This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.
But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
Correction, developers that only work on software products, because those of us doing freelancing, consulting or working in non-software companies, really get it.
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> > Go for depth over frequency.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?
If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".
Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.
It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual.
If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.
And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.
Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.
You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.
You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.
You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.
And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.
Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.
It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.
That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.
> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...
I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.
Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
> You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.
I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?
Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT
And written in a very specific way
Not like that. Like this.
The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.
And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.
It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.
And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.
I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn
But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.
That sounds like mediocrity to me.
In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>.
Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.
Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
To me it's the most obvious sign that the person won't really be engaged with the work at your company. They're just using it as another bullet point in their "personal brand", while spending most time on outside activities. Then expect them to move on in 1-2 years anyway.
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.
I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.
Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice.
But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]
I remember fondly visiting my grandmother in the accounting department of Acme Tool & Die in Cleveland, Ohio. After a snack of her homemade molasses cookies we would gather around the fax machine, carefully sending invoices and unrolling the printed confirmations before filing them away.
Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.)
So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.
The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.
LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.
I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.
But that's the thing, revenue is a very poor metric for quality. It's a very good metric for marketing as you said, but focusing solely on that, which is what linkedin rewards, and potentially forgetting to invest time in becoming an objectively better developer is why linekdin rewards mediocrity as the article says.
So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.
I used to write actively on LinkedIn. Nothing big but still something. I couldn’t align with myself with the original post but I couldn’t tell why. This is aligned with my understanding of how LinkedIn works much more. Thank you for explaining that to me.
If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc.
I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.
Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.
But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.
Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.
This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy.
I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.
I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks?
Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.
I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.
I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”.
All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.
It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.
For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.
>The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed.
>Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
LinkedIn rewards mediocrity.
> your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity.
>Building in public
Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode".
I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it.
In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.
What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential.
What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.
Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.
At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?
We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.
LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.
Haven't the boomers more or less aged out of jobseeking at this point? Even the youngest of the Baby Boomers are around 60 and most of them are in their 70s.
LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for.
Things I don't find it useful for:
Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot
Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."
Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired
Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.
"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.
Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.
A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.
That's a pretty exhaustive list, but I think you forgot, "What X taught me about B2B sales..." type posts. These do seem to have died down but 2 - 3 years ago my feed was absolutely awash with them. They were like a really beige version of those daft TikTok crazes you see. Very much good riddance.
As a general rule, if you’re an engineering candidate that made a profile years ago and is missing updates and haven’t put in much description about your work experience beyond “I worked here from this date to that date”, you’re probably a good engineer.
When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.
Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.
The sad part is, a quick algorithm tweak would probably fix this, but I doubt they're interested in making any changes - Why would they, when LinkedIn is already the winner of the winner-take-all "business social media" market. Sure, they might make user experience better, but that doesn't increase their bottom line.
The reason people are hurt by LinkedIn is we had hoped (somewhere deep down) it would be a modest community of professionals that didn’t descend into ostentatious self aggrandizement.
Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.
Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.
that sounds a bit rough on graduates. we all start from the bottom and some people are not born with well connected parents or schools with wide networks. I actually think linkedin is a good way to pay it forward (although NOT for low effort graduates who send the same template spam message to everybody)
Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.
I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.
My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
> I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
A while ago I had a recruiter try to, ahem, coach me on my CV, which apparently had too few details (apparently still enough to have this interview, but the irony was lost on her) and on my LinkedIn profile, which wasn't up to date and also had few details (deliberately BTW, as I was getting spam).
My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.
To be a nit picky well acktually…one of your articles opens with, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was import this, spoken by Guido van Rossum…”
I believe ‘import this’ was actually penned by Tim Peters.
LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.
1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.
2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.
My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"
I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).
For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.
As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.
I’m pretty sure it is an alternate reality, fueled mostly by bot interaction. If you look at the comment history on a post, much of the time it appears to be flocks of bots posting “Very Insightful”, and often identically duplicated comments.
The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.
I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.
Or worse, it's a biobot using the little palette of cringey prebaked replies you can post: "very insightful, thanks for posting", "interesting thought", etc.
The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.
Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.
Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
> Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.
Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.
LinkedIn has the single worst search function out of any job board or website in general I've ever seen. It's astonishingly bad.
The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.
Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.
Yeah, I think the "pro-linkedin" comments here are probably valid, with the caveat that eventually everyone will quit using linkedin if there isn't more substance on these things at some point.
The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.
This thread is headed by defensive comments alleging that they have benefitted financially from LinkedIn.
These comments only strengthen the premise of the OP that "toxic mediocrity" is rewarded.
It is like a submission that is critical of multi-level marketing that generates a stream of defensive comments from marketers alleging that MLM "is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue". Of course it is, but that is not why the author of the submission is bothered by it.
Fortunately companies are comprised of more than just marketing departments. For many folks, the appeal of their employer, their job and their work is found in those other departments. IMHO.
The OP is not trying to engage in LinkedIn marketing. He is complaining about being on the receiving end of self-made internet marketers.
It would be one thing if the OP claimed "LinkedIn marketing is not effective". The OP does not do that. He claims LinkedIn marketing is "annoying".
This thread (so far) contains zero replies rebutting that claim.
Who is the company behind all this toxic, mediocre marketing and data collection about LinkedIn members to produce more internet advertising revenue, among other things. According to HN commenters, it's the "cool guys"^1
That is but one example of many, many HN comments going back years (part of an ongoing HN meme) presuming that Microsoft has "changed" (I could choose any of them to illustrate, but this one has a nice ID number with lots of sixes)
It's true. Microsoft has changed. It is even worse than it used to be when it was considered very bad
HN commenters trying defend Microsoft may attempt to divert attention away from LinkedIn and blame self-marketers, i.e., computer users. That would be nothing new. But both the OP and the HN title specifically identify LinkedIn. The problem is the so-called "tech" company that acts as an unnecessary and irresponsible intermediary, not the www users they usurp and target for profit.
Unfortunately, however, people at many companies, who are responsible for hiring people, are running around on LinkedIn and believe things of value being communicated there, living this strange parallel world or bubble of self-marketers and make believe that is LinkedIn, becoming part of it themselves with their mediocrity. The signal of excellence entirely drowns in a stream of mediocrity on LinkedIn.
Because LinkedIn makes your employment front and center it encourages status games .
The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)
Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing
Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.
I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.
Yes — I (as somebody who posts to promote my startup) wonder what the true goal is sometimes, as it’s ambiguous.
Certainly target customers and industry peers, but probably recruiters and VCs too.
My interpretation of how a very experienced recruiter once explained it to me is:
It’s “public life” online, and your public persona (in a “The Fall of Public Man” sense), and if you have no presence or a minimal one, when the time comes that you NEED attention (job seeking; shilling your business) you won’t have any listeners due to the algorithm.
Therefore one must constantly be telling the LI gods that they are an active user by posting perfunctory mediocrity.
It’s algorithm-gaming and cosplaying as a table-stakes activity for being “seen” or acknowledged to exist.
"it encourages status games". I think most social media does this. Read a Facebook feed and everyone is either on a beach, had a baby, or got promoted. Nobody is home sick or doing laundry or dealing with a terrible boss.
Can't agree. While there are some evergreen postings, LinkedIn job applications still landed me a couple of interviews (and much more compared to cold applying on the company website). And then there's recruiters reaching out which landed me even more interviews + my current - genuinely great - job.
How else are you going to liquidity-stalk that company you left with some options or even shares?
I take my first cup of coffee with a little tea-leaf reading based on the activity of the CEO and my former coworkers. If you ever see more than 5 connections reacting/liking the same thing you know that HR or marketing sent out an email about it.
LinkedIn is a great place to talk to recruiters still. If you're not picky about where you work, you can find a job pretty fast by working with recruiters directly and skipping the cold apply.
Readit News
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.
But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
We have to, if we want to stay in business.
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> > Go for depth over frequency.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?
If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".
Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.
If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.
And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.
Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.
You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.
You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.
You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.
And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.
Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.
It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.
That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).
Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.
I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.
> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...
I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.
Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.
I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?
And written in a very specific way
Not like that. Like this.
The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.
And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.
It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.
And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.
I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn
But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.
That sounds like mediocrity to me.
In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.
Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.
I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.
Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]
[0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...
…and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.
I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?
So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.
The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.
LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.
is not the insightful bit of wisdom you think it is, even if it did come from Bill Hicks
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
and funnily enough, this is still marketing
"build it and they will come" doesn't work
So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.
I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.
Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.
But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.
Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.
> winning on linkedin
> push them to
* vomits *
> millions of dollars
dirty money.
</rant>
At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.
Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.
I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.
Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.
I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.
Where do I find people posting such rare unicorns!
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
Nothing you post there is going to change your career if your career involves producing real value.
All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.
It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.
For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.
Deleted Comment
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Is that person more likely to be a leader or a follower and ass-kisser in your experience?
So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed.
>Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
LinkedIn rewards mediocrity.
> your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity.
>Building in public
Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode".
I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it.
In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.
What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.
Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.
At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?
We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.
Tell us more about HN...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/
Dead Comment
Things I don't find it useful for:
Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot
Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."
Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired
Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.
"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.
Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.
Awww cute videos with a baby or small animal.
"[crab emoji] positions only - or get blocked"
in my profile and it did not deter anyone from offering me Java positions.
That’s how I find LinkedIn useful.
When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.
Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.
I have seen people say for recruiting advise.
* They recommend you hustle. E.g. deliver your resume pretending to be a food delivery
* Don't follow up if explicitly not told to by your recruiters instructions.
* You must have an up to date linked in.
Usually in hot take format that if you dont do that you got no chance.
So everyone stick to measuring for the role!
Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.
Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.
Disproportionately, and predictably corny and insipid.
To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.
I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.
My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.
To be a nit picky well acktually…one of your articles opens with, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was import this, spoken by Guido van Rossum…”
I believe ‘import this’ was actually penned by Tim Peters.
Sorry, ahem:
#Inspiring #CastTogether
I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird.
What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn.
Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.
1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.
2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.
My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"
I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).
For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.
As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.
The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.
I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.
Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.
Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.
Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.
The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.
Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.
The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.
These comments only strengthen the premise of the OP that "toxic mediocrity" is rewarded.
It is like a submission that is critical of multi-level marketing that generates a stream of defensive comments from marketers alleging that MLM "is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue". Of course it is, but that is not why the author of the submission is bothered by it.
Fortunately companies are comprised of more than just marketing departments. For many folks, the appeal of their employer, their job and their work is found in those other departments. IMHO.
The OP is not trying to engage in LinkedIn marketing. He is complaining about being on the receiving end of self-made internet marketers.
It would be one thing if the OP claimed "LinkedIn marketing is not effective". The OP does not do that. He claims LinkedIn marketing is "annoying".
This thread (so far) contains zero replies rebutting that claim.
Who is the company behind all this toxic, mediocre marketing and data collection about LinkedIn members to produce more internet advertising revenue, among other things. According to HN commenters, it's the "cool guys"^1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866666
That is but one example of many, many HN comments going back years (part of an ongoing HN meme) presuming that Microsoft has "changed" (I could choose any of them to illustrate, but this one has a nice ID number with lots of sixes)
It's true. Microsoft has changed. It is even worse than it used to be when it was considered very bad
HN commenters trying defend Microsoft may attempt to divert attention away from LinkedIn and blame self-marketers, i.e., computer users. That would be nothing new. But both the OP and the HN title specifically identify LinkedIn. The problem is the so-called "tech" company that acts as an unnecessary and irresponsible intermediary, not the www users they usurp and target for profit.
The way to understand LinkedIn is no one is actually trying to engage in good faith. Everyone is seeking status points in a game they're playing. And that status depends on their endowment (people they know, institutions they are part of)
Status conferred from their boss, their peers, their underlings, people in similar roles - It's why LinkedIn feels like a lot of thought-leadering, because the only way to get status is to post something that gets likes within the status game you are playing
Forums like this one and even to some extent Twitter are more evolutionary in that you will likely see higher quality ideas get conferred status.
I use LinkedIn (getting traction for my product). I don't enjoy it but I do understand the game being played.
Certainly target customers and industry peers, but probably recruiters and VCs too.
My interpretation of how a very experienced recruiter once explained it to me is:
It’s “public life” online, and your public persona (in a “The Fall of Public Man” sense), and if you have no presence or a minimal one, when the time comes that you NEED attention (job seeking; shilling your business) you won’t have any listeners due to the algorithm.
Therefore one must constantly be telling the LI gods that they are an active user by posting perfunctory mediocrity.
It’s algorithm-gaming and cosplaying as a table-stakes activity for being “seen” or acknowledged to exist.
back to posting on LinkedIn I guess..
I take my first cup of coffee with a little tea-leaf reading based on the activity of the CEO and my former coworkers. If you ever see more than 5 connections reacting/liking the same thing you know that HR or marketing sent out an email about it.