3 ms·

"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 p

"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.

some_random 9y ago
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.
geofft 9y ago
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.)
- sdfmxiid1 9y ago
  I had a similar reaction. It strikes me a bit as part of the rampant survivorship bias that happens all the time in contemporary society. As in, I worked hard and things worked out, therefore if you work hard things will work out, and if you didn't, you weren't doing something valuable or working hard enough. I don't know that I disagree with the author so much about social media platforms like Facebook per se, but I disagree with some implicit premise they're making. The reason why things like blogs and social media presence are advertised so much is precisely because "value" really means something like perceived value, which depends on things like awareness. That is, it's not really so much whether or not what you do has value, its whether or not people are aware of you and perceive it as having value. So to get eyeball time, you need to put yourself out there. I'm also a tenured professor, and what I increasingly see is popularity driving things, rather than value. That is, the rigor of academic work seems less and less important than the splashiness of it. The colleagues I know whose careers have taken off have done so precisely because they manipulate the social aspect of it--they're politicians more than scientists or mathematicians. In this regard, there seems to be something disingenuous and dangerous about the general sentiment being expressed. To me, it generally seems to be dismissing the sociopolitical aspect of how we reward work, sweeping it under the rug, which will only worsen our problems.

some_random 9y ago

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.

geofft 9y ago

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.)

sdfmxiid1 9y ago
I had a similar reaction. It strikes me a bit as part of the rampant survivorship bias that happens all the time in contemporary society. As in, I worked hard and things worked out, therefore if you work hard things will work out, and if you didn't, you weren't doing something valuable or working hard enough. I don't know that I disagree with the author so much about social media platforms like Facebook per se, but I disagree with some implicit premise they're making. The reason why things like blogs and social media presence are advertised so much is precisely because "value" really means something like perceived value, which depends on things like awareness. That is, it's not really so much whether or not what you do has value, its whether or not people are aware of you and perceive it as having value. So to get eyeball time, you need to put yourself out there. I'm also a tenured professor, and what I increasingly see is popularity driving things, rather than value. That is, the rigor of academic work seems less and less important than the splashiness of it. The colleagues I know whose careers have taken off have done so precisely because they manipulate the social aspect of it--they're politicians more than scientists or mathematicians. In this regard, there seems to be something disingenuous and dangerous about the general sentiment being expressed. To me, it generally seems to be dismissing the sociopolitical aspect of how we reward work, sweeping it under the rug, which will only worsen our problems.