I think what the author describes about a tipping point in receiving offers/intros is true. I also think he is right about social media (FB, Instagram, Twitter) for someone like him. This is also in-line with the author's writing on 'Deep Work' so his stance is not a surprise. However, I see a great great counter-example--Patrick McKenzie (Patio11).

I just checked and he has over 42k Twitter followers and is regularly brought up on HN.

Yet, here's the third paragraph on his personal website:

"I love talking to other small businesses at any time, for any reason: please, drop me an email. I respond to as many as I can, time permitting. Nothing makes me happier than helping people out. See the Standing Invitation for details." https://www.kalzumeus.com/

I wonder if the way Patrick portrays himself and his openness to connecting, ends up with him having a higher quality of inbound than the author. I realize that's a conjecture wrapped up as a question.

I've found social media (Twitter and FB) just so incredibly valuable both personally and financially I usually don't even bother arguing about it.

Random examples: Sold some website classification tech after a SM conversation, got company funded after being introduced on SM, met customers and partners on SM etc.

I'd strongly, strongly dispute the tag of social media marketer though. I just post what I want and interact with whoever I want. If something great comes of it then great, but otherwise I feel better after complaining about random issues in Javascript libraries or some crazy thing I did wrong in a Kaggle competition.

I'm very aware of the trade-off of social media. But they are trade-offs.

"This struck me as humble-braggy, and not particularly enlightening."

But it is true. I'll save my criticism for things that are false, or utterly banal. And people at the beginning of their career might not fully realize how much things change when their career takes off. It's worth saying.

The thing that's false is the implication that careers will certainly / deterministically take off. Especially in academia there are more people who both want a certain role and are qualified for it than roles. If you happen to stumble into the right path - maybe some particular research interest of yours in graduate school happens to line up with someone who just retired at a good university, and so there's an opening; maybe you pick an experiment that happened to succeed instead of fail and so you got more publications because people hate negative results - your career will take off without the need for social media to provide you with opportunities and networking. On the other hand, maybe someone from your informal network will be the step you need to get out of a fruitless program and into something where your career will take off.

If this person is conditioning their anecdata on "successful professionals," it's totally unsurprising that they'll find that successful professionals are successful. That doesn't help those of us who aren't lucky and need to figure out how to push ourselves over the threshold until our career catches.

(Note that I'm not saying that this person's success was simply the result of luck; they also had to be qualified and work hard. But out of the qualified people who work hard, not all of them can succeed.)

I had a similar reaction. It strikes me a bit as part of the rampant survivorship bias that happens all the time in contemporary society. As in, I worked hard and things worked out, therefore if you work hard things will work out, and if you didn't, you weren't doing something valuable or working hard enough.

I don't know that I disagree with the author so much about social media platforms like Facebook per se, but I disagree with some implicit premise they're making.

The reason why things like blogs and social media presence are advertised so much is precisely because "value" really means something like perceived value, which depends on things like awareness. That is, it's not really so much whether or not what you do has value, its whether or not people are aware of you and perceive it as having value. So to get eyeball time, you need to put yourself out there.

I'm also a tenured professor, and what I increasingly see is popularity driving things, rather than value. That is, the rigor of academic work seems less and less important than the splashiness of it. The colleagues I know whose careers have taken off have done so precisely because they manipulate the social aspect of it--they're politicians more than scientists or mathematicians.

In this regard, there seems to be something disingenuous and dangerous about the general sentiment being expressed. To me, it generally seems to be dismissing the sociopolitical aspect of how we reward work, sweeping it under the rug, which will only worsen our problems.

I don’t see many founders on HN or social media after they get funded.. if anything they may post about their company

But that's true of both founders whose companies will succeed and founders whose companies will fail - they both need to focus on the one thing they're doing in the hope of not making it fail.

The interesting question is whether they were spending time on social media before getting funded, and whether that correlates with later success, perhaps due to having better ideas or better offline networking opportunities or whatever.