A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period. That works out to about 4 hours per day.
Unwisely, perhaps, Charlie posted the warning email on his Facebook account, saying “It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”
Indeed.
I really wish I was a Facebook stockholder.
What an idiot.
What the hell can you possibly do on Facebook for 4 hours a day? Hell, what can you possibly do on ANY social networking site for 4 hours a day?
May be he is facebook share holder - directly or indirectly -
And he is just waiting for the day to get fired so that Facebook gets good publicity
I would love to have a job where four hours was half of my workday.
Bottles and models
Perhaps he just keeps logged on to facebook in the background..?How does his company measure his online hours on facebook? time spent between http requests on facebook are attributed to his time online? As a gmail user, I would be caught online for over 10 hours a day (at work), but my actual use of gmail is less than 10-15 minutes a day…
Just things to think about…
Michael,
Off topic, but was wondering: why did you decide to switch from bolding to underlining?
All of our friends are on facebook, all of our high school friends who we haven’t talked to in 3 years are on facebook, as is the cute girl we saw walking on campus (and it’s not too difficult to find her and learn about her). Now, once I leave college, I can’t imagine spending 4 hours on it, but, in college, i know many who have spent at least 2 hours to go…crap…I’ve done nothing today. I agree with Arrington, I wish I owned a piece of it…
No better way of becoming a shareholder than through employment. How about this?
http://www.facebook.com/jobs.p.....evelopment
Would be a relatively short drive on Middlefield for you, too.
Status:
Charlie is going DOWN.
an idiot, indeed.
his employer is Very lenient to only give him a warning and not an instant Fired notice
who knows, if this story is big enough - he could use his new-found fame(infamous, more like) for his benefit.
i can imagine it’d be very tough for him to find future employment - all the employers have to do is google his name - then kaPow! HUGE slacker
#7- good point but he has posted the email snippet on facebook, so he may not be denying it.
Bryan Ye is right on the money. Now, I have heard of people getting caught looking at job sites for hours on end… I wonder if the IT Dept would have acted differently if that was the case.
If he was a real facebook pro he would have put it in a Note not in his About section.
Shit, I need to not be on facebook so much…
you know it is ridiculously easy to find this persons profile on facebook just with the screenshot displayed. Doesn’t make much sense to hide his name and picture at all!
Sorry but you should’ve thought about that before posting it
I think the letter is fake ..
He just made it up to get attention .
If he is spending 4 hours of his 8 hour day on Facebook , he would be seriously underperforming his peers and somebody else that works with him would have noticed …
Anyway I thing the email is fake . The IT department does not warn people HR does, besides why will it take them 6 months to realize that he spends half his work day on Facebook .
500 hours sounds like bullshit… tabbed browsing? I leave my gmail open in a tab, he probally does the same thing with facebook
I’d quit the job in a heart beat, stalker software is evil, if i do my job and socialize at the same time it shouldn’t be a problem, just because I don’t wanna talk to the cube jockey sitting near me doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to anyone while I work. I’m old school and use aim to chat with old college buddies, but if young kids are doing the same thing with facebook good for them.
Nice of IT to give a warning without turning him in directly. How many times would that happen?
IT does warn people in some cases…my previous employer’s IT dept used to monitor sensitive data that people emailed to outside accounts. The head of our department emailed a compensation list with SSNs on it to his home account, and IT sent him a nastygram warnig. Ironic thing is that our department WAS HR.
I’m skeptical of Charlie as well…unless he’s a rainmaker in the trading department, they’d have likely walked him well before this for poor performance.
drug tests and internet usage monitoring are wastes of energy in the same way.
if you still perform your job well, who cares?
unless (for drug tests at least) you operate heavy machinery or drive or something.
I think this actually more common that most people are willing to admit. Just look at the replies to Michael’s post. 20 replies in about one hour. I bet there are hundreds of thousands of employees wasting hours every day monitoring all their RSS feeds.
At least it looks like this guys is getting laid from all his online activity.
Forget about facebook… virb.com is where it’s at.
@Jimmy
You are so right…i signed up for virb today. I cant believe how great it is. http://www.virb.com
Its what Myspace should have been. Its unbelievable… i cant wait for more bands to sign up
He is a goldman sachs trader, he’s lucky if 4 hours is 1/4 of his workday.
Nice blog.
Visit mine here.
Seems interesting.
This year’s graduating class will be a huge test for facebook: first “generation” of facebook will graduate(students who’ve had FB all four years). Let’s see how these folks continue to use FB.
-Zaid
My theory is that Goldman is taking them public and planted this story so guys like Mike Arrington would write about it, bring even more attention to them, and the public would rush out to bid up the IPO. Arrington even admits he’d like to own some and they probably will cut him in on the friends and family…he’ll flip it day one and make another small fortune!
Okay, none of that is serious but I thought it would be fun for the conspiracy people out there. I have to go, the cia is watching me…
This is great stuff.. Good find TechCrunch! This one is worth forwarding to those that get a laugh out of idiots.
Some of us actually get paid to do what Charlie does. I guess Charlie does, too.
who wants a career anyway.
Facebook is a non-player. Lake Erie has a lot of water, but no one is making any money bottling it. Last I checked, Facebook was in the $$ business, not the “user” business. I’m sure their investors won’t take payment in the form of “users” to fulfill their 2X liquidation preference. Fact is, advertising on SOCNETS stinks. Every single report from any company spending in this space or analysts analyzing (LOL) are saying this. I don’t doubt at all that there is a considerable % of users who are on FB for several hours per day. But they don’t even notice the ads, let alone click on them. If FB were smart they would eliminate all ads tomorrow and charge its users for the valuable service they provide. This chasing the ¢20 CPM tail is futile. Charge your users $20 per year and Zuck books $300M. That, is as good as it gets.
I have to agree with some of the lines of thought that go before, that this could very possibly be a prank.
at this moment i have open 52 tabs in firefox, there is facebook somewhere i think. last time i checked this website it was few days ago. so, did i spend all this time, since then on facebook?
Haha, that was actually an entertaining post. More like these, please.
This is beyond idiotic. This cretin deserves to lose his job. He is a grown man with a good job and he is acting like a 12 year old girl.
I wouldn’t admit going to facebook once, Let alone be “proud” of spending half of my time browsing it.
What can you do on Facebook for 4 hours a day?!? By now, he should have all Facebook’s user’s profiles memorized.
Err, why doesn’t his IT department just block Facebook… It’d be easier. Plus, they might as well block all the other social networks (the main ones, at least) while they’re at it. If you want to stop someone going to a site, the smart thing to do would be to block the site. Simple as that. Whatever…
Sorry, for double commenting…
But, this guy must want to be fired or something… But, he can do as he chooses, and possibly deal with the consequences later…
Yes, I realize that blocking the site may stop the problem of him being on Facebook for 4 hours, but not the slacking problem…
Just my opinions…
In response to #7, et all.. there’s a big difference between Gmail and Facebook. Gmail uses AJAX (a specialized use for Javascript) whereas Facebook doesn’t have that type of functionality. So in order for him to be tracked for 500 hours of use he’d have to be using Facebook quite frequently (at least once every 1-2 minutes or the TCP/IP connection would close). So, it’s not hard to say that yes he did browse Facebook for 500 hours non-stop / intermittently. Gmail’s a different story (and IT can track whether you’re writing email all day or just getting page updates :)..).
I just looked for this guy on Facebook, no sign of him. Where did Mike get the screenshot from? Quick and easy viral marketing if you ask me.
Garrett - Facebook does in fact have some Ajax functionality, I remember noticing some last night.
Ppl who comment on TC are stupid. You’re stupid! You read that! You know NOTHING! FB comfortably gets it $10-20cpm, I know, cos I pay it as an advertiser. idiots. and this is not a hoax. can the haters go away and start their own companies? losers.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=648400423
You need to be on London network to view his profile.
Charlie [deleted by MA], Oxford graduate at Goldman Sachs.
Pretty great publicity stunt for FaceBook, I suppose. That, or this guy really wants to change careers.
An awful lot of people might be facing the same thing I guess.
Not just career…this need to be emphasized in University with student’s academic life as well.
This is hilarious, but seriously you cannot measure time on facebook like this. If the guy forgot to log out, it cant be said that the entire day he was on facebook. Also if this is a publicity stunt, then its a brilliant one.
Maybe he was getting paid to use facebook, this company apparently pays you but i have not been able to get an account to do that yet!
http://thymesonline.co.uk/inde.....;Itemid=43
Yep, Oxford graduate will have a tough time finding employment…
A great opportunity for Jobster (whom recently partnered with Facebook) to seize?