I once wrote a post ‘Habits and Mindsets for Sustainable Growth’ recommending a book titled “The Battle Hardened Developer - Fiodar Sazanavets”. While there were many excellent quotes, the one that resonated with me the most was this: “Modern people must distance themselves from social media for their mental health. Developers, in particular, need to be even more careful.”

Through social media, we observe the “curated good lives” of others. I, too, have been traveling abroad for about two weeks now, and I am busy uploading photos to social media, driven by the desire to show this side of myself to the world. I don’t post about the difficulties of travel, the moments I argued with my wife, the places that were less impressive than expected, or the food that tasted bad. I simply edit and publish the photos I like the best.

LinkedIn is the representative social media tool that extends this “self-appeal” from life into career. I have used LinkedIn very actively, and indeed, I have received several good job offers through it. The main purpose of LinkedIn is not to show your happiness. It reveals what great work you are doing and what a solid career you are building. Occasionally, people share stories of failure or difficult moments, but even that is often a method to demonstrate growth through the process. I have no intention of criticizing this. In fact, I actively encourage my juniors and colleagues to use LinkedIn. Since so many people are busy packaging and appealing themselves, I believe that criticizing and avoiding this reality only results in remaining a “hidden expert” who fails to advertise themselves. Furthermore, without it, you might not be able to view your own skills objectively.

However, what is more dangerous than not using LinkedIn is judging yourself while reading the countless posts on it. LinkedIn is populated by employees from numerous IT companies, including developers. Developers from millions of companies attach open-source code they’ve worked on or technical analyses they’ve written. Due to the nature of the profession—where individual activities and careers are proven by source code and websites—these achievements are shared in much greater volume compared to other jobs.

Eventually, just as we envy the lives of others looking at Instagram photos, we begin to compare other developers’ posts with our current careers. If this acts as a catalyst encouraging personal growth, it is wonderful. But it should never reach a point where it causes burnout.

Recently, my life felt exactly like that. Watching someone else’s amazing achievements made me feel like I needed to work harder, but at the same time, I felt an indescribable exhaustion. Conversely, I started to question whether I was living well, or if I was doing something wrong. A tool I used to read about things I didn’t know and to share new insights had started to become a tool that made me look pessimistically at my efforts and made me feel infinitely small.

These days, there are channels on other social media platforms that curate “How to become a good developer.” I follow those channels and tend to read them one by one while lying in bed. As I enter my late 30s, I constantly worry about whether I am being refined into a “good developer.” There are parts where I feel relieved, thinking “thank goodness,” but there are also contents that make me break out in a cold sweat beyond mere embarrassment. Personally, I believe the profession of a developer has a different “standard of evaluation” compared to many traditional jobs. If the career path for most office workers was based on “where you belong”—joining a famous large corporation, receiving a high salary, working as a manager, and retiring at the standard age—then for developers, the criteria for a career path has become prioritizing personal competence and happiness. That is why, even when belonging to a sufficiently good company, they constantly wander looking for other places and want to create and share their own achievements even outside of work hours.

In the end, it comes down to our mindset. If we start evaluating ourselves through comparison, looking at someone else’s achievements—big or small—will only make us anxious about our present. We need to have the leeway to think that there are countless teachers out there who give us insights through new content and teach us the parts we lack.