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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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For more perspective here is my resume

Your projects section is counter-productive. Don't tell me what you've built - show me.

Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.

Constantly apply to every job listing

This is a low success strategy and will burn you out. You're still early in your career so I empathize but the reality of the matter is that you do need to be networking with people so that when you need a job or you want to move up for more money, your talking to a human whom you know and who knows you already. Resume blasting was mostly dead five years ago and with AI HR systems it is 100% dead today.

Networking in a nutshell:

  1. Find people who are working on things in areas that genuinely interest you. Twitter is bizarrely high leverage for this. I have scored many clients via cold DM on twitter because they posted something like "I am working on a banana counting machine" and I DM'ed with "That seems cool. I've been in the banana counting game for 10 years. Want to trade notes?"
  2. Add value in whatever small way you can without expecting anything in return. The default way this is done in networking is to recycle your network meaning you see that Person X is into thing Y, and you also know that Person Z is into thing Y. You introduce them. That's sort of networking 101. I think a better strategy is to shoot random e-mails / texts / DMs to people you already know asking for nothing but a 15 minute catch up call. No objectives, just listen to them talk about work. People like to be heard, a the kids say, and just kind of generally strategizing about work and career with other people pays off well if you're actively engaged and earnest present with it. If you're not, you'll come across as a scuzzy network robot.
  3. Returning to twitter - this is where real tech networks exist and evolve. Linkedin is a hellscape for jobseekers and ... in general. There are some things that Linkedin is really useful for (mostly, getting to people who are Linkedin addicts but have budget and authority). I'd say skip it or use lightly.
  4. (And this one, I think is 100x more true in the age of LLMs) Have a digital public presence that is your own. Not linkedin, not even twitter. Build a blog. Substack is getting pretty cringe and hearing someone say "hey take a look at my substack" is almost a counter-signal. There are plenty of other plug-and-play blogs that don't force branding and their platform into your face. If you're already semi-regularly posting on forums, you can carve out the 1 - 3 hours per week it takes to post a solid 1000 word blog post. Once a week is fine for someone employed full time.

One of the many failures of the boomers was in failing to teach their children the reality of networking and jobs. My own folks, as much as I truly do love them and as much as my upbringing was 11/10 fucking awesome, failed at this as well. I was told, up until college, that you got a job by working hard, having a slick resume and a good handshake. Then I got to a fancy college and all of my friends who had grown up knowing the game went "lol, no, bro, it's networking."

Whatever the outcome of LLMs, I'm quite certain that the returns to cultivating deep relationships will grow ever higher. I feel good and bad about this. It's good to have meaningful connections to real people but, on the other hand, schizo posting with you degenerates is fun the entire original promise of the internet was that physical proximity no matter constrained meaningful knowledge sharing and productive interaction. I suppose the remedy would be a fundamentally new protocol that enforces "humanness." Twitter's recent bot nuke is a gesture in this diretion, but now I am getting off topic.

This feels like getting a job on hard mode. People should be able to find work thru normal processes not needing to be sort of a small business owner after graduating.

This seems like a sign of let’s shut down the Indian IT mills. If companies really needed employees you could get work thru formal processes instead of networking. It seems like there are a lot of people in his situation. Being better at networking changes who gets the job but not the overall need. If jobs are plentiful then companies would hire off the resume pile instead of selecting someone they are already friends with.

If jobs are plentiful then companies would hire off the resume pile instead of selecting someone they are already friends with.

Managers will always go for friends (or at least former coworkers/employees they were on good terms with) first if they can. When jobs are plentiful, they'll search the resume pile, but only after exhausting the group of people they know.

The problem with people talking about "networking" is there are some people good at networking, and these people tend to be concentrated in professions such as sales, marketing, and in management in all fields. Whereas other people are bad at networking, and some fields -- certainly including non-management tech -- have a lot of those people. Telling those people to do networking is a waste of breath; at best they might know what networking is (but just as possibly the term may have no sensible referent), but they have no way of doing it.

Which of course is why networking works so well in those fields. You have to do networking to get a sales job, but everyone's doing it; it's a minimum requirement and you need more, or at least to be better at networking than your competition. If you can do networking in tech, you're way ahead of the competition.

I barely finished highschool by US standards, have no college degree, and no prior work experience in my current role. I switched careers less than 2 years ago and now essentially work for a big tech company traveling around the country (long-term contracting stuff). Sure, doesn't pay great, but we live in a cabin in the middle of the woods in bumbfuck nowhere, so our needs are few. The job I am currently in is also quite meaningful to me, in the sense that I am doing something that will create (hopefully) long-lasting and increasing social good.

I got this job because someone was impressed with my anonymous social media presence on a hobbyist site and reached out to me, so that's one data point in support of your no. 4. They assumed I was a professional. Funny how life works sometimes. Also amusing that I have become yet another denizen of The Motte that sort of "works in tech", even for big tech, although in an very different capacity than the rest of you.

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