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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>At one of my past companies, I recall recruiter disqualifying a candidate for a SWE role solely for having a "weird" headline banner image on their LinkedIn profile.<p>The "weird" image was a benign screenshot of a landscape backdrop of some Miyazaki film. No characters, no action sequences -- literally just trees, mountains, shit like that.<p>This is the kind of lunacy you're up against.
There are a <i>lot</i> of valid business interactions which are basically people in certain niche asking questions or talking about things which are going on which are super relevant to other companies in that niche. These can be informative (most industry insiders who might be interested in your live blog aren't subscribed to it, but most of them have LinkedIn accounts) and even lead to actual collaboration, purchases or funding.<p>ChatGPT takes on $globalevent are not examples of that. But they seem to be more favoured by the LinkedIn algorithm <i>because of</i> rather than despite how generic they are and how artificial their engagement boosting is.
I agree. If you follow people that are really interesting to you and if you don’t just connect with anyone who tries to connect with you, your feed can be pretty good. Sometimes LinkedIn reminds me of the good old days when everyone had a Twitter account and people could discuss there their work and other related stuff without too much politics involved
> gawk at<p>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?
It's really just people being terminally online, but with a thin veneer of professional growth.<p>English speakers don't experience this, but in my language LinkedIn-speak has so many calques from English that, in order to understand it, I often have to translate words one by one to English and then the result back to my language.
> I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space<p>As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.<p>Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.<p>Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.<p>Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.<p>LinkedIn <i>could</i> absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t because their behavior during ZIRP cemented their monopoly.
probably because businesses can now use it as a digital resume and bypass all those pesky *-descrimination laws.
Because your coworkers and management are there. The ones who advance, or decide who does. They’re creating one of the fields on which the working game is played. Also, they pollute the water.. the water the rest of us have to drink. It’s a culture.
Ugh, yes. I work in somewhat of small island of a subsidiary business unit within a very large organization, so I'm a bit out of the loop. Just going to work and doing my job. We had an interim employee from another site for a few months, and the amount of LinkedIn trading reminded me that I'm not playing the game that everyone else is.
> <i>Because your coworkers and management are there</i><p>And investors.
Small business it actually can be a meaningful way to refer people digitally and make business connections.<p>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.<p>Otherwise it's a place for sales people to pump out garbage posts.
Yeah but who the heck even reads those? Whole 'social feed' is just bunch of pathetic 'look at me how I am engaging!' farts that is disgusting. Do recruiters participate? If yes who cares. Do engineers actually participate? I would expect some grifters and bullshitters but nobody serious.<p>If feels cringy and disgusting, apologies to engineers here who worked hard on that but that has no place in anything related to professionals and careers. I go there once every few years, do accept meaninglessly on all new connections and log off, ignoring all other parts. If I lose the job I'll update profile but otherwise the same.
I've seen people cross-post technical content on LI, but never use it as their main platform.<p>In any case, the best advice I got on LinkedIn was from a mentor helping me find my first SE job who told me: You don't have to like it, but you would be stupid not to use it.
the purpose of linkedin is to do online sleuthing when you get curious about what happened to somebody you half remember from high school.<p>then you find their profile and you're left with the question "Have they <i>really</i> been a manager at Arby's for twenty years, or were they a manager twenty years ago and then forgot they had a linkedin?"
You want to get a pulse in the market, or need to clean up the backlog of recruiters invitations because you're a bit OCD and feel bad about not answering people who probably used AI to send you this apparently so personal message, and you also were born poor, so even all those years living a comfortable life your first instinct towards people who could maybe want to hire you is being a nice agreeable folk, as old survival instincts never really die.<p>Then, it is like, things that are not good for you, but you do anyway like drinking sugary beverages, staying awake too late in the night, drinking that last couple beers that you didn't need to drink and didn't enjoy but then give you this morning headache.
Right. During times I'm looking for a job, I use uBlock Origin to completely hide the feed. Otherwise, I see no reason to use LinkedIn at all anymore.
I only use LinkedIn when im looking for a job or information from people I know. Or asking good people if they're looking.<p>Unfortunately I tend to miss people reaching out to me because I dont check it otherwise.
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.
I been hacking on jobswithgpt.com, you don’t need to sign up either.
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.<p>"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
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.<p>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!!"
Never had this happen.
> It's the best platform to stalk people and collect any info using OSINT.<p>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.
I do exactly that. Have a profile. Search for jobs. Apply.
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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.
On the other hand, people have commented (in real life to me) that my linkedin comments are bold, hilarious and entirely unprofessional- earning me a sort of credibility in their eyes for being authentic and having integrity.<p>(and probably more privately, they believe I am too outspoken..)<p>Pro’s/Con’s; just like with all public broadcast information.<p>Also, its always embarrassing when someone talks about a linkedin comment I have made, not because I am ashamed but because I am sort of used to a semi-anonymous shouting into the void style forum like hackernews.
I'm sure it's the same people who comment on porn videos.
This is very helpful in setting the lens you need to see everything else online, or even published in print.
Personally I run a company and pay someone to post for me on linkedin
I have a friend who behaves similarly on linkedin and in real life, and he's very blunt. I like how he calls out some crap on linkedin posts, and nobody dares to like his comments, even though I'm sure everybody approves.<p>Overall, I don't see anyone I know being a cringe bootlicker on LinkedIn. These people are very visible, but probably a small minority of users.
Why even read anything on linkedin at all?<p>The highlights get reposted on<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/</a>
There was once a fad of young women (usually in recruitment) posting their holiday photos. Usually they were wearing revealing outfits, one was wearing something so revealing I could see her lingerie. This was a fad for about 6 months on LinkedIn.<p>What the recruitment companies seemed to never post was actual jobs, the thing that they are supposed to be doing.<p>After that I barely look at LinkedIn.
Reddit or LinkedIn... I'm not sure which is worse.
I went to an event and then looked on Reddit on Facebook and on Reddit the event went terribly. Everything was trash and no one had fun. But then on Facebook, it was super great and everyone had a wonderful time. So the real lesson is, don’t let something or someone else dictate how you feel about something.
LinkedIn for sure, because it's not anonymous, and the cringe is for real.
Love that one.<p>I can't help but notice that LI helped the author to get the job he's about to lose.<p>I really feel bad for folks still in early career, nowadays. I am grateful to be retired.<p>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 really feel bad for folks still in early career, nowadays. I am grateful to be retired.<p>I wonder if there’s an opportunity for a cohort of “retired” people to actually deliver things and eschew the performative bullshit. There’s presumably a lot of experience and skill that can be leveraged. I’d happily partake despite having nowhere near the right age for that, my feeling is the same and I’m not even 30 (hell, I’d learn a lot in such an environment).
Your comment is like un-comprehensible to me, I am 25 and I quit my last tech job 5 months ago thinking I would find the meaning of life only by having some time of thinking on my own and I also wanted to try out building things on my own since I don't find doing a job to be a good money making strategy for life, this is true for most people, not talking about folks with huge equity stake in companies.<p>It didn't work out like I planned and I am still as clueless as possible and loosing money everyday, getting to be retired before 30 sounds both incredibly boring and heavenly at the same time.<p>I want to know what do you think about life in general and how do you spend your young retirement days, does it ever feel like you have too much time but no reason to work towards anything since you have the money or are you still in the fight working towards some purpose ?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply retiring (in the normal sense of the word) at 30 is normal or expected.<p>However I am close to 30 and I am considering “retiring” from a tech career and moving onto something else. That’s why I put “retired” in quotes. I will still work, just not in this increasingly-bullshit industry, and I’ve already reduced my usage/reliance on technology as much as possible in my personal life (I’m still rocking an iPhone SE3 on an outdated iOS version for example, as nothing since then fits my requirements. Similarly my Mac OS is also outdated).<p>I assumed people can decide to “retire” from a job regardless of age (and move onto something else if their finances demand to).<p>> how do you spend your young retirement days, does it ever feel like you have too much time but no reason to work towards anything since you have the money or are you still in the fight working towards some purpose<p>I’m nowhere near retirement in the common meaning of the word but I have some money saved up which allows me to spend a year or so away from the increasingly-bullshit technology industry in which I started my career. Besides the day-to-day necessities and entertainment the only way I’ve found to “fight towards some purpose” at the moment is to argue with techbros on HN because I see <i>nothing</i> on the tech market that would allow me to put my skills to good use, and unfortunately short selling is unavailable to me since I’m not in the US and can’t trivially “just buy puts on the companies you believe will fail”, so yelling at the cloud and hoping <i>something</i> will change is the best bet I have right now tech-wise.<p>I don’t even see open-source/altruism as a way to achieve what I want; the blocker preventing what I want in tech isn’t code, it’s monopolies that have the law (or at least the lawyers) on their side. No amount of code is going to change that, and I don’t have the resources to set a legal precedent confirming adversarial interoperability as legal and take on the worldwide tech industry who will no doubt put their entire war chests towards litigating against such a precedent.
Plenty of people go on to have second or third careers. One programmer I know was a music teacher for decades. He's <i>really</i> good with the interns. That winning the startup lottery means you have more money and thus freedom than most, means you're also less constrained in what you choose. Which may be a good or a bad thing. Constraints are useful, and absolutely freedom is like staring at a blank page not knowing what to write. You really have to push yourself, make yourself uncomfortable in order to find yourself. You can waste the rest of your life sitting at home posting on HN, or whatever forum comes next.<p>There's a whole big world out there that hasn't heard of Nvidia. Go find them, volunteer at a local non profit, help people you think need your help (Alan Watts has a bit on who not to help though). A human has to have a purpose, even if that purpose is planning the next cruise destination. That sounds boring as hell to me, personally, but that's at least got my friend doing things and leaving the house. Learn new skills. Travel. Make friends in strange new places. For the love of Dang, don't just sit at home on HN.<p>Or do. I'm just some rando on the Internet.
(This message brought to you by someone who spent a year retired, posting on HN, and is now, back, gainful employed, trading hours for dollars. Email in profile if you wanna connect.)
It’s a boomers and corp girlie paradise!
In my niche, bioinformatics, linkedin has become somewhat of a force ever since many people left Twitter/X during the 'rebranding'? It's quite weird.<p>They're mostly posts announcing new packages etc. but there seems to be more bioinformatics-y activity than, say, mastodon or bluesky. The posts definitely have a different tone than what OP decries.
Yes there are a bunch of weird niches that got a lot of Twitter traffic but found a home on LinkedIn when there's an overlap with professions. Another niche example that I see is applications for AI powered architectural visualization, many folks posting actually useful stuff there on a regular basis.
I agree with a lot of the sentiment here about the actual app itself but I'm surprised that people aren't seeing LinkedIn for what it is, a tool. If you're a founder, LinkedIn is a great place to find talent & drive inbound sales, at minimum.<p>If you're not using it, I bet your competition is. Sure, the feed is terrible but look at it purely as a talent & sales pipeline. There isn't anything else like it out there.
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.
Kinda sad but LinkedIn has fulfilled the original promise of Facebook for me. Almost all the people I’ve met in my career and at school have a verified profile under their real name and when I want to reach out to them, that’s a place I can start if I lost their number.<p>The feed is hell. The content is cringe. All true. But it’s a very good directory.
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.<p>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.
LinkedIn has always been as if HR and PR agreed on a post.
i've always felt the social world order is as follows:<p>Facebook/Insta: I'm cool!<p>Twitter/X: I'm smart!<p>LinkedIn: I'm successful!<p>Tik Tok: (I have no idea)<p>As long as you know this, it all makes more sense.
HN: all of the above
TikTok: I'm bored (and have a short attention span)
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.
Facebook has marketplace, which is insanely valuable.
I'm going to get the tee-shirt printed :-)
I’m aura farming
Twitter/X: I'm smart? Seriously? That's not how I think of it at all.<p>I mean, yes, there are some people trying to use Twitter to show that they're smart. But my impression is that the overall vibe of it is trying to show that you're <i>influential</i>. People follow you. They retweet your posts. That's the "success metric".<p>Note well: I'm not actually on Twitter. This is my impression from outside.
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. Just use the traditional job bulletins like SEEK, you will have much more success.
My life has been better since I used an ad blocker to remove the LI feed
For me LinkedIn is the employee/colleague phone book. And like every phone book, it’s more ad filler each year.
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.
Corporate is hell, startups are insane. Is there any place to work as a developer and still keep my sanity?
Wish there was keyword muting. I actually have quite a few connections that are interesting to follow - it's just their content never shows up in my feed.
The author complains about duplication in social media. It's certainly not limited to LinkedIn.<p>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.<p>Alternative theory: perhaps they don't care?
It's important to filter out 100% of Linkedin content. Sometimes someone will post a twitter screenshot, usually something offensive. It sometimes hooks me for a moment, but then I remember the golden rule: information posted on twitter is not worth noticing. It doesn't even rise of the level of outage; it's not even worth acknowledging. So the best thing to do is ignore it and move on. I would suggest the same is true for Linkedin and really any social media.<p>If someone said something there, you're really the one at fault for knowing about it. Why did you read it? Having read it, why are you still thinking about it. It's a pure waste of your time, and the only positive course of action is to move beyond outage towards apathy and then finally towards total lack of awareness.
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.<p>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.
I do feel Ramon's (blog poster's) pain.<p>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.<p>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)
Is LinkedIn ... worse because of this ChatGPT scenario?<p>The negatives the author talks about, just sound like LinkedIn on a good day.<p>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 <i>everything</i> 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 <i>fap,fap,fap</i>, 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.
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.
> How do these people stay motivated to do anything. It can't just be money, right?<p>It’s making money to spend quality time with loved ones and pay the bills. For some people that’s enough (no judgement).
I'm not convinced that we can spend quality time with loved ones outside work while spending most of our time at work pretending, and doing useless or unnatural things. I think what you practise shapes you.
And to build a park with blackjack and hookers, in fact, forget the park!
"An error occurred: API rate limit already exceeded" at the end...<p>Is that intentional and a joke? I hope so. I find it funny.
I'm on Linkedin a fair bit and I didn't see a single article about this.
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!”<p>IDK if the vapid LLM slop is worse than this pit of despair and misery, hard to say.
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.<p>When someone starts introducing themselves a “LinkedIn top voice” or whatever you’d do best to run away quickly.
> How do these people stay motivated to do anything.<p>I have no idea.
The biggest challenge with LinkedIn is the primacy of your linkage to your employer enforces a self-censorship that turns into corporate speak.<p>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.<p>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.
LinkedIn needs to be burned to the ground.
LinkedIn for job search is awful. It's just fake jobs and data harvesting.
> It can't just be money, right?<p>Yes, it can.
Almost every comment on here is from the point of view of a candidate/applicant.<p>1. LinkedIn is an advertising pipeline, for employers, recruiters, and candidates<p>2. The main feed is helpful if you want to see people virtue signalling (recruiters claiming that they <i>never</i> ghost candidates)<p>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)<p>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)
I really enjoy their daily games.
I knew society was a sham when I saw three star generals I worked for, with unmatched performance, putting #openforwork and translating military speak to corpo speak so they could get a middle management job doing sales for Raytheon or some other middling job after retirement<p>The whole thing is sickening
You're beating a dead horse here buddy.<p>Show me a social platform that is not complete bullshit. You can't.<p>I do agree with it, LinkedIn is bullshit. But c'mon, this is all the web is now.
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:<p>> 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.