I read an article written by “Ivan Tribble” (a pseudonym) over at the Chronicle. Ivan was part of a committee, at a small college, looking to hire a new professor. It just so happened that a couple of the people vying for the position also had web logs. Ivan’s argument is that the majority of web logs are highly innapropriate for someone to get a job with – and that may be the case. However, one person, in particular, caught my eye:

Professor Turbo Geek’s blog had a presumptuous title that was easy to overlook, as we see plenty of cyberbravado these days in the online aliases and e-mail addresses of students and colleagues.

But the site quickly revealed that the true passion of said blogger’s life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica. It’s one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can’t afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job.

Now, I have a real problem with this. It seems as if the position that this person is going for is not immediately related to technology, which is fine. However, Ivan seems to think that simply because this person has a web log that discusses technology, that he would immediately run off to another part of campus. Can’t a person’s hobbies be different from their profession? If a person had a web log dedicated to cooking, writing, politics, or philosophy – would that person immediately run off to be with people of a similar interest? The whole notion that having interests that aren’t inline with your profession, and being vocal about them on the Internet, is a negative attribute is ludacrous.