How do you get a job as a software engineer if you've been cancelled?

Talk to a lawyer before assuming you can’t sue. Police won’t do anything for you but in any common law country a lawyer can. You can sue the platforms hosting the images (it’s a hard fight but people have won it before) and you can serve subpoenas forcing platforms who are hosting the images to say who uploaded them (e.g. their IP address). If your income has been high before there’ll be a lot of money on the line and you won’t have trouble finding a lawyer to do it on contingency (you don’t pay anything unless you win).

Another option is to bury your name in search results. Create online personas for a bunch of other people with your name. Write a bunch of blog articles using your name. Get all the bad press on page 3+ of Google results.

You could apply for a job with a government - they often have rules preventing them from considering certain information in their hiring processes.

You could also just apply to companies which espouse the values the defamer said you articulated. Depending on your race/gender/any other factors this could land you somewhere you’ll be treated poorly, but a job is a job and someone on one extreme or the other of the political spectrum won’t care how horrible a thing you supposedly said. Of course, that means committing to this option, as the employer will taint your resume and limit future opportunities.

Google has a "right to be forgotten" process: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en

I have used it before and Google responded and removed the links to the offending chat forum. If it doesn't show up in Google it's unlikely any employer will find it.

Also, I'd contact the social media companies directly too. At minimum, you could ask for your name to be removed. Doxxing is usually not allowed on their services. Took much more time and persistence than Google, but I was able to get the chat forum to remove names. Best response if you contact their legal dept., not their customer support. You can find legal contact in Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, financial statements, press releases etc.

This sounds similar to a situation I know of that occurred a few years ago and the person in question got terminated for a particular cause, but they were the kind of person who decides if what they were saying was a joke depending on if you laugh or agree and has been very careful around their manager.

The language you are using makes me think you might be getting pinged from hiring processes because you are very angry/anxious about this whole situation and probably not putting your best foot forward.

That combined with the anxiety of the world being on fire may be making things worse in all sorts of ways, both for you and the teams you are interviewing with.

No damage that is solely reputational is permanent, so it seems you are stuck catastrophising. That can put people in survival mode and I know when I’m at work I want to be in a creative mode environment so you may not be coming across as a cultural fit.

I don’t think you’ve come to terms with the situation and I’d recommend you talk to a therapist before resuming your job search.

Upload your resume to dice.com. You will get about 40 spam calls per day. Take one of those jobs - they are all around 100k/year. Definitely enough to get by in any major city.

Let me just say these guys do not care who they hire. Many of my colleagues had zero technical competence, and once we became friends, they told me they paid someone to attend their interview. Many never even went to college, but paid agencies to fake their transcripts.

Moreover, once I had a colleague who was fired for not doing any work for 6+ months. This individual then reported half the office to the US Gov for visa violations, copied us on those emails, and then threatened to sue everyone for discrimination. Us employees were naturally shocked by this, so we googled this persons name. The first result was a previous lawsuit where the individual did the exact same thing at a past company -- we were floored. Our employer did not do even the slightest due diligence on this person or really anyone else frankly.

You mentioned defamation. According to which country you live in there should be a way to sue around that and at least get a record that you have been a victim of cyber bullying, not necessarily the person you appear to be.

I strongly encourage you to do so if you can. I really hate people having such practice and thinking they can get away with it.

Otherwise/in the meantime the contracting idea works. Could be through a platform - i.e Upwork or Toptal - and/or behind a company name, etc. I'd also look into foreign opportunities.

This all sucks and I don't know what happened but look forward, some people don't want to give meaning to these things and would give you a chance. Good luck and take care!

Thank you all for your insight. I think a few next steps are clear to me.

1. Seek some therapy/mental help. Something I've been lacking and psyched myself out in to thinking I don't deserve it. 2. See if there are any legal avenues/help I can get on contingency, (I am pretty broke at the moment) 3. Maybe just own the situation and try to exude confidence, as hard as that can be. 4. Worst comes to worst, change my name and just try to do contracting work for awhile.

This has been the worst ordeal of my life, and as helpful as this post has been, has just given me more anxiety about the situation at hand. But it's always the darkest before the dawn I suppose. I'm going to shut my laptop and try to meditate for a little bit.

Can't you just address this up front if its that big of a problem? Or put up a little blog or something for people to find?

im also real curious what this is about? Apply to my company, i have no idea what your talking about or who you are haha

There aren’t any names of people that have been canceled that are so infamous that every company will know who they are. I don’t think this post is true or at least not all of it is accurate.

You should invest money into fighting this legally.

If you are the victim of cyber bullying then I would suggest contacting the platform that is housing the libelous posts. I think there are ways on every platform to remove libelous posts. You probably should hire a lawyer to handle this for you that specializes in cyber bullying.

If you were fired over this libel, then you could also sue the company as well and make sure there are press releases that state that you are fighting this as false so that they become higher in the search rankings. Then at least if future employers are looking at this, it will call into question whether or not you are actually guilty.

Had to make an account just to post this.

Get a new email/Linkedin etc of course, and apply to some contractor positions with a nickname on your resume.

By contractor I mean like things you would find on CareerBuilder or Linkedin Easy Apply.

If you get an offer, then you know that not every company is researching you very deeply.

But if even these guys are denying you, then it is maybe time for a legal name change, which still might not even help because you have to provide this info in a background check (which should only be for criminal things, not behavioral).

Probably you are only applying to small companies?

Have you tried a change of name?

If your name is associated with these incidents and you need a fresh start, why don't you consider that as an option?

Obviously this might not pass the background check phase. But not all businesses do a detailed due diligence

I would immediately try to get the defamatory content in question to slide through blogspam and other blackhat SEO techniques. You can also dilute the message through similar but more spammy and completely misleading defamatory content which links out to shady and scary websites to scare off anyone researching the topic.

Get cheap SIM cards for verification and create an array of a dozen sockpuppet accounts all over top social media platforms for downvoting or reporting defamatory content and use them to promote content which makes you look normal. Log in to different social media accounts from fast food restaurant WiFi all over town with different user agents and wireless mac addresses.

You can self employ as a contractor. Not the easiest thing, but clients may have less of a problem with reputational issues than employers.

Whatever you end up doing, please make a follow-up post on this. Everyone deserves a second chance (though this is confused by the fact that by the time we hear about it, many are already through their fifth)

I see many valid options for you to take: you could be upfront with it in a cover letter, disguise it by using a nickname, move into contracting and do business through an LLC, or come out swinging and make a bigger ruckus in your own favor. Whatever works. I'm preparing to be cancelled, because the truth is an ugly thing, and I want to know what works.

Personally, I would just start working for myself and hire an account/project manager to be client facing.

Are you proactively bringing this up during the interview process?

If not, you almost certainly should. It's like a conviction: if I find it when I run the background check, first I'm surprised, and second, the candidate has lost all opportunity to set context. Plus not mentioning it borders on lying.

I don't suspect the best context for you is someone set me up; you should try "I did some dumb things (assuming this wasn't outright criminality), stuff was someone exaggerated, I'm a different person."

I doubt you are on a list. This is just a thing in the back of your mind that is haunting you. Not exactly the easiest environment to find a job these days, given its all via zoom and all.

What I recommend is different. Practice your zoom skills, record yourself in mock interviews to see how you look over zoom, and work on that.

Cancel culture is stupid, and we only make it a thing, if we make it a thing. It won't last 2 generations and society will be sick of it and will have moved on.

As others have said contracting is the way to go. If this were any other trade/craft I'd say open your own business or firm (the software version of which is contracting).

Companies contract smaller companies without even due diligence quite often, unfortunately. At least in your case it could be used for something constructive.

Change last name, get DBA, grab as many small projects as you can to build an active portfolio of happy clients.

All the best.

Register a business and do contracts under that name? Are you able to sue this person?

Apply to large companies? I work for a large company and, when hiring, I never look up people on social media. Mostly because I don’t use social media, so I wouldn’t know the first thing about looking anyone else up.

Could you put you resume up somewhere, anonymized with an email address you could be contacted on?

If you’re happy with 90-95% WFH we’d be happy to take a look and see if you’re a fit for us based solely on experience.

That will not help you now, but I think a support network / company for canceled people shoud be established. There is a ton of people who are living in the fear of losing pretty much everything in a context of ever shifting political and medical Overton window, and then there are those like you to which it happened. Such a company may have difficulty to make business in the Western world, but the rest world usually don't care so it can be economically viable.

Hi Cancelled

Very sorry to hear. I cannot offer you a paid job. But if you like to get involved in projects where you could add value without compensation in return, do head towards https://skilledup.life.

At least this way, you will be involved in something and who knows where it might lead you to.

All the best Manoj

Have you tried to have this information removed from Google? You can select the "defamation" option:

https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=e...

There are plenty of capable, gainfully-employed software engineers that make racist and sexist tirades online, and manage to get away with it for a time...what is different about your situation?

If you were not responsible for the original posts, call it out, show some proof that you aren't the person that others claim you to be, and move on; otherwise, own the situation, accept responsibility for your actions, change your attitude, and get on with your life.

Have you considered starting an LLC and working for your LLC? Take on consulting gigs as the LLC.

Thanks to all for the advice. I think contract work + changing my name is really the only way forward. I was naive in thinking I could get it all back somehow, and I have been too disillusioned to see the obvious through this whole ordeal.

I myself was “canceled” privately from an employer where I had worked for over a decade. Fortunately the issue stayed in-house and my name did not go public.

I wrote an on-topic email about my life experiences and challenges concerning a medical issue, linking to relevant CDC and WHO medical guidance on the topic and suggestions on how the company could take steps to mitigate discrimination against people in similar circumstances.

Despite my good intentions, desire to bring hard data from authoritative sources into the conversation, someone presumably took offense and reported me to HR - I assume the allegation was promoting discrimination, even though I was not expressing any opinion of my own and simply linking to data from authority data from sources & pointing out problems and challenges that the data showed we would face in fighting that exact same discrimination. Sadly ironic.

I never learned the details of the allegation nor had a chance to defend myself. Multiple employees vouched for me, including people from the minority that presumably initiated the complaint, and many others sent me private messages saying how they thought my contributions were constructively adding to the conversation. The investigation was completely opaque, and the ultimate explanation was that I simply used bad judgment. That’s at-will employment for you. No opportunity to appeal, confront accuser, present evidence contrary to the accusations. A decade of good reputation and sound judgment meant nothing when (presumably) a minority reported me for discrimination.

The same HR investigator who investigated me previously investigated allegations of sexual misconduct by a female employee of a manager I knew well. The employee was performing poorly and filed misconduct allegations against the manager too. The manager had kept extensive documentation and was cleared. We were virtually certain the sexual misconduct allegations were bullshit and retaliation: and ironically the target was a supporter of the employee. The target ended up being fired. (Despite it being highly likely there was any more than he-said-she-said evidence with no corroboration.) The problem employee was on medical leave for months and eventually left the company.

Moral of the story: (1) Don’t expect fairness from HR. Their job is to protect the company from liability. They don’t care about you. A big company doesn’t care one whit for fairness and will fire you based on a calculation about liability of the situation going sideways (like PR explosion) (2) Don’t post about non-work topics at work, even if it’s being discussed, unless that’s your job. You never know what risk you’re exposed to. (3) Everything you post publicly online will be around forever. Even if you delete it someone might have an archive. Have sensitive discussions only in private group chats over end to end encrypted messengers, potentially ones that support message expiration (delete history after 1 day | 7 days | etc).

I was fortunate to be able to sign a mutual non-disparagement and NDA with my employer as part of an agreement to mutually terminate my employment, for consideration of staying on paid leave until a certain date so that I could job search without having to explain my departure, and receive my next stock grant. I’ll never be able to work at that employer again unless someone very high rank makes an exception.

The most frustrating part of the whole situation was never receiving a real explanation with any detail about what I was alleged to have done wrong, or what corporate policy I was alleged to have violated, nor have an opportunity to rebut the accusations. I also don’t believe my management chain stood up for me or defended me despite my long record of good judgment and high job level.

The silver lining is that I fortunately found an even higher paying job at a higher level with another tech company. My ability to get a promotion had probably already stalled out, and doubly so after that episode. So the threat of termination resulted in a higher level and considerably higher paying job at another employer, with an small group of people who know what really happened.

I got lucky though in that sense. I’m pretty sure that the person who reported me is a Twitter activist about that topic. I’m fortunate that they didn’t attempt to direct the outrage machine against me, otherwise I might have ended up in the same boat, publicly canceled. I stand by what I wrote as being reasonable, defensible, unbiased, and non-discriminatory (I was proposing ways to fight that discrimination!); merely discussing the topic and mentioning data and facts that the cancel crowd don’t like could get you canceled. My bad judgment was choosing to discuss the topic at work at all (even in a discussion about fighting discrimination).

Be careful what you write. I for one would appreciate if more companies adopted Coinbase’s “no politics or non-work chat at work” policy [1]. Employees could and should engage in the political activism they are passionate about on their own time, not by trying to manipulate the company’s strategy, or engaging in internal debates (unless necessary to contact the company‘s business and establish its social policies, as part of one’s job role) in my opinion, especially through strongarm tactics. This would free employees from the distractions of wanting to oppose extremist viewpoints they disagree with. At my last company I knew large networks of employees who disagreed with what these vocal extremists were writing internally but were afraid to say anything against it for fear of what ended up happening to me.

[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...

Username checks out.

If you were wrong, never changed, and just trying to get away with it: suck it up.

I honestly wonder 1. why someone hated you for years, 2. the hell are you doing online that you gave that person enough bullets to get you fired, 3. don't you also have good relationship in your workplace that you weren't able to convince them not to fire you?

Get legal involved on this, you guys are nuts.