1,127 karma · joined March 14, 2018
For the time being, leveraging a network is still the best way to get hired.
I think in my career so far in ~8 companies and many clients, I only got one of those jobs From a "cold" job posting application. Everything else was at least a soft referral by an acquaintance.
I've had similar bugbears with their other products which end up in me not using anything except the core mail product.
They seem to improve things over time, but it's a game of patience.
E.g. I stopped using the Drive apps and only use it as an async backup store, because it keeps creating sync conflict files if you sync something you edit frequently (like an Obsidian vault). It also for some reason kept setting my user permissions to read only for my note files while it did this (on macOS).
I'm talking about the specific SaaS starter kit trend of recent and that Cory's work predates it - specifically because of snark like yours, which has seen an uptick because of the recent trend.
Ask anyone who's visited the US about how the food tastes. It's not just that serving portions are much bigger, but everything just tastes sweeter too. I've had people tell me they visited the states and even the plain white bread was sweet in comparison to everywhere else.
But, some options are better than others. I used to be on Twitter a lot, and had that reflex for a time after deleting it. Now... it's just not there. I did replace it with a handful of communities and some other forms of content, but it still feels better than before.
Facebook's last hook on me is groups - small town community groups especially. If you live in an area with its own group, there's a high likelihood that it's going to be on Facebook.
I don't really have the time to campaign to non tech-savvy retiring gen Xers and their parents that I don't want to use Facebook to know what's happening in my area, find services, etc.
I envy those who seem to keep the facade up after their own career hardships.
Greece is a good example of also not managing this properly with its own regular massive fires, while national parks around Cape Town and other parts of South Africa do regular controlled burns in very rocky, hill-y terrain.
There's one thing that I notice with these sorts of startups that take on larger social network apps.
If you're not in the US and you try it, chances are you'll find very few users from your own region.
For some platforms that's fine, you can find plenty of others to interact with online where location isn't that big an issue (eg BlueSky). But for something like a professional network it's different. You're very likely building your career network based on who you actually know, which is often starting from your area or country. That makes something like Polywork pretty pointless early on.
Using an LSP will at least clearly highlight when you're making the most basic syntax mistake.
Don't do your job worse in tech you don't know when you're expected to perform at a certain professional level.
Don't do your job worse just because of your tooling preference. Do what you want when you know you can do the job well and not waste reviewer time.
It's not the sole cause to not use IDE tooling, but it is a significant contributor.
There are two main "daily driver" usability issues on SteamOS by default if you need to do technical work:
- Limited software availability via the flatpak repositories.
- Not being able to install certain programs as easily without needing containerisation of some kind (if that even solves the problem in some cases).
Distrobox solves a good amount of both issues on SteamOS, for coding work at least. Slap a virtual Ubuntu on and you're off to the races.
There will be inevitable ultra-basic mistakes, especially if you're also not familiar with testing the code you're actually writing.
I say this as a specialist using an IDE and having had PRs sent to me that weren't even syntactically valid, because the developer was not using an LSP in a language they were not familiar with.
Kind of, depending on the platform, if you squint your eyes at it?
I suppose it doesn't matter what it's actually called. I call it community in general.
Communities in this sense are the middle ground between your direct personal network (which is also the deepest form of relation), and social media as the widest (the shallowest form of relation) form of reach.
Their "OfficeLife" tool banner is still on the main site as well, with an expected release of May 2022.
Development seems to be quite slow overall.
The article makes mention of AI content potentially coming for this industry, but I believe it's the "GirlfriendGPT" and similar that will be the bigger threat, once they improve.
One thing I'm curious about as well is more on the zero-to-one side of becoming an EM: If you're a "junior" manager, it seems there's quite a dearth of jobs out there. Everyone wants someone with 2+ years of experience. It's the same old entry-level-with-experience hiring conundrum, just happening again in your career.
Anyone have advice in that regard?
They're usually fairly open to sole proprietor (no registered company) businesses in many countries.
Have had a decent time freelancing, but would like to get back to a team.
Backend-leaning web dev, having done lots of Laravel in many industries. Love tech communities (I even organise Laravel CPT!), experienced with remote international work (have some posts about it on my website above).
Aiming mostly for product companies, SaaS, startups etc - avoiding agencies/consulting.
Open to changing stack completely, but staying with Laravel won't hurt :)
Sometimes it's also about what systems customers are used to, or fees with each method.
If bank transfer is the only option, it's usually for businesses that payment providers won't touch (even if not illegal).