Re: Portfolios and writing samples...a little more

[Mark Baker <mbaker -at- OMNIMARK -dot- COM>]

Johnson, Dick D wrote

>With the exception of any work done on his/her own, it is unlikely that no
technical writer >owns any work done for any client for hire.  Therefore, it
is imperative that he/she obtain >permission to show this in an interview.
... This is factual stuff, here and it cannot
>be opinionated away.

Not factual at all. You can freely show people writing you don't own,
whether you wrote it or not. I don't own the copyright to the latest John
Grisham thriller, but I can lend you my copy if you want to read it. I don't
own the copyright on the chapters I wrote in HTML 4 Unleashed, but I can
lend a copy of the book to a job interviwer as a sample of my work if I want
to. I don't own the copyright on the OmniMark documentation I write for a
living, but once it is published I can show a copy to anyone I like because
it is a published document.

Propriatary information, on the other hand, cannot be shown to job
interviewers at all. Have you have ever got permission from an employer or
client to show their propritary information in a job interview. I don't mean
a hand-wave from your manager, I mean written permission from the officer of
the company responsible for intellectual property releseing you from the
confidentiallyity agreeement you sighed with the company and allowing you to
show company confidential material to job interviewers? I'll bet you
haven't.

(I've managed more than one documentation group, but I never at any time had
the authority to give ex-employees the right to show company confidentail
information to prospective future employers? Do any managers on the list
have that authority? Would any of you give that permission even if you did
have the authority? Seems to me that at every company I've worked for,
departing employees were reminded very explictly that they were still bound
by their confidentiality agreements.)

I'm not sure whether you are imagining a restriction that does not exist on
published material or imaging a loophole that does not exist for propriatary
material, but either way the contention (in your previous post) that there
is material you can show in an interview room but which you cannot let an
interviewer borrow for later review, is nonsense.

As far as the possibility of that interviewer illegally copying such
material copying goes, the same applies to the John Grisham book. If you
lend me a copy of The Runaway Jury and I make an illegal copy, that is my
crime, not yours. It has nothing to do with the integrity of the
interviewer/interviewee relationship. You might as well suggest that you
should not hang you coat in the closet in reception in case the receptionist
rifles your pockets while you are in the interview room.

---
Mark Baker
Senior Technical Communicator
OmniMark Technologies Corporation
1400 Blair Place
Gloucester, Ontario
Canada, K1J 9B8
Phone: 613-745-4242
Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- omnimark -dot- com
Web: http://www.omnimark.com

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