Featured on @StorylineReddit: December 1, 2025
They still see each other at work events. Same rooms. Same group chats. Same shared jokes that predate whatever went wrong. No one else knows they used to date.
On paper, it’s ordinary colleagues who crossed a line and then quietly stepped back over it. The company culture even encourages friendships. That part isn’t unusual.
What is unusual is the internet.
She works in HR at a major tech firm. He posts almost-nude photos. Drunken updates about sexual exploits. Complaints about the company’s products. Public hints about applying to competitors while naming his employer in his profile. The information isn’t hidden. It’s searchable.
Her question isn’t whether his behavior is wise. It’s whether she has to do anything about it.
Not revenge. Not romance. Just proximity and what that does to responsibility.
This conflict doesn’t revolve around the breakup itself. It centers on a professional boundary that becomes blurry because of shared history.
The narrator works in an HR-adjacent role within a large technology company. She has relationships across departments but no direct authority over hiring decisions. Her ex remains socially present in the same professional circle, and colleagues are unaware they once dated.
Meanwhile, his public online behavior connects him visibly to the company while showcasing explicit photos, intoxicated commentary, product criticism, and job-seeking signals toward competitors. The material is easy to find. Many senior employees would not think to look.
She is occasionally asked for informal assessments of him as an employee. That is where the tension concentrates. She knows more than others do, and what she knows is publicly available yet her personal history complicates disclosure.
She has already alerted certain stakeholders and offered broader social media training. Eventually, his conduct escalates into an NDA violation and termination.
The dilemma that preceded that outcome never fully simplifies.
Text Version
when your ex is a coworker — and a silly one
EXTERNAL
when your ex is a coworker — and a silly one
Originally posted to Ask A Manager
MOOD SPOILER: positive for OOP, schadenfreude for the ex
Original Post March 27, 2009
I work for a big technology company. We are the market leaders in what we do, and we are looking at doing more cool stuff everyday. And I work for HR in the global headquarters.
I have a ‘frenemy’ here. We used to date – our company is ok with employees dating and many employees are married to each other – and he treated me pretty badly. I am with a great guy now, but I still hang out with my ex socially.
Me and my ex are from two different cultures, and I am four years elder to him- I am in my middle 20s ( and no, he is not under 20 years ). We have not told our colleagues that we were dating, or that we broke it off.
My ex has posted his almost naked pictures online, posted drunk updates in various social networking platforms detailing his sexual exploits and his level of sexual frustrations, etc. He has even posted on public forums that he is going to apply for a job with a few competitors and has publicly disparaged our products in the past.
My question? To what extent can and should I be concerned? Personally, I would not hire a guy who is like this ( but that is my opinion). But I want to keep my comments professional. I am not sure that many people know that he talks that way about our products online. And yes, he proclaims that he works for us in his social networking profiles. I am yet to see him use our internal feedback and discussion channels to air his concerns about our products and services though.
My dilemma is this – I know more about how he is because of my past and current proximity to him. I have been with the company for around four years and do have a good HR network. I am not sure if I have to tell people who think of hiring him that he exhibits such behavior online. Many of my senior colleagues are not very well versed in social media and are not aware of all this happening in front of a large and varied public audience.
Should I mention that this guy is behaving in this way when someone mentions to me that they are planning to hire him? Or should I keep quiet? I want to be professional, and don’t want my behavior to be any way affected by my personal equation with this guy.
OOP Added in the comments
Comment 1 Same Day
Hi, I am the person who asked the question. I have talked to him about this many times, but he thinks that as I am old I am out of times. I have even asked our common friends to discuss this with him to no avail. The disparaging information is out for anyone to search and find – yes, even some of the photographs. Hope that a competitor would hire him and will be gone from here.
Comment 2 Same Day
Hi all, me again.
When I was dating him – and now – we are professionally separated. I have no professional say in anything related to his hiring or day to day work. The team, and the extended team I work with has couple of thousand employees and I do maintain professional relationships with them.
A bit about the company culture. It is expected – and encouraged – that you maintain your friendships – yes, I am using the word here deliberately – with your colleagues. At the same time, there is the implicit trust that you will not use it favor one person over another. I am not saying if this is right or wrong, this is the company culture and I have to adapt to it to succeed.
Treating me badly: I guess I can say he behaved like a mega jerk – there was no physical abuse – and that is why I ended it. We have many common friends, none of whom know that we were dating, and hence we still hang out in a large group.
Did I alert some people in the company? Yes.
Do I want to keep on alerting people? No.
Ultimately, it is the work of the hiring manager and HR to make sure that such incidences do not happen. People have asked me my opinion of him as a company asset, and I have presented both the risks and advantages involved in having him as an employee. He is not the only person they ask me about, and always, I reply in a similar fashion.
Let me also say that even though I am in HR, I do not do any hiring.
What I offered to do yesterday in our big HR community newsletter was to train some of my colleagues on social media and how to check up on employees on line.
Many have taken up the offer, let us hope it brings us great employees.
Mini Update May 6, 2009 (40 days later)
Hi all, its me the person who asked the question.
I did talk to people in our PR department general and told them that it is just good practice to check online about what people are talking about us.
He got fired – dismissed – last month because of disclosure of company information in violation of his NDA.
Update Dec 21, 2009 (9 months from OG post)
Well, he acted too big for his boots, and got booted out for leaking confidential product information, which he heard from another department, to a friend of his to blog. Booting him out was used as an example in our company on how not to be an asshole in using social media.
Then he posted his firing letter online in his blog ( as a means to get sympathy – hahaha – for him) – and some of the companies where he was interviewing saw the blog post and rescinded the offer. He went back to his old blogging job, and is still around in our small technology town, but no longer the toast of parties or events.
Lessons learned from here? Be really nice on social media. Do not be racist, sexist or homophobic. And just because you blog, you are not the smartest person in the world.
And on the dating side : I did check with some trusted seniors on this one. As long as the two people are not in a position to influence each others performance reviews etc, it is all fine. Two of my colleagues recently got married and it was good to be there to wish them well.
Personally, I have diversified my dating pool mostly outside of my company and am very much single and enjoying the singledom.
The Original Letter Writer appeared in the BoRU
u/MiaOh who gave their permission to add to the BoRU, and wants everyone to know she will write to AAM for updates season
16 year update Nov 20, 2025
You are not going to believe it, but I kept reading, and reading and reading, thinking the same thing happened to me. And then I checked the dates after seeing how he got fired, and what do you know, it was my letter to AAM, in 2009.
I left the country and HR a few years later, moved to different country in different department, was introduced to a colleague by another colleague (yes, I had a problem.) Got married, continued working there, had a family (human and cat). We both got burned out and decided to semi FIRE, moved to 3rd country and now staying in a small, progressive town with loads of greenery. We joke we moved for our cats retirement. We are all thriving – I have a fully remote, 4 day job which is pretty good (not going to be VP but doesn’t need to work over contracted hours) spouse has his own company that’s doing well. Cats enjoying their retirement years and child enjoying her schoolmates.
Him? Fuck if I know. I did a google search of his name and can’t even find any information about him online – the first few pages of Google were that of people who were artists, researchers and teachers – people who definitely brought more value to the world than he did. If he had a Nazi pedophile dad to support him he could have made it big inventing electric cars but alas, he didn’t have enough family money that warranted him being an asshole.
ETA: Please don’t PM me asking for our net worth details and location.
Source
There is a particular discomfort in sitting at a long table with someone who once treated you badly and passing the salt like nothing happened. They still attend the same gatherings. They still share friends. She laughs at something he says. He refills her glass. No one else notices anything unusual.
Online, it’s louder. Public profiles listing the company. Nearly naked photographs. Drunk posts about sexual frustration. Casual criticism of internal products. Comments about applying elsewhere. It sits there on the screen, timestamped and searchable.
At first glance, this reads as immaturity. But inside a large organization especially one built on discretion visibility changes the texture of it.
She speaks to him privately. He brushes her off, calls her “out of times.” She mentions concerns to a few people internally. She offers to train colleagues on reviewing digital footprints. Weeks pass.
Then he leaks confidential product information and is fired.
That part feels procedural. Clean. Contained.
What lingers is the stretch before that outcome. The moments when colleagues casually ask her what she thinks of him as a company asset. The slight pause before answering. The decision to present both risks and strengths. To keep tone neutral. To avoid personal commentary.
She does not exaggerate. She does not defend him either.
From his side, the posture seems uncomplicated: expression first, consequences later if at all. Perhaps he assumed visibility was harmless. Perhaps he assumed it wouldn’t reach the right eyes.
Years later, she searches his name and finds nothing relevant. The pages fill with other people artists, researchers, teachers.
It would be easy to call that poetic. It isn’t framed that way here.
The more interesting thread is quieter and not entirely resolved: when you hold information that others haven’t noticed yet, and you are connected to the person in question, neutrality becomes something you perform carefully.
She kept her role clean.
Proximity, though, doesn’t disappear.