LinkedIn probably has a net benefit for your career by keeping up to date and checking the messages once a week, but I cannot get over the awkwardness of seeing total BS stories and thousands of replies saying "YES! AMEN!".
"I was running late to an interview this morning but stopped to help a man who fell off of his bike and fixed it up for him. Afterwards I bought him a coffee and talked about life. He mentioned how he had to go to work but was touched by meeting me, he said we had a real connection. I go to the interview and guess what! The man was my interviewer! He immediately offered me a job at 1.5m a year plus bonuses and is fast tracking me to become a regional director. Remember to be a nice human #Hashtag #Human #WEAREPEOPLE #ConnectWithMe"
"I was rushing to an interview still drunk from the night before. I hit a cyclist, but just turned on my wipers and got there in time.
After waiting 30 mins they told me my interviewer had been involved in a tragic accident, but as I was here would I like their CEO job?"
#KeepClimbing #PressureWashYourFender
Humor and corporations do not much but I always refused to fake the "how interesting, let me add some crap to this bullshit and look as if believe it"
Initially I was the village idiot, and gradually become free to actually say what I want to say. Since it is not really PC it was meet with terrified smiles or dedain. But what was said was said.
I like this situation very much because I can relieve some of the stress and straight lies, without confrontation.
Every community slides into its own stereotype like becoming a caricature of itself, but it's not objectively a bad thing, just strange to outsiders while the regulars are just fine with HN as it is. Oops, I mean LinkedIn.
Sometimes I feel like the mods' aggressive enforcement of, what basically amounts to, respectability politics might be hurting HN. The other day someone posted a link to a blog post titled "put bluntly - the effects of sleep deprivation" and someone who had struggled with sleep problems and who, I presume, was sick and tired of hearing people explain this to them like the problem was a lack of awareness. They started their response with "To put it bluntly, fuck you" following by a detailed explanation of their struggle with sleep and all the things they've tried and how they still have to put up with people trying to explain this shit to them.
The mods took the comment down right away of course. But it made me think about how much the enforcement of rules like these might just be reinforcing the echo chamber. Sometimes you need to be yelled at to realize how out of line you are. There was another post where a woman shared her experiences with sexism and having to face death threats and being doxxed because some incels didn't like how she responded to a man hitting on her. Half the comments were questioning her or blaming her for "seeking it out" or whatever. It was really painful to watch others try to respond to comments like that and sound "respectable" and trying to engage with their talking points. It made me wonder about people who post those comments and can go on being engaged with and never actually told how much of a fuckface they're being
Now that I think about it, I kinda feel like this is a major problem with LinkedIn as well. I don't believe in bullying, but I think socialization can be an important tool sometimes
Shameless plug of my open source LinkedIn clone written in a custom Lisp dialect. it's free but we offer cost effective white glove support for businesses and cloud hosted solutions
Someone made a satirical front page of typical HN stories which is right along the lines of what you posted. It was really funny and still relevant even though a few years old now, I can't find it unfortunately
I think the combination of real identities and the fact that you expect past, current and future employers and colleagues to see you on LinkedIn means “positivity” and affirmation is essentially forced on you, lest you be seen as “negative” or not a “team player”.
No one will ever contradict anything on LinkedIn because of that, which is why it becomes such a circle jerk.
I commented on something on LinkedIn in 2013 and, while completely not relevant, out of context etc, I get it thrown at me by investors and partners to this day. It was a remark that was correct at the time for my situation; it doesn't apply anymore now, 8 years later, but seems that people are not very good with that. So yeah; be fake and positive only on LinkedIn if you care about that kind of crap.
It reminds of the time I was going to a job interview, saw a homeless dude and went for a coffee with him. Turns out he wasn’t homeless, he was just CTO of a funded startup. The same startup I was interviewing for. We rebuilt the whole app over coffee and they named the company after me.
(It’s not directly named after me, but the company name and my name have vowels and consonants.)
Remember to ask homeless people for their three favourite programming languages before you give them anything.
I really was once in a meeting where a homeless guy had his face against the window peering in from the outside. While we were discussing what, if anything to do about it, someone recognized the homeless guy as our corporate lawyer. In fact, he wasn't homeless at all, just disheveled. We went outside and brought him in as he was supposed to be attending this meeting.
There was a homeless guy peering in. As a group you noticed his attention to detail, a skill important to a good lawyer. You unanimously agreed to invite him in and offer him a job as a corporate lawyer. He's now the CEO. His name? Jeff Bezos.
The biggest advantage of someone with no experience is they don't know what's scary, stupid, or impossible. So they end up doing magic.
heh i went to a Salesforce thing many years ago not knowing what to expect. I showed up in jeans, tshirt, and my backpack with a kind of confused and lost demeanor (this was also my first time to San Fran). One of the hosts opened the door for me and was like "come in come in, here get yourself something to eat" and walked me over to the breakfast spread. I'm pretty certain he thought i was homeless. When I said i was here for the event he said kinda sharply "oh. go over there and get a badge." and walked away haha.
Yesterday I was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day I got a call asking to come in to do the interview. I was surprised, but I went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.
Hey Newsbinator - I'm here live, I'm not a dog. On a side note to this thread, I saw your company MVP For SaaS and it's very much aligned with what I've wanted to do for a long time. How have you found client acquisition? I really like your idea of targeting marketing and design companies - that's super smart. Overall, excellent looking site :)
Both the comments on this thread would fit well on https://www.shlinkedin.com/, if you haven't seen it, it is basically the sarcastic version of linkedin that you all live in.
Personally, Linkedin has been incredible for staying in touch with a large range of business contacts over the last 10+ years. It's provided me far more value than any other social network -- but the feed is mostly a joke :).
Second that. I only add people I actually do know IRL and most of whom I have met. The feed is something I avoid although I do post occasionally with stuff I find interesting. Only look really at the posts of a very few other people I know. Is also a useful place to keep a record of learning and achievements.
I look at it about once every 2 weeks. That is more than enough. More often is torture.
This is true whenever your real identity is at stake tho? Almost everyone sanitizes their views in the public so much so there's no opinion in there anymore.
There's sanitizing, and then there's writing a parody of your life that's borderline low fantasy. If the joke is that everyone involved knows it's creative fiction, and I'm just the odd one out, then so be it. But if people reading those posts think it's anything more, I'm.... worried about people.
> LinkedIn probably has a net benefit for your career by keeping up to date and checking the messages once a week, but I cannot get over the awkwardness of seeing total BS stories and thousands of replies saying "YES! AMEN!".
There are two ways of looking at linkedin:
* a) linkedin, the job listing service used by headhunters to fill positions,
* b) linkedin, the makeshift pseudo-facebook/myspace/instagram alternative used and abused by career-oriented attention-seekers.
This blog post focuses exclusively on b) while completely ignoring a).
I know people who landed jobs in FANGs just because they kept their linkedin profile up-to-date, even though they didn't even posted a single message and barely had any "like"-type interaction with any type of content. Personally, I've landed my past two or three tech jobs through linkedin, and I barely use it.
I also tried other like-minded services like Glassdoor or stackoverflow jobs, but at least to me those are a dumpster fire when compared with linkedin. Specially Glassdoor.
You get cringe content if you're using it to produce and consume cringe content. Others like me are quite happy with the benefit we take from it.
> LinkedIn probably has a net benefit for your career by keeping up to date and checking the messages once a week
Yes. Ignore the whole post feed, there's no point to that.
But other than that LinkedIn is very valuable, keep your connections, see who knows who, hire people, get hired. It's the only social media (maybe should be called professional media) that I see any value in.
Author: In a position of power
Poor Schmuck: Desperate for a job so that they can keep their apt, eat food
Author: Takes pity on the poor schmuck
Poor Schmuck: Works like a slave to have basic necessities
Author: Gloats about how they unearthed a gem
Author: Lesson from this incident
LinkedIn is my guess, the social media platform with the most reshares and least amount of new content. Everything I see is just a reshare of the same CEO message, or "hustle life" post. I would expect to find posts about career questions and what's a solution to my business issue but it's really just a rebadged Facebook.
I have to have a LinkedIn profile but I try to keep my profile very close to my reality, which means I look like an underachiever compared to my connections.
What makes nonsense like this work is that there really is a percentage of people who actually completely buy into the nonsense and find it all very "inspiring".
To be fair -- any religion could be described the same way, even by religious people (describing a different religion than the "correct" one, of course).
You know the funniest thing about the story above is that after you remove the sarcasm it is plausible... just not in the countries where everything is a car ride away and 1.5m of a local currency is a lot of money.
Yeah the changes over the last few years make it seem like facebook. hopefully the powers that be will notice and come up with some plan to limit such silly interactions on what should be a professional platform. I reported some overtly political posts on there more than once and nothing ever came of it.
I never understood why I always got so depressed reading LinkedIn, until I read The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao. And then I saw that LinkedIn consists almost entirely of clueless people talking to other clueless people, and exclusively in posturetalk (these are Rao’s terms - “clueless” means something specific). And if you haven’t read The Gervais Principle, I highly recommend it, although it may bum you out.
I love the Gervais Principle, but only as a cynical joke that can sometimes be applied to real life. There's really no need to read the book. If you're interested in a laugh, just see the blog post [1].
The gist of it is that there are only three types of people who work in organizations:
1. At the top of the food chain are the sociopaths. Executives.
2. Below it are the clueless, the mid-manager who works nights and weekends out of a sense of loyalty to the company. Unlike the sociopaths and the losers (explained below), they don't have it within themselves to straight up leave the company for something better. To them, this is life.
3. And below that, are the losers. That's everyone else. The pawns in this little corporate game designed by the sociopaths and coordinated by the clueless. They won't be promoted. But unlike the clueless, they have a sense of freedom. They can go work for a competitor if it pays more. Or they'll have a real work-life balance, etc..
It (should be) no more than a humorous take on corporate culture. Don't try to take away any life lessons from this.
I know the book is a bit silly, but I only partially agree with your assessment, because I haven’t ever read anything that better describes existence within most large corporations. Would you be willing to elaborate on what you think it gets wrong?
The first blog post about the principle was amusing and offered some basic structure to the disorganized quality of work life, but it was the application of the principle that started to lose me. The machinations of striving to move from one position to the next started to feel rather nihilistic and cynical, even for me.
I don't think he gets anything wrong after the first essay. Everything after just sounded like a way to make a mountain out of a molehill in terms of an interesting essay.
I guess it turned out to be reasonable life lesson for me. Now to be clear I am not gonna go crazy at work and tell every colleague "hey I learned the deep secret of how this company works"
Even before reading this I had this vague idea about my own 'checked out' existence that he describes as loser.
I agree though, to not take life lessons specially when people take these things very literally. Because they can really come up with statement "I have worked with some of the smartest 'clued in' managers. So on the face of it 'Gervais principle is bullshit."
it's loosely based on another book, The Organization Man. I think it's loosely accurate in that there are archetypes around the worker, manager and executive, but it's certainly not as clean cut as Venkatesh makes out. I've met and worked with plenty of Loser and Sociopath types; it's the Clueless that I haven't found to exist, but maybe it's an American thing (I'm from the UK).
I think the Sociopath one is most accurate to life but that's just because "executives/investors are profit-seeking goal-maximisers" is both a common trope and pretty realistic - that's their incentive structure after all.
Say what you want, the smartest people I know as a professional are on LinkedIn, however they, like me, never post anything, it's just a profile to point people at for a quick overview of your professional experience. However the people that post on there all the time, okay I'll agree with you just don't throw everyone in the same dumpster fire please.
The thing that's been around the longest that always bugged me was:
Getting endorsed for skills by people who have no ability to evaluate my competency at those skills.
It's so shallow and badly designed at its job. But like every social network out there, it's buoyed by its inertia and network effects, and will last far longer than it should given its quality beyond the size of its network of users.
One day linkedin proposed a test to me (it was Python) so I tried it because I was curious what kind of questions they ask. It was like 10 questions, with some random stuff about syntax, maybe how to use a dict for example. And then I got a badge. I have no idea how I would use that when hiring, it tells nothing about the candidates actual ability or experience with the "skill"
Off the top of my head, it was edge cases of code to process in your head and write down the exact result the computer would output. Things like “what is the result of 1 + ‘1’”. And of course there was some kind of “protection” to keep you from copy pasting the code into the console which can be circumvented a number of ways. Too bad that wasn’t part of the test, it would actually be a better signal than their trivia questions.
Forever ago, I created a Chrome extension that allowed you to annotate skills that had been endorsed by others with a "Hell No" label if you felt it was not deserved. For obvious reasons, it never got traction but got a few laughs on the podcast that inspired it, which was enough for me.
I mean unless it had a backend server no one would ever see the "hell no css styling" (and even then only others who also had the extension) so it doesn't really make much sense.
You're right re: needing a backend server, but that was kind of the point of it. You'd have to be "in the know" enough to install it and then you'd see the styling. It relied on Firebase storage for the backend piece. In the end, it was mostly for a joke in regards to ongoing discussion from an old Mule podcast. As such, it was just for fun anyways and never really intended to be more than that.
Yeah it makes little sense. I have my primary school teacher endorsing me as a derivatives expert. Seems to not bother LinkedIn, weighs the same as an actual colleague endorsing me.
I think nobody really cares though, they see it's a cheap signal and adjust accordingly.
The best is when the prompt is something like: "Who would you go to for a question about /mathematics/" and then shows me four people who all have a PhD related to math and science...
Having office-shared with a recruiting firm, and having worked in several startups that have a "long-sales"/"closer" department.. I can attest that LinkedIn is exactly what it is like in the day-to-day jobs in the flesh, too. Lots of gongs/bells/claxons, always followed by _so_ many high-fives and a round of applause.
Everyone knows it's bullshit, but this kind of toxic/fake positivity is demanded, and weirdly, it works even though everyone knows it's fake.
Reminded me of the emails we constantly got with the subject “BANG A GONG!!!” at my last work place. It was only for sales achievements, and I never saw an email like that for any other department. It was nice they used the same subject every time, so I could filter them out.
Heh. Reminds me of this time a startup I worked for got acquired by a big financial firm in New York City - we roll into work the first day and at like 10:00 AM this woman starts ringing an actual cowbell and shouting “Standup! Standup Everybody!” They would literally call the developers into the daily standup like they were a herd of cattle.
I cannot stop laughing! Was the standup even about stuff developers would care about, or did they force you to listen to entirely unrelated financial status updates?
One week at one of my jobs they went around the place with a megaphone shouting at everyone before a weekly company all-hands. "It's all hands time!" etc. I walked out the door instead.
It was only for sales achievements, and I never saw an email like that for any other department.
Sales people ringing a bell in the office when they make a sale is traditional in certain sales environments. When I worked in radio, the sales people did it. I've seen food truck operators and baristas do it when someone tips.
It's related to the expression "ringing your own bell," which means to be shamelessly boastful.
> Lots of gongs/bells/claxons, always followed by _so_ many high-fives and a round of applause.
I've seen exactly this in the Technology department at one of my employers... When the sprints ended the teams that shipped an increment would gather around the bell and each take a turn ringing it while everyone cheered them on. Sprint symposiums happened the following week.
I worked on a project with them that impacted our "shadow IT" team and received an email marked as mandatory attendance required at a meeting. It turns out the meeting involved all 1000 people in the office clapping and cheering for the teams that were involved in the project.
I have no idea what they are doing now it's all remote.
Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just getting old and tired. Maybe I'm just sick of the constant trolling, yelling and generally lots of people trying to out-asshole one another on so, so much of the internet. But I don't mind LinkedIn. I find the cynicism on display here very sad. Sure, there are plenty of narcissists and vapid people posting on LinkedIn. So? At least they're posting "inspirational" stuff, and you know what - even if its BS - if the net emotional effect on other people is generally positive - well wtf is wrong with that? The right kind of BS can be inspirational and drive good behaviours (just as the wrong kind can drive terrible behaviours) - I offer as evidence every religion ever.
For me, I use LinkedIn as my work memory. I've been working since 1987 and have had gigs at so many companies, and worked with so many good people over that time that it's literally impossible for me to remember my own resume (let alone names and faces). It's how I stay in touch with the people who move around and may be the one to help me get my next gig.
A lot of people on HN often go on about freedom of speech, but it just seems to me that where people are happy to defend asshole's speech, no matter how terrible, the kind of saccharine, do-gooder, positivity found on LinkedIn gets torn to shreds. Live and let live. If it's not your cup of tea, please feel free to develop and use an alternative. I'd love to see it. Unless its full of people being total assholes. Then I'll stick with LinkedIn. And HN.
It's more like, the positivity that LinkedIn promotes is weirdly toxic if you take it at face value. (Everything in my life is an exciting journey, so why is your life so boring, reader?)
LinkedIn may be the least toxic social media platforms used today. It promotes an aspirational culture. I want others to do well and it's nice to come across them, at least online, long after we stopped working together.
LinkedIn has the atmosphere of working at a 200K employee multinational that even the CEO isn't really energized by.
It's honestly amusing how similar it is. Whenever I go on there I think of a job I had once in which people tried to one up each other for "most robotic".
Beep boop. The policy section 5 b says
you have used Beep 7 of your allotted holiday days.
Boop Please report your
time
sheet
I feel like TeamBlind is the exact opposite of LinkedIn -- no positivity, no one cares about mission or whatever, the #1 thing is TC and WLB, and everyone is anonymous. And yet its posts are much more honest, candid and just overall useful than those of LinkedIn.
Indeed, they are total opposite. I wonder if these are the same people who show different faces. I wonder about these people on LinkedIn, either they are total hypocrites on LinkedIn, or they totally buy on the corporate BS. I'm not sure which is worse!
I've had a career change recently and I joined a big American corp. I wasn't familiar with this type of environment. The level of bullshit and hypocrisy there is amazing. Fortunately, nobody in my team is into that.
I think everyone's mostly faking it. At least in my experience even the people posting this drivel on LinkedIn and brown nosing for a promotion are totally normal and self-aware when you develop an actual outside-of-work connection with them. I'm also not sure whether this is better or worse!
> I wonder if these are the same people who show different faces.
I would be very surprised if the cringey people on LinkedIn are the same as the based people on TeamBlind.
I assume those cringey "agree?" posts on LinkedIn are written by "influencers" as opposed to the engineers we see on Blind. Hard to be an influencer when everyone's anonymous.
A little too honest, at times. To the point where when you interact with your coworkers in non-anonymous settings, you start to wonder if each person is actually one of the sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/anti-vaxxer people you've seen on Blind.
I don't use non-anonymous social media these days so I don't see what my collegues act like online. But if my experience in real life is anything to go by then those people are happy to wear their anti-vax colours on their sleeve, even at work.
LinkedIn shares something with Facebook, in that it is a giant clusterfuck of additional bullshit on top of a few key features, and a critical mass of participants, that fulfill the promise of social networking.
100% owe my career to LinkedIn, despite having never posted or commented or liked or joined a damn thing.
The access to people and information is, alas, worth the cringe.
Interestingly, I started following a few tech people on LI who create interesting content (no cringe) and use it similarly as Twitter, but without the 280 char limit. As a result, my LI feed is now probably more interesting than FB feed. (To be clear: It doesn't say much good about LI itself; rather the bar going really low due to FB becoming a deserted place and ads machine / self-promotion factory.)
The only interesting thing I’ve gleaned from LinkedIn is how some fairly marginal, mediocre technical managers have gotten promotions and steady work over the years, simply by keeping their noses clean, diplomacy, and ‘good’ behavior. And how tempestuous the careers of the creative, talented people can be.
That was a useful observation, but alas, too late.
Good observation and hits a little too close to home.
It is interesting to see the career graphs of people you know from "Real" life and map it to their retelling on LinkedIn. While some are legitimate salesmanship (you are allowed to present only your best face and exaggerate a little) others are downright fiction.
Used strictly as a "professional" network rather than a "general social" network LinkedIn does provide a lot of value. Just be moderate with your image projection and remember that most people can easily see through any obvious posturing.
I actually like the Linkedin vibe. It’s like an alternate reality where everyone is always congratulating everyone else on their accomplishments! And shipping stuff! And investing in their careers! Seriously though, for some reason all this “The Office” stuff would be awkward and cringey in real life, but in an online format it works? Somehow? It’s similar to how an internet argument can be often way more rage inducing than a real life one, but with positive emotions instead.
There’s a casual disregard for real relationships that gets me.
I’ve seen more than once some poor bastard that gets laid off from a good company end up at shitcorp, inc, and some jackass will cluelessly make a dumb comment.
“Hey Bud, it didn’t know there was enough money in Account Management at Shitco to leave the VP gig at Google! #inspiring #success”
The hardest (or saddest) part of being on LinkedIn is not seeing cringe posts by half-strangers but seeing how people you know well in real life change their behaviour or tone drastically on LinkedIn.
Everyone is excited too. "We're excited to announce..." and "We're excited to hire..." and "It's so exciting to work at..." and "So excited by the release of..."
It's like everyone takes a dose of Adderall with their coffee before posting.
About true. 1 day late delivery: the house is on fire, lets do a root cause analysis right this fucking weekend. On time delvery: This is the best , most awesome delivery ever!
It could be agile innovation/ digital transformation or something like that.
"Incredible Journey" like where the dog, cat, and goldfish had to walk 250 miles barefoot in horrible conditions just to find their real home at the end or something? Sounds apt.
LinkedIn would be so much better if it was just a web interface for your resume and a rolodex for your networking contacts. Like basically all other "social" sites, the feed is what makes the site awful and turns it into a "how can I promote myself" cringe-fest. Get rid of the feed (and messaging, and job board, and notifications, and news) and it would be great.
> LinkedIn would be so much better if it was just a web interface for your resume and a rolodex for your networking contacts
It is. But some section of people, especially, those with average skills and questionable capabilities, tend to pad their profile with bullshit posts. I know I am being too unkind, but many people I know who are in that groove, post these cringe content to "look good".
The talented ones? They use it as an online resume.
Of course, LI exacerbates the cringe with its auto generated posts.
But you forget that that's LinkedIn's entire business model. The newsfeed as a product is exceptional at hooking users and is the lifeblood of many an internet company. You need some way of getting access to eyeballs on some regular cadence to inject ads. It's basically a money printer.
This is generally what most use it for I assume. All the cruft on the stories posted on the blog feed is a garbage dumpster. Messaging is how I keep in contact with past work colleagues.
LinkedIn always feels to me like that awkward party I got invited to where I don't know anybody, they're all pretentious, and I'm just trying to find if there's a dog or cat I can play with in the kitchen.
LinkedIn is the kitchen of outsorcing center of American or German corporation. Ivan with Rajeesh are discussing the point of KPIs, then Rachel enters and asks whether the coffe machine is broken. It is not broken, just nobody have ever cleaned it. There is no happy end here.
The main cause behind Linkedin being cringe is because it's fake and phony. There's so much fake positivity, humbleness, appreciation, virtuousness and empathy from every part of the corporate world now. This used to be at least guarded amongst upper level management, who endured this garbage but at a great financial gain. Now this corporate cringe has penetrated the general public. People who are making peanuts are talking about "synergy", "innovation" and "disruption".
The work world is a bloody mess today compared to the world I joined in 1979. It almost resembles an environment where you have to join a gang, but threats can come from anywhere.
And people wonder why old people, obviously closer to death, are happier.
I deleted my profile a while back after a data leak and I was getting spammed on that email. The cringe factor of continually being "recommended" for crap was pathetic. That was even before the feed and the posts and the inspirational nonsense.
It's performative corporate wankery that HR people love because it lets them think that they're promoting their corporate owner's "triple bottom line" and "social stakeholders" and blah blah blah.
HR thinks that it needs to do this crap to motivate employees, it's like the "newsletters" and "employee of the month" etc.
The cringiest thing is that they don't have laughing emoji response on posts. It's probably because someone at a meeting said that "we must provide a safe place for everyone to feel empowered to share anything without being laughed at".
What they didn't consider is that this also accelerates the toxic positivity that existed before emoji responses.
In my opinion, it's because a lot of work culture behaves like kingdoms and these people are either trying to pretend they have a kingdom, protect their kingdom, or signal that they'll be good servants.
I think linkedin, while it's always been pretty fake, is getting close to a point where it is either going to get overhauled or collapse completely into an empty wasteland going beyond embarrassing self promotion and into even more absurd cliches of what "professionals" should share.
It serves an important function, and I have used it to find work and connect with former colleagues. But I think by ratcheting up the social media style attention algorithms, the company has been strip mining their credibility, and there is not much left
Once I'm a billionaire, it's the first thing I'll do after paying for WinRar: deleting my LinkedIn account.
I never respond to anything, just keeping it around for now for the connections. I recently checked the inbox and noticed something very weird. It showed a list of recruiters that had sent me a message and their profile picture. There were about 15 on screen. All 15 were hot white blond women in their mid twenties.
I'm not sure what to think of that. The odds seem impossible. I work in a boring sector, so that doesn't explain it. Attractive women as recruiters isn't a new tactic, but in this case I had a very strong feeling they're just fake pictures. It's probably just one guy controlling all those profiles.
LinkedIn is the social platform on which people express themselves in the least authentic manner, because they are the most fearful of the consequences of honesty, and the inverse - are most aware of the benefits of duplicity. Even those of us who feel positive about the trajectory of human development, know that human society is a horrifying shit-show. However as a precondition of employment, we are expected to demonstrate that we can pretend that the companies we staff are not rapacious monstrosities. Even the more fervent capitalist will acknowledge in private opinions that are unacceptable in public e.g. capitalism works better than other systems only because we have repeatedly failed to organise our society around any principles other than fear any greed. But we don't say anything like that, because most of us on linkedin have found ourselves in a better than random spot within a violently unfair society.
If any one of us posted our true inner thoughts on linkedIn we would dramatically reduce our employment options in any industry other than the approved shamanic avenues - filmmaker, writer, comedian, and might find ourselves and our children descending to a less favourable spot in our grossly unfair societies
What we post on LinkedIn is a bloodless, pureed and filtered version of ourselves, a formal terrified curtsy before the mighty power of the employment market.
Fight club made 100 million at the box office, and you wouldn't know it from the positive motivational tripe we post, but I'd bet $20 'fight club is my favourite movie' is a damn good proxy for 'who pays for linked in premium?'
LinkedIn shares something with Facebook, in that it is a giant clusterfuck of additional bullshit on top of a few key features, and a critical mass of participants, that fulfills the promise of social networking.
100% owe my career to LinkedIn, despite having never posted or commented or liked or joined a damn thing.
The access to people and information is, unfortunately, worth the cringe.
I just systematically unfollow everyone I connect with. My news feed is "blah blah blah was mentioned in the news" or a few posts in various game development groups I am a member of. Got so tired of the "Amens" and the "but the interviewer was the dog" and the "only 5% of the population can solve this" memes.
Oh, and I say "fuck" an awful lot. And I posted bad artwork of a bear fucking a gallon of orange juice, and a recruiter saying the word "no whore" with a duck swearing. And some blood spatter. And a programmer telling an entrepreneur that nobody gives a damn he got six column inches in the San Francisco Bee. But I didn't say damn, I said fuck. And a programmer fighting a mechanical octopus by stabbing it in the eye. I also posted a poem about entrepreneurial exploitation which I am currently illustrating.
Apparently this is unprofessional and would make me unhirable, but I like to think that really, I'm just a guy wearing a duck suit disrupting synergies in the meta or something.
Also, my standard reply to recruiters is "Thanks for making me aware of this opportunity. Sounds boring and exploitative. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."
Definitely am guilty of the "broetry" style of separating everything on a to a single line though, don't know what it is about the cluttered LinkedIn UI that makes a paragraph of text hard to read.
Guilty of a few "respect" posts though. Mostly around the "and then flipped the bird and hung up on the toxic interviewer" type of post. Was interviewing last year and just "got up and walked out" (or the Zoom/Meet/WebX/Skype equivalent) of the meeting. "Well would you look at the time, it's already I-don't-give-a-shit-anymore o'clock, thanks for your time today. Bye!"
Footnote: My colleagues tell me I am joy to work with and brighten up any team I am a part of.
Thank you for posting this, it is absolutely hilarious and spot on.
I wouldn't even mind some of the cringe posts, if they at least came from people I knew. But, the majority of my feed is posts from people I've never heard of, shown to me because a mutual connection "liked" them. No, I'm not going to congratulate a total stranger on their new job ... or try to comfort them after their dog died, etc.
By comparison, my Facebook feed is currently the worst it's ever been since I started using it in like 2007 or something, but it's still light years better than this.
I do occasionally enjoy some of the full-length articles posted on LinkedIn by public figures (e.g. Ray Dalio), but I have no freakin' idea why he only posts them there.
Once upon a time I used Linkedin to keep track of my contact list, which seemed to be its purpose back in the day.
It doesn't be so useful for that these days; especially since you can't get your contact data back out of the system anymore.
So I ended up removing my profile.
I keep meaning to hand-extract contact data so I can leave linkedin completely. Possibly I'll do that when I need to change my email later this year.
Meanwhile, has anyone noticed that you can't actually scrub the feed to get it completely empty? Even if you unfollow everyone and everything, and tell linkedin you're not interested in any activity whatsoever.
There is a huge irony to Twitter using LinkedIn as a punching bag. Twitter is full of people pretending to be cool and popular and witty by doing things like making fun of LinkedIn posts for being fake.
I'm playing the role of the the smart one who thinks they have it figured it all out, and you're playing the pedantic one, right?
I definitely adopt a Hacker News voice when commenting here. But in my experience both HN and Reddit are different from most social products because I engage in lots of disparate conversations rather than having to to present a consistent personality and be building a brand and set of followers.
Pretty good article, actually. It nailed a bunch of reasons I can't stand linked in but didn't realize it. It really comes down to a very odd version of phoniness. Yes, it exists in all social networks but the linked in version is more cringe. I love this fake Linked In status update:
> Yesterday was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day got a call asking to come in to do the interview. was surprised, but went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.
I imagine it's kinda what it must be like living in the CCP: Everyone is self-censoring and putting forward a fake face in hopes of appealing to some nebulous authority that may or may not be watching. Facebook is becoming more and more like this which is why people are finally leaving en masse. Any network based on censorship is doomed to be replaced by one where people feel like they can be themselves.
I would guess that way more people are on LinkedIn than Twitter. Most of the work-force is on the former, mostly only technologists, journalists, and artists on the latter.
I have friends in the traditional London banking community who absolutely don't know how to engage genuinely with social media and probably aren't interested in learning, but they're there on LinkedIn, talking in the traditional corporate language that they live in.
Company xyz is hiring, amazing place to work blah blah, you would be perfect! Then the email is CCed to 50 other students and you find out the guy sending it only started at the company last month and gets paid a large bonus for whatever sheeple he can bring in :)
Don't forget after joining you have to make that post telling everyone how this is your dream job and show off the company goodie bag! #WeAreHiring #ChiefJediFinder
I think I probably still have a linkedin account but it's been ignored for many years.
The most value I've got out of the brief period where I occasionally logged in was periodically threatening to endorse <good friend> for proficiency in <technology they hate>.
(obviously I never actually did it, but given how I relate to my friends the faux threat was absolutely funny to both of us every time)
Funny this was posted because I have been thinking the same recently, more so than normal.
LinkedIn is a good way to connect with my clients/friends/colleagues and establish what is a small network of people in my field, who know each other and often benefit from each other. I also think the ability for recruiters to see my experience + the people and clients I work with has meant that my job opportunities are far greater than if I didn't have LinkedIn.
But my god, some of the posts on there are absolutely cringe and I don't normally like using that term. Don't get me wrong if a colleague or a client I have worked with recently is promoted or changes positions I am genuinely happy for them and it deserves a like or a "congrats".
But don't go around preaching your corporate life story like your experiences are gods gift on earth, or go around preaching vague and ambiguous virtues that we all know. You don't need to make a story about everything that happens to you and the majority of your network couldn't care less.
I don't get what's the big deal. Just unfollow everyone you connect with, disable all notifications, and check it once a week. That's what I do, and I see no "cringe". This way LinkedIn becomes just an "instant" messenger with a job board attached.
You can't eliminate other people's "cringe" but you can shield yourself from it very easily.
What an excellent post. LinkedIn seems to be getting worse and worse, merging in the worst aspects of the every-photo-is-staged "influencer" culture from Instagram and the stupid/not-inspirational/definitely-not-true meme story posts from Facebook. It really is so cringe.
Because almost all of us are wage slaves terrified of (our socioeconomic background's version of) starving alone under a bridge, and the few of us who are neither independently wealthy nor terrified are either too cool to have any use for LinkedIn and/or too crazy to pass on there
"I came from nothing and now I'd like to announce that I've accepted a position at your favorite FAANG, and I am so humbled to make more money than you, and to have had a degree from a brand-name university. #betterthanyouall"
"What's that? I can't hear you over how much money I'm making"
I pretty much only look at messages or invites once per week and don't use it for anything else anymore. The constant self-congratulation is indeed exhausting. Whether it's people graduating from something, or finding their "dream job" (watch them change dream jobs a year later). The main feed is very facebook-like as well, its gotten very low quality. I suppose LinkedIn likes it that way, but for me its kind of lost its shine.
LinkedIn is cringe because it is a virtual environment for work culture, which is also cringe. Everyone on LinkedIn wants to be inspiring, and say something like "What you view as a negative, I view as a positive." That's not cool, that's corny.
If wee all worked in one global corporation and it had Yammer, that's LinkedIn. Except there is no asshole lady from marketing or HR who would delete without notice snarky or awkward posts. I sign in multiple times a day no idea why... anyways, yesterday I was strolling around downtown and noticed a homeless person, my son said "dad, look a homeless person", I stepped into chewing gum and noticed 5 euro note. Gave the note to the homeless and received in exchange American motivational book. I decided to share this with my manager and received another American motivational book.
I don’t mind celebrating releases or blog posts which share something technical or meaningful. I hate that i will have to see the same posts under the ‘X liked/shared this article’. And then you see constant celebrations of new positions, the same job ads under people’s shares and likes, people praising others (i guess this is an automated thing) and endorse skills, etc. And then memes and random posts sharing personal details and stories make total sense and explain why all social media news feed are terrible and the same applies to LI.
For me, the worst cringe was when I was “recommended” for skills the recommenders didn’t understand. Being recommended by people even one level below you is cringe. Work is not like being a TA.
LinkedIn is one of the reasons I stopped trying to have any meaningful online conversations. And im guessing Im not alone. The cognitive dissonance and lack of any nuance is truly astounding. Im not sure if thats the real people self or they put on a show for clickbaits. Irrespective of the causal factors, the outcome is mindless statements that are just cringy. I only use LinkedIn to update profile for recruiters to contact me.
I mainly use LinkedIn to see how much better my former colleagues are now doing, compared to my career progress. When not stalking former colleagues I A/B test[1] my spam posts about my canvas library[2] to see which variants generate more views of my profile.
[1] Not proper A/B testing. The variants get posted once a month or so, making the results meaningless to anything beyond my ego.
This is funny. My LinkedIn is usually great. I opened it to demonstrate and it was full of my friends announcing their ProductHunt stuff, their new startup, etc.
So I closed it to come here and talk about that, and when I opened the front page again, it was all full of posts from a week ago with friends posting about awards their companies won and press releases and stuff.
Why did it get so boring on the second try? Weird...
LinkedIn is just a rolodex for ex colleagues for me, and a way to let recruiters know enough to contact me if necessary.
I once tried paid LinkedIn when I was job hunting, and all I could see were a bunch of unemployed people on there spending far too much time on it rather than looking for a job.
If you you call out any of the rampant self-aggrandizement, exaggeration, humble-brags, or in some case outright lies there's no real upside, and plenty of potential downside.
LinkedIn has been doubling down on this though. In the past week I've been hearing this new podcast ad from them about how "LinkedIn helps you be you real self". It's pretty bad. Can't find it right now but I've been hearing it non stop for a few days now.
When you add a contact and they come to see your profile, that’s most likely because they came to unfollow you. Do the same. But all you are left with is an advert stream.
Just imagine a world where LinkedIn didn’t exist. Countless other companies could’ve formed to build something far better. But because of network effects we get stuck with whatever horrible design won because they were first and scaled up.
On a personal basis--and leaving aside the marketing benefits that companies see--it's basically a self-updating Rolodex. I selectively accept invites, haven't updated my sparse resume in over a decade, and use it to check where people are or what their titles are.
"I was running late to an interview this morning but stopped to help a man who fell off of his bike and fixed it up for him. Afterwards I bought him a coffee and talked about life. He mentioned how he had to go to work but was touched by meeting me, he said we had a real connection. I go to the interview and guess what! The man was my interviewer! He immediately offered me a job at 1.5m a year plus bonuses and is fast tracking me to become a regional director. Remember to be a nice human #Hashtag #Human #WEAREPEOPLE #ConnectWithMe"
It's just a giant circle jerk.