The Story of the “Cisco Fatty”

Twitter has recently been sold to the social media crowd as the next step forward for 21st Century Business. This has then been followed by a continual flood of articles, columns, features, blog posts, and yes, even tweets, on how exactly this works. Thus far, little agreement has been found. That is until now. It now appears that everyone is saying the same thing: don’t do what the “Cisco Fatty” did! Which of course begs the question – What did the “Cisco Fatty” do and why are he or she referred to with such a name? So here I am to give you all the details.

The “Cisco Fatty” is the nickname given the Twitter user “theconnor” who received a job offer from the computer networking company Cisco. He then followed this good news with the following tweet: “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” All good and fine, right? Well, it was until Tim Levad, a Cisco employee found the public tweet and replied back: “Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.” Uh oh.

This little incident was then picked up by other Twitter users who had fun with it, turning it into a youtube sensation, and piquing the interest of the news world at large. Lesson of the day? Don’t make fun of your company on prospective company on a public platform (like Twitter).

“theconnor” has since put his profile on private.