I stopped using social media in 2017, and it’s been a sanity saver. But this year, I was forced to join LinkedIn to apply for jobs. Also, as I quit my job a few months ago, there was no way to keep up with the people I had been working with for the last year. While these people were in my WhatsApp–my primary place for keeping contacts, it simply doesn’t “scale” well. LinkedIn came into the picture.
I never made a LinkedIn account because I never understood its purpose. Now, I’m moving from being a student to entering the workforce full-time, and work is gradually taking center stage in my life. I’m beginning to grasp the importance of connection or “weak ties” as used in the book The Defining Decade by Meg Jay. I got my previous/first job through a person in a telegram group. I never met him in person but occasionally had been discussing books, self-improvement, agonizing over philosophical ideas. He was one of the “weak ties” and helped me to kickstart my career in software development.
In my experience, LinkedIn is undoubtedly not a place to look for meaningful connections like other social media, but it is well-optimized for building and keeping “weak” connections. So, I’m trying to ignore the bad parts such as inauthenticity, and virtue signaling, which are quite prevalent in that space. I don’t visit my feeds or interact with posts.
I set up my Twitter a few days ago with a similar idea in mind. I wanted to share my developer journey and potentially connect with like-minded people. While I will continue to write blogs, more demanding than I previously imagined, I’ll use Twitter for brief updates. Secondly, I’m hoping that sharing my programming journey on Twitter will help me build my “weak ties” network.
Twitter wasn’t on my radar at all, but turns out, the dev community there is pretty massive. Plus, it’s perfect for sharing quick updates, which I couldn’t resist. So, here I am!
For precautions, I have uninstalled both apps from my phone, and thinking of setting up some browser extensions to limit the usage of these apps on my laptop.
