Publicness and the Modern Career

This week, I accepted a new job. It will be a big change for me–among other things, I will be leaving the DC area and moving to New York. I may talk about that in more detail some other time. For now, I’d like to focus on how a blog post I wrote three years ago and a recent connection on LinkedIn made it possible for me to get this job in the first place.

Writing

I love to write, and I always have. It is one of the few true constants across my entire life. These days, anyone with a love for writing should be putting their work online. If you are already going to be investing the time and energy to write something, you might as well put it where people might conceivably find it. At minimum, it makes it easier to share with friends and family who are geographically scattered. At best, you open yourself up for a lucky break.

I have been blogging since November of 2004, when I was 19 and my interests were primarily politics and philosophy. I had been writing online in one form or another for years before that, but it mostly involved arguing about religion or video games or whatever I happened to feel strongly about at the time in various forums. Blogging was different; it became my method of choice for thinking out ideas through writing.

The early stuff I wrote was variably juvenile or pretentious, or both, but the mere act of doing it helped me to get better over time. The more I did it, the more I found I enjoyed it, and the easier it came to me.

In late 2008 I started a new blog specifically for longer analytical pieces on technology and new media. I wanted a blog that I could point potential employers to without the risk that while they were there they might stumble into some dumbass thing I had written when I was 19. They would have to go to the extra effort of googling me to do that!

Medialets

Back in 2009, an app analytics company called Pinch Media released a slideshare presentation based on data they had on iPhone app usage. It went viral, briefly becoming the talk of the tech blogosphere, and even getting a nod from the Onion. I took issue with the way the angle tech blogosphere coverage was approaching it from, and also with how some of the data was presented in the slideshare itself.

So I wrote a critique on my blog, fully expecting that it would only be seen by the handful of friends and family who usually read my posts. Shortly after posting it, the analyst for Pinch Media jumped in with some salient remarks in the comments section, which was a fun surprise.

Then I was contacted by someone from a company called Medialets, which at the time was one of Pinch Media’s competitors in the mobile analytics space. Rana, one of their cofounders, asked if I would be open to talking on the phone.

We talked, and she floated the idea of maybe having me work with them on a project by project basis. It was definitely more interesting than the job I had at the time. But I did have a job, and grad school, and a girlfriend in DC, and family and friends in northern Virginia. I spent a lot of hours driving between all of them, with very little free time left afterwards. So I was interested, but I didn’t follow up, and they didn’t either. I followed Rana and Eric Litman, Medialets’ CEO, on Twitter. After a while, I noticed that Rana had left the company for other ventures, so I assumed I was unlikely to have any dealings with them in the future.

Then, a little over a month ago, Google’s Bradley Horowitz connected to me on LinkedIn for reasons that remain a mystery to me. But I figured he was probably connected to some interesting people, so I looked. I saw Eric, and remembered him from my previous encounter with his company, and thought–why not? So I connected with him.

In the time since my last interaction with Medialets, I had added an MA in economics and a job in online ad operations to my resume. It just so happened that they were looking for someone to work in ad operations, so Eric reached out to me about a job.

Living in Public

New media is not a panacea; it still takes experience and education to qualify for a job, and that isn’t going to change. But your ability to do a job is far from the only thing that determines whether or not you get it. To start with, your potential employer has to know you exist.

Jeff Jarvis has recently championed the benefits of living in public, and one of those benefits is definitely that it creates the opportunity to be discovered. If the kind of work you want to do involves skills that can be demonstrated online, you should be demonstrating them.

But there is more to what a person would be like as an employee than what skills they have. One of the benefits of the various social networks we’re on is that people can get a feel for our personalities over time. While this may not be a perfect indication of what we would be like to work with, I think it’s fair to assume that everyone prefers to work with people they like rather than people they don’t. If you have a blog that puts your skills and personality on display then you are creating the possibility that someone will grow to like you, someone who either has a job you are qualified for or knows someone that does.

Take Eli for example. His blog just oozes social science smarts. If you are looking for a young, brilliant economist, reading his blog should be enough to convince you that he’s your guy. Moreover, you really get a sense of what his interests are, as well as of his sense of humor. I had a class with him years ago, but I really came to know his personality afterwards, by talking to him on Twitter and reading his posts.

Jeff Jarvis thinks that we are in the midst of a moral panic about privacy concerns, and I tend to agree. The privacy conversation is an important one, and we need to have it, but we should be very careful not to undervalue what each of us can get from moving more of ourselves into the public.

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Adam Gurri

Adam Gurri works in digital advertising and writes for pleasure on his spare time.