Your next job will come from someone you barely know
⌛ It’s Monday, March 18, and we’re 21% of the way through 2024
Today: The law of “weak ties,” Apple Notes tricks, and the shadow side of software optimization. By Harris Sockel
“Welcome to LinkedIn! It’s a cesspool,” a coworker told me (half-jokingly) when I joined the platform two years ago. I joined absurdly late (over a decade into my career) because honestly, I don’t love the idea of defining myself by my job.
But at a certain point, social pressure got to me. Yes, I receive spammy messages from people offering me $50 to “answer a few questions” about [app I’ve never heard of]. I realize, though, that today not only do we need to have a job, we also need to present ourselves as having one — and be part of a network of people doing the same. It’s the principle of “weak ties”: the idea, proven by a five-year longitudinal study whose results were released in 2022, that most of your career opportunities come from distant acquaintances and strangers. That is, people who know of you but don’t actually know you.
This contradicts conventional wisdom that jobs come from people who know you well or have worked with you directly. On Medium a few years back, Airbnb machine learning engineer Devin Soni analyzed the power of weak ties in social networks. Without weak ties, Soni writes, the entire network would come crashing down: acquaintances do the subtle but important work of building bridges between tight-knit communities. Also on Medium, the Executive Director of Harvard Business School’s research division, Carin-Isabel Knoop (on Humans in the Digital Era), explains what happens when ties become too weak: LinkedIn can begin to feel like a bad dating app, where (according to a recent study) 77% of job seekers were ghosted by prospective employers somewhere during the process.
What else we’re reading
- Digital minimalist Denis Volkov shares 12 lesser-known Apple Notes features to help you locate that insight you jotted down and promptly lost. If you’re an Apple Notes user, add tags to your notes to automatically group them into folders. (Tags can be added anywhere in a note, just type # and a word.)
- I loved this list of affirmations for anyone frustrated with the status quo (in any context, big or small). I keep returning to this one: My capacity to create change is only as strong as my capacity to change.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom (about software development)
“Every time you optimize something to make it faster, more memory efficient or involve fewer humans, you’re crossing your fingers and hoping the generalization holds. The more you do this in a system, the more likely edge cases are to create surprises.” — Marianne Bellotti, author of Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)
Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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