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Yeah, it's horrible; I deleted my Facebook a decade ago because I hated what social media interaction was becoming and it was doing a number on my mental health. I deleted my old Twitter a few days ago, and I haven't done anything on Bluesky in months and I never used it much. The only social media I use regularly now is HN and SomethingAwful.

I would so love to just delete my LinkedIn, but you can't do that now. A lot of job applications require you give your LinkedIn. So I am stuck logging in occasionally. It's dystopian.

I have noticed that, at least in the Java world, people lie a lot about stuff going "faster", and I think it's just justification to not fix their terrible code.

I have written a lot of JMH benchmarks in the last year to test out claims from developers (some are on my blog, a lot I haven't written about yet), and so much shit that's supposedly "faster" simply isn't.

For example, I had a coworker who would write all this logic into tons of nested and sequential `for` loops, and the logic was disgusting but lent itself well enough to the Java streams API. I brought this up to this coworker, and he said he wouldn't do that because the streams are "slower" and that he "benchmarked to check". I wrote my own JMH benchmark to check and it turns out that the streams (at least for an application like this) are not actually slower than the loops; the two versions ran within about 3% of each other's. I don't think he actually wrote benchmarks, I think he was just lying and wanted me to stop interrogating.

I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks?

Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.

I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.

To paraphrase Hunter Thompson: we will never know for sure if there's a heaven or hell, but I do know for sure that if there is a hell then it's being stuck having to read through LinkedIn for eternity.

LinkedIn is easily the worst "social media" on the internet that I've been on. So much shit is "inspiration porn" for anecdotes that clearly never actually happened so that the person can try and brand themselves as some kind "corporate influencer". By itself this wouldn't bother me, except you pretty much have to have a LinkedIn now.

I generally think it's actually really important to call out bullshit, even stuff that's seemingly harmless (for reasons that are probably far beyond the scope of this post), but I don't respond to comments on LinkedIn anymore, because it's effectively a resume and I don't want these kind of opinions to influence hiring decisions.

And this makes me feel a bit conflicted, and it has led to a direct resentment of the entire platform. I kind of wish Microsoft would limit LinkedIn to purely resume stuff.

Yeah, I don't think I disagree with anything you said.

I was a little upset when I created the Ask HN, because I was pretty convinced that I was going to get this job and accidentally started getting preemptively excited. I try not to count my eggs before they hatch, but sometimes that's easier said than done. Easy to get into your own head and hate yourself a little when you feel rejected and frustrated.

My wife (who is awesome and supportive and cool) gave me a bit of a pep talk and it actually did make me feel better and I'm more or less alright now.

That's generally what I do, I bring things up just to handwave them away and acknowledge that they're there.

The problem is, of course, that even handwaving things away, there's still a near-infinite number of potential caveats for any given subject, and I always feel a compulsion to list all of them. I did bother a friend of mine last night in order to get him to tell me how much of my rambling is tolerable so hopefully I have a better handle on it now.

You're not wrong. That's why I was happy enough to delete all my posts.

I didn’t say I wanted to lie about my personality. I said I wanted to tune my personality so that I do better in interviews. It’s subtly different; I wanted advice on putting my best foot forward, and I was wondering if people had ideas for doing so.

It’s not just about this one job, obviously it’s impossible to know what a single employer’s reasoning is for this stuff; I have just noticed a pattern of me being pretty bad at interviews, and being declined enough to where I probably need to make some kind of change. I am not asking for one simple hack to make friends, it’s fucking interview prep. I don’t think I have low social intelligence in most cases, I have never had much issue making friends or anything like that. I don’t dispute that I am probably annoying and I don’t think I am awesome.

It’s not like interviews are anything like actual human interaction in any meaningful sense, and clearly a lot of people must agree because there are dozens of specific “interview prep” services out there.

Yep, definitely think that’s a pretty good idea.

I agree that's what it should be, but that absolutely not what it is and it hasn't been that way for many years. People treat LinkedIn like Facebook and post their opinions on things.

Most of the potentially worrisome stuff I've posted has been comments responding to other peoples' posts. I went and deleted nearly all of those, though.

I gotta admit that it saddens me a little to think that calling myself a "wannabe-intellectual" or "eccentric" would have any connotation other than very mild self-deprecation, but I suppose it won't hurt to make it simpler in the shorter term.

This really actually doesn't matter in many cases. These moments are perfect place for you to demonstrate humility and how you deal with feedback.

That's decent enough advice, but when people confidently "correct" me with something that's actively wrong, it's always a bit jarring to me. It takes me a like thirty seconds to parse their feedback, read to make sure that my code isn't wrong, and then process that I need to somehow respond to it. It's difficult to know what to say at that point.

I dunno. This post has given me a lot to think about.

It's not just this one employer. It's been months and I've had pretty limited success. This has happened with dozens of employers and after a certain point I have to assume I'm doing something wrong.

Oh my.

I'm not sure why that would be suspicious. If I were planning nefarious stuff, it's not like it would be hard for me to make have a social media presence to fly under the radar.

I actually more or less did air all my dirty laundry on my first date with my wife, and we've been together since 2013, so at least that worked out ok.

Still overall I think I agree with you. I think most techy people tend to like me if they talk to me for awhile, but I can be kind of abrasive with initial impressions.

I'm just psychoanalyzing myself at this point; overall good advice...thanks!

If I'm hiring someone, I want to like working with them, and if I find them ranting online, I just mark them as negative and pessimistic. I can't help it - that's human nature

I understand this, but we can agree that this kind of sucks, doesn't it? Everyone has bad days where they're frustrated about something and could write something a bit cynical in the process. I don't think that's reflective of their entire personality. From Ted Lasso:

I hope that either all of us or none of us are judged by the actions of our weakest moments… but rather by the strength we show when, and if we’re ever given a second chance

Dunno, obviously you don't want someone who's a downer all the time, but I feel like the permanence of the internet can skew perspectives.

I do a fair amount of public speaking (I've spoken at Lambda Days six times, the Clojure Conj once), and I was a university lecturer, so that stuff isn't too hard for me.

I'm definitely guilty of rambling though; it's pretty hard for me to do say concisely. I'm not 100% sure of the best way to get better at that.

Oh I know, I will keep applying and hoping for the best, obviously. I don't really have the privilege of being able to give up, as I need to pay my mortgage.

It's just a bit discouraging sometimes. I don't really think I'd be a worse engineer than most people they end up hiring, so it's hard to not take this personally sometimes.

99% of the time, when I'm rejected I just roll my eyes and move on, but every now and then (and it appears to be kind of stochastic), one rejection will just get a bit more under my skin than others. I've been rejected for thousands of jobs and I don't have a crisis for each one.

It's just tough for me, because I kind of take pride in being accurate and technical questions often have a lot of edge cases and caveats that I feel compelled to point out because I don't want to say inaccurate stuff.

But of course that can go onto infinity; at some point you need to summarize and accept you can't be 100% accurate. I guess I need to figure out how to strike a balance between "blathering on" and "hand-waving away details". I have no idea how to do that but that might be a good thing to get out of mock interviews.

Yeah that's fair.

It's probably still better overall to have no social media compared to social media with edgy takes.

Outside of some jobs requiring LinkedIn, I've never actually heard of anyone being declined for not having social media.

I haven't had a Facebook account since 2015, I don't have an Instagram and I hadn't updated my Twitter for years until I deleted it (about two hours ago). As far as I'm aware, a lack of social media presence hasn't been a factor.

Only social media I have now is Hacker News.

I feel defeated now primarily because I really thought that I was going to get an offer on this job, so it kind of felt like a punch in the stomach when I got rejected this morning.

I think I was feeling confident enough during the interview, but it's entirely possible that some of my cynicism bled through in my intonations in the Zoom call.

I do tend to be long winded when I speak, so maybe that is working against me. I'll actually take that in mind.

Yeah honestly it really is something I hadn't considered much, especially my old Twitter which I haven't logged into for years and the last posts were when I was in an extremely bad state mentally. I completely forgot about it even existing, but of course whether or not I remembered it doesn't mean it won't potentially hurt my prospects.

It's impossible to know how many jobs I've been turned down for due to my online presence and edgy takes; most of my takes really aren't that edgy or even that out there, but they might be enough make a potential employer think twice.

I just deleted my old Twitter, my Reddit account, and most of my posts on LinkedIn. I don't think any of them were really that bad but I don't really need them haunting me for forever.

This company doesn't have fifteen employees so I don't think I'd have much recourse regardless, but it was over the phone and it wasn't recorded. It would be my word against theirs. I did end up reporting them to the NYC Department of Labor, though.

Of course, they were just the ones stupid enough to be honest about it. I have no idea how many jobs I've been declined for where they just gave me a generic form letter.

As it stands I don't really think I'm putting on an act during interviews. I am a very bad liar and if I lie people can tell almost immediately so generally I tend to be pretty brutally honest, and my personality more or less shines through there.

I don't really want to put on an act, I guess I'm asking for more "how do you present forward the more positive parts of your personality and quiet the bad parts during an interview?"

I acknowledge there is still some dishonesty in that, my personality is a package deal, good and bad, but I do think that most of my coworkers end up liking me after they get to know me.

I was declined from a job recently specifically because I wrote a blog post about my history with depression and medication for it [1]. That's not me justifying after the fact, they actually told me this.

I took down most of the posts on my blog that were personal as a result. Most of the stuff on there now is just technical stuff that I'm not too worried about being attached to my name.

[1] To be clear, the blog post was only talking about prescribed medication, I've never done any illegal drugs and I've never been an alcoholic, I'm not speaking in code for "self medicating".

In this particular case I actually have a phone call with the recruiter scheduled today to ask why they passed on me.

In general they don't tell me when I do ask though. I understand that; they don't want to risk me suing them if they divulge anything that could be even construed as illegal, I probably wouldn't give feedback either honestly.

Beyond this, comes the counter-intuitive position of being far more skilled than an interviewer. This can definitely work against you at times as well for a number of reasons. Just because you are the most technically adept for a position, doesn't mean you get the position. The technical aspects of most jobs are more about a minimum of, can they do the job. Not, are they the best fit.

This has been happening to me a bit, at an increasing frequency lately

I don't want to come off as cocky, but I think I have a decent understanding of concurrency and distributed systems, and I think a lot of interviewers simply do not. Sometimes I'm "corrected" on my whiteboard examples, and I have to push back because I'm not actually wrong about something.

And that kind of makes me seem like a douchebag, but at the same time I'm not going to pretend that I'm wrong on something if I don't genuinely think I might be wrong.

I mean, I don't disagree in principle but in practice I don't have years to spend waiting for the perfect job. I have decent savings so if I need to survive I can for awhile, but not forever.

I'm actually surprised that they gave you a reason. Usually I get some email like "while we were impressed by your skills and enjoyed talking to you, we do not believe that you're a good fit for CompanyX".

Well I see the problem already.

That was a joke. I did ask ChatGPT how much trouble I could get into by saying their name and it wasn't clear but honestly the problem is bigger than one company so I don't really need to throw them under the bus anyway.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying.