Here’s a fun thing that happened to me on LinkedIn:
A few years back, I was job hunting, using LinkedIn at bit to find leads. During this ongoing process, my father, who’d been receiving chemotherapy treatments passed away.
Being the “technical one” it fell to me to manage his various accounts. I logged into his gmail from the same browser I’d used LinkedIn, and started to contact people he knew but was out of touch with.
The next day, I started receiving email, from my dead father, from LinkedIn. Claiming he’d just joined the service and wanted to connect to me.
I still don’t have the words for this, years later.
What exactly is wrong with these folks at LinkedIn? They seem like caricatures of actual humans to me now, and I no longer even bother to visit the site.
If anything positive comes from cancel-culture, canceling LinkedIn would be my preference.
LinkedIn did some really dodgy shit before MS took over and started cleaning it up. Slowly.
They tricked you into giving them access to your email. They used endorsements to trick you into logging back in (and hitting the previous trick login...). The marketing bods who came up with that shit will occupy a special place in hell along with every other growth hacker.
The content is about as low value as on any other social network but compared to the toxic waste Twitter and FB spew out, the worst you'll see on LinkedIn is an annoying writing style where everyone seems to be drafting a motivational seminar or self help book.
Wasn’t downloading contacts from gmail standard for bootstrapping social networks? I know Facebook did that and I’m fairly certain Snapchat and Twitter did too. This doesn’t excuse it, but I generally recall this as being sort of a standard onboarding process in ‘07 or so.
Yup. They used to (or maybe still do) have 5 pages of "Do you know these people? What about these?" each time I logged in, and in one of the pages it would ask to connect to your contacts. I don't know how but they actually tricked me into do it that, and all my gmail "contacts" (read: anyone i ever sent an e-mail to) received an invite to connect to me. I received hundreds on new connections over the following days.
I closed LinkedIn last year when I realized I never got anything remotely good out of it. It's a terrible place to find jobs. There is no lack of websites that do the same, but better.
I only started using LinkedIn a year ago, because for the longest time I had an extremely low opinion of it. I had SMTP-level filtering rules to keep the LinkedIn spam out.
It's not so bad now. The nice thing is re-connecting with people you haven't seen in 20+ years. It helped land my current job.
I didn’t appear so, at least from my interpretation.
As I read it, the comment implied Microsoft had something to do with cleaning it up and/or that work started post-acquisition. Neither of which reflects the reality.
> a special place in hell along with every other growth hacker
I beg to disagree. Growth hacking is a general term. You can use morally neutral or negative techniques. The fact is people prefer to hide behind terms such as "growth hacking" when what they really do is abusing gullible people. They muddy the waters as it benefits them. I do growth hacking too, most startups needs it - but I use only ethically neutral methods. We really need to make a radical distinction between these two.
I see your point, but I disagree. Ogranic/natural growth for new products doesn't exist these days. Nobody cares about a new product/service. You need some creative ideas in order to get noticed. Not all of these ideas are morally wrong.
Just a simple example. Years ago you would use social media channels such as Facebook to promote your project. But at some point Facebook realized they can monetize this and decided to drastically filter your posts unless you decide to pay them. However, people noticed that the filters on FB groups are much less strict so they started to create groups around topics related to the project. In this way they attract people who could potentially be interested in their project because they show they're interested, and not because someone tries to convice them or spams them etc. This is a simple example of ethical growth hacking. Ethical, because nobody gets hurt, and hacking, because at the beginning it was a bit nonstandard (I believe it's mainstream these days).
"Customer's choice" is a strange word to use for people who are not purchasing anything.
The loud, insane voices on Twitter and other social media demanding cancellations are rarely purchasers of products/speeches/people they attempt to cancel.
Ideological mobs are not customers, they are censors.
I have another fun story. I have a contact at LinkedIn whose name matches a famous Bollywood star. One day I get a notification from LinkedIn "You contact xxx is in the news". I enthusiastically click the link, only to find out that the person in the news is the famous Bollywood celebrity. Who is writing these algorithms in LinkedIn ?
I almost fell for a similar trap when I installed their app and it was about to pull ALL the contacts from my phone. By default.
I killed the app instantly and uninstalled it, never to touch it ever again.
I cannot trust the app not to send unrequested connection requests, really.
I've kept the same mobile number since I was 12-13 (and I'll be 29 in some months). I have no idea about the number of people that got my phone number over the course of the years but surely I do not want to connect on LinkedIn with all of them.
Cancelling LinkedIn is super easy. I have a procmail entry that cans any mail from LinkedIn; I don’t have an account with them; and I have an entry in my hosts file that removes them from the internet for me.
But your story is disturbing. How might it have happened, technically speaking?
I don’t know the technical details; I simply walked away in disgust.
But: I imagine since I had valid login credentials, and they were likely cached in a cookie, well, seems like they harvested cookies and went hog wild?
Tbh, its things like this that
Have prompted me to leave the industry entirely. My personal take is that there are very few ethical people in C-level positions, and hence most companies are entirely unethical. YMMV
Survival of the fittest != survival of the friendliest.
If it takes a lack of empathy to get ahead, those without empathy will be ahead where possible. Won't win you many friends, but why fraternize when you can delegate and enjoy the credit?
> Tbh, its things like this that Have prompted me to leave the industry entirely.
What did you go to, if you don't mind my asking? I'm not in the industry yet, but I'm looking at it. However, I agree with you on there being very few ethical companies and am looking for alternative careers.
The problem with that is in places like India if you don't have LinkedIn you may not exist professionally. HR and recruiters will breezily say you dont need to send a resume, we will just copy from your LinkedIn profile.
It's so disappointing because staying in touch with former work colleagues would be a really valuable service. Somehow it seems impossible to offer just that.
Similar story, my mother passed away 4 years ago and she was already on LinkedIn, but we weren’t connected. Without fail, LinkedIn sends me a bi-weekly email telling me that my mother is on LinkedIn and I should totally connect with her. It’s always the same, never any other suggestions. Haven’t figured out how to stop those emails.
One day, when you're not paying attention, your friend says to you, in a tonguetwister, "ifyoudontmindmelookingthroughyouraddressbookandcallingeveryonesaywhat?"
"What?" you reply.
"Nothing.", says friend.
Later that day, when you're not looking, your friend copies all the numbers out of your address book and starts calling everyone. If they pick up the phone, friend says:
"Good afternoon, Friend's Name, Your Name said you'd be interested in my new social network, would you like to sign up?"
If you found out that this had happened, would you still be friends with this person? Would you still talk to them? Would you still want to know what they have to say?
Yeah, this resonated with me. It's strange we need real-world equivalent stories to get a real sense for how strange some of this conduct is.
One problem I see is that the invasion/violation is abstract, instantaneous and committed by an inanimate thing. I wrote something about it here along the same lines:
It’s even worse than that, because LinkedIn actually pretended to be you —- its invitations to “connect” were crafted to look like they contained a personal note from you.
What is fair about this? That there is more than one dishonest asshole out there? Sure, that's true.
Does it make them any less of an asshole if someone else is also being an asshole? Not in my eyes.
Whenever someone acts like an asshole, I stop my dealings with them, avoid any interactions.
With humans, that means no longer talking with them, calling them, or messaging them.
With an online service, that means saving my data and deleting my account, never installing their app, never going to their website, creating a straight-to-trash filter for their email.
In both cases, I will share my knowledge about them close ones if it can save them some grief.
There's something icky about singling out one individual for something a lot of others are doing at the same time, especially if you're in a community that praises those others.
You're not looking around enough. What do you think all those articles about marketing, promoting your startup & co., getting to $Nk passive income per month are about? Look past the flowery language.
Look at how many people are willing to ignore GitHub's transgressions. The privacy controls it provides are objectively worse than the other big companies that serve as the go-to examples when people try pointing to evil social networks. You can also step back and watch discussion of its dark patterns get buried in downvotes and illogical, half-thought out responses that attempt to rationalize them as Good Decisions that Make Sense, as if they're selected for any other reason than to drive up user acquisition and engagement.
This has to stop. This is nothing whatever to do with "fairness". Criticising appalling behaviour can stand alone without examining every single one of societies ills and making comparison.
anecdote time: When I was working at Thomson Reuters marketing did some sort of outreach thing to the accountant community, and they had a bunch of accountants in to some sort of social gathering and the marketing person was up talking about how they were going to do social stuff for the accountants, etc. etc.
And finally one accountant spoke up and asked (I paraphrase): You do realize we didn't become accountants because we like people?
When I heard about it, it made me think, you know, programmers sure are a lot like accountants.
Theory time: Perhaps my high karma is derived from all the other geeks realizing intrinsically I hate social networks as much as they do, so they upvote me in solidarity.
This is a forum, AKA a 'bulletin board', and would have been universally recognised as such in the glory days back before what we now call 'social media' existed in anything like its current form.
This sort of behavior is a natural result of the VC funding model. Companies are forced to either explode in popularity by any means necessary or fail fast. Stable, linear growth via word-of-mouth is impossible.
LinkedIn taught me, back in 2005, to never link my address book to anything. This has been so helpful because any time an app wants to do anything with my address book, I assume that they will do the dumbest, most embarrassing thing possible.
Also, I used to have the “I don’t care if people see what I do setting” turned on, because why not. Then LinkedIn started emailing people because I moused over their post and stuff. Some contact emailed me to ask what I needed from her and it was so weird. And the email it sent her was super incorrect and stupid and said something like “Prepend wants to get back in touch with you.”
People wonder why I don't want to use smartphone apps for, well, almost anything.
This. This is why.
At least browsing someone's web app using a real browser on a real PC, I know I'm in control of what data they do or (usually) don't have enough access to read.
I was looking into some of the new banks in the UK recently, and it is apparently becoming common to not only provide but require the use of their mobile app to identify yourself and set up an account with them. Oh, and by the way, their terms imply that they might also use that app to track a few little details, like your location at all times. Perhaps they just need "to make sure it's really you"? I will enjoy the Schadenfreude if the data protection regulator gets involved... but not as a customer of any bank that tries that!
My girlfriend's father, who works at an insurance company, heard I was looking for work while I was over at dinner, and starting talking about one of the hot new technology things they're investing in, which was real-time location monitoring in-app. I tried to be polite—as I am with most people who hear that I do computers or whatever— but he did seem taken aback by my lack of enthusiasm for my insurance company being able to know where I am at all times.
Banks in Brazil came up with something called a "security module". It's a kernel driver that intercepts all network connections. It makes everything slow and probably leaks highly sensitive private information back to the bank and god knows who else. I had to boot windows in safe mode in order to get rid of this thing.
Apparently, malware is perfectly legitimate if it serves the business interests of the rich and powerful.
Back in the day if you played a audio CD from Sony, you got a rootkit for your added enjoyment. To this day I have never bought a Sony product due to that debacle and never will until someone goes to jail for hacking millions of computers. Which pretty much means I will never buy a Sony product again.
I suspect if they'd tried something like that today, it would have been a much bigger deal in the media and the resulting legal actions would have cost them a lot more. At least the fiasco probably increased awareness of the danger and prompted changes in various computer misuse laws around the world.
My personal view is that the operating systems we trust to be the foundation of our modern devices simply shouldn't allow that kind of access to most applications. Installing software that genuinely does need some level of privileged access to do its job -- perhaps device drivers, or diagnostic tools for people who work in hardware development and really do need to test low level I/O -- should require a different process from the user's perspective.
That process for privileged installation should come with prominent warnings telling the user not to do it unless they're sure you know who's asked them to and why, and perhaps require the user to enter some sort of text confirmation in response to avoid accidental/auto-pilot click-throughs. The need for this kind of installation should be rare enough for normal users, particularly if the OS is designed to run most third party drivers in user space anyway, that this wouldn't be a big deal for usability.
Maybe then even banks might think twice about trying to pull that kind of stunt, if they would have to field many calls from concerned customers over the next 48 hours asking whether someone was trying to hack their bank account. Perhaps they'd even make it into the news as a result, and have to explain why their software was triggering security warnings, which could be nicely embarrassing PR too.
Yeah. At least those only accidentally introduce vulnerabilities into your computer, right? God I hate these anti-cheat software companies... They think they can just own people's computers for the sake of some game. The sheer audacity of it is what pisses me off...
I agree with your argument on principle but cheating in multiplayer games is a real problem and for now kernel level anti-cheat is pretty much necessary until better methods are developed like server-side ML detection. For what it's worth anti-cheat software is routinely disassembled by cheat developers so at the very least it doesn't do anything obviously malicious and likely doesn't have glaring security issues (any of which would get immediately exploited by said cheat developers).
If your game company “pretty much requires” you to install “anti cheat kernel modules” on my machine, unless you’re supplying that machine to me as part of my game purchase price exclusively to play your game with, you can just go broke thanks. Flawed business models do not give you the right to break into and exploit my hardware.
So what if it's a problem? Are these game companies entitled to stop cheating by any means necessary? No. It's my computer and game companies have no right to tell me what I can or can't do with it.
If I want to cheat at their game, that's my right. The game is running on my computer and I should be able to modify anything I want whenever I want. Cheating at games is just an exercise in computer freedom. It shouldn't be prohibited to begin with as a matter of principle.
I actually have little interest in cheating though. What happens often enough is these anti-cheat services will scan my processes, detect my development tools or virtual machines and label me a cheater because of them. Some games literally refuse to even start because of this. They also ensure a lack of Linux compatibility due to their proprietary Windows drivers.
> so at the very least it doesn't do anything obviously malicious and likely doesn't have glaring security issues
If it's an online game you cheating ruins the experience for other people who have their own rights and interests in a purchase they made. I still don't think it justifies a rootkit but it should be made clear that the impact of cheaters is often to the detriment of thousands of other people.
What's broken is the online gaming model. It's wrong to play with random untrusted people and expect to not find cheaters among them. Just like it's wrong to place a computer on the open internet and expect it to not be scanned, probed and possibly exploited by malicious actors.
The horrible truth these companies don't want to face is people should be playing only with trusted friends. This would destroy their "massive online game" model so of course they don't want to do it. They'd rather own your computer instead.
I don't want to play with just my friends, I as someone who's been playing online games for about 20 years, don't think the playing with many other people part is broken and that is very enjoyable. What's broken is often the choice of server architecture and decision to not have the right amount of moderators to handle reports.
Many games use either partly or entirely P2P decision resolution which is easier to game then purely server side. Then also the gaming industry has been downsizing and automating moderation for years now which means typically the companies with the largest online presence (looking at you ActiBlizzard) don't have enough actual moderators to handle reports and they resort to leaning more heavily on these grey area technologies to catch cheaters. It's fundamentally an issue with expense cutting imo.
There are other ways to attack cheating. Besides, trusting a remote system you don't control is a case study in Security Failures 101. It's about as likely to work in the long term as typical DRM schemes: it does create a barrier, and it will deter casual violation by most people for as long as that barrier holds, but if there's enough incentive then sooner or later someone who knows what they're doing will break the barrier, and then they might share that ability with everyone else anyway.
This is reminding me of the time I changed an abbreviated word in my job title to its spelled out form and I got dozens of connections congratulating me on the new job.
Would you have preferred that they wrote down everyone's birthday, or not have wished you their birthday? I don't see how this applies to the LinkedIn situation.
I'm pretty sure I've sent those kind of misguided congratulations, probably twice that I can remember. One was a guy who I knew had moved to India, so I congratulated him on moving back to the U.S. - I think he had really just changed the status of his online consultancy. The other was just updating the name of the company because it had just been bought out. I never got a response from either of them.
I could practically set my clock by this...when I would get an announcement email from someone asking me to join LinkedIn and connect with them, I would know they (1) just got a new phone and (2) fell for the grey pattern during sign up/new login to share all of their contacts.
This is one of the most compelling arguments against the laissez-faire attitude to sharing personal data that has permeated the tech industry as we've become an increasingly connected society. It's all very well saying the person who owns the device consented to RandomNotMalwareAtAllApp accessing their address book, or listening in on their mic, or accessing their camera or photos, but what about everyone else who is now being observed or data mined as a result of that action?
Obviously there has to be some reasonable middle ground, because otherwise no-one can ever provide an online service that offers a genuinely useful facility, say hosting email, even if it's done in a way that is respectful of privacy. But hoovering up someone's entire address book or photo collection or whatever, and then dumping the details into some database of shadow profiles or using it for other purposes that affect the data subjects? At some point, I think you are clearly across the line of what should be considered acceptable behaviour.
What reasonable middle ground does there need to be? If I share my contact book with an app I want:
1. That data to go exactly nowhere.
2. The company to not profit from the data except by profiting off me directly using their service.
3. That company to not allow anyone else (including me!) to do shady things with that data.
It’s not really complicated. It does make some business plans impossible, which causes some people to make absurd rationalizations.
That is exactly the sort of middle ground I had in mind. You aren't entirely prohibiting sharing data that might involve other people, but it is only shared for a specific purpose requested by the person providing the data and never used for anything else.
My actual last name is impossible to spell if you just hear it. Even if you enter what you heard into Google, you won’t find it.
Took a class. After a couple months I gave a presentation which included my full name spelled out on a PowerPoint. That same day I got a few friend suggestions on a certain social network which included girls in my class who I otherwise had no connection with (no previous suggestions, no mutual friends). This was either an incredible coincidence or they had looked me up.
I haven’t looked at a profile on any site without considering this day since.
Sadly not linking your address book is probably not enough. I use 1 email address for almost all online shops and site registrations, and sadly I also used it for Facebook. The result? Shops upload their customer data to Facebook (I think it's an FB "feature" so they (the shops) can target ads at their customers), and guess which identifier they use? Yeah, I'm quite sure the customers' email address.
Hah, even if I used different emails, my name is very very unique. And writing this I wonder how GDPR compliant the whole thing is, or if they just trade md5s of emails with each other..
Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking.
- If you see it as a place to mostly transact with recruiters, Yes, your feed is absolutely going to be crap. If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.
- If you see online networking as shouting-from-rooftops self promotion, of course you'll notice the worst of the worst shouters. If you realize anyone you'll ever need to engage with professionally is basically a click away, you start looking at what on these people's mind. You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points.
- "Performing professionalism" is the best. Of all the social networks, LinkedIn has the greatest built-in policing mechanism: its users' fear for their own reputation. Being an ass might end up costing real dollars, so maybe best avoided, the logic goes. You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. There's a lot to like in that.
Plus, LinkedIn is nerdy. Text posts actually perform better than links. Attention is fairly aligned with follower count. (I've collected data for a year, and some pretty clear trends emerge)
So yeah, it's good that we have this variant of a social network, if anything I wish there were more like it.
For me the experience is bad not because I don't understand how the platform works but because it represents some of the soullessness of modern culture and online media. Most of the content that it posted there, even by real people doing real things, often sounds like self-parody or a TEDx talk. The platform itself warps the way people relate to the world. The point you raised about reputation is a good one: it's not just reputation in itself but also a certain culture and way of thinking that is unofficially enforced.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the usefulness of it but I can feel something dying inside of me each time I use it as well. I cannot for the life of me relate to someone who enjoys LinkedIn for its own sake.
Instagram has people posting “accidental” selfies that took 3 hours of make up, 156 tries under a full lighting rig and then an hour of post processing.
LinkedIn is full of that same brand of fake, just applied to work. Acting like some boring-ass conference was awesome, pretending that celebrating some minor work achievement with cake was the ultimate team building exercise etc.
You know, I've long struggled to articulate what it is about LinkedIn that I find so grating, and you just nailed it perfectly, thanks.
A significant percentage of my LinkedIn contacts are friends, ex-classmates, social acquaintances, other people who aren't in my "professional network" but I accepted their connection request because meh, why not? The fakeness is particularly obvious when reading their posts. I'm like "C'mon Dave, I know you don't really give a shit about car insurance, it's just a job. Do you talk this with your colleagues?"
I keep LinkedIn around because it's helped me find jobs in the past, but my experience on the site improved dramatically when I set up a custom uBlock Origin filter to hide the homepage news feed. I've never seen anything on there that remotely felt worth reading, and my most common reaction to other people's LinkedIn posts is to cringe.
What I meant by "understand how online networking works" is not that you - or anyone else - has struggled to grasp which button to click to connect with someone. Hundreds of millions of people use LinkedIn, and yet that's not quite the use case I'm talking about, so let me be clearer:
Most of the value lies in the messaging. You connect with someone. You read their stuff, or they read yours. You strike a conversation. You continue that conversation here and there. You hop on a call to get to know each other a little more. You continue chatting here and there. It could be a week, it could be two months, but do you see how easily now you're not "a vendor" or "a jobseeker", but, YOU?
So your CV doesn't need to compete with a gazillion other CVs, before people start asking you if this opportunity is of interest. And clients come to you because they trust you. That's the kind of networking I'm talking about.
Yeah, I like it. It gets me business. I get to engage with really nice people in my industry, who self-select because they find the stuff I write interesting. It's not dependent on my physical location or whether I got entry into some event.
To clarify, I was indeed talking about understanding the culture, and it is the culture itself that invokes a reaction of nausea. Engagement metrics, Medium-style "lessons learned" posts, growth hacking, hustle porn, the word "influencer" taken at face value, "storytelling", hashtag optimization, "adding value" etc. I live in the real world and I accept and understand that this stuff makes money and that it's not gonna change any time soon but the economic reality of it does not lessen the feeling of postmodern horror. I know there are plenty of genuine conversations about real, non-marketing projects interspersed around this but the general culture is disturbing on a profound level.
Personally, I don't even mind shameless self promotion. Got a new cool job? Good for you. Are you giving talks at conferences? Amazing. You raised money, you screenshot positive reviews of your app, you post your open source package or article, that's all great, I might even share it or like it if I know you and want you to reach a part of my audience.
What I can't stand is the "growth hacking". Claiming quotes as your own to look wise and insightful. Badly describing a step in Elon's career to sound like someone who never gives up. Bad Work memes by people who can't meme! "software devs vs designer" or "how DHL, UPS, Amazon delivers packages" tiktoks. Obviously dysfunctional bogus prototype from "now this" from the nineties disguised as something novel. Talking about how working for $tech company is special / not special at all. Posing in suit at home describing how difficult it is to work from home... For some reason, these posts annoy me, especially if they are obviously a copy of a post that went viral last week
What bothers me more is the absurd amount of noise in those posts. A "software devs vs designer" bad meme can get 200 absolutely inane comments from people who just want the poster to notice them at all costs. It's only comparable to Youtube.
Facebook engagement feeds on outrage, but LinkedIn feeds on people wanting to make "connections" at all costs.
This captures my sense of the linkedin "culture" pretty much perfectly...I have an account mostly as a rolodex of former coworkers and business contacts, but I simply cannot stand the things people post and the way they interact with each other. Even just the tone and writing style is off putting. It's actually kind of wild how quickly I want to gag if I bother to scroll through the feed.
This is pretty much my experience with linked, to the extent that I use it at least.
I see my friends from my old job posting about wind turbine projects using our software. See my last big project get released into the wild. Give them a thumbs up; keep in touch, keeps doors open. Find new doors. Not a time sink, more high quality data than googling jobs. Seems mostly helpful. I get spammed invites from many kids coming into industry/almost graduating, but I mostly like it - if they seem honest I accept and get to watch them take their first steps in the job world too. I’ve had seniors asking for advice on how to break into computational mechanics and try to help with project advice / sending resumes along. ...Make friends and influence folk. Not bad.
> If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.
Does anybody actually see linkedIn as this? LinkedIn largely markets itself as an employee <-> recruiter <-> employer connection platform, and almost all of the posts I see reflect that. Let's say I mute the posts advertising job openings or blatantly pushing company PR. Most of what's remaining is just buzzword regurgitation by self-proclaimed "thought leaders" trying to make a name for themselves before they jump ship for a better title. There's a reason we don't see many LinkedIn links getting to the front page of HN - there's very little good original content there.
If I want to get an honest opinion from professionals in my community, I'll follow them on twitter, read their blogs on their own platforms (or the likes of substack), or even reach out directly. Everything posted on LinkedIn is implicitly poisoned by the filter of "This post exists mostly to make me look good to future employers/employees", which rarely makes for good content.
While I largely agree, the direct messaging function is also very useful - sometimes I can't find the email/number for the person I want to speak to because they've moved on since I last had their details and for whatever reason I didn't get the new details - in that case LinkedIn messaging is often a good backup and often a fair bit quicker than asking a series of mutual acquaintances for details.
I rejoined LinkedIn a while back after quitting years ago. I've since had numerous connection requests from people I didn't know who didn't even reply to a short, friendly message back. I joined some popular groups related to my professional interests, and their content turned out to be close to 100% bad-subreddit-quality self-promotion. The valuable connections I do have on LinkedIn invariably originated with some encounter elsewhere and then one of us looking the other up, not through LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn has produced, to my knowledge, 0 useful opportunities either for me or for someone in my network through me. Not a single one, ever.
Meanwhile, I've been an active participant in many other online forums for decades, from old-school Usenet to HN. The opposite of everything I wrote above about LinkedIn applies with many of these other forums: I have enjoyed countless worthwhile discussions with interesting and/or professionally relevant people, replies or private messages I've received have been genuine and relevant, from time to time useful opportunities have been found for me or someone I was talking to, I've often found external material via those forums that was interesting or informative, etc.
So am I bad at online networking, or is LinkedIn just a bad forum for useful online networking? IME, it's very obviously the latter, and that doesn't appear to have changed much during the extended period when I wasn't using it. The more I write here, the more I think it's time I got around to deleting that account (again).
This 100%. Don't waste time on linkedin. Online networking? Sounds like BS, sounds like another self help book, or some dumb TedX talk that says you aren't successful because you cross your legs when you sit. It's all nonsense and BS.
There's a sector of society that is conned into believing the white collar koolaid and LinkedIn is the social network for that. Anyone who's really doing anything doesn't spend time there, ime.
> You don't care about Mark Cuban or whatever, because it's a whole lot more interesting to hear your real target audience talk about their pain points.
They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content, reshared allies' content or posted memes about work ethic.
Knowing what your client's PR line is can be useful, but there's a world of difference between that and them publicly admitting weakness by sharing actual pain points.
Also, whilst I agree that it is important and useful this variant of social network exists, I could hardly imagine a more user hostile implementation: dark patterns everywhere, a model which encourages invitation spam yet sometimes makes it unreasonably difficult to connect to someone you actually met, forums which seem designed to not result in interesting conversation.
> They do that? I was under the impression my target audience(s) mostly shared corporate content.
They really do. Mind, not ALL of them.
If you think about it, writing on LinkedIn is hard, exactly because of the "professional performance" thing. Most people are afraid to get caught out as clueless (not saying they are, just imposter syndrome). BTW, that's why they share corporate guff: it's associating yourself with a brand you perceive as "strong". The majority of any segment is going to be like that. But the minority of any segment is actually there talking. And that's all you need, because once you hit on the pain points, you get talking about it as well, and the silent majority, who you don't see LISTENS.
I'll share my own data:
Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!). Marketers don't care about NLP, and NLP practitioners usually don't care about marketing. But marketers have problems that NLP can be used to solve. So the question was how to even have that conversation, and around which pain points. I did an experiment that ran over a year, and I tracked the data, to see how it builds. A year on, I'm amazed at the results.
> Professionally, I live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing (pretty small niche!)
The people who hate linkedin with a burning passion (or at least see it as a bizarre, soulless hellscape of inauthenticity) are people who see sentences like this and think "the horror, the horror".
Maybe you really do "live at the intersection between NLP and financial marketing" but to me that just sounds like bullshit.
Exactly what I felt after reading that. What does the intersection between NLP and financial marketing mean? I'm genuinely curious - hopefully the parent commenter will provide a link to the service/product.
"I use NLP to solve problems in/for financial marketing(ers)" is all they said.
I'm fascinated how simple uses of language like this are such a turn off for so many people but correlate pretty highly to more pay. You say bullshit, I say knows how to present themselves, a little flourish generally goes a long way.
If the argument is generally people who use flowery language don't have the skills to back it up then I have experienced that before certainly, but then I offer you that if it works for people who don't have the skills then imagine how useful it must be for someone who does.
I have no idea if talking like that "correlates pretty highly to more pay". Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I think people should speak and write clearly for reasons that have nothing to do with money.
The problem is that these titles/descriptions are very vague when it comes to explaining exactly what a person does, and people often view these types of vagueness to be confusing and sometimes unreliable. Other examples: Chief Heart Officer, Cloud Architect, etc.
Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points and relating it to your solution. I don't dispute that LinkedIn is excellent for that (including some of the content put out by companies I've worked for) and I'm sure that nailing it generated leads for you. That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting.
But all the times clients have told me about pain points have involved phones or meeting rooms and the assumption I'm enough of a pro not to discuss that with their clients or competitors!
> That falls under corporate PR, and some corporate PR is actually interesting.
I am going to put a question mark next to this dichotomy, and here's why.
This idea that you have "authenticity" vs. "corporate PR" is no longer true.
For sure, there's still what we think of as "corporate PR" (Look at our employees volunteering! Look at the award we won!). But fundamentally, this idea that there are "corporates" and there are "workers" is fast becoming dated. You don't have to be a freelancer or an indie hacker with a SaaS side project to be a company of 1. You, and everyone else in the knowledge-work economy is a company of 1.
The lines between who's "in" (an employee) and who's "out" (unemployed) are really blurred - and will only become more so. Contractors; freelancers; side-projects; these are all manifestations of the same thing.
So when I say "my content" and you say "it's your corporate PR" I think is the wrong way to look at it:
Trust IS personal. Views ARE personal. Heck, employment IS personal.
> Your example seems to be more about you talking about potential client pain points.
No, it really isn't. Anyone who builds stuff, side-projects or otherwise, knows you CAN build all sorts of stuff, but the question is whether you SHOULD. To understand what's worth building, I was - and still am - having a lot of conversations with clients. LinkedIn made it a whole lot easier, of course. the pain points are not "potential", they're real. And because the building is done is tandem with the market, it's hardly a wonder I position the services as a solution to those pain points.
Maybe I got it all wrong but it seems to me this is what Steve Blank was talking about in the "The 4 steps to the epiphany."
I think you have a poor understanding of why the average LinkedIn user cares about their job. Most people would quit immediately if money wasn’t a concern, so the idea of spending time posting about their career for fun comes off as extremely fake and inauthentic. Your motivation is different from normal which is why you don’t get it. Are you self employed?
Personally I would rather build things of value in my spare time. Personally LinkedIn world reminds me too much of a big corporate HR department. If you work in HR fine, but for the rest of us?
Guess if your ambition is to climb the corporate ladder contributing a lot to open source and building a GitHub resume would more likely attract the companies you might want to work for in real life.
I didn't like LinkedIn for a long time (I much preferred Twitter) but since becoming a business owner I've appreciated having a place where I can go and "talk shop" and connect with other business owners going through the same things I am.
Maybe it's just that I've cultivated the right community, but at least 90% of the content I see on LinkedIn is interesting, personal, and thoughtful. I much prefer it to every other social network I use.
“If you see it as a place to have conversations with your professional community, your feed is going to look like a constant streamed event with the best content.”
No. LinkedIn is where your feed will be full of people trying to sound like super productive “thought leaders” to people who think the phrase “thought leader” means something. Then again, if someone is the kind of person that thinks TedX talks have great content, or a sketchy business seminar in the local Hilton ballroom has great content, then I guess it’s fine.
Personally speaking, my experience has not been this. Perhaps it is the circles I run in, but the content that is posted tends to be sparse and of low quality.
To me LI is much less as described. My feed tends to be more BestOfLinkedIn than anything your descriptions: https://twitter.com/bestoflinkedin
> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others. There's a lot to like in that.
yes you see a lot of positivist comments... But I believe they are just mostly noise, in a way it reminds me of the crowds we can see in official videos of dictatorial countries, all trying to weep or more than their neighbor when their great leader dies or cheer more when they do another military advance... For me the timeline of Linkedin is just that, lots of noise, really little practical information.
I agree with you however, the networking potential outside of the circles of a real-life network is tremendous, and I've used that quite a few times. Reminds me a bit of IRC friends and channels where you can quickly reach people with the right expertise without being a big figure of the topic...
Lol, the OP article inspired me to go see whats on my Linkedin feed. In the top few items there was someone I dont know posting what I will generously call 'politically charged content'. Same shit different platform.
> Unpopular take: whether your LinkedIn experience is good or bad is a pretty strong indicator of how much you "get" online networking.
It also helps to have some empathy for people on the network. I get a lot of LinkedIn connection requests from people who want to sell me something. They add a message to the connection request--explaining what they are offering. I usually ignore them but don't get emotional about it. For the most part these are people trying to make a living like the rest of us. You can't blame them for trying. I wish them success.
LinkedIn is like every large internet gathering (Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, etc): 80% is a sea of thoughtless garbage, 15% is trivial but entertaining, and the remaining 5% is genuinely useful information and functionality that didn't exist 15 years ago. The stuff the article points out--hilariously--is the equivalent of browsing r/politics (or r/wallstreetbets the past 2 weeks).
For useful 5% LinkedIn my principles are:
- I unfollow all companies and people so the newsfeed is totally empty.
- I don't post, like, follow, or any other kind of interaction
- I add everyone I meet professionally (school, work, networking, etc) immediately after meeting them.
- I keep my profile updated with essentials only (pictures, work history, etc).
This has some nice benefits that are hard to replicate:
- In the event I need to reach out to that one person I used to work with, for whatever reason, I have a way to reach them without ever having to get personal contact info like an email address or phone number.
- If I need to put a name to a face for someone in a professional network, I can do a glance through LinkedIn. I think everyone appreciates when someone takes the time to remember you, so this is really valuable.
- The occasional "what is that one friend doing 5-10 years later". Just the other day I was browsing alumni from my school and saw a friend I haven't seen in about 10 years. Turns out, we both changed careers and went into software engineering!
This is generally spot on. Also, in my last life I only used LinkedIn when I needed a new job, but as a startup founder it became far more useful. The #1 feature is "who do I know that can give me a warm intro to person X?"
This requires, of course, keeping your LinkedIn network only full of people you actually know and not accepting all the random connections.
I treat everything on LinkedIn as a press release. Not just content from organizations, but especially that from individuals representing themselves or their (small) businesses.
It's all just a dishonest representation of their 'best self'.
The LinkedIn Crowd is just as bad as the Instagram influencer crowd and I hate what the internet is becoming.
> The LinkedIn Crowd is just as bad as the Instagram influencer crowd
No, it's more fake and forced.
I once sat through an hour meeting about "representing the company" better on LinkedIn which was triggered by a post by a sales guy which had been dutifully reshared by colleagues until a board member saw it and decided it was sexist. The post in question was one of those awful only-on-LinkedIn stories involving our hero, the sales guy, bumping into a distraught stranger recently laid off by the industry vertical he was selling into and comforting her with words of sage wisdom. It wasn't sexist per se, but it was pretty nauseating and probably bullshit.
After this, I think my colleague responsible for drumming up social media engagement better understood why I was uninterested in helping the company hit performance metrics by posting on a biweekly basis with random people in my network @mentioned to beg for likes.
Give me a feed full of poses in improbably expensive clothing in front of a Santorini sunset, 31st takes of overly technical "improvised" guitar solos and artfully posed kids any day.
I don't think your statement holds ground. If your coworkers behave like conversations on Instagram or LinkedIn, I'd hope you'd get the gumption to find another workplace.
Is this why men in business have learned to avoid talking to women in business? A man delivering a sales pitch to a man isn't offensive, but a man delivering a sales pitch to a woman is sexist. And then women notice that men avoid talking to them, frezing them out.
I believe the assumption of sexism was based on the assumption the hysterical person requiring comfort from a kindly man didn't actually exist, but was inevitably cast as female.
Personally I'm not particularly bothered by the gender of distressed people I might be able to calm down with a quiet word, but if I try to turn it into a teachable moment on LinkedIn then shoot me...
I'm more self-conscious about posting to LinkedIn than any other network. I know will cross post content from Twitter, but even that needs to be re-written to be more "professional". It's strange.
Why? My timeline is exclusively about professional interests. Blog posts, interesting papers, etc. Sure there's marketing crap in there, but that's also nice as I get to see what my contacts are building / hustling. I find it inspiring. After all, most of them I know as actual people doing cool stuff.
Meanwhile Twitter/Facebook are negativity cesspools, it's hard to spend much time there.
That's because people's careers are tied to their Linkedin profiles, so naturally you're only going to get the most positive, shiny things being propped up on it.
This feature also inhibits sharing though, which is why Linkedin has such an artificial feel about it.
It would be kind of cool to see a more reddit-y or hackernews-y professional networking site.
Like, I'm glad I have a professional connection to my friends who've went into healthcare, but honestly I have no intellectual curiosity about medicine and I ignore it if it comes on my feed. I'd rather see the stuff you're talking about - interesting papers, blog posts, etc - in a professional context with possibly the opportunity to network. The culture is somewhat here on hackernews, although more geared towards startups and computer science, but I'd like to see it available for other professional fields.
I think we're almost at the point where the predictive text bots could all chat with each other in the LinkedIn echo chamber. I look forward to the day where I get a notification from "me" on LinkedIn saying we just had a great interview and start at the new company next Monday.
We are absolutely at that point. People are optimizing their content for the algorithm, and using keywords and hashtags so the machine recognizes patterns batter.
Even on a mostly non-algorithmic feed like Reddit, the highest upvoted comments on popular subs always feature an extremely predictable response, like a dad joke, followed by similarly predictable sub-comments written solely to garner upvotes.
> Even on a mostly non-algorithmic feed like Reddit, the highest upvoted comments on popular subs always feature an extremely predictable response, like a dad joke, followed by similarly predictable sub-comments written solely to garner upvotes.
The subreddit simulator is a good proof of this, especially once it was rebased on top of GPT-2. Generally, the closer a subreddit is to the top of the list the more it's content will look like the output of the language model.
Reddit is the very essence of an algorithmic feed. Nunber of upvotes vs downvotes is an algorithm (though a straightforward one), so of course the content will reflect that metric.
I created a fake almost empty profile to test a previous job's profile scraping and it regularly gets more search hits than my real profile according to the emails.
Unlike what the author thinks linkedin revenue isn't largely fueled by recruiter business. It is driven by where he thinks they are weak: linkedin marketing solutions, or in friendlier words "feed interactions". See the most recent microsoft earnings report:
And unlike what the author thinks linkedin navigated the current climate around social networks pretty well. Not only they've succeeded in keeping the network out of the political environment, and showed strong growth in user base and engagement (see above report), they also ranked as the most trusted social network consistently according to Business Insider Digital Trust study:
This breaks the site guidelines and will get your account banned here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting to HN? We'd appreciate it.
1) If you are looking for a job then it’s great to use linkedIn since a lot of companies put their listings on the platform and its also perfect to remain in touch with your old colleagues
2) If you are a passionate technologist/programmer who loves to discover new technologies ,software , tools or what’s happening in the industry then I must say linkedIn might not be a great place since its more like filled with people who are just posting content to gain likes or visibility just like every other social media.
Using LinkedIn does become depressing when you start seeing posts from people saying “ohh they landed their dream jobs while you might be searching for jobs and then you start comparing yourself with other people on linkedIn. You become depressed.
And that’s one of the reasons I stopped using LinkedIn its nothing but a place full of
people who are chasing likes
LinkedIn is great for marketing and looking for jobs but if you are technologist/programmer who wants to learn something new or expand their knowledge I would suggest using specific programming related subreddits or hackernews
Honestly I have gained so much knowledge just by using these platforms and I’m really thankful to people who contribute to hackernews with amazing links
You're lucky. I got so many junk job offers over the years, mostly secretive "amazing opportunities" they would only talk about over the phone.
I one (rare) time replied that I receive several such messages per week and that if recruiters want our attention, maybe they should reveal more about the offer (sometimes they reveal literally __nothing__, not the industry, not the tech stack, nothing).
The recruiter got extremely offended and said I was rude and that I just missed out on a great opportunity.
I rarely ever log in to LinkedIn, but do have their app on my phone (which I also rarely use). And I always ignore whatever stupid notifications it triggers (it seems they are almost as needy as Facebook). About a month ago, this LinkedIn notification pops up on my phone:
"Ding! You're distracted (again). Here are tips for staying focused."
I'm not distracted. I'm using my phone. And interrupting what I'm doing to tell me I'm distracted is...impressively oblivious.
I don't find much value in the LinkedIn timeline, for reasons well-described by this article.
However, LinkedIn has been of tremendous value to me as a founder of an enterprise software company. I see two primary areas for value:
1) Sales - LinkedIn allows me to quickly understand who I'm dealing with. Size of company, positions, org chart, etc. This is important information to know when trying to move along the sales process.
2) Recruiting - LinkedIn profiles are essentially a public resume directory. When folks are recommended or referred, I can often get a good sense of their resume by checking LinkedIn. This saves time for everyone when the connection does not need to be made due to lack of fit.
Whatever value you think you are finding on LinkedIn is negative value. Anyone of value is too busy producing value to give an eff caring about the epitome of a dead social network.
"what happens when you have a literally captive audience and the company can do whatever they want in terms of data abuse and features"
If you are employed, you cannot fathom how dependent on linkedin some people are. It is when you are most vulnerable that they get that $5 to see who viewed your profile (I didn't even know they had that feature until some out-of-work friends were talking about it)
LinkedIn weirds me out. It's like there's a machine somewhere churning out bubbly young blondes and they all wind up as recruiters on LinkedIn. There was even one that billed herself as part of a combination job-search and matchmaking service: get an interview and a date! It's not surprising that some guys are getting confused, because there are users who are intentionally recreating an "enterprise" version of the thirst/influence dynamic of other social networks.
Baser dynamics are definitely not absent from LI. I've heard of salesmen creating catfishing accounts and boosting their response rates from executives. But that's also the seedy underbelly that's always existed in enterprise- tales of HR violations at trade shows and industry conferences abound. It's just more surreal or perhaps hypernormalized to see it in the clean, sterile, ostensibly professional world of a business social network.
I don't like LinkedIn as a social network but as a hiring manager, there's nothing else close to it. Sometimes we wish there were, but it definitely fills a niche.
Out of curiosity, what niche does Linkedin fill for your day-to-day work? Personally I only have a profile so people can see I physically actually exist, outside of that I don't think I've ever used the site for anything.
// Out of curiosity, what niche does Linkedin fill for your day-to-day work?
Not the original poster but I'll take a stab:
Someone says "I know a guy you may be interested for your team." Guess what the first thing I do is?
I have a meeting with someone (internal or external) that I hadn't met yet. Guess what I look up before I meet them?
Who do I know who works at Bank of America (or whatever.) Guess where I can find an answer in two seconds?
If you life doesn't involve meeting/evaluating/finding people then I guess you don't need LI. But really - you can go through your whole work life and not be interested in the professional background of people you are meeting etc?
As a hiring manager, it's only one source, but it's an important one. Examples of how I use it:
- Posting job openings and company updates to my personal LinkedIn status.
- Using the recruiting tools (these cost extra) to search for candidates with specific skills.
- Looking through the staff of a specific company in search of potential candidates for a specific role.
- For most candidates I'm only 2, sometimes 3, hops away on LinkedIn. I look to see who we know in common.
- Sometimes it's the only resume-like document I have for a candidate, so I refer to it during an interview and I often share the candidate's LinkedIn profile with other interviewers when providing them context/background about the candidate
- Less often, to directly message former coworkers if I don't have some other better way to reach them.
- Also less often, there are some active LinkedIn interest groups, but in my experience, the quality of discussion isn't as good as other forums.
I'm in LinkedIn almost every day, one way or another. So are most tech recruiters I work with. For anyone who is not actively part of the recruiting effort, I have no idea why you'd be on it that regularly.
For what it's worth, we also use a lot of other recruiting tools, but I would say that it's odd to find an engineer who doesn't have a LinkedIn profile and I do recommend them for anyone who is actively job hunting (at least within tech). It's great for when you're on the market, passively or actively.
An active GitHub account is also good, but it's not a place recruiters or hiring managers start their search.
An active personal website is even more valuable than an active GitHub account, but also not likely the way a recruiter or hiring manager finds you.
Oh, one other thought: for lots of startups and companies, applications aren't where we find all our best talent. That's not to say you shouldn't apply, it's just that the signal to noise ratio for applications is low. As a hiring manager, you can't just wait around for the best people apply for your team. You have to actively recruit. If you want to be recruited for those sort of jobs, LinkedIn is a pretty important way to show up on their radar.
I thought LinkedIn was only for looking for jobs and getting business contacts, for business to business work. I see people posting personal "stories" and, to be honest, I'm a bit confused.
I like LinkedIn. It's one of the few places on the internet which still has this 'wild west' vibe. I enjoy the random connection requests and scam attempts.
It's the only social network which actually allows me to meet smart interesting people outside of my immediate network.
Maybe LinkedIn doesn't work so well if you're a rich person, but as a regular person I really like it.
I've established many successful personal and business connections through LinkedIn.
It honestly got better after Microsoft bought them, it's less scammy. Sure they want you to pay for certain parts, but that's perfectly reasonable in my mind.
You're right about the wild west vibe, people still seems try to navigate LinkedIn. It's like Facebook, but then again certain posts simply don't sit well with people on LinkedIn. Political debates are pretty much shot down instantly, even those from politicians. So try to promote their business, some want to get hired, and a ton of people are trying to hire. It's all a big mess with a corporate vibe but somehow targeted at the small /medium business segment.
The thing about LinkedIn I find extremely amusing is "social media managers" and "online marketing experts" who are looking for work on LinkedIn and get nothing but silence, while technical people are booked for job interviews within hours if not minutes.
I dropped my LinkedIn years ago because they either tricked me into connecting my email contacts or did it without my permission.
Every time I logged in it would ask "Do you want to find new connections from your mail list?"
Every. Time.
One day it stopped asking. Week or so later I got a suggestion for random people I emailed once years earlier. Got curious and checked settings and saw it was connected to my email contacts.
No idea how, maybe I accidently clicked it? Maybe they decided they knew better than I did. Whatever caused it I closed my account that day.
Couple years later (I think?) MS purchased linkedin and I smiled to myself safe in the knowledge it was only a matter of time until MS ruined it and every abandoned the platform. I was mistaken on that one.
My experience with LinkedIn is remarkably positive. I am contacted a few times a month for professional opportunities and two of my most recent jobs started from recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a chance to put forward your best self to the professional world. It is a serious force multiplier - do the work once to make your profile really shine and reap continual benefits.
Knowing who is looking at your profile (and hence who might be interviewing you for a new job) is incredibly useful information. Does this person have a technical or a business background? Do we know the same people from previous jobs? Do we have similar interests or did we go to the same school?
All of that information is very powerful when meeting someone for the first time and can give you that 5%-10% edge during an interview. It's the kind of information that allows you to make a great first impression.
I am not affiliated with LinkedIn but would recommend it to anyone struggling to find the right opportunity in the technology world.
Social networks are just vacuums of interest and I think they'll continue on that trajectory until an inevitable societal disinterest in centralized information sharing platforms.
The internet will never reflect reality.
- If you walk around venting to everyone all the time, you will have no friends.
- If you walk around virtue signaling and one-upping people all the time, you will have no friends.
- If you walk around telling people all the prestigious companies and schools you've attended, you will have no friends.
Except on the internet all of the above is totally acceptable and even encouraged. People love to share information about themselves, there's a psychological component to this. It feels good.
- It feels good to let people know exactly how frustrated and slightly nihilistic with the world you are.
- It feels good to unload on the political opposition and get likes and shares in return.
- It feels good to have reductionist arguments that get cited on mainstream news.
You can delve into plenty of reasons why people do this stuff. Personally, I don't think it matters and I say that as someone who detests social media so much that I stay off of it. People come to the internet for different reasons and those reasons find an intersection on social media. I love IRC primarily for this but also because it couples anonymity with the service. We get some abusers and manipulators but even the stalking and harassment attempts that people have tried on me are worth the stay. I can speak freely and relate to people in a way that would not be possible otherwise, and largely I thank the culture of Freenode and it's channels for that. Yet, Freenode is also a vacuum of interest, just one designed for nerds that communicate over ASCII anonymously.
Join the network that's right for you, just like you would in real life.
All the good points that social networks have, as noted in this thread, forums also have. You get to know people, you recognize them even if never seen in person, you may hire or be hired from there and you may discuss interesting or hot topic without being a pretender. I’ve seen it many times on local tech forums. These have less reach, but more meaning. ‘Social network’ thing that puts a profile first and topics second is what brings this madness: self-presentation, fake friends/connections, viral idiocy, etc. We as a species are not ready to go full-public and stay ourselves. I think that the reason is in our deep history, when a leader or a current speaker that climbs up a rock has to behave and speak differently (publicly) than when we hunt or fight together. When everyone climbs their own rock, a tribe becomes a silly circus.
This could just be re-titled as "Sometimes people turn their brain off when interacting online". Is it shocking anymore that people openly say bigoted stuff "with their real name, alma mater and workplace all listed"? They do this on Facebook as well.
> In this story, straight from the weird world of LinkedIn, people use Skype in 2020, hiring managers give unsolicited feedback on performance at the end of an interview, and contracts are flourished and signed immediately.
This phrasing really left a sour taste. Perish forbid people use Skype for a job interview. What, they couldn't FaceTime? This man living in a one-room apartment with his family couldn't have the decency to have an iPhone or join the rest of the 21st century in installing Zoom?
The implication there is not that they use unfashionable communication methods, it's that the stories are fake reposts of fake stories that someone invented years ago, when using Skype was a regular thing.
While I love linkedin, as it makes it very easy to apply to so many jobs, the photos seriously need to be removed.
A person's physical attractiveness should play no role in hiring, many people who are disabled might not be able to take photogenic pics. Those people are heavily disadvantaged, any person of color is heavily disadvantaged, I really hate the idea of social media creeping into LinkedIn.
For one it doesn't make a lot of sense for your political or social views to become a part of your employability. It's a resume not a statement on who you are. Then again I generally hate social media because it leads to the least informed shouting the loudest.
LinkedIn used to constantly harass me with popups asking me why I hadn't uploaded a photo. Guess I'd have felt a lot worse if the answer was "because I'm insecure about my appearance" or "because experience tells me some people have issues with my ethnicity" or "because I did upload a photo once, and then realised that the people who looked at my profile also looked at other profiles of people in completely different roles who had similar facial features to me and found it really creepy" and not simply that I didn't want to.
My Facebook photo is from when I signed up, at a time when I needed a university email address to do so, but I'm quite happy sticking other photos on there. As for LinkedIn, mostly I just don't care whether clients know what I look like, but I think the repeated surveys got some ruder answers!
Sorry but your understanding of what LinkedIn is for is kinda limited.
If your big problem is you are applying for jobs and you think your appearance has something to do with your outcomes, you can easily just not have a photo there.
But there's a huge element of LI that depends on photos. For example - I get an invitation to connect. I don't recognize the name but I recognize the face - it's the woman I gave my business card to because she was in my industry.
Or - I am interested in to talk to someone who works at Bank of America (or whatever) because I am interested in what it's like to work there. Oh, I see my contact John Smith works there. Who's John Smith, again? Oh yeah I remember the face - it's that nice guy who sat next to my team 3 jobs ago - let me ping him. The
I'd be interested in a tool like that. I try not to look at the names of applicants and drop anyone who supplies a headshot but it would be nice to have that information filtered out.
Yes, several applicants supplied a headshot for the last engineering role I hired for.
I would definitely be okay with phone only interviews, but this is more of a like when a recruiter's browsing through hundreds of candidates he or she shouldn't see pictures first.
That's not all LinkedIn is for though. If it was a submit-your-resume-for-recruiter-screening website, your suggestion to remove the pictures would make sense. But it's used in a very different way which is why I don't think the pictures are a problem.
What are you talking about, you can definitely apply for jobs on LinkedIn and your photo is front and center. If the person receiving that application doesn't have the most positive reaction to your photo, maybe you suffer a disability which leaves your face disfigured, you're much less likely to get a job
Curious, what is "orthogonal?" If you are a manager, your lack of network will prevent you from recruiting well. If you're closer to sales and marketing, building a network and presence is like the same skill set as the job.
If you're a baseline software developer, it's still kinda odd to not have a network. You haven't worked with anyone in the past that you want to maintain professional ties with over the long term, kinda a red flag. (You can argue there are other ways to do these things, sure - but all else equal I'd go for the candidate with a good LI and a good network - shows competence and desire to connect)
So yea curious what work you think is totally orthogonal to LI?
Are there actual developers who care about LinkedIn presence out there?
It makes sense to have an account there, to appease HR people, but are there technical people who make use of this to create real connections? Or even display existing ones? There is some kind of mechanical "add randomly suggested people from the company" phase when getting a new job, but apart from this I do not see the point.
Desire to connect over LI is entirely artificial and does not represent anything meaningful (heck, I have my past bosses as connections, even though I wish to never see them ever again). Conflating number of linkedin contacts with some social skill seems vastly misguided at best.
//Are there actual developers who care about LinkedIn presence out there?
I'll give you my example and let's see where you disagree.
A few months ago I was looking for a new job. Google and Amazon were on my radar so I looked who in my network is now in senior and relevant roles in those firms. I connected with two guys (one in each company) who were immensely helpful to me (a) shaping my resume (b) giving me the lay of the land and (c) championing for my candidacy.
The thing is: these are both guys I had worked with tangentially 10+ years ago. We weren't close enough to keep in touch after we left that company. But that didn't stop them from being immensely helpful when I reached out (and I do this for people I barely know, all the time.)
So then the questions to you:
1. Do you agree that I got a lot of valuable help from these people?
2. Do you agree that without LinkedIn, I would not have connected with them?
3. If 1 and 2 are true, would I be a fool to neglect this useful tool?
So sure, if you don't have LI you may be an awesome developer and problem-solver but it's also a flag that you are ignoring what, if used correctly, is a very capable and important tool. If it's a privacy stance (for example) I understand and deeply respect it. But if you're just confused about value of connections and don't know how to ask/give help, those are pretty concerning signals in a situation like hiring where I don't know a ton else about you.
I am not disparaging the value of connections (although I may add that focusing on FAANG and enormous tech corps is quite US-centric or even SV-centric, and generally the odds to have a connection in smaller-sized companies are quite low).
I have probably worded my thoughts poorly. What I meant is that LinkedIn is not a tool of the trade, it is a tool for career building, which is quite different. I am adding people on linkedin as they come, sure, but that has no relevance to my work, only to my ability of finding work and being visible there.
So to answer tour questions:
1) Yes
2) Yes
3) Probably, but what is relevant to your situation may not be relevant to others, in many cases LI can only be a very marginal help.
We need a rethink of how we're monetizing our privacy. We're like chumps at the table.
So, current state of affairs is we get bunch of free services, with IRL lockin effects, and place control of social norms in the hands of a handful of companies.
In the aggregate, it's fair to value these free services at say $1000.00 a year, if you paid for it.
Now, is our privacy really that cheap?
Shouldn't LinkedIn-cum-Microsft being paying me to get an inside seat at my professional life? They pay me, and we exchange a strictly delimeted bits of information I am willing to part for payment.
I bet, lol, that one would easily make far more than a grand a year from selling specific bits of one's personal and professional life to interested companies, maintain direct control of one's privacy regime, and likely end up enriched, rather than sucker punched as is the case today.
I have actually had good experiences with LinkedIn. I use it to keep in touch with co-workers and there’s more to it than recruiter-prospect communication:
• Using LinkedIn to contact old co-workers when I need a reference.
• An old boss of mine at one point needed someone for a contract he just got, with gave me the perfect short-term gig.
Given how central LinkedIn is to many people’s professional careers, I find it shocking that their support department is not contactable via email.
Do they even have a support department?
Everything is fine until you have an issue. If your issue isn’t answered by one of their pre-written articles, then there isn’t much you can do about it.
There are a surprising number of “big” tech companies that do the same.
- Reddit support for example, I only ever get automated responses. They just got a $6 billion valuation, yet they have no support email.
- Substack doesn’t list its support email on their website, I only found their support email by searching Twitter, found a random tweet that mentioned it, and amazingly it was the right address.
When it comes to what school you went to, you can tell LinkedIn whatever you want. Just make sure you silently set it back to something true once you get that job offer and look confused when your recruiter thinks you went to school in Boston.
I've heard LinkedIn is very helpful when you're looking to switch jobs, but unfortunately this has not been my experience.
I noticed that everyone on LinkedIn projected themselves as an "expert" on something and in their own way wanted you to believe (marketed themselves) as someone who could solve every problem they'd encounter. This left a particularly bad taste for me, so I didn't seek out to network way too much on LinkedIn. People I know have 500+ connections on there, while I have about a few dozen. Perhaps this is the reason for my unsuccessful attempts at landing an interview from recruiters lurking on LinkedIn.
I had an amazing (amazingly bad) recruiter experience recently. They managed to make three screw-ups in the very first two sentences: "We are looking for a talented Back End Engineer [1], and if you think you are ready, a Back End Engineering Team Lead [2]. Don’t worry that you don’t have healthcare experience, you get to learn that with us [3]."
[1] I haven't done hands-on coding in 10 years, as my LinkedIn profile clearly shows.
[2] I've been in management and senior management roles, perhaps I am ready for a team lead role indeed :)
[3] I do actually have healthcare experience.
We really need a tool that addresses copy-paste-driven recruiting.
For some time I thought I was the only one with issues on LinkedIn. I'm happy to see I was wrong.
My fundamental issue with it is that I believe it takes more from the society than what it gives back, it's extractive. On a world where inequality is rising and unemployment is hitting records on multiple countries, LinkedIn keeps its approach of having to pay $29 to see more things and get advantages. If you're based in countries where $29 is too much, too bad for you.
Its purpose is to make money with my job search, not with the fact that I found a job.
LinkedIn is where my totally unethical former employer offers me "consulting opportunities" at $500/hr every 6 months to keep tabs on whether I still keep their shady shit confidential.
Originally I had linkedin in 2009 to keep track of my contacts (as that was what they were for at the time, afaicr).
Unfortunately I can't easily export contacts anymore, so I'm kind of stuck. The number of dark patterns linkedin uses is ... rather large. And every few months I come back, it seems like there's some new option to share my Personal data. Defaulted to "on" of course.
I keep meaning to hand-copy all the contact information I still need and delete my account, but it's a lot of work so I keep putting it off.
Originally you could get out phone numbers and e-mail addresses that way. The last 1 or 2 times I used it, I didn't actually get the contact info back out for most of my contacts.
If you think about it, it is very similar to Facebook, where the majority of things people post are how happy they are and how successful they are; or the odd ranter. However LinkedIn does not have ranters.
which is weird when you think about it.
Only showing succesfull and how happy you are is not a realistic view of life, and hiring candicates who are engaged in this behaviour should be a major red flag?
OMG! i just realized that microsoft owns two social networks: linkedin and github. never thought of it that way before. always thought they were left out of the social network game.
The most awful thing about LinkedIn is that for most people you HAVE to use it, if you apply for a job and you don't have a LinkedIn account or it isn't up to date the vast majority of HR departments will ignore your application completely. Yes I hold both lazy HR people and LinkedIn for this. I've had women look me up on linkedin and refuse a date because of it too. Truly dystopian.
I have not logged on to LinkedIn for years. And when I do, it is only for its search engine for work. 75% of the ads forward you to the company's website where I actually apply.
When I get my next piece of work, I add LinkedIn back to the AdBlock/PrivacyBadger and leave it out the door. That "platform.linkedin.com" (and the share button) tends to pop up in other corners of the internet.
The last couple of job searches I updated or recreated and this time around I again realized how pointless it is. It's a circle jerk for HR, is jampacked full of terrible recruiters, the job search is beyond worthless. I see absolutely no reason to have an account there ever again
From my perspective it has been and is a ball of "who gives a shit"
I find Quora these days to be less self-congratulating than it was 5 years ago.
That said, my main interaction with it is the digest emails. The recommendation algorithm is a bit wonky, and will recommend you many answers for any topic whose answer you merely glance at.
Certainly, I just think the two are in the same category, along with Medium, as opposed to the Facebook/Twitter or TikTok/Instagram/SnapChat categories. Different vibes and demographics.
I don't care if people on LinkedIn want to marinade in their own sauce.
I believe most people keep their accounts for the same reason as me, which is to maintain network of people you worked with, contacts to recruiters, to get leads to potential job opportunities and to find people to recruit. It is nice to know when your colleague changed job or is looking for new one.
Other than those I completely ignore all other content.
I believe people who post those messages are either pressed to get some publicity or/and misunderstand what LinkedIn is for.
A fairly unique and interesting feature of LinkedIn that I've noticed: posts seem to have a much longer tail than, say, Twitter or Facebook. If I share a text-based post with useful info, it's often still getting engagement 15 or even 30 days later.
And because the median quality of LinkedIn posts is so bad, good, non self-aggrandizing posts really stand out. The algorithm is GREAT at elevating them.
I guess what I'm saying is, posting on LinkedIn in good faith is the new attention economy market inefficiency.
So often here on HN, things like: Object Orient Programming is absolute garbage! LinkedIn is the Devils social network! Python has all these WTFs, why aren't we killing it in favor of Julia? Here I am, I found my job through LinkedIn, applied to places where my classmates ended up. That was nice. And I use classes in Python when it suits me and I even build stuff that people appreciate (how!?). Oh yeah, I also enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, take my Karma!
I use it to keep in some level of contact with a wide group of work contacts as they move around the industry. But it’s not an enjoyable experience. I wrote about how it could be improved in the hope someone would do it... so far still waiting.
https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
LinkedIn has provided a treasure trove of comedy material. I especially enjoy Joshua Fluke's youtube channel [1] where he shows cringeworthy team building videos he culled from LinkedIn.
Wish he didn't make fun of bad English from non-native speaking posts - of course they'll seem cringey to us. There's plenty of legitimate examples he could have used instead.
I mean there is stuff like https://stackoverflow.com/jobs and in South Africa we have offerzen.com which are not brilliant but they are much better than linkedin. So there are some for tech related jobs. Probably because they realized that tech people in general hate linkedin and don't really use it for getting jobs. So there was a market for a platform.
Whereas for other people linkedin already fills that space (crappily) and most people tend to just put up with it. I'd assume anyone who wants to disrupt the online job finding market now has to compete with microsoft. So any innovative idea they have for their platform will quickly be implemented in linkedin before they get any sort of traction. So no one bothers, and linkedin stays crap.
Because there is a song and dance involved in maintaining a career. Who you know, how you look, how you talk, and if you’re lucky, how good you are at a job. Dance dance dance, congratulate others, share your new job, upkeep your references, dance to every song, and then show up to work and do the same dance there. You don’t actually believe you’re getting paid to just do your job right?
Remember everyone, repeat after me, I am successful, I am successful, I am ...
I am successful, therefore I am. Dance your ass off.
I find LI is providing me with a daily feed of good material mixed with the silly stuff, but it took a long time.
Now I can't look at LinkedIn because there are too many good posts about technically interesting things, conferences I find interesting, general industry commentary, and announcements about scientific and technical developments that I find novel and glad to have discovered. I just don't have time to read them.
LI definitely learns over time from interactions and connections, and it seems to have learned what I want to see to make it addictive.
There's a lot of guff as well, the self-promoting and nonsense puff pieces. But it's easy to recognise and scroll past.
I've found some good thoughtful writing that I enjoy too, and activist pieces by people obviously promoting their own business and themselves, yet doing something decent for others in the process. Especially a few recruiters: There's a few putting the time in to teaching people who are struggling at finding a job in a pandemic how to do it better, for example.
And in open source hardware, I'm seeing a lot of activist-style writing at the moment.
Mainly I wanted to say, for the HN audience, that there's a surprising amount of interesting scientific and technology announcements to be found, if LI learns what kind you're into and starts picking it out.
I've also met a small number of really interesting people via LI, with whom I now talk off LI, and ended up with some great contracts and now my current job through it. All of these through people who approached me. I've never applied for anything via LinkedIn.
And been to some great online conferences last year that I only discovered through people mentioning them on LI, leading to something of a minor career change (still in tech).
For me I can't deny LI has been very helpful, though it took a while to get better.
I still refrain from posting, though, and I'm also rather conscious that people can see what I "liked". So I'm a bit careful with those choices, while remaining genuine. I have been acutely aware of the "professional appearance" thing, not wanting to affecting job prospects by writing the wrong sorts of things, or even sensible things in the wrong sorts of drama zones.
Perhaps that carefulness and drama-subject avoidance worked out to tune LI's feed towards better quality things for me to see.
> The professional neg: Recruiters ask senior level employees if they’re interested in entry level roles or, better yet, internships.
Wait, this is a thing? Knowing this makes me feel a lot better. This always leaves me scratching my head when it happens. Kind of messed up that they do this.
It's not a thing. Shitty low-effort recruiting is a thing. EG I have C++ on my resume from like 10+ years ago and I get invites for exciting senior developer opportunities that I am technically qualified for, but if you actually read my LI you'll see I've moved in a different direction.
There's no "neging" though that's ridiculous. Like, you think a recruiter you've never seen before or since will intentionally spend their time sending you a role you'd never apply for?
All this and more is why I never signed up for LinkedIn, I think they're a bunch of scammers and a very nice collection of dark patterns and there is no way I'm going to support a company like that with either my content or my presence.
I've never signed up for a LinkedIn account. As far as I can tell it hasn't been a problem for me as I've been happily employed ever since I graduated from college.
A few years ago, a company I never heard of (and would have thus never considered) reached out to me on LinkedIn. The recruiter wrote a thoughtful message connecting what they are looking for in the role to what he saw on my profile so I engaged with him. Several months later I was working at that company (both a huge pay increase and a very interesting experience.)
This happened again a few months ago, minus the huge pay increase but still an interesting opportunity.
If these two opportunities didn't come along - I am sure I'd be working somewhere else and be fine - but I am really glad I was able to connect with these.
So again to answer your question
>> Am I missing anything?
How would you know what you're missing if you aren't receiving the opportunities? Maybe you can be working in a much more interesting place and making much more money instead of where you are - but if you don't let people tell you that you won't know.
This resonates so well because LinkedIn is great and terrible.
To give it its due - both my current and previous role materialized because a determined internal recruiter did a thoughtful search and found me on LinkedIn. So: really important career development milestones happened for me because of LinkedIn.
Say it more bluntly - I make more money and have a broader skillset/experience because of LinkedIn. From that point of view it's the most valuable website I've ever visited.
On the flip side, the social elements of LinkedIn feel bolted on and are absolutely horrific.
The classic turd of LI is the "influencer" who crafts a virtue-signaling (I hate that term but it applies here) post of which the linked article has plenty of examples. It tends to be admonishment to either be kind or bold. Either "A man came for an interview. I could tell he was exhausted and said he had kids at home. So I hired him even though he had none of he qualifications" or "Don't be your own detractor - even if you know you aren't remotely qualified for a job, apply."
The key thing here is it's terrible advice. If anyone actually did this, they'd go out of business or be black-listed as a candidate. Nobody actually does this shit but it somehow resonates as "feel good" with enough people.
All of this is magnified by the worst feature LI could possibly have: when someone likes something, all of their network sees it - same as if they actually posed content. I guarantee you, when someone out of he kindness of their heart clicks "like" on the "I hired the unqualified dad" post, they aren't intending to broadcast that post to their hundreds/thousands of contacts, but that's what happens.
There's actually a non-trivial group of my contacts that I want to maintain contact with (key to industry, good friends from b-school) who are terribly guilty of this behavior and there's nothing you can do to protect your feed. It's actually gross.
I don't understand LI's strategy at all. LI is immensely valuable because it has a real deep, proven knowledge of real professionals, who leverage LinkedIn to recruit and be recruited - which are immensely valuable (see my example.) Similarly, it's strategic to be up to date on where my former colleagues are ending up etc, so I'd be a regular LI user for those reasons. I'd even pay.
This bolted on social stuff MIGHT look good on some engagement metric, but it's clearly such low trashy engagement that it detracts from the value of the business, and it's so apparent to me as an outsider that I can't understand what they are thinking.
I don't have a problem with the last one. Posting that you have a new role (which is what I think you mean) is totally appropriate because it helps people update their mental model of where you are.
Otherwise yea, kinda fits with the theme I am alluding to
My main issue with LinkedIn's timeline is there is no way to only see content actually posted by your contacts.
I don't care if someone I met at an industry conference liked something posted by someone I've never met. And 99% of the time, I don't even care if they commented (especially if it's a pre-written congratulatory 'comment' that LinkedIn suggested to them).
Annoyingly, the only way to 'improve' my timeline is to add more people/companies to follow. That's pretty much the exact opposite of what I want to do.
The description at the end about how it's basically a hostage situation but with the hostage takers trying to be fun is the most excellent metaphor for anything I've ever heard.
It's so fucking accurate, and explains why the site's content trends towards a very corporate-friendly "safe quirky" that I personally find nauseating.
>It's so fucking accurate, and explains why the site's content trends towards a very corporate-friendly "safe quirky" that I personally find nauseating.
Haha, all LinkedIn posts do look like if Silicon Valley's Jared Dunn had written them.
It has close to 0 value for job seekers. In the past year I’ve received 5 real contacts from hiring managers (sadly all of whom wanted SRE, not DevOps. I find sre dull and I would rather be on the dole than waste my life in performance analysis).
I also received over 1,500 connection requests and 5,000 InMails from parasitic headhunters. None of those had jobs amenable to my location or skillset. 75% of them were from spam houses in India. The other 25% were from generally incompetent headhunting sweatshops in the usa.
I don’t give a crap about inspirational stories frok the head of DailyMail (I Hired a FELON), or other social media garbage. I just wanted a job.
I gave up on my search and deleted my linkedin protile for good this week. It was the most freeing feeling since deleting pagerduty and facebook.
I worked for Reid Hoffman about 20 years ago. If I could get him on the phone I would ask him if he had any idea what a piece of trash linkedin has become.
LinkedIn is useful to network with recruiters and have yourself be 'available' in the job market - basically a phone directory for resumes. But I definitely do not care for its news feed or other social features, which are simply either marketing/advertising posts or political posts these days. It has become especially bad with the overt injection of progressive politics into many companies' practices in this last year, particularly their outward-facing public relations, all of which is leaking into LinkedIn and turning it into Facebook or Twitter.
As a lawyer who depends on network building, especially a during no-contact world, LinkedIn is critical to me to stay up to speed, increase interaction with clients/colleagues, source new hires, etc.
The best way to get out of the LinkedIn treadmill is to take control of your own presentation. At Leet Resumes, we write engineering resumes for free (premium hosting services coming this fall): www.leetresumes.com
Use us, or use someone else, or write your own resume and host it on your own personal site. It's better to own your own presentation on the web than rely on a distant, and perhaps not friendly, corporation.
I don't think I would use a service called "leetresumes" but having your own site is good advice as a place with high SEO value when people DDG your name. However, this doesn't replace LinkedIn, unfortunately. Also to echo someone else, hiring managers love LI for good reason, it's easy to source a bunch of candidates with potentially niche experience.
A few years back, I was job hunting, using LinkedIn at bit to find leads. During this ongoing process, my father, who’d been receiving chemotherapy treatments passed away.
Being the “technical one” it fell to me to manage his various accounts. I logged into his gmail from the same browser I’d used LinkedIn, and started to contact people he knew but was out of touch with.
The next day, I started receiving email, from my dead father, from LinkedIn. Claiming he’d just joined the service and wanted to connect to me.
I still don’t have the words for this, years later.
What exactly is wrong with these folks at LinkedIn? They seem like caricatures of actual humans to me now, and I no longer even bother to visit the site.
If anything positive comes from cancel-culture, canceling LinkedIn would be my preference.