Why geeks don’t like “personal branding”

“Personal branding” is just a fancy way of saying “marketing yourself”.

Most geeks aren’t fans of marketing. They tend to prefer unambiguous technical specifications and logical arguments to the artificiality and cheap tricks they perceive as being used by too many marketers.

So, “personal branding” to geeks basically means “creating an artificial impression you project for others”, or if they’re feeling less friendly, “making yourself out to be something you’re not”.

Geeks are generally very interested in what they consider to be accuracy. For example, they’ll consistently rate themselves lower in recruitment skills lists than non-geeks as they don’t want to inaccurately portray their skill level. They’ll compare themselves to those they most respect (by definition, people who know more about what they do than they do), and find themselves wanting. Thus, they will deny being an “expert”, even though they know that many (most?) people who have done a two-week Java course or read Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours will probably claim a greater skill level.

Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, famously (at least to me) wrote Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years in which he strongly questioned what exactly you “learn” when reading one of these Teach Yourself Pascal In Three Days books. Not much, he argues. To back this up, he calls on research that suggests that it takes roughly 10 years to develop expertise in a wide variety of endeavours — from physical sports such as swimming and tennis, through chess, to art through music composition, playing music, and painting.

Learning requires focused repetition with an awareness of your performance and attempts to improve your performance with each repetition. Expertise, they say, takes around 10 000 hours of said focused repetition and awareness and experimentation. Unsurprising, then, that few geeks under 30 would suggest they are experts in anything; they use a totally different scale.

Besides not liking marketing and using a totally different scale, there are two other reasons why geeks tend not to like personal branding:

A large number of geeks would rather not be in any sort of general spotlight. They’d rather be respected by others within their interest. And those within their interest would likely be turned off by any inflated claims.

Also, there is a negative emotional reaction to the term “personal branding”, much like the negative emotional reaction that happens to many when the term “Jail4Bail” is mentioned — everyone is jumping on the bandwagon, especially those trying to position themselves through “thought leadership” (by being the “echo” in the “echo chamber”), and the wrongness of the marketing is overpowering any value the message may contain.

The irreverent Violent Acres pretty accurately expresses the major fault of “personal branding” as it is being too often practised in “Personal branding is a load of garbage“:

All of this goobly-gook is a clever way of saying that instead of going to the effort to become a certain sort of person, we can just insist that we are that sort of person until others give in and believe us. Instead of developing our personalities into something with substance, we can simply buy all of the proper accessories needed to project the right ‘image.’