I was texting with my best friend. Her mum has cancer, and my friend is going through the brutality of watching it take her piece by piece, just as I did with my own mum 13 years ago.

I was thinking about how to respond to the latest message, too personal to relay here, when a suggested reply, animated in glowing colours to let me know it was "intelligent" popped up: Hang in there!

My thought process was immediately broken as I contemplated what an absolutely obscene thing it would be to send in that moment.

The more I work in building human-computer interactions, the more I think: you can’t assume anything. (You know what they say about assuming? When you assume, you make an a-s-s out of you and me.)

What was already a tough moment, was somehow made worse

Most people make this mistake, with engineers and developers on Twitter, where they assume the number of followers they have must correlate with how good of an engineer they are. When the only thing a sizeable Twitter following actually shows is how good they are at writing tweets

On giving up on twitter:

Paradoxically, the less I use Twitter, the better I am at my day job, but also the less likely I am to get approached with opportunities to change my day job. So the thing that makes me a more desirable candidate is the thing that makes me less likely to be a candidate in the first place.

So should you?

if someone new to Engineering asked me how to fast-track their career via job-hopping up the ladder, especially in the world of startups, I would suggest they get to tweeting. I would love to say that the most effective thing you could do is work on your skills, and the community will reward your hard work with new opportunities. But that would be dishonest, as unfortunately, it’s not how the world works.