Hacker News Reader

Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

Why’s this shameful, exactly?

There’s no shame in saying you’re available to work.

IMHO selling yourself (selling anything, really) is a bit demeaning. But this is probably a class affectation on my part, not real moral intuition.

Don't almost everyone sell themselves? Many people, as employees, sell themselves for 5 days per week, every week, except days off.

And everybody buys stuff, and therefore relies on people selling stuff.

The only way I see we could avoid being exposed to selling would be do have a different way to organize the economy / the society.

I think it's the self-promotion part that's seen as slimy and shameful. Yes, as an employee I trade my time for money, but I don't write blog posts at the office about what kind of transformational and high-impact work I'm capable of, and about this week's top-10 coding life-hacks, and how I can single-handedly turn your project around from life support to on-schedule deployment.

Admittedly, the people who are good at this tend to get promoted and quickly end up as Directors and VPs... It just... ugh, turns my stomach.

Oh, I see. Well, I guess I'm fine with the self promotion (which you do a bit to get hired even as an employee), as long as it's honest, polite, done a the right place and not annoying.

I'm not on LinkedIn (and I hope I won't need to be there the day I want to freelance) but I guess people are there for exactly this stuff, so posting an ad for yourself there is only fair, I suppose.

> but I don't write blog posts at the office about what kind of transformational and high-impact work I'm capable of, and about this week's top-10 coding life-hacks, and how I can single-handedly turn your project around from life support to on-schedule deployment.

That's not at all what the comment above was suggesting.

Saying you're open for work and offering services is not slimy.

I think you're confusing LinkedIn slop with offering services. They're not the same thing.

Those people are good at imitating the form of what curious and highly motivated by things beyond money do naturally.

Early programming blogs were written by people who had thoughts they just needed to share with the world. Because they were highly confident and self motivated people, they also often ended up being sought after and making a lot of money.

Then later others tried to turn the process into a formula they could use to increase their earning power, even if they were writing about things they weren't passionate about.

You put it better than I could have done myself!

My post was truthful, useful for both me and the potential employers, and I know it's what linkedin is for. Objectively, I did nothing wrong. And still I was really embarrassed by it, and deleted it after I landed a job.

I just really don't like tooting my own horn. I was raised to prize humility, I guess it's quite common in Sweden.

As one of the other replies (nested too deep to reply to directly) said, many of us were raised to be humble and self-effacing, especially about skills related to innate abilities like intelligence. So it feels unseemly to say, in essence, "Hey, you should hire me because I'm great at X, Y, and Z." It feels weird enough to list skills and accomplishments in a resume, but overtly selling yourself feels wrong.

Maybe people like us should team up in pairs and promote each other. I'd have no problem talking up a colleague I knew to be talented, far more forcefully than I'd ever do for myself.

that only works if we know each other very well. every time someone tried to talk me up i felt more awkward than if i had done it myself, because that person didn't know me well enough to actually judge that. the only talking up by someone else that i can tolerate is: "i have worked with this guy and i would hire him (again)"

Selling ANYTHING is demeaning? So you believe the only non-demeaning way to live would be to live entirely self-sufficiently, making and growing everything yourself?

There are multiple definitions of the word "selling". The poster is referring to what salespeople do, not what a grocery store does.

Grocery stores are experts at sales tactics throughout the store. All that fruit does not look so beautiful in the field, and virtually every store is trying to develop their 'ethos' to capture the customers with enough money to be able to care about that.

There is no way to avoid selling in life. Otherwise, at the least, you will be constantly overlooked. There should be no shame in it. The shame is only when sales replaces instead of presents the value proposition you are offering.

There is a trivial defeat for nearly all grocery store sales tactics: make a shopping list.

Engaging with certain salespeople is an altogether different proposition. In order to buy a car, you are forced to interact with multiple odious people who have ripping you off as their sole objective. Thats what I think of when I think of a “salesperson”. See also mattress stores, wireless carrier “retention” departments, HVAC installers, etc.

Eh. Sure. Make a shopping list.

But also buy, within reason, stuff that's on sale, looks good, etc. Otherwise just order on-line.

I hear and understand that gut feeling. Whenever I hit that particular feeling, though, I remind myself that it’s only shameful if you’re knowingly selling something that can’t deliver what you’re promising.

I can understand what you're saying, but there's a different way to look at it. Imagine yourself in the future. You're in a position of leadership and people want your advice. Let's say a student asks you how they should get a high level job in a competitive marketplace. What would you say?

Personally, I would tell the student they should be ambitious and tell people what their skills are. They should ask for responsibilities and compensation. They should tell people that they are worth the risk.

If you agree with me about giving that advice, then you should now put yourself in the place of the student. Shouldn't you receive the same advice? Shouldn't you be ambitious and ask people to give you responsibilities and compensation? If so, then you can understand why selling yourself is actually important and there's nothing immoral or slimy about it. It feels wrong sometimes, but that feeling may not be aligned with reality.

You can remain dignified and poor or become demeaned and rich.

“Pessimists are often right, optimists are often happy and wealthy.”

Commerce is demeaning?

If you look around, I believe you will see many people buying things for fun, while those same people toil to sell something.

It appears that one half of commerce is demeaning but some people compensate with the other.

Only when you're trying to sell bullshit. If I can actually solve someone's problem, and they don't mind my price, then we're helping solve each other's problems and everyone benefits!

Where things get sleezy is when you're competing with applicants that will bullshit, so you have to bullshit as well just to keep up, or when customers have unrealistic expectations and waste your time.

Well it's a couple things - Expectation to be "successful" i.e. social media presents extreme conceptions of success, similar to a supermodel body expectation vs. real life. To say, "I'm looking for work" is to publicly admit failure against such a standard. The fear is that for every potential employer, 10 people you know will see the post and say, "tut tut, what a failure" and then call their 10 friends to share the news of your failure - some people think advertising for work is sleazy (as others mention) - annoying people only to be told no, a sense that you're being annoying

It parallels something like the idea of being say 45, never married, and looking to marry, or being recently divorced at the same age. There is a sense of having failed, or being judged by people as having failed. For men, the sense of being a pickup artist or overly aggressive.

That's why some people struggle with it. And it ought not be shameful, in either case. But it's probably more wise to point out those feelings and work through them, process them, than it is to just say "I do not recognize any valid shame here, does not compute"

Right. All my family and friends see me as some kind of genius wizard because of my school grades and because I do stuff with computers that they don't understand. And they hear about all the fancy new stuff happening in the industry all the time, not the negatives. So the idea that I would have to look for a job just doesn't compute for them. They expect me to be headhunted, not sharpening up my LinkedIn page.

Of course, I shouldn't let their misconceptions bother me, but there it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com