Ask HN: What are your companies Engineering Blogging Guidelines?
A lot of people write blogs and a lot of companies have blogs. Do people who work at said companies, have a list of guidelines about this - things they can/cannot write about both internally and on their personal website? My company is trying to formalize their blogging guidelines and what engineers should not write about. I am trying to understand what industry standard is to give them feedback. If you have a company policy regarding blogging, I would appreciate it if you could share it.
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At the end of the day, unless your company is the kind that's desperate for 'thought leadership' style attention, it's not likely you'll get the OK to do much under official auspices.
Are they trying to use it as a inbound sales funnel? Are they using it for recruiting talent? If so, what talent pool are they trying to draw from? Is your product highly technical?
If this blog is meant to be a sales funnel ("this product is amazing; look at how invested our engineers are!"), then the content will need to be specific enough to demonstrate your product's engineering quality while being buzzwordy enough to identify with your audience. Ex: If you work for a company that builds insulin pumps and are trying to blog about the software powering those pumps from a sales context, you might talk about testing strategies your team employs on the RTOS powering the pump but not about how you mocked a subset of the CPU's instruction set to fully unit test it. That content might be more appropriate for recruiting embedded engineers ("that's a cool tech stack! how can I apply") --- it's all about capturing your audience.
An important thing to keep in mind is that your blog should be consistent with its messaging. If you're creating a highly-technical engineering blog, keep it highly-technical. If you're writing an engineering blog meant for sales, keep it focussed on sales. Readers are flighty, and one way to get them to unsub really quickly is to write content that isn't relevant to them.
Good luck!
It contained no data specific to the customer but they said they were worried someone might get the wrong idea. They're not allowed to even disclose who their customer is per their contract.
They said I could post it on a tech blog but just not there. I thought about posting it here but I don't know what to do since I don't have much of a social media presence. All my techie friends are on LinkedIn.