Has anyone else noticed that LinkedIn is turning into a shitty social media platform? Memes and videos are now being posted.
I used to get decent use from it but stopped updating my profile because the site is cancer. Full of self patting on the back and people adding me to “grow their network”. Recruiters contacting me with “perfect fit” position in languages not on my profile.
Can someone please develop hacker news type basic site but for jobs? No memes, no dark patterns, no likes.
It's extremely frustrating, because in 2023 you're sort of expected to have a linkedin (some job applications even require it!), but people have started treating it like the next FaceBook. From 2020-2022 I saw a lot of COVID conspiracy theories and political memes being posted, and I wanted to respond to them, but since LinkedIn is basically a resume, I withheld responding, for the same reason that I don't put my voting history directly on my resume.
Though honestly the worst part is the "inspiration porn" that people post on there all the time, nearly all of which reduce to "the job market is tough, but don't give up because it gets easy!!!". When you point out that it, in fact, does not ever get "easy" to wake up to 30 rejection emails every morning, they either try and sell you on some meditation routine, tell you that you have a bad attitude, or just block you.
Honestly, it really is the absolute worst platform that I am stuck using. There are worse websites, obviously, but no one is forcing me to go to 4chan or The Daily Stormer every day.
You can have a LinkedIn profile but not use the feed-- I don't see how that's necessarily frustrating. Make a profile, provide the link on job applications. Occasionally edit your profile so it's up to date. Then, don't use it. Simple enough.
Coincidentally, this drives everything that is so bad about the platform. All the normal people you know in real life wouldn’t be caught dead posting to LinkedIn, just using it as a resume and jobs platform. The only people willing to post anything are attention seekers and influencers.
It’s a similar complaint to how your Facebook and Instagram feeds barely contain the people you follow anymore, which encourages regular people to post less and attention seekers to post more.
The business model of ad-supported social media apparently doesn’t work under the paradigm of checking in on your friends for a reasonable amount of time (like 5 minutes a day) and calling it a day. Instead, it’s just optimized to be as much of an addiction as possible, and there’s no way your real respected work colleagues can provide that amount of content.
I wish there was a way to never accidentally click on or navigate to the feed at all on LinkedIn. Could be a good opportunity for a browser extension to just nuke that part of the DOM.
Yeah, I basically use it for online resume storage.
For years LinkedIn languished as the site everyone was on, but nobody actually used for anything. But I have actually gotten a couple of leads from it now.
The feed is trash though, for sure. And you have to laugh at the endless parade of bimbo pictures attached to accounts that are supposedly "recruiters." Unprofessional and insulting.
Speaking of "bimbo" recruiters, some of them are low key phone-sex operators.
I had an experience where one of them reached out to me about a job over the phone. She had a hot-sounding voice and the job seemed intriguing, so I figured I would give it a shot. Her LinkedIn photo was stunning. Yes, I sheepishly admit that I was taken in by her and this influenced my decision to even consider a random job from a recruiter.
She was friendly but kinda ditzy, seemed to barely know what she was talking about, and once the easy stuff was over, I was abruptly handed over to some dude. It's like... I thought you were my recruiter, so who's this other guy? He pretty much handled my recruitment process from that point on, but she was allowed to be the first one to talk to me on each call and get the credit for "recruiting" me, although she turned out to be more like live-bait than anything else.
IMO, the tactic of many of these recruitment firms is to hire attractive women to fool male programmers into considering otherwise unappealing jobs and direct most of the profit to the male recruiters.
Part of me is glad the industry is in such a state that no recruiters are contacting me anymore. 99% of third party recruiters are blood sucking parasites.
I recently pointed out to our corporate security that a data broker has detailed employee records for our entire company including job titles and start dates. Given the nature of our business, that data cache is a roadmap for security compromises. The most likely culprit was scraping from LinkedIn. It isn't always a good idea to put your data out there for others to aggregate.
Some companies supply that information voluntarily. Experian (iirc) even has a product offering that ‘helps employees qualify for loans and demonstrate stable earnings’ if the companies will just only send them payroll history. So it may not have been scraped necessarily, just “shared” in the ordinary course of business.
Further to that, my feed have been filled with Certification posts. Folks would boast about their 3 hour Certification courses with long cringe posts! And LinkedIn would not stop it, because they need to sell LinkedIn Learning!
Honestly, if it were just people bragging about how they took a 3 hour class and got a useless certification, I don't think it would bother me. LinkedIn markets itself as a glorified resume, and it's pretty common for people to fluff up their meaningless certs.
I just feel like there should be somewhat of a boundary between personal and professional life. There are things I would say to my friends that I wouldn't tell anyone in charge of giving me money, at least not directly, and I feel like LinkedIn (purposefully or otherwise) is actively trying to erode that boundary. It's horrible.
There's not much I would post on Facebook that would cause me heartburn if a potential employer were to see it. (And most of my Facebook friends would be profoundly uninterested in most tech topics I would post on.)
But, yeah, I keep my LinkedIn--to the degree I use it at all--very anodyne except to the degree you have relatively extreme opinions on specific tech topics.
I don't have a facebook, but I don't think I post anything that's likely to get me fired to any social media. However, there's sort of a difference between "not being fired" and "being hired".
My political opinions are pretty normal (basically typical American lefty), and if my employer were to find a blog post I wrote about universal healthcare or something it's doubtful that they'd fire me. That's a little different than me plastering "BIDEN 2024!!!" all over my resume, and that's why I utterly hate LinkedIn.
There's very little correlation between a company that's deeply integrated with LinkedIn tools and what it's like to work there. If you're going to judge all companies based on their recruitment toolchain, good luck finding an acceptable position!
I can't remember where, but it was a fairly typical form where you put your name and information, upload your resume, required fields have a red asterisk, and the LinkedIn profile was required.
Now, I have no idea how much parsing they actually did; you might have been able to put "asdf" to make it validate.
Keep in mind that the majority of people only want to network when they need something. You can use LinkedIn to do the opposite and create meaningful connections.
1. Judgment-free support. That lady you barely remember from your previous job is starting a business. Encourage her. Some person is starting yet another podcast? Ask a couple of kind questions.
2. A low effort contact list. Next time you go out to an event and meet with new people ask to connect on LinkedIn. You have a better chance of maintaining that connection with LinkedIn reminders than if you exchange phone number or email.
I've never had a Linkedin nor any other type of social media, not even a public Github page, and I've received many simply great job offers, especially in 2022-2023.
Putting this out there so people don't think they need to join some absolutely shit random corporate social networks to get a job.
Either Indeed, or from email. The emails usually come from recruiters using databases, but I've also received emails directly from the companies using word of mouth, too.
I aggressively clicked "not interested" on meme/fluff posts for a while and now when my LinkedIn page always starts with some sort of system design diagram. My next click is usually straight to the jobs page anyways.
The site will be done for once they start putting trending topics in the jobs page.
The best is 'unfollow'. I have a a bit less than a hundred connections, all real people I know, and I follow 0 accounts. So there is no feed. It's empty.
Holy crap did this topic take a nosedive. My point wasn't even to "dismiss" COVID conspiracies, just point out that I didn't really want them on my LinkedIn wall.
But fine.
> Then there was the vaccine effectiveness, which was claimed as 100% but actually was well below that. Same for their preventing transmission, which was nonsensical.
I think there's literally no one that claimed the vaccine was 100% effective; certainly no one with any kind of medical credential. I don't think there's ever been any vaccine in history that's been 100% effective, the numbers I heard when I got my vaccine was between 80-90% effective, and due to Bayes theorem hijinks that means the actual likelihood of being immune is well below that. This was never a cover-up, the scientists were pretty up-front about this.
> Let's start with Wuhan being a likely origin point. This one gets bonus points, because it wasn't just a "conspiracy theory" but also "racist". All based on a Lancet paper that any smart reader could tell was bunk, and which turned out to be totally soaked with conflicts of interest.
I don't recall anyone saying it was racist for saying Wuhan was an origin point. What people called problematic was people trying to label it as "kung flu" or "Wuhan Flu".
> Then there was the "conspiracy theory" that natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity; again, turned out to be true.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I don't think this was ever disputed. "Natural" immunity may indeed give you stronger immunity to COVID, but it has one major disadvantage: you have to catch COVID to get it, which is potentially lethal, and even if it wasn't "lethal", can have long-term side effects that we're still unsure about, not to mention that while you have COVID you're substantially more infectious than when you're not. Any reduction on infectiousness is a potential win.
> literally no one that claimed the vaccine was 100% effective
Well, apart from the President of the US [0], and Pfizer themselves [1], and many others.
> I don't recall anyone saying it was racist for saying Wuhan was an origin point
Many, many people claimed this; including a NYT reporter [2] and WaPo [3].
> I cannot speak for anyone else, but I don't think this was ever disputed.
Yes, this was heavily, heavily disputed. Even Nature claimed mRNA was superior [4].
I hope you reflect on the fact that it took me only about 5 minutes to dig up these links, and that what you called a "nosedive" can now be seen as an educational experience.
The "nosedive" was specifically because people like you cannot stick to a topic and instead make everything about COVID conspiracies, as I already stated.
That said, I'll give a look to your links, though I seriously suspect that they don't validate everything you're saying.
> people like you cannot stick to a topic and instead make everything about COVID conspiracies
I haven't talked about Covid here for a long, long time.
I responded to your claim with a long list of easily verifiable instances of "conspiracy theories" being proven correct - which was then immediately flagged despite containing no misinformation, rudeness, etc. The irony is lost on people, apparently.
I'm sure you can find something wrong with all those links, if you try real hard - but if you put as much effort into verifying them I bet you'll learn a lot more.
If this adds a humorous twist on it for you, I saw someone describe it as like a dating site except it’s women trying to contact men and men ghosting them.
I thought this was a joke, but then he puts it right in his profile:
> PLEASE READ PROFILE. While some people use LinkedIn for "networking" and advertising their "personal brand," I use this site exclusively as a dating platform. If you are intelligent, attractive, female, in or visiting San Diego, and perhaps a bit out of the norm, I might be interested. Send me a message and invite me out for a drink! (and please make it clear you are asking me on a date) All non-dating related messages will be ignored.
But at the same time seems like it is a failed platform for him too:
> UPDATE. LinkedIn is too full of faux career climbers and not enough dating opportunity. Follow me on Instagram @georgehotz
Besides the joke, I think it can help you sympathize with women in that situation as well, and maybe improve your dating :) You can start to see why lots of attention still feel shollow.
Yeah ok, people are sending me jobs... do they even know what I do? This looks automated, they probably send a million?
It's not very subtle. I watched a 2 minute clip of 5 men working together to save a dog from a river. And that was loosely connected to a generic post about how team work is effective. Sometime in the last 5 years LinkedIn just became a slightly more formal variant of FB/Instagram.
>Can someone please develop hacker news type basic site but for jobs
You can just use it in the original way: simply look at profiles, make the occasional requested intro for someone you actually know to someone you actually know, and maintain your resume. I have ignored the drive to turn it into a social network and it pretty much works the same as it did when it started.
For example, when I have a meeting with someone I always look them up on LI first, to see if we have something in common.
I agree! I think it's actually easier to avoid the big, weak network because it started as a professional tool. I curate my connections and don't accept every recruiter or sales person who sees it as yet another marketing channel. It's been invaluable for reaching out to my former coworkers to try and recruit them
It’s been like this for many years now. I can’t really remember it otherwise. I’ve lost respect for some colleagues after seeing all the self congratulatory posting that exaggerates what happened and long-winded work stories on their profiles. I’m done with giving folks a pass at this stage on their Linkedin ladder climbing nonsense. Like most social media it’s a giant circlejerk just with a white collar lean.
I think it's even worse than that. I've seen a lot of crazy political discussions there where people, fully identifiable, are just losing their minds, saying racist stuff even.
I have no idea why people would be willing to risk their jobs like that but I see people from Fortune 50 companies doing it. Crazy
That is something. I stopped reading it entirely sometime last year but don’t recall the crazy uncle effect. What was mentioned sounded similar to what I experienced, including the memes—-but I didn’t realize it was sinking so low in becoming Reddit on a bad day without the anonymity.
Jesus, I hope this guy is just posting a sarcasm. This reminds of a post from a guy (SDE2 in Amazon) I remember, leaving Amazon and posting how great he was as an engineer and a bar-raiser.
You'd hope as much, but it reads very similar to other serious corporate-speak. Take the explanation for why Keysight Technologies is called Keysight Technologies:
'The name Keysight is built from two English words: key, meaning indispensable or essential, a means of access; and insight, meaning the power of seeing, having vision and perception. The name connotes seeing what others cannot, having the critical or key insight to understand and unlock the changing technology landscape.
Keysight reflects what's in our DNA, what we strive to provide to our customers - the key measurement insights engineers need to accelerate innovation and ultimately achieve success - whether they see success as being first to market, increasing their differentiation, ramping up production, or achieving lower costs of test within a rapidly changing technology landscape.
According to Ron, the name Keysight "captures the spirit of our new company - innovative, insightful, and forward-looking, with the special kind of vision to sort through the rapid technological revolutions and anticipate customers' needs so they stay one step ahead."'[0]
Eh, I don't see anything wrong with that. You have to rename the company. "Agilent" and and "Hewlett Packard" are taken. So you pick a name and make up some marketing fluff to justify it.
"Keysight" sounds like "key insight," which is what you get from decent test equipment. They could have done much worse.
Well most people see LinkedIn as a central place to store resumes.
Being everyone’s free storage unit does not generally make money.
So they have to turn the resume storage part into a loss leader and turn a profit some other way. Being a place to list job postings is the most obvious but they have competition already.
Throwing on ads will make money but LinkedIn isn’t a site most people stick around on. Turning LinkedIn into a social media site keeps people on the site so the ads work, but it’s a pretty ugly way to do it. The type of people who are actually going to use LinkedIn like Facebook is probably the worst kind of people you want sticking around too.
LinkedIn could have stayed a small site with a small team but they got started by getting money from investors. Now they have other people to answer too.
>Well most people see LinkedIn as a central place to store resumes.
Or as a self-updating Rolodex of which there were quite a few at one point. Obviously it can serve other purposes as well but that's all I've ever used it for.
People have been posting about politics there for a very long time; it's only just starting to bubble up into your timeline, I suppose.
Don't hesitate to mute accounts. For example, blocking Gary Vee almost single-handedly made my LinkedIn feed usable again. I never followed him or any of his pages to begin with, but enough of my connections embarrassingly engage with those kinds of posts that it cluttered everything up. Go to the source and pull out the root of the problem.
re: politics, there are one or two LinkedIn entities that post the most mildly progressive of content, and it's the knuckle-draggers in the comments that made me block these pages.
I host a weekly open-mic at a local bar (mostly music but some standup and poetry) and more and more often I’ve had to figure out how to gracefully handle a performer using some of their 6-10 minutes to share their not-as-popular-as-they-might think political takes or commentary.
And it should be handled gracefully, because I’m not in the business of banning political content from the contents of poetry or standup or lyrics or whatever. Both from all sides I wish there was a bit more of a shared cultural understanding or reservation towards divisive political topics.
It really is this group of maybe max 10000 people all boasting to each other, interspersed with “I got laid off, available to hire!”. It’s a pretty depressing place.
I wonder what the strategic plan Microsoft had in mind originally was? Was it really as simple as “we are all about business, that is the business network”?
> I wonder what the strategic plan Microsoft had in mind originally was? Was it really as simple as “we are all about business, that is the business network”?
I thought that’s what they bought Yammer for - but then they also bought LinkedIn.
I think his point is valid though. While I see C# listed all the time on normal job posting sites, on HN it's always the sexy meme languages like Rust and Python.
I appreciate Python started-off as a toy-like language - but its utility as a glue-language for serious number-crunching (see: how almost all ML projects involve Python somehow) and the admirable community surrounding it means its credibility is established. The worst thing anyone can say about Python is that it’s the new VBA.
Rust is the new C++ - Microsoft wouldn’t be investing tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars in enabling Rust for Windows drivers if it wasn’t serious. (Whereas it’s Zig and Carbon where I have concerns about adoption and longevity: the post-C ecosystem isn’t large enough to sustain three languages that overlap each other so much)
I'm just messing around, I use Python and Rust all the time and I love them. But the larger point is that these are not representative of the average tech job. Most of them are C#, Java, C++, JavaScript, etc. You pretty much only see Rust postings for startups. Python is more common these days, but it was also a HN meme at one point:
It did not. It started as a language do system administration for the Amoeba operating system.
Here's part of the README for the first public release (0.9p1, available from python.org):
"This is Python, an extensible interpreted programming language that combines remarkable power with very clear syntax."
"Python can be used instead of shell, Awk or Perl scripts, to write prototypes of real applications, or as an extension language of large systems, you name it."
What I meant was that - in the time after it was created for sysadmin tasks - but before it found it’s new home in data-science - Python was often used as a beginners’ language as a more modern and expressive alternative to BASIC - which led to its “toy” reputation - an undeserved reputation that it has successfully shed.
It is hard for me to accept that historical interpretation as I started using Python back in the 1990s, when it was already making in-roads in steering high-performance computing codes. NumPy's roots date from that era.
In 2002 it seemed that half the attendees of the Python conference were there because of Zope.
I was programming full-time by 1999.
So for me Python was well-established in several areas far before its wide-spread use in computer programming education or its use in data science.
I never had any exposure to HPC, scientific or numerical computing, even through university and in my career - that world is still comparatively silo'd off from the wider dev ecosystem IME; I know you are correct in what you say, but I imagine Millennials like myself (who were still in middle-school when you were using Python professionally) only ever saw Python in less serious applications.
I have found frameworks such as Laravel to be so extensive and full of add-ons/tools, that I am really enjoying PHP development more than ever! I know PHP gets a lot of hate, but it still is such a powerful language with many great frameworks.
There's lots of good "serious" php out there, the challenge is it has been so accessible there's even more garbage php that's crowded out the go stuff.
For me, the biggest challenge is that the job listings on whos hiring are almost never hardware based, so it pretty much completely eliminates it. There are some hardware listings on the ycombinator job search portal, but its pretty minimal and the search tags are kinda meh. Just wish there were more hardware startups in general.
I tend to see the same stuff over and over again. For example one place has been hiring their third engineer for the last 3 years. But I suppose every job site is like this.
If they've been trying to fill a single position for three years, I imagine they've tried other mediums too and the problem isn't just where they're posting the ad.
Probably very few people here are familiar with Xing, the German "business networking site". I was convinced LinkedIn would eat Xing's lunch when they launched in Germany, since the same happened pretty fast to Facebook and its local clone (StudiVZ). However, it hasn't happened then and only now some small tendency for people to prefer LinkedIn can be noticed, but mostly because of international contacts and not because the site is all that great.
Anyway, in the last couple of years, Xing also mutated from a business contact network to a wanna-be Facebook social network, with memes, neurotic posting, outreach metrics etc. Instead of being a contact backbone, it's become an attention leech, basically the same experience as you describe for LinkedIn. At least in case of Xing, it's more or less known that they have been infested by product managers for a long time, whose only metric for success has ever been "innovation (tm)", so it's explainable, but still stupid. I suppose same could be happening at LinkedIn, even though they never have been good to begin with, palatable at most.
For me the last nail in the coffin was showing unfiltered images of human remains - from the latest middle eastern conflict. No trigger warning, no NSFW filter, nothing. That's unacceptable.
The business model of linkedIn is a bit messed up. It pretends to offer something to you, the individual. Yet you are not paying for the site, so you are part of the product not the customer. The real customers are companies (advertising) and recruiters (self-described raw meat to be had). However, linkedIn seems to have messed up with that business model as well. Because recruiters wants recruits - not just a mailing list of people who are not interested. This leaves only the advertisers, thus turning even more recruits from visiting the site, therefore making the site less interesting to recruiters. A downward spiral, really.
Recent offerings of linkedin Learning seems to be attempts to mitigate this but at the core of the problem really is that the site offers very little value to recruits. Maybe there are some smart business model people around that could fix that, who knows. The space is ready for dis-ruption.
I made the mistake of answering to an antivax post (something like “yeah “we” survived the Spanish flu and other pandemics but always at a horrible cost.” And my feed turned awful, I report posts on a regular basis now.
Other than that, it’s still the way to contact anyone, I mean anyone I remotely know or knew.
Yeah. I usually try other means first but if I don't have or can't find what seems like a reliable email address, LinkedIn is a pretty good avenue--especially with so many people having largely migrated asway from Twitter and Facebook.
The recruiter spam and self promoting content from people who talk like they got 3 mortgages and 4 ex-spouses or ... -the opposite- absolute silence and disdain of a crowd that never posts these thoughts under their real name (and rant on HN or twitter instead speaking their truth on LinkedIn) has always been deafening.
In the age of Musk's twitter it is somewhat peculiar that LinkedIn ended up as the last social media platform where interesting posts can be discovered provided you don't "blind-follow" and follow the right people. None of this will work for those who expect it to work as some kind of magic garden where recruiters will present only what is relevant to you. That LinkedIn though never existed in the first place.
> Has anyone else noticed that LinkedIn is turning into a shitty social media platform?
As someone who didn't bother to curate their LinkedIn account all I can say is: This is great news! Now my career opportunities are again the same as everybody else's.
> Recruiters contacting me with “perfect fit” position in languages not on my profile.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but not everybody is bothered by that. Most languages popular nowadays (C#, Javascript/Typescript, Java, C++, etc.) are popular partly because most devs can jump between them pretty easily.
Definitely not defending Linkedin, though. A coworker of mine writes posts about his stance on abortion. I don't know what Linkedin's policy is about it, but it's super awkward, and I just stay far away.
On multiple occasions I have responded to a "perfect fit" type message on a tech stack mismatch, only to have it lead to a phone screen where everyone is confused why we're talking.
My current job is primarily using a new-to-me language (C#) on a platform I hadn't used in 10 years (Windows), and though I have some buyers remorse (Windows is still terrible), everybody was on the same page about my skills, I've picked up C# easily enough, and it's worked out fine so far.
From my experience when I respond to them that I don’t know a certain language and code in C# and know some Java I get instantly ghosted. It’s not even worth my time to respond.
Yes, but I also find it's one of the best remaining social media platforms for talking about craft. Unfortunately, it tends to suffer from toxic positivity that's almost the inverse of Twitter's ability to incite fights. There's almost an implicit "let's make each other look good" dynamic. Although, you do occasionally see controversial engagement bait too.
> Can someone please develop hacker news type basic site but for jobs? No memes, no dark patterns, no likes.
I'm building flexible.dev that eventually will be _exactly_ this!
Right now there are no comments, want to add those soon. The job feed is curated (manually, eventually automatically) from Reddit and HN "Who's hiring" posts.
I spent some time a while back to "unfollow" everyone on linkedin apart from a very few select individuals. I unfollow people by default everytime I have a new connection. My wall is uneventful, but at least I don't feel like I'm going to facebook everytime I connect (which is rare)
One day I decided to rapid-fire dismiss all of the "suggested connections" that LinkedIn was putting in front of me. I probably dismissed 200 in a single sitting.
The next day(?), I got a warning from LinkedIn that my account was being audited for misuse or some such thing.
Although I was manually dismissing those suggestions, I'm guessing it tripped some bot-detector or something.
>Has anyone else noticed that LinkedIn is turning into a shitty social media platform?
Seeing as it's somehow the only social network to spam my email (I never even touched LinkedIn) endlessly? Yeah, it's been shit for many years. Even by social media standards.
I have not touched LinkedIn since MS took over. And I'm not surprised by what it has become. Pretty much when a big corp takes over a social media this can be expected. Please get off LinkedIn. It is a cancer of digital society.
Between that and the "I've been unemployed for 5 months and am about to lose my house" posts with 1000 replies telling them how to network better, it's very very depressing.
Yes and it was as predictable as sunrise after Microsoft acquired them. Formally, I was a paid subscriber and conducted a good bit of business via LinedIn. After Microsoft acquired them, I canceled and now visit LinkedIn infrequently, and usually then only in response to a direct message. Those on the previous thread cheering the prospects from Microsoft's acquisition of Activision/Blizzard are likely to be disappointed in the outcome as well.
I think I notice that every time I have to login. Isn't exactly new, is it?
I'm curious what "decent use" you used to get from it? That you used to be contacted by better fit jobs? Were you finding contract positions? Or hopping from a full time to another full time?
It has to be tough, as I imagine that most folks aren't actively looking for a job except for when they don't have one. I try and respond politely to any contacts I get, but there have been times I was overwhelmed.
The use was mostly getting decent hits from recruiters and the feed when I opened the page didn’t want to make me vomit.
I am frankly at a point where I realized internet became an extremely toxic place full of dark patterns. I miss days of nerds making sites to share informations and hobbies.
Makes sense, I think. I, sadly, never remember LinkedIn not doing that. I think I can find a tweet or other journal entry talking about how awkward the site is every time I ever find myself using it. Shame, as I do want to keep in touch with friends from old jobs. Doesn't feel like a good way to do it, though.
I’m not much on social media as it is (HN is about the only one left that I still visit regularly), but even when I was doing _some_ social media, it was Twitter and _rarely_ Facebook, but never LinkedIn. Not for years.
The last time I probably used LinkedIn for anything was networking some when I changed jobs (almost 10 years ago). Unless you hop jobs a lot, I just don’t see how it adds any value.
Until their privacy and visibility policies are put on par with other social media platforms, I'm going to use it strictly for job-hunting when needed.
Worse than that. For me, in recent months, the volume of adverts and 'suggested''s feels like it's been throttled up so much that it's completely overwhelming the majority of my personal networks output ... which is the only reason I'm there.
Potential RIP in a matter of weeks/months ... frustrating.
>Has anyone else noticed that LinkedIn is turning into a shitty social media platform?
It's always been a shitty social media platform. It's entirely performative; just people yeeting artificial pseudo blog posts out into the ether, all virtue-signalling past each other.
LinkedIn is one of the worst websites I can think of.
This reminds me of the hay days of Bolt. For ever new hire, their managers and directors and VPs and what not would post something effusive and congratulatory. It's kinda comical and tiring.
My LinkedIn network is my biggest audience. I use it to post random thoughts and whatnot, because it's more fun when you know there's an audience. I rarely get any views or likes though.
Get a dog and every day take it on a long walk-and-talk where you tell your dog all your hot takes and random thoughts. Your dog will look forward to this, will look for you on days when you forget or think you are too busy for the walk-and-talk, and as a side benefit, you will get a little exercise, some sunshine, and fresh air.
It can also help clarify your thinking. If you can't convince your dog that technical debt is widely misunderstood, then how will you convince your colleagues?
My solution is aggressively unfollowing or disconnecting from people. There may still be a lot of low value interactions, but at least I don't have to see them.
LinkedIn has been showing algorithmic feed from 1st, 2nd, & 3rd degree connections for a while, but they recently started aggressively showing out of network content for engagement. So unfollowing might help to filter out speicific people, but it won't stop your feed from getting cluttered with unrelated posts from some random person.
My perception was that… at least 5+ years ago. I’m on there only if I need a job, otherwise it is dead to me. There is no content I have any interest in on there.
The most surprising thing is that there's people who think LinkedIn used to be good. It was built by spamming people and grabbing contact books without consent. It's always been trash.
I dunno, it literally got me to a 180k salary (Eastern Europe based so astronomical) just by me having a profile there. I didn’t have to find a job since 2015 thanks to it. You might argue that the feed is shit, but to me it’s normal human behavior trying to stand out and abusing everything that you can (including feed algos), so I just don’t look at it.
I’ll be forever grateful to LinkedIn and I would never be in the situation I am right now if it hadn’t have been for it.
Wow interesting! I've being using LinkedIn since it first started, and honestly this is first time I have heard a positive story that is not written by MS or LinkedIn staff or related people. I guess a broken clock can be right 2 times a days. Still won't touch LinkedIn with a 10 feet pole since the MS take over.
A lot of my friends and coworkers from Eastern Europe share my sentiments. Every job I’ve had was due to being recruited via LinkedIn without me lifting a finger, starting from 1k euros gross per month, up until 15x that.
Couldn't agree more. I lived in the middle of nowhere USA bc of my spouse and an amazing remote job found me on LI, circa 2015. Would never have happened otherwise
Similar to other posts, LI is probably the website that changed my life the most. It's made finding a new job so easy it's almost embarrassing to discuss with non-tech people. I just set my profile to "Open to work" and recruiters just stream in and eventually I get a job that is awesome and pays well. No other website has had a larger impact on my life.
You're right, it's always been awful, but it's actually gotten worse which is something I did not think was possible (Facebook quality 'news' feed, constant awful captchas and popups to name a few).
I only look at it once every couple of months to check up on old colleagues. If I am looking for a job I am forced to use it more often, but mostly just the messaging part. The feed is something I think most people can safely ignore.
I always liked Bill Gurley's take on LinkedIn (paraphrasing):
"I only ever accept connection requests from people I 100% know to be honest, smart and good judges of character. That way, if I meet some new person, I look them up and see they are connected to someone I know: I immediately call the shared connection and ask their opinion."
Yup. I installed LinkedIn not long after it was a thing, and just kinda clicked through the sign up flow. To my horror, it contacted every single person in my contact list telling them I was on LinkedIn.
It was trash, but dealing with recruiters has always been, and keeping professional network into a separate space was the saner thing to do.
In that sense, I think it worked as intended: people would only need to react to recruiting mail, and that only during the spans they cared about moving careers.
The whole "tell your life on linkedin !" promotion pushed by Microsoft clearly degraded that part.
yeah, the most useful resource wasn't even the recruiters (which was occasionally helpful, but none of my career roles were gained through LinkedIn Recuiters). Having a way that wasn't twitter to connect and talk with old co-workers and colleague was invaluable.
My last role was gained by reaching out to a colleague I haven't talked to since college and asking about the role I applied to, and he was nice enough to give me a referral (I honestly wasn't expecting a referral. it was easily 5+ years since we last interacted, didn't talk that much in college, and I wasn't the best student to begin with). I doubt he posted his roles on Facebook so I never would have thought to contact him otherwise.
Unrelated, but linkedin has the most user hostile notifications of any site I have ever seen.
I got a notification to follow a podcast the other day. Not a person I follow asking me to follow it, it was a notification saying "here is a random podcast do you want to follow it."
How the hell is that a thing that companies can buy?
Way back in the day I used to get excited when I saw a notification from Facebook / Reddit / LinkedIn. Now, every notification is this kind of crap, so I make sure to block all notifications from these apps.
I'm sure these sorts of changes increase engagement in the short term but are detrimental to the product in the long term. I really think that change was the beginning of the end for Facebook in particular.
I really admire the creative bullshit these execs come up with, AI can't compete: "This means adapting our organizational structures to improve agility and accountability, establishing unambiguous ownership and driving improved efficiency and transparency through reduced layering".
I'm all for criticizing empty corpo talk, but that quote is actually pretty reasonable and not empty. They are just saying that they are simplifying their organizational chart so that they don't have teams with overlapping responsabilities.
It's just a polite way to say "we noticed that we had 2 teams doing the same thing so we merged them and dropped the resulting excess headcount".
> that quote is actually pretty reasonable and not empty
It does have an actual discernible message, which puts it above a lot of other corporate gobbledygook. But it's still corporate gobbledygook that requires careful deciphering to understand what it says.
I don't consider it reasonable at all. It's slightly meaningful word vomit.
There can be several reasons why they (and their employees) would want that though. Being very honest is not a positive in this case. Duplicate work and ambiguous ownership is fuzzy and unclear. They won't come out and say "we overhired and now we are shedding our deadweight" because no one wins with that more crude statement.
The least you can do for the laid off employees in this situation is try and not make it harder for them to find new jobs, so you keep the message vague.
It seems to me that "we overhired and need to fix that" is a message that would make things easier for those laid off. It's saying that the people are being laid off because of a business misjudgement by the company, not because those employees performed poorly.
>They won't come out and say "we overhired and now we are shedding our deadweight" because no one wins with that more crude statement.
to be frank, we should probably stop pretending they "overhired". That term implies that these MBAs were somehow blindsided by the imminent recession that analysts have talked about as far back as 2020 and that this wasn't an intentional strategy to maximize growth while labor was "cheap" (or at least, the money to hire labor).
This was all calculated and most companies still came out of this larger than when they entered the pandemic. It was all calculated and workers were nothing more than expendable pawns. Not much we can do about it without stronger labor laws, but that's a multi-decade battle.
They had 700 people doing redundant work? Good thing they waited until there was potential for a recession to actually decide to look into that. Excellent business leadership.
Which potential recession are we talking about? The one that was supposed to happen 3 months ago? or 6 months ago? Or 9 months ago? A year ago? 2 years ago? There’s so many potential recessions i’ve lost count!
reading it closely it exemplifies everything wrong with the current job market:
> adapting our organizational structures
"free money is gone so we need to downsize"
> to improve agility and accountability,
"we don't have money nor time to nurture juniors. they are gone"
> establishing unambiguous ownership
"We're dropping risky products and specializing towards the most profitable features, ".
> and driving improved efficiency and transparency through reduced layering".
"we're making the remaining workers work more to make up for the people we let go. And cutting out some key managers, producers, and middlemen that will slow things down in the process".
I honestly see is as corpo talk to justify all the usual things that happening as of late.
I appreciate how many people have defended this statement as 'clear and straightforward' by providing a way clearer and very straightforward summary of it with 1/3 the word count...
I love how the "leveraging resource to add value using laser-focused synergistic..." business double-speak euphamisms can also be used to fire people, not just take up air during management meetings.
That doesn't even read that bad IMO. They are recognizing that they're organizationally bloated today and are laying people off to be more cost-effective. Pretty straight forward.
Thank god I'm in academia and can afford to not be in any social platform, especially that one. I hate social media in general but LinkedIn is just especially disgusting for me. In any other social media that is not linked directly to some kind of real-world reward I can at least understand that people are venting, or being assholes just for fun, or saying stupid things just because it's free and easy. But the roleplay that happens in LinkedIn is worse for me because it's like the Uncanny Valley: it pretends to be real. And what's even worse, it tells you between the lines: you also have to play your role in this sick theatre or risk being ignored. In other words, it's like living in a Nordic country. Yikes.
The Finnish word kalsarikännit means "that feeling when you are going to get drunk at home, alone, in your underwear — with no intention of going out" (I am given to understand)
Nordics (in particular the Finns) are renown for their heavy drinking to the extent that their disapproving states try to price them out of the habit. They don't care and get pissed anyway, which I find endearing, and real in a nice way. More details: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/style/pants-drunk-time.ht...
It’s endearing from an external perspective because of how the narrative sounds to outsiders (“the government is protecting the citizens from themselves”). The inside truth is much less romantic: Nordic governments are authoritative and jump at any opportunity to tax the hell out of their citizens. Nordics don’t drink even remotely as much as for example Germans and I don’t see Germany in trouble for that. They get away with it because Nordic people live in a golden cage and as long as you conform and lower your head, everything kind of moves forward comfortably.
I'm surprised it took this long for LinkedIn to do layoffs. The amount of recruiters looking for candidates, tech companies hiring, etc. has gone down since the beginning of the year. As such, the income from LinkedIn that is tied to job postings has decreased. In order to continue looking good on paper they have decided then to layoff employees to cut costs.
The same thing has happened at other companies that make money from job postings.
God please no. I already have to yell talk to a human to get my problem solved with support phone calls. I really would rather not get spammed by AI bullshit. If you're trying recruit me, at least have the respect for my time to get a human to talk to me.
I agree with all the takes about LinkedIn turning into a bad social network, but is that intrinsic to its design or is it something that happens no matter what?
Is there a way to design a site--at the UI/policy level--to end up with a community that doesn't suck?
For Hacker News, for example, is what we like about it just a consequence of the current set of members (in which, case, it might change eventually), or is it the moderation that keeps it good? If the latter, is there some way to automate the moderation (to make it scalable to LinkedIn-sized networks)?
I'm also thinking of Quora, which was once an amazing community, but eventually (though it took years) degraded into just another meme-fest/click-bait social network.
I think it’s an intrinsic byproduct of any site/community that puts an algorithmic feed optimized for “engagement” front and center. By our nature, we engage with things that ping our extreme senses, which is the core reason Facebook and Twitter have gone to complete crap. Clickbait is truly bait and we are just angry raging fish if baited sufficiently.
I think it’s absolutely possible to have a community that doesn’t suck if sucky behavior is punished instead of rewarded.
Well said. I think HN has two qualities that make it work:
1. No need to drive engagement.
2. Heavy moderation to keep things on track.
#2 won't work without #1 because of what you said (the nature of getting engagement).
But is there some way for moderation to scale? Maybe this is where LLMs come in?
Ironically, LinkedIn should be the one experimenting with this. If they can get revenue from recruiters or job seekers, then they don't need the toxic kind of engagement.
upvotes and downvotes help, and I'd argue HN does a good enough job at preventing new accounts from being able to do disproportionate damage (discouraging bots, astroterfing, etc.)
Another thing is user friendliness and maximizing engagement. Whatever Facebook did around 2015 or so to make everything bloated, animated reactions, and slower seemed to make things more user-friendly for a subset of less technical users, such that people who can't fact-check obviously fake articles and spam posts are enabled and incentivized to post as much as possible, and adding algorithms on top of that to maximize "engagement" make these things inevitable.
Twitter's chronological got turned off as the default at some point for a similar algorithmic "for you" page that I think has also made things worse for their platforms.
No idea about Quora, but eventually for ad-supported sites you start maximizing for time on the site and getting people to look at ads, rather than "quality" in the content on your social media site.
The fact that YCombinator doesn’t need to optimize the platform for profit/advertising for the business to continue to run profitably means they can afford to maintain rules which encourage only niche high quality discussions and keep high standards for moderation.
HN engagement is not (for now?) directly related to any significant "real-world" metric, meaning that (for now?) people are not using it as an indicator in a CV or anything like that. Having a lot of points here also does not lead (at least as far as I know) to any significant "real-world" social engagement between its users. As soon as such a score exists, human beings will start to optimize it in some ridiculous and disgusting ways.
I also suspect that moderation is heavy, but I have absolutely no idea about how it works, who does it, etc. I've never seen moderators engaging with the community here, which means that probably moderating itself does not add to your social score.
You will frequently see the top comment is by him when he describes merging / redirecting threads, explain title changes, or try to set expectations for hot/contentious topics.
it's both. Human moderation will always be an important factor. If you want larger communities to work well you need to put a proportionate effort of human attention in to maintain it, including bottom-up from users. Bot-autocracy is bad not just because it doesn't work well but also because it makes people feel alienated.
And the design is important too. There's no followers here, no monetization, no flashy upvote count, essentially no identity with a capital I. HN and sites like it work to a large part because there's no status or financial grift involved in posting, people largely just post to communicate. The exact opposite of what Twitter is turning into.
adverse selection, a community is good, so it grows, and then it becomes attractive to the mainstream, and to bad actors who exploit it for their own agendas, and extract value while making it worse.
Having a LinkedIn account still seems necessary to be taken seriously, but in my experience using LinkedIn to network and job search seems less useful than ever.
I disliked LinkedIn during "layoff season". It was promoting a false narrative, folks were sharing that were "affected" and people who had the job, sharing their story of how difficult it was for people who were let go.
What was the point of all this? There wasn't truth in any (or many of these) of these posts. Folks were sharing what they thought worth sharing, mostly to gain more attention.
That said, I think, we should see LinkedIn as a marketing platform targeting corporate employees.
> Folks were sharing what they thought worth sharing, mostly to gain more attention.
This is what influencer culture does. There’s very little value actually shared on LI nowadays, most valuable content for me comes from tech-specific groups and a lot of that is just aggregated from newsletters.
Microsoft (who owns LinkedIn) reports quarterly earnings in ~1 week. For public companies, timing it around an earnings call can help control the narrative since the company will have a chance to explain to investors why the action wwill increase shareholder value.
When I read these stories, all I really hear is that these companies have lost all ability to innovate and invent. They've spent a fortune on these people, carefully choosing and then tuning them to be experts in the business and now they can't think of anything for them to do? They should be embarrassed.
That’s one way to look at it. Or, it could just be that, during the covid boom years they overhired to support growth that never materialized, and now they’re stuck with a bunch of overpaid freeloaders (sitting at the top of each salary band) who are neither experts in the business nor uniquely talented/useful/needed.
> now they’re stuck with a bunch of overpaid freeloaders
Interesting how even though in this scenario it's the company that did the wrong thing, it's somehow not possible to mention it without putting some blame on, and insulting, the employees that were hired.
You’re correct, it’s unfair of me to insult newer FAANGM employees without also insulting the lazy, overpaid, freeloading lifers who set the wrong hiring targets at said companies.
I use the term freeloader because the truth is…network effects exploit an inefficiency in human social dynamics that’s so powerful, it produces monopoly-level market capture and profits. So it’s a fair assumption to make that anyone hired at a network Monopoly money machine like LinkedIn will, inevitably, turn into a do-nothing freeloader (not necessarily through any fault of their own).
They're all bullshit factories. They grew like crazy and are still growing but depressing the tech job market is more important. Why have $1 million in profit per employee when you could have $1.05 million, lives be damned?
I don't know if they are still doing it but very many years ago, they'd give you LinkedIn Premium for life.
No access to internal tools like DopeFlows and Merlin but honestly that was over half a decade ago, I bet most people that work there didn't even know they existed.
Fucking hate LinkedIn and didn't have a profile for many years. Recently started a new company, and if you want to be taken "seriously" by investors and business customers, you need to have a LinkedIn profile.
There's no alternative anymore. I really hope something new comes along soon.
The one that most others moves to. Until then, being a pioneer in terms of moving early to a new professional networking platform with little people on it just seems pointless.
This is actually a great question because LinkedIn has become ubiquitous in the professional world and I cannot, for the life of me, think of anything that is currently available to replace it. Could someone build it? Sure. Could someone gain the mindshare (and marketshare that it has)? Someday?
Easy to say flippantly, but my colleagues (let alone my network) are distributed across 10+ countries on four continents. My local 'meatspace' has nothing to offer me career-wise. A professional network needs to be online.
But it doesn't need to be through a third-party website. It's entirely possible to cultivate and maintain such a professional network by directly communicating with people. That's what I do, and it causes no trouble.
Meatspace isn’t going to work that well going forward because of wfh making physical proximity irrelevant. I’m contemplating a move to a company located in NYC but I live in Dallas (it’s wfh obviously). I wouldn’t have been able to make that relationship in meatspace as I’d never even heard of the company before let alone shook the hands of someone who worked there.
My LinkedIn feed is pretty good, mostly relevant (semi-)technical content that helps me to stay up to date with the industry. However, I have spent quite a lot of time to make it like that by unfollowing people who post or like shit content.
I just paid for a "Premium Career" account and it was $250 for one year or $39.99/month. I've gotten my $250 back from consulting leads through LinkedIn, but it stills seems high for the value to the average person.
The first month is free to try and may be rather enough to find a permanent job. But indeed the pricing is high bar especially for an ocassional freelancing.
I don't do any outbound messaging. Someone just read one my posts and reached out. That's sort of the ideal way to land customers; have them come to you. It's still hard, just in a different way.
First off sorry for all of the employees that will be affected by the cuts. On one hand, it seems that if there is a contraction in the employment market, there would be less need for LinkedIn job boards and the staff around it. On the other hand, Microsoft is doling $69B for Activision Blizzard and I assume that money needs to be made up from some where. I can't imagine what is going to be like Activision Blizzard employees after the merger.
Telling jobseekers they needed a Premium subscription when they've probably just lost their job and burning through savings is not exactly a genius marketing idea.
Has anyone else noticed that their connection count stays 'correct' but a significant number of people that I used to be connected to now are surfaced as recommendations for me to connect with? It's absurd! I doubt people regularly go through their networks and unconnect from people that they don't want to keep in touch with, kind of defeats the purpose. So wth?
I used to get decent use from it but stopped updating my profile because the site is cancer. Full of self patting on the back and people adding me to “grow their network”. Recruiters contacting me with “perfect fit” position in languages not on my profile.
Can someone please develop hacker news type basic site but for jobs? No memes, no dark patterns, no likes.