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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)

#71

Post by virtuabhi »

luckydude wrote: post #64
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'm pretty much retired but I was an engineer and then a manager and then a CEO/VP engineering for ~20 years. If you think I'm not going to google you before I offered you a job you are mistaken. Of course I'm going to do that. Think of it this way. One of the questions we asked ourselves about every hire is "would they pass the grocery store test?" Which is: if we saw that person in the store would we go chat with t…

I don't like your grocery store test at all. Before I give reasons, can you elaborate on what things make you "cringe"?

Edit: Surprised at the support for grocery store test. If I was hiring and doing the grocery store test, then I would reject everyone who has posted in support of this test as they make me "cringe".

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

#72

Post by nwsm »

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…

Agreed. Luckily my employer's policy is to not look at it, and never take it into account.

Although additionally, if saying 'fuck' on twitter excludes me from your selection, I probably don't want to be there anyway.

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

#73

Post by snowwrestler »

RandallBrown wrote: post #62

Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media? I use Twitter to follow interesting celebrities and industry professionals. (Adam Savage Mythbusters fame, pro climber Alex Honnold, several notable iOS programmers). I rarely interact with any of them, but I find out about lots of interesting things. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends around the country. I can keep my dad updated to wh…

Unhappiness from social media for me happens when social media makes me aware of things that make me unhappy. For example, I get a lot of news from Twitter, and sometimes the news makes me unhappy. I have a great diversity of friends and family on Facebook, and sometimes one will post something I find really distasteful.

If I was reading a novel instead of Twitter, I wouldn't experience that unhappiness.

The thing with social media is that the content is in such little morsels it's easy to say "just a few more," and the platforms are carefully designed to serve you the kind of content that will keep you saying that. So it's easy to "accidentally" spend way more time reading social media rather than (for example) reading a novel. That can tilt the balance toward more "makes me unhappy" content and less "makes me happy" content.

And sadly, the more tired I get, the easier it is make that sort of mistake--and also, the more that sort of unhappy stuff tends to affect me.

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

#75

Post by sigzero »

RandallBrown wrote: post #62

Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media? I use Twitter to follow interesting celebrities and industry professionals. (Adam Savage Mythbusters fame, pro climber Alex Honnold, several notable iOS programmers). I rarely interact with any of them, but I find out about lots of interesting things. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends around the country. I can keep my dad updated to wh…

I am the same way. I don't opt into any of the survey things or re-post the "Here's the things about me" ones. I am using it less though. Just because I want to do so.

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

#76

Post by ravenstine »

RandallBrown wrote: post #62

Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media? I use Twitter to follow interesting celebrities and industry professionals. (Adam Savage Mythbusters fame, pro climber Alex Honnold, several notable iOS programmers). I rarely interact with any of them, but I find out about lots of interesting things. I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends around the country. I can keep my dad updated to wh…

I do think that it is usually a good thing to ditch social media entirely, but I also think that current attitudes are dismissing the possibility of healthy social media habits.

At this point, the only social media I use is Facebook through mbasic.facebook.com. This is really just to act as a rolodex and see peoples' pictures. I hardly interact with it. The reason I use mbasic is to save space and bandwidth, and to prevent Zuck from invading my phone. Because there's no infinite scroll, it prevents me from wasting more time on it. I also simply hide or unfollow anything I don't care for. A friend posts too much political/conspiracy nonsense? Blocked. I followed some company page years ago and now I just get inundated with promotions? Unfollowed. Too many vacation and "my life is great" photos? Blocked.

I've consistently avoided the social media anxiety I once had.

Facebook is(can be?) a useful product, as much as I don't like Facebook as a company. It wouldn't really be that difficult for someone to build a competitor to Facebook that really just did these few things really well, skipping all the other crap few people really use. Maybe people just assume that in order to have a viable social media product, they have to compete with Facebook on all fronts?

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

#77

Post by amadeusw »

nwsm wrote: post #74

> If you’re serious about making an impact in the world, power down your smartphone, close your browser tabs, roll up your sleeves and get to work. I found this pretty pretentious.

How come? I found this very empowering. It's just the motivation I needed this morning, and perhaps every day. It makes me realize that I'm here at work for a reason, and browsing hn is not one of them.

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

#78

Post by some_random »

lkrubner wrote: post #66
gnicholas wrote: post #55

> 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 market…

" This struck me as humble-braggy, and not particularly enlightening. " But it is true. I'll save my criticism for things that are false, or utterly banal. And people at the beginning of their career might not fully realize how much things change when their career takes off. It's worth saying.

The title of the article does however include "Your Career". While one's career may improve if they quit social media after their career takes off, this article is framed as being for literally anyone.

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

#79

Post by geofft »

lkrubner wrote: post #66
gnicholas wrote: post #55

> 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 market…

" This struck me as humble-braggy, and not particularly enlightening. " But it is true. I'll save my criticism for things that are false, or utterly banal. And people at the beginning of their career might not fully realize how much things change when their career takes off. It's worth saying.

The thing that's false is the implication that careers will certainly / deterministically take off. Especially in academia there are more people who both want a certain role and are qualified for it than roles. If you happen to stumble into the right path - maybe some particular research interest of yours in graduate school happens to line up with someone who just retired at a good university, and so there's an opening; maybe you pick an experiment that happened to succeed instead of fail and so you got more publications because people hate negative results - your career will take off without the need for social media to provide you with opportunities and networking. On the other hand, maybe someone from your informal network will be the step you need to get out of a fruitless program and into something where your career will take off.

If this person is conditioning their anecdata on "successful professionals," it's totally unsurprising that they'll find that successful professionals are successful. That doesn't help those of us who aren't lucky and need to figure out how to push ourselves over the threshold until our career catches.

(Note that I'm not saying that this person's success was simply the result of luck; they also had to be qualified and work hard. But out of the qualified people who work hard, not all of them can succeed.)

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

#80

Post by baq »

virtuabhi wrote: post #71
luckydude wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty much retired but I was an engineer and then a manager and then a CEO/VP engineering for ~20 years. If you think I'm not going to google you before I offered you a job you are mistaken. Of course I'm going to do that. Think of it this way. One of the questions we asked ourselves about every hire is "would they pass the grocery store test?" Which is: if we saw that person in the store would we go chat with t…

I don't like your grocery store test at all. Before I give reasons, can you elaborate on what things make you "cringe"? Edit: Surprised at the support for grocery store test. If I was hiring and doing the grocery store test, then I would reject everyone who has posted in support of this test as they make me "cringe".

it doesn't really matter. would you like to work for someone who cringes when he sees you? it's not a good career choice.
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