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Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

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Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#51

Post by herbst »

tapeleg wrote: post #20

Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand. Quite honestly, an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place. Especially true in the realm of IT, where there just simply ar…

I think it's OK to the check Facebook profiles and look for stupidly shared information around drugs or something like this.

I wouldn't want to hire a specialist who is publicly promoting drug usage.

On the other hand if you Google me you find something related to me liking ganja. Which imo helps future bosses to filter me if they aren't OK with that.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#52

Post by herbst »

ProAm wrote: post #45
tapeleg wrote: post #20

Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand. Quite honestly, an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place. Especially true in the realm of IT, where there just simply ar…

You know employers perform credit checks to perform the same 'character check' on you, if you have bad credit the chance of you getting a job offer goes down dramatically. Career growth is rarely based on job performance.

This is a American only thing isn't it? Anyone knows of this in Europe?

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#53

Post by deadbunny »

thisisit wrote: post #24
rhcom2 wrote: post #3

Is HN "social media"?

In some sense, yes. A friend of mine, once got obsessed over the karma he was generating on HN. Every two hours he would check his HN profile, just to see if his karma had increased or not.

> Every two hours he would check his HN profile, just to see if his karma had increased or not.

This seems highly inefficient. he should have spent that time writing a script to do it for him...

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#55

Post by gnicholas »

> In my own professional life, for example, as I improved my standing as an academic and a writer, I began receiving more interesting opportunities than I could handle. I currently have filters on my website aimed at reducing, not increasing, the number of offers and introductions I receive....My research on successful professionals underscores that this experience is common: As you become more valuable to the marketplace, good things will find you.

This struck me as humble-braggy, and not particularly enlightening. Are there any details on this research? It's not at all surprising that a tenured professor at Georgetown would have lots of inbound requests, so that one data point isn't particularly relevant for most people. What fields were these other professionals in?

I'm completely open to the possibility that in some fields, the most successful people are not on social media much. But laying out this blanket advice without any detail on where it might or might not apply isn't very helpful.

There are a lot of founders on HN, and I am interested to see the perspective of other founders. We wear lots of hats, including as social media marketers—which of course entails some social media presence. I'm pretty sure my Kickstarter would have never been funded if I weren't on FB, for example! But maybe I'm wrong, and I'm not considering the alternate promotion avenues I would have pursued if I weren't on FB?

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#56

Post by davis »

kcorbitt wrote: post #9

This is self-promotional, but also highly relevant! A few moths ago after reading Cal Newport's book "Deep Work", I decided to try to improve my social media usage by writing an app that could block HN/Twitter/Google News (the big 3 digital distractions for me) by default, and force me to go to an extra step to temporarily unblock them when I wanted to use them. It seems like a small thing, but that extra friction of…

This is amazing!

So it looks like the app is setting up a VPN and doing traffic filtering there. How exactly does it work?

Also, one question I have: what sort of transparency/guarantees do you have about data privacy? I saw the notification when I installed it but would like more considering all traffic will go through this local VPN.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#57

Post by ProAm »

herbst wrote: post #52
ProAm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know employers perform credit checks to perform the same 'character check' on you, if you have bad credit the chance of you getting a job offer goes down dramatically. Career growth is rarely based on job performance.

This is a American only thing isn't it? Anyone knows of this in Europe?

Oh yes, America only, at least as far as I am aware of. I should have specified that.

Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

#60

Post by taway123789 »

tapeleg wrote: post #20

Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand. Quite honestly, an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place. Especially true in the realm of IT, where there just simply ar…

On the flip side, employees can use this to their benefit also. I almost joined a company where my boss was a wildly right-wing put-up-the-wall type. Perhaps he'd be a good boss. But i'm brown. Do I want to take that chance? If he supports someone who think me and my family are all rapists, i'd like to know that.
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