LinkedOut

1. I Was There, Gandalf

Social media and I go back to the Myspace days. I don’t mean the sad corporate version it became after it was sold. I mean Myspace in all its early 2000s glory. Every page played music and most of them looked like someone was hosting a rave. “My Top 8” and who got added/removed or had their rank change was a new kind of gossip.

When Facebook came along, I stuck it out over in Myspace land for a long time. I’ve never been particularly good at social media, and I didn’t really see how Facebook was in any way better.¹ But it eventually got to the point where all the new people I met didn’t have Myspace anymore. So I caved and signed up for a Facebook account.

In retrospect, this was the beginning of the “new web” in a lot of ways. We traded quirky, and often terrible, customized pages for the uniformity of whatever the Facebook UI happens to be at the moment. We traded Tom² for Zuckerberg. And, in hindsight, I think we’re all the poorer for it.

2. Am I So Out of Touch?

The platform we all used wasn’t the only thing that was changing though. At some point we were all told that we needed a LinkedIn to be relevant in the professional world. At first, it was mostly an online resume. But the engagement machine always demands more eyeballs, and it was quickly insufficient to just have a LinkedIn that you updated whenever you were looking for a new job. You needed to have a personal brand.

Want a job? I hope you have a GitHub full of projects or open source contributions, a blog, and constant posts everywhere for the scrutiny of a prospective employer. And believe you me, HR would go digging. Managers would add you on Facebook and LinkedIn when you started a new job. How lovely and welcoming and totally not at all about monitoring what you’re saying.

LinkedIn never sat right with me. It always seemed performative at best. Everyone was there putting on their best corporation approved smiles and showing their stick-to-it-ness, gratitude, mindfulness, and re-posting the same made up heart string tugging stories as everyone else. I’m sure there were multiple bots full of banks of those vaguely motivating posts about giving some random person a chance at a job. It could happen to you next!

A trend was emerging. It took me a long time to notice, and even longer to truly put my finger on the thing that was gnawing at me. Something was making my subconscious scream and rattle its cage. Authenticity, or specifically the lack of it. That’s what was slowly dying.

Now, social media and the “personal brand” have become a race to the bottom with contestants vying be the most fake. Sometimes in the name of bettering a salary, other times in hopes of accruing clout, or engagement, other times… I don’t even know what they’re chasing.

Ultimately I decided to quit social media. I’m not built for the world where we all wear cheap plastic masks and monitor our social media score³ anxiously. I’m not sure that I ever felt the depression that more and more evidence points to social media causing, but I clearly was feeling something. I proved that to myself when I discovered that I had a lot more “head-space” for consuming educational content and working on projects that increase my skills. What’s even more shocking is I discovered this almost immediately after I eliminated the constant scrolling.

3. No, It’s the Children Who Are Wrong!

I still struggle with the notion of expected inauthenticity in the corporate world, and in the hiring process especially.

“Tell me about a time you struggled to complete a task and how you overcame it.”
I think I’d rather squirt hot sauce in my eyes, thanks. I’m in the business of solving problems, not dwelling on them. How did I solve them? I used my big fucking brain, my years of experience doing hard shit, and the resources available to me. Do you want me to do that for you or not?

“Tell us why you would love to work for WidgetCo!”
Why are you fishing for compliments already? I don’t even know if I do want to work for you yet. All I know about you so far is that your careers page made me scroll past the same 20 generic claims about your culture that every careers page features before I could click on the “view openings” button, and that you’re the kind of place that asks me this stupid fucking question on the application.

When you collect unemployment in some states they make you sit through a cringe worthy “how to job hunt” online class where they tell you some variation of the same tired old advice that you can get from the most basic web search.⁴ Advice about practicing an elevator pitch for yourself until it sounds natural. How to weaponize inauthenticity to bullshit your way into a job as mandatory training.

What about those of us that want to show up and do our best to do good work? What if we value the doing more than the saying? What if we want to be authentic and honest?

“But now you’re doing this whole Studios thing, you write this blog, you stream, and you’re even on Bluesky which is just new Twitter! What is this if not branding? You’re talking a lot about the things you’re doing in all those places! You’re a big fat hypocrite!”

Harsh, but fair. I’ve been thinking about this a lot too. I’ve been asking myself “how do I do this without becoming exactly the thing I hate?” I’ve been asking myself “how do I monetize this so that I can keep doing more of it without becoming yet another sales bro trying to DM or email people to buy my product?”

I’ve also been thinking about what this means for my future employment prospects. I have found streaming and blogging to be extremely rewarding, and I don’t want to stop either thing. I have tasted the freedom to make my own decisions about what should be done, and seen that I am right. Or at least close enough to right enough of the time to show progress. What happens when you become good at branding and solving the strategic problems as well as the technical ones? When I think about the people in the software space who have a strong personal brand I can’t help but note that a lot of them seem to be self-employed. Perhaps once you do this for long enough you become an outdoor cat?

I don’t know that I have the answer to any of this. I don’t know how exactly I’m going to do this. I’m going to try my best. I’m going to look to the folks that I admire in this space, and listen to their advice. I’m positive that I’m going to make mistakes along the way, but that’s ok. I’m used to error messages. We go again. Another iteration.

I encourage you to join me in trying to bring back authenticity, even if you don’t want to build a brand of any kind. Maybe if enough of us vote for authenticity with our attention and our actions we can start to make it the norm. Or at the very least maybe we’ll find more like-minded people.