If anyone has a clue, please enlighten me.
There is some value in posting on LinkedIn, but the real value is that you can go back and find people who are weak connections when you are looking to hire, purchase services, or ask favors.
I think everyone should join LinkedIn and connect to every one of their colleagues that they would work with again. Then, once in a while, keep that connection alive by sending a message or commenting on a post.
It's a long game, but will pay dividends should you ever need to chat with them.
Signalling allegiance.
Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet.
What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?).
From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path. And a networking opportunity, where you meet someone face to face (and can meet them repeatedly) is a far better way to let someone know you exist than sending them your resume.
There are other ways to raise your profile that don't involve networking events and you can argue that they are better, but that's a cost-benefit analysis you should consider.
That being said, industry networking events, like conferences and such, are almost not at all useful for that purpose. In my experience they're mostly used for B2B sales (which is a kind of networking, I guess).
An exception would be mixers for interns and juniors; few people have a developed network at that point, so even those with a couple good contacts are interested in expanding, and there's a lot of potential.
Agreed! I'd go so far as to say hiring is irrational in the aggregate.
The usual "rational" artifacts, if we can call them that (coding challenges, resumés, etc.) serve almost exclusively to eliminate candidates rather than boost good candidates. Firms are generally ok with false negatives from these artifacts as simply the cost of doing business.
> From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path.
I've seen this described as "people hire who they vibe with", and I've yet to see it play otherwise in my career. I'm not saying this is good, or fair, or desirable. It just is.
The folks who get offers are the ones who can meet people, tell stories (even true ones!), listen, and demonstrate that they can empathize with and contribute to messy, flawed organizations.
Humans have yet to invent a technology more powerful than social relationships, and I think technologists downplay this at their own peril.
This is not a hardline position, but I’m surprised at how vehemently people insist that their news habit has benefits beyond entertainment.
(To be clear, I have nothing against entertainment.)
Why does the author care that much anyway? Seems like a person I would not enjoy talking with.
A lot of the activities on that list are like this. Reading the news has a non-zero impact (hey, I'm on HN, and it definitely helps me keep up to date), and it's "easy" in that it fits into my heuristic for happiness. Same with using a metal straw, and same with picking between credit cards.
In a sense, these activities are "free" in terms of their perceived difficulty, but have a positive, if small, impact. If they're "free", why not do them?
Mmm, yes and no.
It depends where your meat comes from. If you buy meat the way it's produced in the US where you have great big sheds full of cattle in the desert with everything trucked in, then yes.
If you want permaculture, you absolutely must have livestock.
If you want arable farming of any sort, you absolutely must have livestock.
The whole thing breaks down very quickly if you don't have grass and clovers growing in fields, and ruminants eating them, breaking down the tough cellulose, and then shitting it out and trampling it in.
It’s not vanity, it’s a desire to understand my world and my place within it.
What IS vanity is imagining that one’s own tastes are the only tastes that matter in the world.
I'm confused by how differently some otherwise smart people view the world than I do. My wife and family, by some definitions, are worthless. They have no economic value. But I look at them and feel that we lead lives of meaning and purpose every day. We know why we are alive and we are living up to it. If that's unproductive, then productivity itself is, I declare, vanity.
For instance, I think there is a difference between reading some news daily and consuming only news. My father was in the latter category growing up -- I never really saw him read a book, but he was always reading a paper or listening to/watching a news program. Personally I find that I get more from reading books as they're afforded the space to go into depth on a topic. I think the author is trying to point out that that surface level news consumption is fine but probably not as beneficial as we might want to tell ourselves.
The one thing I've found most helpful news-wise, though, is that I find that it's one of the better ways to learn a foreign language to an upper-intermediate or advanced level. I relied heavily on RFI and other news outlets when learning French, with the added benefit that you're often getting international news the media doesn't report on here in the US.
The author isn't bashing on "hobbies" and is not even bashing on "vanity activities". S/he is merely challenging us to acknowledge them for what they are. Stop kidding yourself.
If you churn credit cards (for example) and are one of the 10% that can make it truly profitable, then good for you. The other 90% are probably kidding themselves. Same for the other examples. The author is encouraging a self-sanity check. Are you in the 10% or the 90%, and wherever you land, are you okay with that? If not, you may want to reevaluate, pick something else, or make peace with it. It's better than kidding yourself.
The question is more about if the rewards are meaningful. I think it's actually worth doing a bit of churning to get exposure to different banks and figure out which one you like... might as well get paid for that. But after a certain point, I value stability and routine more than $300 to jump through hoops... and I'm not going back to Chase no matter what they want to pay me.
Profit is fun to look at and sounds impressive, but optimizing for it completely misses the point if it doesn't lead to something more important (e.g. human flourishing, or net societal gain)
boberoni•4h ago