Ask HN: Refactor Social Skills?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992290

by oregonic • 12 years ago

8 16 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Any suggestions on how I might go about refactoring my social skills? I'm 35, maybe a bit Aspergers (have a clinical diagnosis, but still find people kind be kind of dismissive about it, like its no big deal and I should quit being so dramatic), but certainly I have issues with depression and/or social anxiety.

Honestly, I don't feel super lonely or anything like that... I was fortunate enough to meet my wife at a young age and I have two sons, and I feel most comfortable with a small number of intimate relationships like I have.

But this creates a hardship when it comes to trying to support my family (among other things), and we are living in poverty.

How do I go about "fixing" my social skills so that I can get over my anxiety about social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (even Github is social) and use them to get my career back on track. Right now, I use oDesk to try and minimize social interaction, but I'm back to doing the same stuff (LAMP stack PHP dev work) I was doing 13 years ago for less money... still the notion of networking and "selling myself" is completely overwhelming to me.

I'm working with my local Vocational Rehabilitation office to update my Java skills (through O'Reilly) with the hopes of getting a good job, but I have to figure this out because the idea of having to leave my house for 8+ hours a day and deal with the social demands of people is a huge mental block for me, and causing me to freeze up from making any progress in school... Even this fear presupposes the fact that I will get a job offer, but at 4+ years since the last dot-com I worked for tanked, I feel like this isn't going to happen unless I radically change something.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

gexla• 12 years ago

You probably should be looking for a job rather than attempting to go through Odesk. The problem with making a living on anything but a W2 is that the level of difficulty goes way up. I imagine living in poverty while attempting to run a business is quite common, there is even a term for being modestly profitable - ramen profitable.

Most people in your same position probably don't want to do that. You need someone who can take care of the "running a business" parts. Maybe that isn't so easy these days though, I don't know.

You could do a search for posts by Patio11. He might even pop in as mentioning Odesk is the magical word to summon him. His posts are gold but they assume that you are actually into running a business.

It's hard for me to weigh in on your social issues as I don't have the same problem. You generally get better with practice though. Are there meetups that you can go to? Are there support groups for people who have the same sorts of issues? Maybe you could start out with social events for people who share your traits and then branch out from there.

ETA: I think most important is to be talking to people who share your condition. People who have been able to deal with it. Running a freelance / consulting business is hard enough. It's even more difficult when you add a condition like yours. The market right now (and possibly more so when you first got started) is such that its pretty easy to get development gigs, especially for those willing to work for cheap. That may not last forever though.

oregonic5• 12 years ago

Thank you for your thoughtfulness.

Reading blogs like Patio11's have always made me optimistic about being able to work for myself (when I looked him up and saw "Bingo Card Creator" I immediately remembered a post from years back that he wrote about bringing that product to market).

If I am marketing myself for a full time job or a freelance gig, it seems like I need some kind of public personal built on social media to back up a resume. I don't have that kind of footprint, and I feel like I need to change that.

If I tweet a bunch, ask/answer a bunch of questions on Stack Exchange, and create some useful library for a fashionable language on Github, does that solve this problem? Or is that a total simplification?

patio112• 12 years ago

it seems like I need some kind of public personal built on social media to back up a resume.

Absolutely not required. Many of the best engineers I know don't maintain any social media accounts at all. Many more lurk rather than e.g. writing 500k words a year in a publicly visible fashion.

Tweeting, answering questions on Stack Exchange, and creating a useful library does not cause engagements to magically offer themselves to you. Convincing people that you can create something which makes their business better is, generally, what gets one engagements. If one hypothetically wants to, one can create online artifacts which tend to widen the funnel for inbound interest, but then you still have to sell the inbound leads on working with you. Even if you have 500k+ words of fairly high quality online, you still might find yourself getting most actual consulting leads in meatspace. (This was true for me.)

Many folks have no substantial inbound interest from folks wanting them to work, and have to meet people in e.g. meetups, conferences, and the local community to get engagements. That's not the worse thing in the world. I personally rapidly lose capability to continue high-level interactions after the first hour or two, but luckily an hour or two is all you need to put up with for e.g. a client meeting or a meetup. If you can't do an hour, do thirty minutes and leave early. If you can't do thirty minutes, do ten minutes, and work your way up.

paulhauggis• 12 years ago

Odesk is terrible for finding good work. It's better to go through craigslist.

dllthomas2• 12 years ago

Craigslist will involve unstructured social interaction, though. Possibly more than Odesk (I'm not very familiar with Odesk). Possibly, for that matter, more than a carreer at a typical big corp.

oregonic5• 12 years ago

Ok, my problem is:

CL -> Resume -> Resume Screening -> Social Media Check (!?)

Which raises an exception in the hiring process because I don't look legit on social media. Am I wrong on this?

patio112• 12 years ago

Yes, you're mistaken as to the pervasiveness of social media checking. Most people getting hired as devs don't have elaborate social media profiles.

loumf• 12 years ago

Yes. I would estimate that even among good developers, it's less than 1 in 10. You might be overly influenced by looking at HN type job listings -- they tend to ask for GitHub and possibly check Twitter, etc.

You can get a payroll job in a lot of companies being able to do enterprise web apps that will pay well and they wouldn't imagine that you need to have social media presence.

The resume screen is basically a keyword match -- the most important thing you need to do for the screen is write a good cover letter that directly addresses the job ad. For the interview, do a lot of research on the company and show interest in their specific position. Assuming you can pass the tech screen, that will put you in top 10%, because most people do 0 research and come to the interview acting like they never heard of the Internet.

Go on a couple of interviews where you aren't super interested in the job (but can definitely get through the resume screen) just to get some practice.

bjourne• 12 years ago

You can't refactor your social skills. Sure you can learn tricks such as "keep eye contact", "firm handshakes" and "smile more" but if you prefer solitary activities instead of people, no amount of refactoring will fix that. If you're 35 years old, your personality is unlikely to change very much, you just have to live with who you are. Maybe try for remote positions, work from home or part time work?

dnt404-1• 12 years ago

I don't know if this is a feasible step for you considering you have a family to support, but you can do what I did. I was starting age 24 when I dropped programming for over a year, and studied master's in counseling psychology plus sociology (2 degrees). 14 months later, today, I turned into an extrovert :) not permanently though. I can now turn into introvert/extrovert according to the situation and need. I am more adaptable and more sure of myself.

Programming jobs and the people it brings can be isolating at times, and if you are trying to improve your social skills, it is not a very effective environment, generally.

I turned not because of the degrees,but the people I met there in those programs. When you spent 3/5 hours a day discussing/debating/fighting/having-fun with another groups of human beings, you just change. I was not too isolated before I worked in programming to begin with though in my case; it was working in programming that slowly made me too isolated.

Being a total geek has its perks, but the rest of the people don't care about hackernews ;) Start from there.

oregonic5• 12 years ago

Yes I think the ability to be somewhat extroverted (given a short enough time interval) would be good for me... I remember taking the Briggs-Meyer test in 2005 when I was doing pretty good socially and moving up in my career, I wasn't extremely introverted at that time, just on the cusp.

Then, yes, I got more isolated. I moved away from the city where I grew up (Portland, OR) and had friends to a rural setting (to a small farm, which was I dream of mine)... After 5 years on the farm, I had to move out (and am still dealing with all the negative feelings of betrayal by my parents and siblings for how it happened), and I moved even further away.

dllthomas2• 12 years ago

I expect deliberate practice would also be of some help, as it is with many skills. I don't know whether it would be of sufficient help, or really have any more specific recommendations, but it might be an area to explore. With limited resources, of course, there's a trade off between spending time and effort improving these skills, and spending time and effort structuring your life so as to be less reliant upon them.

lily2014• 12 years ago

You are already an adult.A 35 year old adult. Just make more friends, and communicate with them a lot. You can overcome this issue by yourself

Ask HN: Refactor Social Skills?

Related Stories