Opinion: Treat Staff like Adults

There’s a nasty trend that I’ve seen at a number of sites in recent years. It’s the tendency to try to block and or censor anything that the company thinks could be detected as an issue. Some companies are so concerned about their IP (intellectual property) that they try to stop any potential leak of that property.

While on the surface, that all might seem to make sense, but often it ends up being not sensible and unproductive.

Here are examples of staff who just couldn’t work effectively because of rules that block them doing perfectly valid things:

• I’ve seen staff who couldn’t look up the syntax of things like BULK INSERT because the system flags it as a shopping site (which is forbidden).
• I’ve seen staff who can’t look up how to work efficiently with operating system threads because the discussion they want to read happens to be about threading and how they are used in games (and, you guessed it, gaming sites are blocked).
• I’ve seen staff who can’t look at content from a presentation because it’s shared on a site like SlideShare (and all sharing sites are blocked).
• I’ve seen staff systems work at one third of the normal speed because of all the protective code that’s been added. (I have a personal dislike for the impact of tools like CyberArk).
• I’ve seen staff who can’t download a presentation or code sample because it’s on a Google Drive, Azure Storage Account, etc. (because, once again, they could possibly be used for sharing files).

And so on, and so on.

Automated censorship has never worked effectively yet. (Machine Learning and AI might change that one day, or at least make it bearable). And this is no different.

Treat the staff as adults

Rather than try to guess and block all the things you fear staff might look at or use, please consider treating them as adults. A better set of rules for technical staff like developers is:

• We recognize that you are a professional staff member.
• We don’t block what you do.
• We will, however, monitor all your usage.
• You might be required to justify your usage.
• We’ve detailed the types of things that are never allowed (that don’t fit with the company ethos or the law) and some do attract significant penalties.

These auto-censoring and blocking tools that try to keep you safe end up just causing angst and frustration, don’t work very effectively, and from what I’ve seen, almost always end up with staff finding ways to circumvent them.

Worst of all, treating the staff like children won’t make them love your company. Neither will anything that keeps blocking them from doing their jobs.

2026-08-28