The Cosmetic Class

Yes, it's absurd. I've my 20 able developer friends who weren't able to find job despite being very good developers. They were always messing up interviews.

Yes, they can solve whatever tricky questions you throw at them because they've lots of experience working on low level stuff.

People's eyes are so used to Instagram people that they think less attractive people are less healthy so they'll not be good at problem solving which takes great genes. This is what most have concluded from Instagram photos of bodybuilders/athletes/celebrities.

I am guilty of this myself, I've dated many beautiful ladies who i chased with passion. They all had invested lot of money into their looks. They always complained about not being well off like me but now you know why.This is what attracted me to them. Face is the first thing i notice, i was young and naive and got fooled by clever makeup. So why you can't do same as a man? Hack your way to success.

If you are a good programmer and still not getting paid well or getting promoted faster, then it's probably this.

Here comes the twist. We finally figured out it has to do with their appearance. No one gives this as reason to you, they simply reject you period.

So we got a writer and analyst, to figure out what the market truly wants then created a script and we gave it to the programmers to memorize.

Add some professional make-up artists, took some photographs at a studio with many others (pretending to be at some event of great importance). This went straight to their Instagram account.

And 16 out of 20 programmer friends showed up for interview and got a successful placement.

But still 4 of them didn't find job yet.

What is this? This is new normal and this is what people who are interviewing and recruiting want.

> People's eyes are so used to Instagram people that they think less attractive people are less healthy

Instagram has little to do with that; the two-way association between perceived health and attractiveness is deeply ingrained (the exact extent to which it is a very ancient feature of culture vs. an evolved biological trait independent of culture, I don't know, but it's one or both of those things.)

> Instagram has little to do with that; the two-way association between perceived health and attractiveness is deeply ingrained

See a professional makeup artist and see how he can improve your attractivness without improving your health.

Go to interviews/dates/event with and without professional makeup and compare your success rate.

Eh. For many young people, this IS the "real world". These are their experiences. It's not productive to discount so many other people's realities.

I really, really dislike this kind of medium-to-long form article that don't bother to even expose some sort of context (topic introductory line). This is incredibly disrespectful to the reader. You read the first half trying to put the pieces together, while given that this is a proto-longform article (does not have the length, but has the tone), there is fluff added here and there for flavor. This is so frustrating to read.

> The truth, then, is this: our generation was raised with the understanding that the image we portrayed mattered more than who we actually were not out of some malevolent, externally imposed agenda, but because it was actually true. The result was that nothing we ever did felt organic; instead, everything felt like a checked box.

As every generation before? Why even speak about generation here? This seems like an absurd reduction from the author, while this is the kind of thing you learn to recognize as you age and you start seeing the word with your own eyes. Most people becomes disillusioned as time goes on, seeing how much public action is fake.

A much more interesting analysis would be to show how the new engaging platforms distord this longstanding social behavior (signaling), amplifying it or distording it. But to say that they are an "Instagram" generation is giving far too much credit to Instagram. The world was not "disrupted" by Instagram, it was only a lens and a way to capitalize on this behavior.

I could go on with the "lost authenticity", but I feel I'm just trying to justify the time taken to read this empty piece.