MyCivio

When I started out as a developer, my colleagues suggested using LinkedIn as a way to network with other developers in my region and find job opportunities. I found it to be very effective and I can attribute it to landing interviews and making professional relationships.

With the right approach, I was able to make connections without having cold call complete strangers. A simple hello and a genuine curiosity through a quick coffee date was enough to help build my network. But it also made researching and getting a leg up on other candidates much easier: You could easily find decision makers by simply pulling up the companies I wanted to work for. I could find an email address, a phone number, or an easy way to connect to the individual. And the workflow worked in an opposite effect – recruiters and even hiring managers would reach out to me about opportunities. The more I connected, the more opportunities I landed.

On the other hand after 2016, LinkedIn, as well as other social media platforms, began to change. Recruiters started to utilize Linkedin as their lead generation and my inbox was starting to fill up with messages of staffing firms being represented by recruiters which had avatars that looked like super models with suits on.

No longer could you simply reach out to other professionals with genuine notes. You had to load your activity with blog posts and articles with corporate buzz words and lingo just so you could build up a false sense of validation through reactions from other LinkedIn users. It was very hard to be unique because LinkedIn wanted you to be the same cut as everyone else. Developers in the business to code awesome things, not influencing others into your way of thinking.

But the biggest turn off, and my eventually deletion of my LinkedIn profile was the tribalism of the political advocacy of the platform itself, as well as the user base. What was once an established etiquette where content and interaction was strictly professional and about business turned into tribalism often seen in office politics.

This eventually lead me and a majority of developers to leave LinkedIn altogether. Not as a boycott to what the platform was becoming but as an epiphany that we didn’t need social media for find jobs. There were communities that us developers could turn to maintain our networks. Some turned to Discord or Matrix where they maintained a close knit community away from the corporate oversight of major social media platforms. Others used federated platforms such as Mastodon, or self-hosted their own platforms to keep in touch. The more extreme choose to go back to their roots and used IRC chat servers.

On the flip side, some developers simply choose to leave cyberspace and just utilized job boards like Indeed or Glassdoor. Or they found sites like remoteok.com to find remote jobs. These sites are great as they generally are more niched, thus the competition is low both for job applicants and companies. However, as sites like these mature, their pricing begins to match the demand. Thus, smaller companies like start-ups and mid-level enterprises cannot justify the cost of maintaining job posts on such niche sites.

This lead to my business partner and I to create a web application which provides companies job postings at a cheaper, more affordable price without sacrificing too much on features. But ultimately, we want to keep the job opportunities numerous for our large network of developers that chose to unplug from mainstream social media.

As the social media exodus continues and more and more tech workers demand more remote opportunities, we hope to provide more opportunities for remote work who are looking to get away from corporate controlled social media but still have the benefits of social media platforms like LinkedIn

Our site is up and running! Come check us out!

https://mycivio.com