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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.
I've benefited a lot from my specialist area (energy industry) in which consultants and analysts will post genuinely informative and thought-provoking articles. It works to enhance their technical reputation and give them publicity, and it can be very informative for me.
But to achieve any usefulness from the platform I have to aggressively prune, by blocking every contact who ever posts something I don't find interesting. My block list is vast, and my threshold for blocking is incredibly low.
Ultimately, it's probably only a community of about 100 experts that post informatively on the energy industry.
So long as you don't mind doing the work, I find LinkedIn's algorithm to be the best of the main platforms at respecting my choices of who I want to hear from (although admittedly I should probably be using Bluesky instead).
I've also had tens of people tell me they really enjoy my posts on LinkedIn - I tend to post slightly against the mainstream opinions in my industry, and with humour, so I may not have developed a particularly professional reputation, but I've gained more publicity than anyone else in my company outside of the Exec level.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!!"
the purpose of linkedin is to do online sleuthing when you get curious about what happened to somebody you half remember from high school.
then you find their profile and you're left with the question "Have they really been a manager at Arby's for twenty years, or were they a manager twenty years ago and then forgot they had a linkedin?"
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.
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.
Why even read anything on linkedin at all?
The highlights get reposted on
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.
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.
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.
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.
LinkedIn has always been as if HR and PR agreed on a post.
I'm going to go against the grain and say that posting on LinkedIn is actually a good idea. It builds your brand and that is valuable.
As cringe as it may be, it puts your name in the working memory of people who might be useful in your career (recruiters, hiring managers, potential collaborators, etc.)
I also think this goes for all the analogous versions of LinkedIn (like Tiktok if you're a creator, or Instagram if you're an artist). Not having a place to show off your work will slow down your growth and progress.
I'm a fairly private person but I've been considering the opportunity cost of it, and I think it's pretty high. Overall +EV: the risks of putting yourself out there are low (i.e. strangers think you're cringe), but the benefits are very high (new jobs/opportunities). I might just start embracing the cringe.
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.
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.
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.
For me LinkedIn is the employee/colleague phone book. And like every phone book, it’s more ad filler each year.
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)
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
When I lose my job and need to search for a new one, I'll just use ChatGPT to create a bunch of useless apps to make it look like I have active Github presence, and then I'll ask him to create me a bunch of blog entries about tech in general. It doesn't need to be good, it needs to make me look good in the eyes of HR and the manager.
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.
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.
Corporate is hell, startups are insane. Is there any place to work as a developer and still keep my sanity?
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.
The feed is hell. The content is cringe. All true. But it’s a very good directory.
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.
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?
It’s making money to spend quality time with loved ones and pay the bills. For some people that’s enough (no judgement).
"An error occurred: API rate limit already exceeded" at the end...
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.
LinkedIn for job search is awful. It's just fake jobs and data harvesting.
My life has been better since I used an ad blocker to remove the LI feed
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.
> How do these people stay motivated to do anything.
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.
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.
my account got hacked and is lost. i hear nothing from linkedin. i start to like the silence.
> It can't just be money, right?
Yes, it can.
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.
Linkedin like Facebook were ok when both were just a directory.
One they started a feed it started going downhill.
Once your feed wasn't showing you your friends/contacts updates but updates from random weirdos you don't follow, you never heard or seen of in your whole life - it went to utter fucking shit. Just trashy self promoting dumb shit.
Both Meta and Microsoft are to blame for this enshitification of social.