Precisely. The cyber stalking of applicants is about to get even worse. Anyone having a public presence on social media is hurting themselves.

And anyone without one is then nobody.

Someone needs to build a bot that posts boring, but socially acceptable content that won’t raise any red flags for potential employers.

I disagree. I happily include my personal site with quite some controversial articles (being my opinion at that time) on it in my resume. It works as a great filter for companies I wouldn't want to work for.

This works great for competent, experienced software engineers who are in extremely high demand right now. To be blunt, most people are not that valuable economically to a company, and so have to fight a lot more to get a lot less. Most people would find a hard time getting work with any broadly controversial topics associated with them.

There's also the argument that software engineers may not always be in such high demand, and you never know what's going to be catalogued and indexed to you 10, 20, 30 years from now.

I am in demand now as a data analyst. But I did that already in my first jobs after college.

I was able to get by on working as a bartender while looking for a job. I had fun doing it and little cost of living.

Why should I have sacrificed my mental health or my happiness for a job working for assholes? (pardon my language)

I'm not saying you should have done it. I'm saying a lot of people have to.

When you find yourself having to make a public apology for an old blog post in the future, you’re going to regret doing that. Or maybe a gen Z hacker that hasn’t been born yet will ransomware your business because you wrote an article today with a word that will become socially unacceptable in the future.

I have no delusions that my political opinions or writing style are original enough or convincing enough to change the world. So it’s all just risk for me. If I’m writing something on my blog, it’s probably a focused technical article with no politics and little to no humor.

Why should I censor myself just because there are extremists out there?

I actually despise these trigger warnings and cancel culture of cultural pieces just because the author was a misogynistic idiot (or anti semite, or proponent of slavery). We need to put bools/texts/essays into their historical contexts and discuss why we today hold beliefs that are different (and to us feel more modern/humane/better).

I am politically very left, atheist and I argue against dehumanizing isms since my days in high school 25 to 30 years ago. But still I find value in discussing ideas from Kant, Luther or many others that nowadays are often canceled in educational settings because of their despicable values/isms.

Honestly you could probably train a GPT-3 based model on the posts of medium and high profile people in whatever industry you work in, add a couple post-content generation checks to eliminate any accidental plagiarism, and you'd be most of the way there.

Then I'm nobody and I'm good with that.