Want a new job? Reddit might be to blame

Why on Earth would we make big career decisions based on anonymous tips?

The answer is – because it’s easy. Because it confirms what we already feel. Because they are pressing all the right buttons in our heads…

If I asked you: “Are you stupid?”, your answer, hopefully, would be – NO!

But what if you are? What if we all are? Not in the general sense but concerning how easily we get seduced by Jane and Joe Doe on the internet, especially on Reddit. In a sea of relatable posts and viral threads, even the smartest among us can get swept up.

And that raises a bigger question:

Are we really shaping our careers or is Reddit shaping them for us?

Something’s off

That was the wake-up call or rather, the wake-up question, behind the talk I Didn’t Want to Change My Job, but Reddit Made Me Do It, delivered by Mirna Horvat (co-founder and CEO, Leapwise and xolvi), at Shift Conference in Zadar.

In the last three years, she has read around a thousand CVs and interviewed roughly 200 people that wrote them. Something was off, she said.

Almost all of the CV’s had the same motivations for leaving their current jobs, they used the same phrases, had the same salary expectations, the same frustrations, the same anxieties.

Trying to figure out who was writing the script for what she was seeing in every job interview, she spent four months online, reading through Reddit, LinkedIn and various other online communities.

50 users shape communities of 20.000+ members

A handful of anonymous users, around fifty of them, are shaping community with 20.000 members or more. That might sound strange, but it’s actually not unusual.

There’s something called the 90-9-1 rule, or participation inequality, defined by Jakob Nielsen back in 2006. What does it mean? Basically, it says that 90% of people online are just consuming content, 9% occasionally comment, and only 1% actually create content.

On career-related subreddits, it’s even more extreme: 95% are silently reading, just 4% occasionally comment, and still, it’s the same 1% who are setting the tone – and the narrative – for everyone else.

But let’s return to our 50 “influencers”. Ninety-seven percent of them use so called throwaway accounts, but they also share some common characteristics:

They work remotely for well-known companies, but claim they only “sweat” for two hours a day. And they all seem to share the same attitude: No company is good. None.

That’s not all. They’re all earning €11,000 or more, at least, according to Croatian Reddit.

Science behind their impact

It’s clearly BS. So how come it works so well? It’s about being negative. Really, it is.

Mirna pointed out that negative comments trend 40% better and receive 40% more engagement. She even explained the science behind it.

A recent UCLA study scanned brains of people exposed to negative content. The amygdala, the brain’s fear center, activates in 180 ms, while the prefrontal cortex responds only after 500 ms. In other words, you feel fear before you can think logically about what you see.

Also, you have to take into consideration that the negative aspect of information, and the feelings you get from negative comments, stay in your mind five times stronger than the positive ones.

This isn’t about us as individuals, Mirna added, it’s about evolution. Our ancestors had to react quickly to negative circumstances in nature to survive. So our brains became wired to prioritize threats over feel-good moments.

She then brought up an MIT study which found that just being exposed to a negative comment makes you 25% more likely to think negatively about your own job, even if you were perfectly happy with it before.

People only share extreme emotions

Mirna shared another reason for the negativity bias. It’s the J-Curve effect from a study of 15 million Amazon reviews.

Most people leave either 1-star or 5-star ratings, while the indifferent majority stays silent. The same applies to how we talk about work, neutral days don’t make for engaging stories, so people share only strong positive or negative emotions.

This isn’t just Reddit. LinkedIn’s 2023 algorithm favors posts with emotional language like “I’m happy” or “I’m excited,” giving them three times more reach than neutral posts.

You probably shouldn’t blindly trust listen to online expert eather

We should stop listening to those flashy online voices who became “senior professionals” at 25 after just two years of work, living a dream life and getting paid astronomical amounts for their so-called brilliance.

A Harvard Business Review study even found that 73% of people giving online career advice have never actually hired anyone, and yet they’re out there, dishing out advice like experts.

But this is your career. You get to decide your next steps. As Mirna wisely reminded us, true growth takes time and patience, there are no shortcuts:

Every skill you have is built in layers. It takes up to 1.000 hours of dedicated work to acquire each layer, each step. And if you want to move forward, you cannot skip them. If you try to skip steps, you’ll have to make up for it later.

The very things you’re trying to avoid will come back to haunt you. Maybe not now, but eventually, in another job, another role, you’ll be forced to catch up.

Talk to real people when you want to change jobs

You really don’t have to be a victim of everything you read online. If you can’t stop yourself from diving into Reddit threads or doomscrolling posts about bad, bad IT companies, remember the 72-hour rule:

After an intense emotional experience, your feelings drop by 50% in the first 24 hours and usually fade by day three. Give yourself time before making big decisions.

The truth is, Reddit (or any online platform) can’t make you do anything.

“We allow ourselves to be influenced by the noise coming from outside,” says Mirna.

She concluded with a few grounded pieces of advice:

Talk to real people when you want to change jobs. Don’t just rely on the internet. No job is perfect. No company is perfect. Work with people you admire. When you stop admiring them, move on. Do something else. And stop doing anything that isn’t turning you into the person you want to become.