I had an interesting conversation with my friend Isaac about how he uses Twitter. I approached him because I wanted to be more effective at using Twitter to get job interviews. He’s the best i’ve ever met at finding opportunities through Twitter so I wanted to learn from him.
Everyone knows the job-finding process is, er, cooked.
Applying through the usual channels is unlikely to succeed because of marketplace saturation. The hardest part seems to be actually getting an interview. Everything after that is also non-trivial, but if you can reliably get past the first bottleneck your chances of success are fairly high. At that point it really is a skill issue, which can be easily solved by just getting better.
And I feel like I suck at getting interviews? Like I just don’t really know how. I have never been good at it. I’ve never figured out the formula. Every job i’ve ever gotten was because someone liked me and took a chance on me. Now that I think about it i’ve only ever had to interview once and that was for an internship. Everything after that was because I knew people and had managers that liked me and I skipped the entire typical hiring process. The takeaway here being if people like you and know you do good work, you can skip most of the process.
But now i’m transitioning into an area where I don’t really have that. Few people know whether I can code well. I’ve never worked on a production codebase before. The only people who can vouch for me are my teachers at Fractal Tech and everyone there that i’ve worked with. And that can definitely help me find a job in New York, but it’s not very helpful for finding a job anywhere else (Sydney/Melbourne).
I’ve got friends here in Sydney that are great software engineers and I should leverage that more. I should do way more networking than I currently do. I’m just really really bad at it. Like horrible. I’m shy in this respect (for some reason?) and I don’t like bothering people?
Isaac is so good at just cold dm’ing people - literally hundreds of people every month. I saw his twitter dm’s its nuts! he just dm’s every one and anyone that seems interesting and most people don’t respond back or the conversation ends after one or two exchanges but some of them hit and those connections can be really useful.
It seems like Twitter really is the best way to find a job these days. But it requires you to be authentic, post a lot and show people what you’re doing and what you want. Literally just show your work and tell people what you want, and do it shamelessly. Americans love shameless self-promotion.
This comes into direct conflict with my need to be authentic. I’ve carefully curated my twitter account in a sense. I love all the people that follow me because by and large they are very high quality follows. People that are the best at what they do, the best at the things i’m interested in. And I have a severe aversion to coming across as some weird grifty tech-job seeking guy. Because that’s not my image, it’s not aesthetic. My twitter aesthetic is reflections on meditation, the path, spirituality, technology — some confluence of those things.
How can I develop a voice that:
- remains authentic
- is interesting to a wider audience
- signals my desire to find a swe job/find a good team/good fit
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I think I have to double down on building in public but specifically building tools for wellness and inner growth. Tools that help facilitate the things I really care about (this is how I remain genuine). And then I need to talk about building those things and what I learned.
I have some ideas of the first steps I should take to do this.
But a fresh perspective I picked up from Isaac that I want to immediately implement (but that I have a psychological aversion to) is to just dm people!
Thought someone’s post was interesting? DM THEM! Saw someone on the timeline that mentioned working somewhere you’ve always wanted to work? DM THEM! Saw someone built something cool? DM THEM! Read something really profound and moving? DM THEM! Ask if they want to chat!
The crazy thing is this is a such a good strategy. You lose literally nothing by reaching out to people and interacting with them. You wouldn’t have interacted with them anyways so the worst people outcome here is already the default outcome!
So, that’s what i’ll try this week. DM people more than I scroll/read twitter.