I like Cal Newport's Deep Work book. It gave me some extra confidence to blow off social media, email, and Slack, and focus on one thing, without feeling like I must be missing something important.
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)
#62Am 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 what I've been doing without having to call him. (I still call him, but we can talk about the pictures and things we've seen over the last week or so.) I plan vacations and events with friends. Next weekend I'm going to a bachelor party in the Adirondacks with people from around the country.
I've never been worried about my employer seeing my social media profiles. If I wouldn't do something in public, I wouldn't post it to social media. Maybe I'm unique in being able to restrain myself.
I always hear stories about how people are "so much happier" after they quit Facebook. What is happening on your Facebook that's making you unhappy?
Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)
#63Earlier 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.
> Career growth is rarely based on job performance. I hear what you’re saying about credit checks. But I think the sentence I quoted is a little too extreme. Performance usually plays a significant role. It’s just not the only factor. Otherwise, (for example,) why is the careless, checked out teenager at a fast food joint not promoted to manager?
> Otherwise, (for example,) why is the careless, checked out teenager at a fast food joint not promoted to manager?
Because managers are increasingly hired from the outside, increasingly with college degrees, and a diligent, hard-working teenager wouldn't have been promoted either?
I'm with you on the broader point, things like credit checks and social media lookups are mostly disqualifiers for hiring, while performance is still a big part of career growth after being hired. But it seems a bit odd to use entry-level service work as the example, since performance often is meaningless there once you're not getting fired.
Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)
#64Career 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 them, because we thought that would be fun, or would we cringe and try and hide from them. It's a good test, work is not just cut and dried, there is a social aspect of work even if it is just you'd say hi outside of work.
Your social media gives me a glimpse into the rest of your life and you'd better believe that is interesting info to a prospective employer.
Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)
#65This 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…
Seems like a bunch of you are replacing procrastination through social media with procrastination through coding. Marco Arment also has a Mac app, which quits any app in a list that's been idle. https://marco.org/apps
Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)
#66> 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.
Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)
#67> 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…
I don’t see many founders on HN or social media after they get funded.. if anything they may post about their company
Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)
#68Career 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…
What makes you think it gives an accurate or actionable glimpse?
Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)
#69Am 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…
For most people there exists a news headline that will ruin their day or at least disrupt their morning e.g "Young child decapitated at amusement park" or "North Korea moves one step closer to nuking Western US" or "Bacon Gives You Cancer".
Facebook heavily encourages people to write and share headlines like this (true or not) and then promotes them prominently in your news feed.
This can take a heavy emotional toll on people over time and gradually make them more unhappy
Re: Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)
#70Am 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…
If you are able to avoid the distractions then I agree. I am working to wean myself off of Facebook in that I'll only check in once a day. And eventually just once a week. I don't use social media on my phone.