Ugh, I'm generally pretty down on social media, and don't worry, it looks like spammers and algorithms are going to ruin the professional network in the long run too. But somehow, in the last month, I'm getting what the Internets consider "viral" attention, which is a pretty low bar for LinkedIn. I suspect my usage of it will practically stop if I can land a job, but for now, I don't mind the attention... if it helps.
At the four-week mark of non-employment, I've had a total of four leads, and various levels of discussion and interviews. One was a series of red flags that I politely declined further involvement, one was a good second interview that I was pretty excited about, but didn't get it, and two are still up in the air. What I have not done is blindly submit to jobs without knowing someone on the inside. I did this early last year, when I went through a brief period of wanting to do something else, and after 200-ish applications, it didn't go anywhere. So I'm sticking to what I can control. All of the above were initiated through my network. Two came to me, instead of me to them, through a contact.
A Google search says that "good" action on your posts starts around 1,000 views, or maybe 3,000, in some cases. Well, a post that I made late last year about QA is at 100,000 views, and counting. The follow-up is around 30,000. My post about getting booted from Facebook is over 35,000 so far. Just this month, my posts about getting RIF'd, what to do after getting RIF'd, and what to put on your resume, are all tracking for 20,000 so far. The rest made this month have been around 3,000 each, including one from yesterday that still has some momentum.
Apparently this isn't typical. Cool, but what do I win? I've had hundreds of profile views, some categorized as blurry-icon recruiters that I can learn the identities of if I pay for premium. It's hard to measure what the value of this is. I don't have a new job yet, so I'm not sure that it's particularly useful. But again, when I compare to my effort last year, I've had 100% more interview action than before, which was none.
What's already exhausting is that everyone has a hot take about AI that isn't rooted in any data or study. And yes, coding with AI agents is way more fun and takes a lot of the tediousness out of it, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't still require your expertise. I have more opinions on that, but I guess that'll be a future post. Maybe it'll get 100k views, too.
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