I Read All 61 Comments On My Own Promotion Post And I Have Some Notes

So I got promoted in March, and did the social media post about it which for years I’d vowed I would never, ever do and then did six hours after the notification, because apparently I'm just like everyone else.

The post went well.

Sixty-one comments, which for me is a huge amount, my usual average is about four including the two where my old colleague Priya is just lovely.

At some point that night however, well after I should have been tucked up asleep in bed I found myself actually reading every single one of them instead of scanning for names I recognized.

This proved a mistake from the perspective of not getting enough sleep, and useful from the perspective of noticing, at long last, a pattern in the comments that I’d scrolled past hundreds of times in the last six years without registering.

About forty of them were "Congratulations!" (and that's it)

Forty of the sixty-one.

Some with an exclamation point, some with two.

One with a party popper emoji.

A guy I know somewhere, who shall remain nameless to prevent future friction from his colleagues who know nothing about this, simply wrote "Congrats" with no exclamation point at all, an attempt at formality I somehow perceived as deeply hostile and am frankly still smarting from though I'm 99% sure there was no bad faith involved.

I just want to make this clear, I'm not complaining.

That's a nice thing to say.

It costs nothing.

I've almost certainly said it hundreds of times to dozens of other people throughout my life, and likely within about 3 days this week.

BUT forty 'congratulations!' in a row does something to your brain.

It ceases to be a word and becomes... Texture.

My conclusion after reading through these forty was that I cannot tell you a single thing about any single one of those forty people beyond knowing their names and seeing their faces floating around my feed for years on end.

I have no idea what any single one of them actually does for a living.

An interesting observation when so much time is spent on a platform fundamentally predicated on what one does for a living.

Then the comment that managed to turn it on themselves

There is always one, isn’t there?

In this case it was another brief acquaintance of mine from 2019 who typed a genial "Congrats mate!" followed by ninety words about their own recent career changes and all they had learned about patience, I think.

It is impossible to argue with that sort of comment.

There's simply no available move and you can't reply, "this isn't your story".

All you can do is type "thanks!" and surrender it over and let them keep it, and know that the next 10 people who click on your post will be treated to ninety words of career lessons from an acquaintance they've never heard of before reading one word from you.

I'm quite convinced this is precisely the goal, however much they'd deny it.

I don't believe there was malice involved, they just discovered free speech on the internet and are utilising their platform correctly.

Someone who disputed something I hadn’t actually said

One thing my post stated was that the promotion was largely because a manager had taken a chance on me, even though I wasn't necessarily qualified or ready.

The subsequent reply read, verbatim approximately, "Nice observation, I'd gently challenge that, readiness is a construct that we invent for ourselves", and consisted of three bullet points of theory, concluding by reiterating exactly what I’d just said but wearing a slightly smarter coat.

I replied, just once, then replied again to his rebuttal of my rebuttal.

Since then I have had the silent, steady, satisfying feeling that I had handled it perfectly without him knowing anything other than the fact that I’d said something more than just "congratulations".

The recruiters who announced themselves so overtly

There were two this time, both offering remarks such as "that's a wonderful point on managers taking chances; it really resonates" and then both adding me as a connection within four days.

Within hours of connecting one sent me a job spec describing a role I’d interviewed for a year prior in a company that was tangential, at best, to anything that I actually do.

Again, it’s not necessarily a bad strategy but it is incredibly obvious.

It’s like someone attempting to hide behind a very small lampshade.

It’s much easier to just send me a message directly as if I am a person instead of a potential data point.

The three replies I actually still think about

This was a bit unexpected.

The first was from a woman I’d only met once three years prior, total: approximately eleven minutes of conversation, and had the following response: "I love what you said about a manager taking a chance; that’s what I went through two years ago of sitting around, waiting until I was ready, but no one ever gave me a chance.

What do you think I did wrong?".

A bit of a tricky question to answer at midnight I felt, and my answer probably not as useful as it deserved to be.

The second was a total stranger who picked up a throwaway remark I’d made about an ongoing restructuring within my own team and messaged me that night to say they’re due for something similar and how they were dealing with it.

We eventually talked on the phone and still keep in touch now.

The third was of course Priya with that familiar nice message, referencing something specific which had happened in 2021 and that I’d almost completely forgotten.

So there are 58 largely meaningless statements in that comment section, and three deeply rewarding ones.

The fact that the bar was set so incredibly low is sort of breathtaking

I opened the post scroll hoping to read meaningful affirmation and I ended up sitting up until 3am with thoughts about my own capacity to perform meaningful actions when interacting online, essentially to give more than a congratulations/exclamation mark combo and then moving on.

I am statistically an exemplary citizen of the forty.

The astonishing thing in that knowledge is how very low the bar really is.

You are rewarded massively for very little.

You don’t need to strategise, you don’t need to pre-empt the trends in comment sections, you don’t need to think about optimum posting times.

There are no best-practice algorithms for this.

You simply read the text, find a specific point which stands out from the more generic comments about the status update, and you say something genuine about that specific point.

Anything at all is fine and the stakes have been set about 10 centimeters off the floor.

Nobody seems capable of clearing this mark without undue concentration or quite the amount of effort required to move their arm into position.

Everyone is desperate to be seen on this platform.

The reality is that all anyone wants is to be able to be the one visible face.

So just pay attention to the one person in front of you.

Anyway.

Congratulations!