LinkedIn is loud, and corporate is hell
ramones.dev99 points by austinallegro 3 hours ago
99 points by austinallegro 3 hours ago
Is there some legitimate thing people are doing on LinkedIn that the crap is getting in the way of? One can make a profile and (thought it’s terrible for this) search for jobs without ever scrolling the feed. If you don’t like it just don’t use it.
It feels like complaining that the strip bar has alcohol and nudity everywhere, why are you there?
I think it's more just a bizarre platform for us to gawk at. I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space and especially a professional space that is going to be your first impression for a new job prospect. Maybe having a loud profile is a positive to some sorts of recruiters but posting anything beside resume information on that site just seems like a guaranteed malus on future prospects. Even if you'd like to run a live blog on some project you're working on as a sort of portfolio - do it on a platform you have full control of in case you want to rescind it or modify it later.
> gawk at
Exactly this, it’s just another outgrowth of the attention economy, and I assume there is a payoff for many people or they would not be engaged with the platform. I assume part of that is purely for the attention, but part of it must be remunerative from a professional standpoint as well. The lines get blurry fast in influencer spaces. What is work, what is personal, what is even real, and how much does any of that matter as long as you are getting attention?
probably because businesses can now use it as a digital resume and bypass all those pesky *-descrimination laws.
Small business it actually can be a meaningful way to refer people digitally and make business connections.
I think big business it's also a way of keeping in contact with former colleagues so that when you're interested in jumping to another company you can do it easily in one place.
Otherwise it's a place for sales people to pump out garbage posts.
I only use LinkedIn when im looking for a job or information from people I know. Or asking good people if they're looking.
Unfortunately I tend to miss people reaching out to me because I dont check it otherwise.
Because it's being assumed that if you don't have LinkedIn then you are not a suitable candidate to hire, sometimes in pre-screening they explicitly ask to provide it, or get screened out. So when you make something like that a de facto requirement to get a job, or at least to be considered, then people will complain about it. Per your analogy, it's like I have to have a mandatory strip club membership to be considered for xyz.
My issue with LinkedIn goes beyond the cringeworthy content. It's the best platform to stalk people and collect any info using OSINT. Unlike other platforms where you can have some nicknames etc., you are most likely to have legit info in there. I wouldn't be surprised later if digital ID in smartphones will be required to update/sign up there, "to make sure we fight fake accounts!!"
> It's the best platform to stalk people and collect any info using OSINT.
It's the main platform of interest if you ever talk to data brokers just because of the richness of personal information, employment history, and social network (connections) information present there. Microsoft is sitting on a goldmine of personally-identifiable information, and the platform is aggressively scraped every millisecond for new data.
If I wanted to really fuck somebody up badly the first thing I would do is get their LinkedIn.
Haha, you're absolutely right. But the kind of thing he's complaining about is on HN too. "Why the Cloudflare outage should never have happened" and so on and so forth. Everyone has wisdom to share but somehow they're never equivalently successful.
"As a third-year student in Computer Science at the University of Tzatziki, I would never use unwrap, I'd use expect, so then the error log that I skipped over would be accurate..." blahblahblah
It‘s not so easy. LinkedIn is not solely about searching job. It provides a window into the world of coworkers, friends and managers alike. These are the fellow humans we like to watch and listen to. As a species we are well versed doing so which results in most of us watching and some of us providing content trying to get attention and (most of the time) making a fool of ourselves. We just cant help ourselves.
The highest level of cringe you can feel is when you see people you know well in real life post on LinkedIn. The contrast between the way they speak in real life and on LinkedIn is often immense, you don't feel that level of contrast with random internet strangers.
This is very helpful in setting the lens you need to see everything else online, or even published in print.
Why even read anything on linkedin at all?
The highlights get reposted on
Love that one.
I can't help but notice that LI helped the author to get the job he's about to lose.
I really feel bad for folks still in early career, nowadays. I am grateful to be retired.
When I was first let go of my job, and ran into the SV ageism, it infuriated me, but I think that it may have actually been one of the best outcomes I could have hoped for.
i've always felt the social world order is as follows:
Facebook/Insta: I'm cool!
Twitter/X: I'm smart!
LinkedIn: I'm successful!
Tik Tok: (I have no idea)
As long as you know this, it all makes more sense.
Aka, which vanity is one most vulnerable to. Makes sense that they’d segment out like this, since the space tends to be winner take all.
Only people over 60 think Facebook is cool. That's not to denigrate people over 60.
The solution, as always, is doing more of what you want to see in the world. Maintain a personal blog and post more from the heart.
"An error occurred: API rate limit already exceeded" at the end...
Is that intentional and a joke? I hope so. I find it funny.
LinkedIn is hell. I had a redundancy about a year ago, and like the author tried using it to network and find another job. I swear half of the people on there are not copy/pasting from ChatGPT like the author speculates but are just straight up bots that use AI. Hust use the traditional job bulletins like SEEK, you will have much more success.
LinkedIn has always been as if HR and PR agreed on a post.
I wish LinkedIn was that good. In my eyes LinkedIn has become "Facebook but with resumes" - I accept that I should have a profile on there for resume visibility but there are so many features built into that site that just should not exist and so many genuinely valuable things around job seeking they could do that they're simply not.
It's an excellent example of a product that could be massively improved by just removing things - look back to early linkedIn days where their email notifications actually meant there was likely something relevant that you care about there. Now they've created a platform where the valuable is buried in piles of irrelevant slop.
I hadn't used linkedin for over a year, so I recently deleted it. It used to be useful as a kind of phone book/rolodex; but they pivoted somewhere, and I'm not sure why I hadn't deleted it sooner.
The author complains about duplication in social media. It's certainly not limited to LinkedIn.
I wonder if part of the problem is that people don't see each other's posts and don't quite realize how repetitive they're being when they write them? You can't expect the same amount of coherence that you get in a small discussion where people actually read each other's posts.
Alternative theory: perhaps they don't care?
Yeah even on HN not everyone got to the real issue. It is not so obvious unless you have done SRE or like me just have to do oncall and have to do some SRE for your services. The obvious take is "there is a bug at line X" and especially with it being Rust the tempting lol Rust code is buggy it was meant to be safe. But code will have logical bugs so you need to know how to deal with that uncertainty in deployments.
RE Linkedin - it's a good filter, see some BS post, add it to a list, then when you need a job and want to choose your boss, or when you want to hire someone, you have a filter :-). Maybe 3 strikes to allow for an honest mistake or something that looks like AI but turns out it wasn't.
> How do these people stay motivated to do anything. It can't just be money, right?
It’s making money to spend quality time with loved ones and pay the bills. For some people that’s enough (no judgement).
I only maintain a profile on LinkedIn because it is standard and expected. But I never open the website except when I get notification maybe on important message or to update significant part. I don't read posts or anything else. I even block the website on my AdGuard Home instance and added it to kagi seach blocked sites.
I don't see any reason why would I try to engage with people there. And that's even before LLMs, they just made it much worse.
For me LinkedIn is the employee/colleague phone book. And like every phone book, it’s more ad filler each year.
idk i like linkedin. every week i get emails about jobs they think i might be interested in and its pretty on point. nice to have a centralized place for job advertisements. before that, youd have to go on each website individually which was a pain.
The biggest challenge with LinkedIn is the primacy of your linkage to your employer enforces a self-censorship that turns into corporate speak.
The overton window on LinkedIn is actually quite small and because everyone there is really an employee rather than an employer, you get essentially slop that has been easily trained on and therefore is easily generatable by AI. It's just all low perplexity takes.
There's mostly no room for nuance because of the performative takes. Unlike a forum like Hacker News where your identity is almost totally abstracted away, every LinkedIn post is a move in the status game of career visibility.
I do feel Ramon's (blog poster's) pain.
I'm so lucky that I'm at a place that I can see my direct manager actively protecting us from a lot of these things like random busywork and solutions for the hell of a solution. As a result we can get some really good work done and actually deliver on the large projects we're given in the roadmap on time.
I just hope Ramon can find somewhere that respects his talent and his time and allow him to do his best work without the stress. I really wish that for everyone (although, no perfect world exists)
I had faced something similar as Roman and am now building many things with these AI tools that I’ve always wanted. Never simultaneously felt more uncertain and hopeful, and wonder if I would do well to be my own boss. The challenge/learning now is getting it monetized.
LinkedIn is mostly people trying to impress folks that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. As such it just becomes an echo chamber of self-promotion and grifters while 99% of folks that are legit top tier in their field aren’t wasting any time there.
When someone starts introducing themselves a “LinkedIn top voice” or whatever you’d do best to run away quickly.
Is LinkedIn ... worse because of this ChatGPT scenario?
The negatives the author talks about, just sound like LinkedIn on a good day.
Personally I'm never on there outside of when I'm looking for a job and I'm honestly not reading anyone's posts...
It has gotten way worse since the Ai rise. Before it was the "how to be a winner" mindset now everything gets posted. Mostly AI garneted slop with glitchy AI images that advertise just plain false information. No one corrects stuff and barley anyone actually clicks a link an a post - no one cares. Just mindless self fap,fap,fap, like TikTok but for "professional" and business people
I mean, LinkedIn was like this before ChatGPT. The advent of LLMs just made this sort of corporate shitposting explode as everyone could now write one with such little effort.
I feel like for science it’s like how Twitter used to be with regards to finding new and interesting papers. But I wish people were banned from using LLMs for anything post related. You might as well replace those posts with ads.
My LinkedIn feed has been unrelentingly depressing recently, more than anything. Every time I log in it’s former coworkers posting about how they have been jobless for a year+ or posts like “I was diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer, goodbye!”
IDK if the vapid LLM slop is worse than this pit of despair and misery, hard to say.
> It can't just be money, right?
Yes, it can.
> How do these people stay motivated to do anything.
I have no idea.
Almost every comment on here is from the point of view of a candidate/applicant.
1. LinkedIn is an advertising pipeline, for employers, recruiters, and candidates
2. The main feed is helpful if you want to see people virtue signalling (recruiters claiming that they never ghost candidates)
3. The main feed is REALLY helpful to see what's happening on the other side of the fence (recruiters complaining about hiring managers ghosting/ripping them off)
4. The interactive part of the posts on the main feed is helpful for "correcting" poor assumptions (recruiters are often saying "Put X on your CV/Resume if you want to stand out" - which is good advice, except that candidates /don't/ put it on their resumes/CVs for a set of reasons that recruiters don't realise)
LinkedIn needs to be burned to the ground.
So delete your account. I just got hired. Can confirm LinkedIn is irrelevant if you have a reference.
"Your LinkedIn profile URL (required):"
HR is lazy.
Do you want to work in a company where HR is lazy to even work?
I really enjoy their daily games.
I was also placed on a PIP and yeah man, corporate hell at these big companies is definitely a thing. They’ve drank all the kool aid about AI and the execs have been taking the $AI board stinks up the moon to push AI down your throats. Then they are using fear and lack of transparency on decisions to get people to compete while pretending to be positive-sum (note: it’s zero-sum) these PIP and performance ranking stack cultures are so toxic.
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I wasn't familiar with the PIP acronym so I asked $AI:
> A PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) is a formal document a company uses when they believe an employee isn’t meeting expectations. It’s framed as “support,” but depending on the environment, it can be anything from a genuine improvement tool to a pre-termination protocol.