That’s all well and good until that means no one with interesting work or good pay wants you to work for them.

Which for many people is a real concern.

Serious, non-rhetorical question:

Do you guys think that the correlation between "interesting work or good pay" and "would not hire a employee who frequents a nude beach" is positive or negative?

(Probably best to mention the country where you work, when you give your answer.)

That's not quite the question I think to ask.

What might be more useful to ask is 'in my area/social strata/available employer options, would they hesitate to hire me if my nude photos at a nude beach show up when someone does a typical google search for my name.'.

Replace nude beach with 'revenge porn', 'embarrassing rant at taco bell', or whatever.

Relating to the nude beach thread, don't forget that can happen due to things outside of their control (rando comment on a picture someone else took, creeper writing some 'ship fiction, god knows what).

There is a ton of noise out there of course, so odds are even something really embarrassing won't be found unless it makes the social media spotlight of the day, but most sane folks are going to think twice before doing something because of it. Which is enough for a chilling effect.

A great many employers (including ones that many people here consider interesting work and good pay) would hesitate to hire someone with that kind of baggage for public facing jobs. Some of them even for internal jobs.

Tech tends to be pretty unusual here, in that there isn't a lot of public facing jobs period, and they tend to be so in demand (recently) that employers can't be very picky. If you're high profile though, it can still be a problem, because they'd need to ask 'am I ok having this person represent me publicly, when x thing shows up in a Google search'. You might see that in leadership positions, for instance.

A findable Twitter post that seems believable enough from someone claiming you sexually harassed them, for instance, could be enough to round-file you for a leadership position at a FAANG.

Most of the population doesn't have a lot of good job prospects accessible to them - they might have only 1-2 decent employers for their type of work in their area, and have a house and kids - and in some geographic regions, such things that are considered boring in Tech can not only make you homeless/unable to support your family, but get you outright murdered or thrown in jail for life.

I can largely agree with your post except for one critical passage:

> Replace nude beach with 'revenge porn', 'embarrassing rant at taco bell', or whatever.

These three things are in no way comparable.

An embarrassing public rant is direct evidence of you being rude, unhinged, and/or prone to substance abuse. It is legitimate evidence against your character, even if it was a one-time event many years removed.

Revenge porn is not your fault and should not affect your professional reputation. However, I can see how it can paint an unflattering or unpleasant picture of you. Maybe you're being the submissive in a S/M relationship, which pretty much by definition will make you appear passive and low-status. Or vice-versa, maybe you're very dominating during sex and it might make others afraid to deal with you even if you're the nicest dude ever in the office.

Going to a nude beach says nothing bad about your character, assuming you are just sunbathing or swimming and not acting like a douche. And neither does it paint an unflattering picture of you, assuming your private parts are not utterly out of the ordinary.

Those are entirely socially subjective judgements.

Do you think a manager from Saudi Arabia, India, Japan, or China would agree with your assessment? Or who grew up in the Bible Belt in the US?

Especially if the candidate happened to be female? Culturally, odds aren’t great.

In fact, in some of these cultures, I could see the nude beach as being the biggest offense since it was the most clearly voluntary. Everyone has a bad day and gets angry sometimes after all (Taco Bell rant), or can be attacked by an angry Ex (revenge porn).

Not condoning, providing understanding for those who haven’t seen that kind of judgement happen from someone before.

I can't imagine a company saying "sorry, we have to let you go because we saw a naked pic of you on xvideos in a non-sexual context made by a creep"

Of course they wouldn’t say it, generally, you’d just be round filed along with 90%+ of the other applicants and never know why.

Unless they’re entertainingly dumb, in which case they’ll bring screenshots. Which has happened.

Most companies don’t want drama with, around, or from employees. They want people who get what they need done, done.

Something comes up that looks like drama? Round file.

And good luck contesting it if they do this - courts generally give quite wide discretion to hiring decisions like this. It would need to be explicitly based on a protected class, which is quite narrow, AND they’d have to have documented it as such - which they’d have to be complete idiots to do.

Oh, and you’d have to know about, and find the documentation.

Then you aren't very imaginative. Teachers have literally had this happen to them for a couple decades now. As have politicians.

Do you think HR is going to investigate? The type of company that rejects you for something like that is just going to look at the thumbnail and not mention why they haven't hired you.