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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
// 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
“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...
> 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.
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/
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
The underbelly of LinkedIn is Blind. Of course, Blind has all the vanity but less masturbation because it’s anonymous. So you’ll get the ‘actually, ___ sucks’ posts versus the endless dick sucking and self dick sucking on LinkedIn. Grotesque really, but what are you gonna do.
I’m at peak misanthropy today thinking about LinkedIn posts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
304 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadIt'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.
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.
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...
No more or no less than how most coworkers act at 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.
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.
This feature also inhibits sharing though, which is why Linkedin has such an artificial feel about it.
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.
One online cesspool at a time please.
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.
https://twitter.com/j4n0/status/1125380024733925377
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.
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)
it is not a feature, it is psychological abuse that generates revenue.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Just writing this list made me frustrated.
Facebook engagement feeds on outrage, but LinkedIn feeds on people wanting to make "connections" at all costs.
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.
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.
I've seen so much blatant bigotry and thinly veiled sexism on LinkedIn that I'm having a lot of trouble relating to this one.
> You don't see trolling; you don't see fighting; no one will give you points for being shitty to others.
Same here, I've seen plenty of shitty self-serving or downright condescending comments get rewarded with "claps" or whatever emoji they use on there.
That and the Business Insider links. Does everyone else pay for a subscription or something?
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 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.
https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-...
> dark patterns everywhere.
Not disputing that, unfortunately.
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!
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."
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.
"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.
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.
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).
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.
No, it's largely about me, as a reasonably tech-literate person, understanding abusive design and dishonest behavior.
Pick any of the news stories in the sidebar which are related to social issues, and expand the comments.
* Or product, depending on point of view.
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.
Definitely not. No one I know uses LinkedIn except when they are looking for a new job.
The ones I've found who are using it a lot are either: paid to, or desperate for work and try to fluff up and BS their way into a job.
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.
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.
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.
To me LI is much less as described. My feed tends to be more BestOfLinkedIn than anything your descriptions: https://twitter.com/bestoflinkedin
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...
Also a bit like the emperor's clothes. "If you don't like, it you just don't truly get it like I do."
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.
I set it to "Open to Finding New Jobs", and then get 1 to 2 applications per week. I found my last two jobs by recruiters contacting me.
It works great for that. I never had any use for all the social networking.
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.
... bye Felicia
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.
And generally I have come to conclusion that I do not want my photo to be shared online. I'm just old fashioned that way.
Are you also against in-person or video interviews?
It helps perception of the prime facts by removing largely irrelevant data.
Yes, several applicants supplied a headshot for the last engineering role I hired for.
The agency that developed it wrote about it here: https://www.bynd.com/case-study/antibias
I've not used it, but I think the idea is thoroughly neat.
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
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.
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?
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.
Thank you for your time!
They're online environments (aka media) for discussions (aka a form of social interactions).
"Social media" is just the mass market name for forums.
Edit:
I'm kind of flattered that someone created a new account just to nitpick a comment of mine :-))
Keep on keeping on, senormenor: https://xkcd.com/386/
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.
I was with you until this part. I have never seen praise of any large social network _or_ any growth-hacking dark patterns on HN.
Including the automatically generated page-$USER@ aliases, which would send a page to the related employee?
Fun times.
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:
https://jessems.com/hairdresser-analogy
[1]. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-91UA-Xy2Cvb98deRXuggA
Of course my parody account would have
- a background photo of me on a stage with a headset and
- a professionally polished profile photo with my arms crossed.
smh
I’m at peak misanthropy today thinking about LinkedIn posts.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.