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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Don't almost everyone sell themselves? Many people, as employees, sell themselves for 5 days per week, every week, except days off.

And everybody buys stuff, and therefore relies on people selling stuff.

The only way I see we could avoid being exposed to selling would be do have a different way to organize the economy / the society.

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I think it's the self-promotion part that's seen as slimy and shameful. Yes, as an employee I trade my time for money, but I don't write blog posts at the office about what kind of transformational and high-impact work I'm capable of, and about this week's top-10 coding life-hacks, and how I can single-handedly turn your project around from life support to on-schedule deployment.

Admittedly, the people who are good at this tend to get promoted and quickly end up as Directors and VPs... It just... ugh, turns my stomach.

Oh, I see. Well, I guess I'm fine with the self promotion (which you do a bit to get hired even as an employee), as long as it's honest, polite, done a the right place and not annoying.

I'm not on LinkedIn (and I hope I won't need to be there the day I want to freelance) but I guess people are there for exactly this stuff, so posting an ad for yourself there is only fair, I suppose.

> but I don't write blog posts at the office about what kind of transformational and high-impact work I'm capable of, and about this week's top-10 coding life-hacks, and how I can single-handedly turn your project around from life support to on-schedule deployment.

That's not at all what the comment above was suggesting.

Saying you're open for work and offering services is not slimy.

I think you're confusing LinkedIn slop with offering services. They're not the same thing.

Those people are good at imitating the form of what curious and highly motivated by things beyond money do naturally.

Early programming blogs were written by people who had thoughts they just needed to share with the world. Because they were highly confident and self motivated people, they also often ended up being sought after and making a lot of money.

Then later others tried to turn the process into a formula they could use to increase their earning power, even if they were writing about things they weren't passionate about.

You put it better than I could have done myself!

My post was truthful, useful for both me and the potential employers, and I know it's what linkedin is for. Objectively, I did nothing wrong. And still I was really embarrassed by it, and deleted it after I landed a job.

I just really don't like tooting my own horn. I was raised to prize humility, I guess it's quite common in Sweden.

As one of the other replies (nested too deep to reply to directly) said, many of us were raised to be humble and self-effacing, especially about skills related to innate abilities like intelligence. So it feels unseemly to say, in essence, "Hey, you should hire me because I'm great at X, Y, and Z." It feels weird enough to list skills and accomplishments in a resume, but overtly selling yourself feels wrong.

Maybe people like us should team up in pairs and promote each other. I'd have no problem talking up a colleague I knew to be talented, far more forcefully than I'd ever do for myself.

that only works if we know each other very well. every time someone tried to talk me up i felt more awkward than if i had done it myself, because that person didn't know me well enough to actually judge that. the only talking up by someone else that i can tolerate is: "i have worked with this guy and i would hire him (again)"

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