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I reject that set of skills not because I don't value communicating, but because I think it's a terrible way of communicating. The world has an unbelievable, e

I reject that set of skills not because I don't value communicating, but because I think it's a terrible way of communicating. The world has an unbelievable, enormous, tedious, completely indefensible surplus of self-promotion and marketing. Marketing fills every public space and enters every public discussion. What good is it? Look, you have made entire hard and boring jobs of it. Are you doing something useful? Who is it useful to besides you? Buying into an obnoxiously self-promotional attitude is defecting in a giant Prisoner's Dilemma. It's enriching you only by taking away from others, and at the expense of filling the world with crap. It serves only to make my life and others' a little worse as I filter through "good self-promoters" to find people who are good at ordinary, interesting, non-self-promotional things, who do and say things I actually want to pay attention to. So no, I don't think people who engage in a bunch of self-promotion are stupid or inferior, just selfish and shameful. I will leave money on the table all day in order to not deal with the crap. Hey, it's relevant to the article: Having glimpsed just how unacceptable the world judges my demeanor, could I too strive to make up for my shortcomings? Practice a shit-eating grin until it becomes natural? Love the world twice as hard? I see the appeal of getting with the program. But this is not my choice. Striving to meet others’ expectations may be a necessary cost of assimilation, but I am not going to do it.

bluekeybox 15y ago
> It makes my life worse every day as I have to filter through "good self-promoters" to find people who are actually doing interesting things. Or maybe you are setting up a straw man there as the people you find interesting are simply bad at self-promotion? At a party once, I met a graduate student in physics and a guy who worked for an advertising firm. The physicist made a self-deprecating joke about how he sees his occupation as not terribly productive (I guess he saw his own potential for making a big discovery as pretty slim), but then remarked with some relief that at least the fact that he can dedicate his life to research is "a sign of a wealthy society." Immediately after that, he went up in arms against the guy in advertising, confronting him with, "but what do you do that's useful?" I had to interject, telling the physicist, that without people willing to buy stuff including all the plastic toys (chemical engineering) and fancy gadgets (electrical and computer engineering), there would be much less currency floating around in the economy and we wouldn't have the wealthy society he spoke of just a minute ago, in which case the big physics projects like the LHC would not get funded (i.e. we would be back to the 18th century or earlier).
- mquander 15y ago
  The people I find interesting are all over the board at self-promotion! It's barely correlated. That's the point. The self-promotion is completely unhelpful in directing my attention to anything useful, but it is designed specifically to try to fool me. Nobody needs advertising to be "willing to buy stuff." Advertising shifts demand around from companies that are worse at advertising to companies that are better at it. What do you suppose people would do with their portion of the GDP if there were less advertising? Sit on their hands, because they don't aspire to anything? Would men, their savings accounts bulging with useless money, moan, "I only wish I wanted an iPad more?" Although I admit that it is unavoidable, I find it non-obvious that commercial advertising contributes anything at all to the economy, and supposing it does, I find it completely unbelievable that it is worth the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of labor spent on it.
  - bluekeybox 15y ago
    > Nobody needs advertising to be "willing to buy stuff." Untrue. First of all, even if advertising "only shifted demand around," it would still be worthwhile because our country participates in a global economy and we export many products abroad (as well as import others, but that's a different question). Second, the statement that advertising "only shifts demand around" is just plain wrong. Advertising creates demand, and this creation is overall a positive thing (admittedly there are plenty of specific negative examples). For one positive example: Americans didn't buy into cars simply because of utility. They bought into cars because of the entire "lifestyle" image created around owning a car -- and this image was created in large part thanks to advertising campaigns. There would be many fewer cars around today, and our economy would be much slower were it not for advertising. To naysayers below: as Henry Ford's famous expression went, "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd tell me they want a faster horse." In other words: people did not immediately buy into the idea that a car is something desirable. At the time, cars were clumsy, noisy, not very comfortable or easy to drive. The whole idea of a car as something to aspire to had to be "pushed" onto the audience, and Ford was not shy about doing it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Advertising.2C_marketing.2C_and_packaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Advertising.2C_mar...).
potatolicious 15y ago
How is self-promotion enriching yourself at the expense of others? "Hey everyone, I'm really good at iOS development." <-- How is this at all harmful to anyone, and how is it bullshit, or making the world worse? This illustrates an incredibly entitled view held by some geeks - that it is the responsibility of everyone else to come and discover how awesome you are. That is, to be blunt, a load of bullshit worse than any bullshit crockery the worst MBA could come up with. If you are good at something, how is anyone supposed to know about it unless you make it a point to tell them? How is it someone's fault that they bothered to let their abilities be known to the community at large, and that they got chosen over you? Quite the opposite in fact - self-promotion can (and does) do more good for the world than quietly assuming that people will realize your brilliance in your silence. Look at all of the code blogs out there offering insight and advice on our industry and our craft - each one authored by someone who is no doubt using it as a tool for self-promotion. Demonstrating their abilities and knowledge by giving it away for free, how is that taking away from others?
- mquander 15y ago
  Consider the following three approaches of communicating that you are good at iOS development: 1) You write interesting blog posts about iOS development and discuss it with other people working on related projects. 2) You write apps and open-source them or publish them and their utility yields lots of great reviews. 3) You write some mediocre apps, but you make sure to tell people stories about how good you are at iOS development, and you network your way to a piece in every tech blog to advertise your apps. The difference between 1, 2, and 3 is that your actions in #1 and #2 are actually evidence that you really are good at iOS development, whereas your actions in #3 are not evidence of anything! Nobody with a healthy sense of skepticism "knows" that you are good at something because you make a point to tell them about it, because it doesn't take any skill (in that thing) to do the telling. Someone is supposed to know because you do it and you did a good job and your work helps other people. This apparently sensible approach would work even better if everyone else in the world were not screaming from the rooftops how good they were. The code blog author writing useful advice is great. That same blog author submitting all his posts to Hacker News contributes nothing more to his greatness.

bluekeybox 15y ago

> It makes my life worse every day as I have to filter through "good self-promoters" to find people who are actually doing interesting things. Or maybe you are setting up a straw man there as the people you find interesting are simply bad at self-promotion? At a party once, I met a graduate student in physics and a guy who worked for an advertising firm. The physicist made a self-deprecating joke about how he sees his occupation as not terribly productive (I guess he saw his own potential for making a big discovery as pretty slim), but then remarked with some relief that at least the fact that he can dedicate his life to research is "a sign of a wealthy society." Immediately after that, he went up in arms against the guy in advertising, confronting him with, "but what do you do that's useful?" I had to interject, telling the physicist, that without people willing to buy stuff including all the plastic toys (chemical engineering) and fancy gadgets (electrical and computer engineering), there would be much less currency floating around in the economy and we wouldn't have the wealthy society he spoke of just a minute ago, in which case the big physics projects like the LHC would not get funded (i.e. we would be back to the 18th century or earlier).

mquander 15y ago
The people I find interesting are all over the board at self-promotion! It's barely correlated. That's the point. The self-promotion is completely unhelpful in directing my attention to anything useful, but it is designed specifically to try to fool me. Nobody needs advertising to be "willing to buy stuff." Advertising shifts demand around from companies that are worse at advertising to companies that are better at it. What do you suppose people would do with their portion of the GDP if there were less advertising? Sit on their hands, because they don't aspire to anything? Would men, their savings accounts bulging with useless money, moan, "I only wish I wanted an iPad more?" Although I admit that it is unavoidable, I find it non-obvious that commercial advertising contributes anything at all to the economy, and supposing it does, I find it completely unbelievable that it is worth the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of labor spent on it.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  > Nobody needs advertising to be "willing to buy stuff." Untrue. First of all, even if advertising "only shifted demand around," it would still be worthwhile because our country participates in a global economy and we export many products abroad (as well as import others, but that's a different question). Second, the statement that advertising "only shifts demand around" is just plain wrong. Advertising creates demand, and this creation is overall a positive thing (admittedly there are plenty of specific negative examples). For one positive example: Americans didn't buy into cars simply because of utility. They bought into cars because of the entire "lifestyle" image created around owning a car -- and this image was created in large part thanks to advertising campaigns. There would be many fewer cars around today, and our economy would be much slower were it not for advertising. To naysayers below: as Henry Ford's famous expression went, "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd tell me they want a faster horse." In other words: people did not immediately buy into the idea that a car is something desirable. At the time, cars were clumsy, noisy, not very comfortable or easy to drive. The whole idea of a car as something to aspire to had to be "pushed" onto the audience, and Ford was not shy about doing it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Advertising.2C_marketing.2C_and_packaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Advertising.2C_mar...).

potatolicious 15y ago

How is self-promotion enriching yourself at the expense of others? "Hey everyone, I'm really good at iOS development." <-- How is this at all harmful to anyone, and how is it bullshit, or making the world worse? This illustrates an incredibly entitled view held by some geeks - that it is the responsibility of everyone else to come and discover how awesome you are. That is, to be blunt, a load of bullshit worse than any bullshit crockery the worst MBA could come up with. If you are good at something, how is anyone supposed to know about it unless you make it a point to tell them? How is it someone's fault that they bothered to let their abilities be known to the community at large, and that they got chosen over you? Quite the opposite in fact - self-promotion can (and does) do more good for the world than quietly assuming that people will realize your brilliance in your silence. Look at all of the code blogs out there offering insight and advice on our industry and our craft - each one authored by someone who is no doubt using it as a tool for self-promotion. Demonstrating their abilities and knowledge by giving it away for free, how is that taking away from others?

mquander 15y ago
Consider the following three approaches of communicating that you are good at iOS development: 1) You write interesting blog posts about iOS development and discuss it with other people working on related projects. 2) You write apps and open-source them or publish them and their utility yields lots of great reviews. 3) You write some mediocre apps, but you make sure to tell people stories about how good you are at iOS development, and you network your way to a piece in every tech blog to advertise your apps. The difference between 1, 2, and 3 is that your actions in #1 and #2 are actually evidence that you really are good at iOS development, whereas your actions in #3 are not evidence of anything! Nobody with a healthy sense of skepticism "knows" that you are good at something because you make a point to tell them about it, because it doesn't take any skill (in that thing) to do the telling. Someone is supposed to know because you do it and you did a good job and your work helps other people. This apparently sensible approach would work even better if everyone else in the world were not screaming from the rooftops how good they were. The code blog author writing useful advice is great. That same blog author submitting all his posts to Hacker News contributes nothing more to his greatness.