The Categorical Imperative: Shout Without Spamming — A Practical Playbook for Promoting Your ML Work (and Getting Hired)

# The Categorical Imperative: Shout Without Spamming — A Practical Playbook for Promoting Your ML Work (and Getting Hired)

You built something cool — a model, a library, a weekend hack that didn’t explode. Now what? Tossing it into the void and praying for traction is a hobby for people with mood rings. If you want people to notice (and maybe pay you), you need strategy, brevity, and a little social grace.

Call this the categorical imperative of ML posting: act only according to maxims you’d want everyone to follow. If everyone posted a weekly self-link, the community would drown. If everyone made one concise, useful post and kept it updated, the ecosystem would be healthier. That sounds moralistic, because it is — it’s practical ethics for attention economies.

Let’s walk the rulebook — with a few mathy metaphors slipped in so you can impress your future manager in the same breath.

## The One-Post Rule (a.k.a. enforce a fixed point)

Communities tolerate one concise, useful post; they do not tolerate a daily self-linking opera. Think of your post as a fixed point in a dynamical system: if everyone iterated the same transformation (post once, update), the system converges. If everyone keeps changing wildly (spam), you get chaos.

What to include: pricing or engagement terms, what you offer (consulting, product licensing, contract), clear calls to action, and what you’re willing to exchange (money, equity, feedback, artisanal coffee). Update the post instead of creating new ones — that’s the ‘natural transformation’ that keeps your state coherent across community categories.

## The Advert Checklist (structured like a good type signature)

A recruiter is a strict type-checker: they read a post and expect things to line up. Provide this minimal interface and you reduce impedance mismatch.

– Headline: one sentence that answers “what” and “who.”
– Offer: product, service, or collaboration description in two lines.
– Terms: flat fee / hourly / rev-share / equity — be explicit.
– Delivery: timeline and what you’ll actually deliver.
– Proof: one link to a demo, repo, or short case study (no link shorteners).
– Contact: email, calendar link, or application form (no autoplay subscriptions).

This is Occam’s razor for adverts: remove noise; keep the explanatory variables.

## How to Write Hiring and “I Want Work” Blurbs (recruiters love order)

The job market wants predictable output. Templates exist for a reason — they save time and nine rounds of follow-up email. Use exact types: location (or remote), comp range, employment type, two-sentence role summary and required experience. For seekers: location/flexibility, salary range, arrangement, resume link, and a single-sentence “what I actually do best.”

This is not bureaucracy for fun; it’s filtering. Think Bayesian: clear priors help both sides update sensibly.

## What to Brag About (and What to Skip) — metrics first

Tech bragging should be verifiable and brief. Put metrics first: latency, accuracy, PR-AUC, or revenue/retention. If your repo is open-source, show one compact benchmark and say whether it’s production-ready or experimental. Don’t lead with “novel” — that word is overused like a deprecated API.

If research matters, switch modes:

– Product mode: Did it make something cheaper/faster/smaller? Say so. That’s the language of operations managers (and cloud bills).
– Research mode: If you discovered a principle or limitation, summarise the practical implication in one sentence. Don’t drown people in math unless they asked for the appendix.

Category theory loves structure-preservation. When you state what you built, say what structure you preserve and what you intentionally discard.

## Production Readiness on Your CV (prove it runs in the wild)

If you want production roles, show packaging (wheel, Docker), benchmarks on representative datasets, and operational features (parallelism, memory footprint, edge compatibility). A repo with demo notebooks and CI tests is recruiter candy.

This is software engineering hygiene, not virtue signaling. It turns your proof-of-concept into a real covariant functor from Research → Product.

## A Quick Reality Check: Where the Jobs Are (and isn’t this fun)

If you’re hunting recommender roles in Europe with an MSc, you’re not doomed. Big tech, e-commerce, streaming, travel, ad-tech, and niche startups hire for this stack. PhDs help for bleeding-edge algorithm design but aren’t mandatory for applied roles. Smaller hubs and vertical startups often value pragmatic experience.

Practical next steps: target companies that deploy models at scale, highlight A/B testing and ranking experience, and show you understand the data pipeline — recommender systems are as much data engineering as they are ML.

## Community Etiquette and Conversion Tricks (respect the fragile ecosystem)

– No link shorteners, no auto-subscribe, no spam.
– Update your single post instead of reposting.
– Engage: reply to commenters and reciprocate.
– Share code with a minimal reproducible example and one-line “why this matters.”

In game-theory terms, this is designing a cooperative equilibrium rather than exploiting a selfish dominant strategy that collapses the commons.

## Two Sides of the Coin

Promotion is necessary. If you don’t surface your work, you’ll lose opportunities. But attention is a scarce commodity: unstructured shouting reduces the signal-to-noise ratio and erodes trust. The answer isn’t silence — it’s intentionality. Use templates, be transparent about terms, and treat communities with the same respect you’d want when reading other people’s posts. That’s both ethic and efficient.

And, yes, this means occasionally holding your tongue. If we all did that? The feed would be a kinder, less clickbaity place. A bit boring? Maybe. But also functional.

## Final Note (and an invitation to argue)

Treat your promotional behaviour as a moral and logical system. Ask: if everyone followed my posting rule, would the ecosystem improve? If yes, post. If no, revise. The categorical imperative here is oddly liberating: constraints create better signals.

What’s your posting maxim? If you had to convert your personal promo strategy into a one-sentence theorem, what would it be — and would you accept it as universal?