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Possible to get away from LinkedIn and Github? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/cs_career_questions

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I'm a career transitioner looking to get a higher paying job working as a Web Developer. I've been self teaching for a bit over 3.5 years now and am currently working part time at a very small start up while still working on my own personal projects and slowly researching and studying CS topics.

I have been networking, mainly online and some locally. I also have been trying desperately to get away from mainstream social media platforms (left instagram, left reddit). But I find myself being highly encouraged by those within my network to keep my LinkedIn profile maintained and regularly post as a part of appealing to recruiters. I dislike the LinkedIn platform and what I perceive to be toxic positivity that proliferates on there. I also have reservations on hosting all my code on Github, but that seems to be what everyone defaults to for showcasing their portfolio.

I generally want to use alternatives to FAANG products whenever possible, and even though it's not in the acronym, I include Microsoft in this list. I'd like to move away from using Microsoft products (LinkedIn) and their acquired platforms (Github) without nuking my potential career prospects.

This is more asking about long term advice as I believe as a new developer, this may not be possible (?).

Nevertheless, I'm seeking any advice on how to still advance my career in tech while staying off of these major platforms.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

TLDR; New web developer wants advice on how to continue to advance career without use of major media platforms, specifically LinkedIn, but also Github.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Linkdin is effectively a personal website generator with social features. Your profile page is the important part, but only if you’re optimizing for “searchability” / random discovery. If you’re doing that, then you’re competing with everyone else who is also doing that.

A personal website is fine; better even. It’s a project all on its own, and you can do cool stuff with it. Show off your projects on it. You can host your code on any platform that supports git, but you’ll get bonus points for using a self-hosted instance.

I have a linkdin account only to reserve my name and link to my website.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A personal website is fine; better even. It’s a project all on its own, and you can do cool stuff with it. Show off your projects on it.

Ah, this is very encouraging. I've put a good effort into making a minimal, but aesthetically pleasing website that showcases links to the startup's website, a nonprofit Coding role I briefly held, as well as my portfolio projects. I've also put the effort into writing extensive (sometimes quite lengthy) blog posts directly on my site covering various beginner developer topics.

You can host your code on any platform that supports git, but you’ll get bonus points for using a self-hosted instance.

This is quite interesting. I've been investigating hosting my own Gitea instance on a Digital Ocean or Linode VPS for a while now, but wondered if it would be worthwhile from a career perspective.

What gives me pause is that self hosting my projects like this may make my projects less discoverable on search engines. Could you elaborate on why you (and potential employers) would assign "bonus points" for this?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Absolutely - self-hosting something like that is in and of itself a project!

I wouldn’t worry about discoverability - you want to hunt for the job you want, not necessarily wait to be discovered. Once you have a position in your sights, you get to point at your site / projects / git host via everything - your cover letter, resume, business cards, etc.

Having a blog is fantastic. You get to showcase your interests and skills in whatever areas you want, and a good combination of technical capability and enthusiasm will get you in most doors easily.