Five FAKE Pieces of Career Advice That Hold You Back
With the recent onslaught of fake news permeating social media and the internet at large, society is increasingly dealing with the question of how to decipher truth from fiction. The 2016 election was a watershed moment, from Pizza Gate to the accusation that an ISIS leader came out in support of Hillary Clinton. Pandora’s Box of internet garbage is open and flowing.
The problem is largely centered around ridiculous click-bait headlines , because unfortunately, simple falsehoods (“Obama is a Muslim”) are better at grabbing attention than nuanced truths (“Obama is a multi-racial global citizen who spent time in his youth with Christians, Jews, and Muslims”).
But while easily debunked falsehoods have cropped up in greater volume in the past couple years, the reality is that the internet has never had a shortage of trashy content. Bad information isn’t a new problem; it has simply become amplified with the advent of social media.
It also isn’t restricted to facts.
As a society, we’ve come to use the internet as a tool for life advice. We consult the internet for relationship advice, moral questions, financial decisions, and far far more. There is an abundance of pseudo-wisdom available to us; good advice is in unfortunately in short supply.
Unlike fake news, advice cannot be explicitly proven wrong. However, there is undoubtedly a difference between good and bad advice, and to succeed on the internet and in life, we all need to learn how to tell that difference. To traverse the badlands of internet and social media content, we need to rely on our logic and intuition to develop an ability of discernment.
This is specifically relevant when it comes to professional life. In my career, I have encountered many pieces of internet “career wisdom” that seem to be accepted as good advice by most people. Initially, I viewed this advice as a series of unfortunate realities that I would have to accept. Eventually, I came to conclude that most of that advice was complete garbage and I needed to get rid of if I ever wanted to be successful.
By ignoring bad advice, I was able to navigate my career in ways that would have otherwise been impossible.
Below, I highlight five common ideas that I consider to be ridiculously bad career advice. This is from my own personal experience, and I encourage you to consider whether it is true for you as well:
“Gap in the Resume”
Career advisors across the internet agree that a “gap in the resume” is a problem that desperately needs to be avoided. The menacing-sounding “gap” is simply a period of time when you don’t have a job.
This idea is built on the theory that another company will be less likely to hire you because you’ve been unemployed for a period of time. The hiring manager will notice that you’ve been out of a job from April to September and kindly place your resume in the rejection pile.
The problem with this argument is that it keeps people stuck. Employees stay in terrible jobs that they hate — out of fear.
In reality, companies hire because they need a skill-set to run their operation; your six month gap does not factor into how that operation runs. If you can convince someone that you have the skills to successfully do the job, your work history will be the last thing on their mind.
On the other hand, if you have a great resume but can’t persuade someone on your skill-set, you’re probably screwed. I would work on that one if I were you.
So for goodness sake, quit the job and book the three month excursion to Thailand. There will be jobs when you get home.
“Foot in the Door”
In theory, getting your foot in the door to a great company would be a good piece of advice. “Started from the bottom, now we’re here” says Drake (if the bottom means growing up Jewish in an affluent Toronto suburb). It directly clicks with the aspirational ideology of the American Dream, where anyone can become anything.
Getting your foot in the door sounds practical and ambitious, like you’re hustling your way up to the top.
Yet unfortunately, this is terrible advice. Getting your foot in the door is settling for less — taking an awful job at a company with a big name and putting up with misery for a while before things hopefully get better. This isn’t hustling; this is suffering. Avoid it.
Even great companies have terrible jobs, and inter-departmental politics often make it extremely difficult to get to where you want to be. For example, operations roles at investment banks rarely provide any route to becoming a trader or a dealmaker.
Instead of getting your foot in the door, find a great company where the door is wide open and you can work on interesting problems from day one. Do not waste your time on meaningless jobs — you are better than that. Better to take a great job at a no-name company than a bad job at a great company. In the latter, you may not last long anyways.
“It’s a Numbers Game”
This was always bad advice. Pursuing a job search as though success is a product of random chance is an almost guaranteed way to end up in an unfulfilling job.
The problem with the numbers game approach is that it encourages you to maximize the number of companies that you apply to and therefore spend less time on each individual company you look at. This prevents legitimate introspection as to whether you would want to work at any given company, and also limits your ability to make a thorough case of persuasion to that company as to why you should work there.
The hiring process for most companies works the following way: a department allocates a portion of its budget to a manager who is dealing with an excessive workload or doesn’t have the skills to meet his/her current requirements. Generally, there is an explicit reason why they decided to hire a new employee.
Talent recruitment is incredibly time consuming, so the process is outsourced to an internal or external recruiter. This recruiter manages the hiring process and eliminates resumes without a fundamental understanding of the underlying business problem that drove the decision to open a position in the first place. Therefore, with inadequate knowledge, the recruiter relies on superficial criteria to evaluate candidates — basically, just whether the resume meets the provided requirements.
For most people at most times, the recruiters are simply slowing you down and worsening your odds. You have almost zero time to persuade someone who doesn’t even understand the position in the first place.
So instead of firing off a hundred applications, simply skip the recruiter and the application process, and directly email the hiring manager with a detailed argument as to why you can do the job better than anyone else. This is the individual that can properly evaluate you, and can also recognize talent even in the absence of prestigious credentials.
“Get a Few Years in Banking or Consulting Before Starting a Business.”
This is, and always was, a complete joke. Many people advocate that it is a responsible decision to work in a high-paying, high-stress corporate job to gain a skill-set before risking it all to start the business. Evidently, this is the necessary experience before you can build a business.
Except that it just doesn’t work that way. The corporate world is, in no uncertain terms, the complete opposite of starting a business. Corporations encourage conformity, risk-aversion, and bureaucracy. Take those norms into a startup and prepare to get crushed by competition that is more agile and brave than you are.
I started my career in finance before moving to a startup and then starting my own business. In order to get where I am today, I had to unlearn everything that I had been taught in a corporate setting. The best advice I could give to anyone who wants to start a business is to go start a business. Getting a corporate job is a simply a diversion (or a regression) away from what you really want to do.
Don’t Be a Jack of All Trades
Ok, ok, this one probably used to be good advice. In the 19th and 20th century, where division of labor was king, focused specialization in an in-demand field was a route to a lucrative career. Jumping around was a sign of distraction and immaturity.
But in a rapidly changing world, this advice ain’t gonna cut it. Because what happens when your job gets automated? When, as a data analyst, a software program can do your work better than you can? To stay competitive, you will constantly need to evolve and find new ways to add value in the 21st century.
In fact, your future job probably doesn’t even exist yet, so trying to specialize in it is impossible. Instead, a better strategy is to create systems that improve your odds over time. For most careers, this will require taking a multidisciplinary approach, where you can integrate multiple modes of thinking and seemingly unrelated skill-sets. Developing a diverse talent stack (as a completely random example: biology, data analytics, marketing, and social media) will open up wild career opportunities that you can’t even imagine.
So there you have it, five point of fake career advice that commonly circulate the internet.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.
