouldnt have surprised me that a lot of people sent me an email this weekend. But the amount of concern and encouragement that people showed in their emails was touching. And in a way, getting hacked makes me feel so lucky that Im part of a community that cares. So thanks. Oh. And also, thanks for being my test case, because I cant tell if weve fixed the feed problem until I send another post through the feed. So, heres hoping