Why is LinkedIn so cringe?
trungphan.substack.com
trungphan.substack.com
"I was running late to an interview this morning but stopped to help a man who fell off of his bike and fixed it up for him. Afterwards I bought him a coffee and talked about life. He mentioned how he had to go to work but was touched by meeting me, he said we had a real connection. I go to the interview and guess what! The man was my interviewer! He immediately offered me a job at 1.5m a year plus bonuses and is fast tracking me to become a regional director. Remember to be a nice human #Hashtag #Human #WEAREPEOPLE #ConnectWithMe"
It's just a giant circle jerk.
But you can't spell impossible without POSSIBLE.
#Influencer #Leader
Article to my free e-book on being a social media ninja in the comments :rocket:
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(I'll see myself out)
1. Shockingly accurate
2. Making me laugh loudly
Thanks!
;)
Agree?
#startup
The Holy Trinity
(page is just a rando blog post so yeah it doesn’t need it, and it uses JavaScript…)
No one will ever contradict anything on LinkedIn because of that, which is why it becomes such a circle jerk.
The mods took the comment down right away of course. But it made me think about how much the enforcement of rules like these might just be reinforcing the echo chamber. Sometimes you need to be yelled at to realize how out of line you are. There was another post where a woman shared her experiences with sexism and having to face death threats and being doxxed because some incels didn't like how she responded to a man hitting on her. Half the comments were questioning her or blaming her for "seeking it out" or whatever. It was really painful to watch others try to respond to comments like that and sound "respectable" and trying to engage with their talking points. It made me wonder about people who post those comments and can go on being engaged with and never actually told how much of a fuckface they're being
Now that I think about it, I kinda feel like this is a major problem with LinkedIn as well. I don't believe in bullying, but I think socialization can be an important tool sometimes
"I was rushing to an interview still drunk from the night before. I hit a cyclist, but just turned on my wipers and got there in time. After waiting 30 mins they told me my interviewer had been involved in a tragic accident, but as I was here would I like their CEO job?" #KeepClimbing #PressureWashYourFender
Humor and corporations do not much but I always refused to fake the "how interesting, let me add some crap to this bullshit and look as if believe it"
Initially I was the village idiot, and gradually become free to actually say what I want to say. Since it is not really PC it was meet with terrified smiles or dedain. But what was said was said.
I like this situation very much because I can relieve some of the stress and straight lies, without confrontation.
It reminds of the time I was going to a job interview, saw a homeless dude and went for a coffee with him. Turns out he wasn’t homeless, he was just CTO of a funded startup. The same startup I was interviewing for. We rebuilt the whole app over coffee and they named the company after me.
(It’s not directly named after me, but the company name and my name have vowels and consonants.)
Remember to ask homeless people for their three favourite programming languages before you give them anything.
#qualifyLeads #ROI #winning
The biggest advantage of someone with no experience is they don't know what's scary, stupid, or impossible. So they end up doing magic.
#HireNoExperience #TakeRisks #PoorNowLaw
Author: In a position of power Poor Schmuck: Desperate for a job so that they can keep their apt, eat food Author: Takes pity on the poor schmuck Poor Schmuck: Works like a slave to have basic necessities Author: Gloats about how they unearthed a gem Author: Lesson from this incident
Everything is so Saccharine.
The entire social media internet is either contrarian-trolls or vapid saccharine-sweet profiles.
Yesterday I was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day I got a call asking to come in to do the interview. I was surprised, but I went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.
The post would be written like this.
This insufferable style of two line breaks between short sentences.
Seems to be a requirement for LinkedIn viral content.
I have to have a LinkedIn profile but I try to keep my profile very close to my reality, which means I look like an underachiever compared to my connections.
Yes. Ignore the whole post feed, there's no point to that.
But other than that LinkedIn is very valuable, keep your connections, see who knows who, hire people, get hired. It's the only social media (maybe should be called professional media) that I see any value in.
Personally, Linkedin has been incredible for staying in touch with a large range of business contacts over the last 10+ years. It's provided me far more value than any other social network -- but the feed is mostly a joke :).
There are two ways of looking at linkedin:
* a) linkedin, the job listing service used by headhunters to fill positions,
* b) linkedin, the makeshift pseudo-facebook/myspace/instagram alternative used and abused by career-oriented attention-seekers.
This blog post focuses exclusively on b) while completely ignoring a).
I know people who landed jobs in FANGs just because they kept their linkedin profile up-to-date, even though they didn't even posted a single message and barely had any "like"-type interaction with any type of content. Personally, I've landed my past two or three tech jobs through linkedin, and I barely use it.
I also tried other like-minded services like Glassdoor or stackoverflow jobs, but at least to me those are a dumpster fire when compared with linkedin. Specially Glassdoor.
You get cringe content if you're using it to produce and consume cringe content. Others like me are quite happy with the benefit we take from it.
Oh wait, the people behind are corrupted themselves, it is human nature reflected in machines.
The gist of it is that there are only three types of people who work in organizations:
1. At the top of the food chain are the sociopaths. Executives.
2. Below it are the clueless, the mid-manager who works nights and weekends out of a sense of loyalty to the company. Unlike the sociopaths and the losers (explained below), they don't have it within themselves to straight up leave the company for something better. To them, this is life.
3. And below that, are the losers. That's everyone else. The pawns in this little corporate game designed by the sociopaths and coordinated by the clueless. They won't be promoted. But unlike the clueless, they have a sense of freedom. They can go work for a competitor if it pays more. Or they'll have a real work-life balance, etc..
It (should be) no more than a humorous take on corporate culture. Don't try to take away any life lessons from this.
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Even before reading this I had this vague idea about my own 'checked out' existence that he describes as loser.
I agree though, to not take life lessons specially when people take these things very literally. Because they can really come up with statement "I have worked with some of the smartest 'clued in' managers. So on the face of it 'Gervais principle is bullshit."
I think the Sociopath one is most accurate to life but that's just because "executives/investors are profit-seeking goal-maximisers" is both a common trope and pretty realistic - that's their incentive structure after all.
Getting endorsed for skills by people who have no ability to evaluate my competency at those skills.
It's so shallow and badly designed at its job. But like every social network out there, it's buoyed by its inertia and network effects, and will last far longer than it should given its quality beyond the size of its network of users.
I think nobody really cares though, they see it's a cheap signal and adjust accordingly.
https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/image/C5103AQHf_hGI8go5Tg/p...
If pulled off correctly, its a powerful endorsement.
However, how does one really check if the endorsement is real or a favour for a reverse endorsement.
Everyone knows it's bullshit, but this kind of toxic/fake positivity is demanded, and weirdly, it works even though everyone knows it's fake.
Sales people ringing a bell in the office when they make a sale is traditional in certain sales environments. When I worked in radio, the sales people did it. I've seen food truck operators and baristas do it when someone tips.
It's related to the expression "ringing your own bell," which means to be shamelessly boastful.
I've seen exactly this in the Technology department at one of my employers... When the sprints ended the teams that shipped an increment would gather around the bell and each take a turn ringing it while everyone cheered them on. Sprint symposiums happened the following week.
I worked on a project with them that impacted our "shadow IT" team and received an email marked as mandatory attendance required at a meeting. It turns out the meeting involved all 1000 people in the office clapping and cheering for the teams that were involved in the project.
I have no idea what they are doing now it's all remote.
For me, I use LinkedIn as my work memory. I've been working since 1987 and have had gigs at so many companies, and worked with so many good people over that time that it's literally impossible for me to remember my own resume (let alone names and faces). It's how I stay in touch with the people who move around and may be the one to help me get my next gig.
A lot of people on HN often go on about freedom of speech, but it just seems to me that where people are happy to defend asshole's speech, no matter how terrible, the kind of saccharine, do-gooder, positivity found on LinkedIn gets torn to shreds. Live and let live. If it's not your cup of tea, please feel free to develop and use an alternative. I'd love to see it. Unless its full of people being total assholes. Then I'll stick with LinkedIn. And HN.
But I find LinkedIn’s positivity cold and almost inhuman with the repetition, exclusive positivity, and focus on work.
It seems very weird to me.
It's honestly amusing how similar it is. Whenever I go on there I think of a job I had once in which people tried to one up each other for "most robotic".
Beep boop. The policy section 5 b says
you have used Beep 7 of your allotted holiday days.
Boop Please report your
time
sheet
Please report your time sheet was downright triggering
I've had a career change recently and I joined a big American corp. I wasn't familiar with this type of environment. The level of bullshit and hypocrisy there is amazing. Fortunately, nobody in my team is into that.
I would be very surprised if the cringey people on LinkedIn are the same as the based people on TeamBlind.
I assume those cringey "agree?" posts on LinkedIn are written by "influencers" as opposed to the engineers we see on Blind. Hard to be an influencer when everyone's anonymous.
100% owe my career to LinkedIn, despite having never posted or commented or liked or joined a damn thing.
The access to people and information is, alas, worth the cringe.
That was a useful observation, but alas, too late.
It is interesting to see the career graphs of people you know from "Real" life and map it to their retelling on LinkedIn. While some are legitimate salesmanship (you are allowed to present only your best face and exaggerate a little) others are downright fiction.
Used strictly as a "professional" network rather than a "general social" network LinkedIn does provide a lot of value. Just be moderate with your image projection and remember that most people can easily see through any obvious posturing.
I’ve seen more than once some poor bastard that gets laid off from a good company end up at shitcorp, inc, and some jackass will cluelessly make a dumb comment.
“Hey Bud, it didn’t know there was enough money in Account Management at Shitco to leave the VP gig at Google! #inspiring #success”
It's like everyone takes a dose of Adderall with their coffee before posting.
It could be agile innovation/ digital transformation or something like that.
Refreshed the page and got "Couldn't be more excited to start the next chapter in my career..."
Refresh. "So excited and proud to share..."
It is. But some section of people, especially, those with average skills and questionable capabilities, tend to pad their profile with bullshit posts. I know I am being too unkind, but many people I know who are in that groove, post these cringe content to "look good".
The talented ones? They use it as an online resume.
Of course, LI exacerbates the cringe with its auto generated posts.
I stopped paying attention to any of the tacked-on social features years ago.
It is that and that's how I treat it. Super useful.
I don't read the post feed or post anything myself, that'd be a waste of time.
And people wonder why old people, obviously closer to death, are happier.
The company she represented? Fucking Boeing.
It's performative corporate wankery that HR people love because it lets them think that they're promoting their corporate owner's "triple bottom line" and "social stakeholders" and blah blah blah.
HR thinks that it needs to do this crap to motivate employees, it's like the "newsletters" and "employee of the month" etc.
A bit like Facebook - except you don't actually like any of them.
What they didn't consider is that this also accelerates the toxic positivity that existed before emoji responses.
It serves an important function, and I have used it to find work and connect with former colleagues. But I think by ratcheting up the social media style attention algorithms, the company has been strip mining their credibility, and there is not much left
That's why that "i got pip'ed at Amazon" was such a breath of fresh air.
By far the best thing I've seen on Linkedin.
I don't care what amazing next step of your journey awaits you, I want to know if you quit or if you were fired.
I never respond to anything, just keeping it around for now for the connections. I recently checked the inbox and noticed something very weird. It showed a list of recruiters that had sent me a message and their profile picture. There were about 15 on screen. All 15 were hot white blond women in their mid twenties.
I'm not sure what to think of that. The odds seem impossible. I work in a boring sector, so that doesn't explain it. Attractive women as recruiters isn't a new tactic, but in this case I had a very strong feeling they're just fake pictures. It's probably just one guy controlling all those profiles.
If any one of us posted our true inner thoughts on linkedIn we would dramatically reduce our employment options in any industry other than the approved shamanic avenues - filmmaker, writer, comedian, and might find ourselves and our children descending to a less favourable spot in our grossly unfair societies
What we post on LinkedIn is a bloodless, pureed and filtered version of ourselves, a formal terrified curtsy before the mighty power of the employment market.
Fight club made 100 million at the box office, and you wouldn't know it from the positive motivational tripe we post, but I'd bet $20 'fight club is my favourite movie' is a damn good proxy for 'who pays for linked in premium?'
I am not an apologist for LinkedIn but I got my last three jobs through recruiters that found me that way and think it is an awesome tool, for free.
100% owe my career to LinkedIn, despite having never posted or commented or liked or joined a damn thing.
The access to people and information is, unfortunately, worth the cringe.
Oh, and I say "fuck" an awful lot. And I posted bad artwork of a bear fucking a gallon of orange juice, and a recruiter saying the word "no whore" with a duck swearing. And some blood spatter. And a programmer telling an entrepreneur that nobody gives a damn he got six column inches in the San Francisco Bee. But I didn't say damn, I said fuck. And a programmer fighting a mechanical octopus by stabbing it in the eye. I also posted a poem about entrepreneurial exploitation which I am currently illustrating.
Apparently this is unprofessional and would make me unhirable, but I like to think that really, I'm just a guy wearing a duck suit disrupting synergies in the meta or something.
Also, my standard reply to recruiters is "Thanks for making me aware of this opportunity. Sounds boring and exploitative. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."
Definitely am guilty of the "broetry" style of separating everything on a to a single line though, don't know what it is about the cluttered LinkedIn UI that makes a paragraph of text hard to read.
Guilty of a few "respect" posts though. Mostly around the "and then flipped the bird and hung up on the toxic interviewer" type of post. Was interviewing last year and just "got up and walked out" (or the Zoom/Meet/WebX/Skype equivalent) of the meeting. "Well would you look at the time, it's already I-don't-give-a-shit-anymore o'clock, thanks for your time today. Bye!"
Footnote: My colleagues tell me I am joy to work with and brighten up any team I am a part of.
It does tend to veer into this weird territory of everyone marketing to each other.
Anyway add me on linkedin.
I wouldn't even mind some of the cringe posts, if they at least came from people I knew. But, the majority of my feed is posts from people I've never heard of, shown to me because a mutual connection "liked" them. No, I'm not going to congratulate a total stranger on their new job ... or try to comfort them after their dog died, etc.
By comparison, my Facebook feed is currently the worst it's ever been since I started using it in like 2007 or something, but it's still light years better than this.
I do occasionally enjoy some of the full-length articles posted on LinkedIn by public figures (e.g. Ray Dalio), but I have no freakin' idea why he only posts them there.
It doesn't be so useful for that these days; especially since you can't get your contact data back out of the system anymore.
So I ended up removing my profile.
I keep meaning to hand-extract contact data so I can leave linkedin completely. Possibly I'll do that when I need to change my email later this year.
Meanwhile, has anyone noticed that you can't actually scrub the feed to get it completely empty? Even if you unfollow everyone and everything, and tell linkedin you're not interested in any activity whatsoever.
(Or two if you're reading this)
I definitely adopt a Hacker News voice when commenting here. But in my experience both HN and Reddit are different from most social products because I engage in lots of disparate conversations rather than having to to present a consistent personality and be building a brand and set of followers.
> Yesterday was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day got a call asking to come in to do the interview. was surprised, but went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.
Will something replace LinkedIn one day?
It's made for those whose profile appears better than reality to begin with.
I have friends in the traditional London banking community who absolutely don't know how to engage genuinely with social media and probably aren't interested in learning, but they're there on LinkedIn, talking in the traditional corporate language that they live in.
Ah so that's why twitter is so insufferable
Don't forget after joining you have to make that post telling everyone how this is your dream job and show off the company goodie bag! #WeAreHiring #ChiefJediFinder
The most value I've got out of the brief period where I occasionally logged in was periodically threatening to endorse <good friend> for proficiency in <technology they hate>.
(obviously I never actually did it, but given how I relate to my friends the faux threat was absolutely funny to both of us every time)
LinkedIn is a good way to connect with my clients/friends/colleagues and establish what is a small network of people in my field, who know each other and often benefit from each other. I also think the ability for recruiters to see my experience + the people and clients I work with has meant that my job opportunities are far greater than if I didn't have LinkedIn.
But my god, some of the posts on there are absolutely cringe and I don't normally like using that term. Don't get me wrong if a colleague or a client I have worked with recently is promoted or changes positions I am genuinely happy for them and it deserves a like or a "congrats".
But don't go around preaching your corporate life story like your experiences are gods gift on earth, or go around preaching vague and ambiguous virtues that we all know. You don't need to make a story about everything that happens to you and the majority of your network couldn't care less.
You can't eliminate other people's "cringe" but you can shield yourself from it very easily.
"Try-hard: Somebody whose effort level and emotional investment is excessively high for the level of play in which they are competing."
I can't stand all the humble bragging.
"I came from nothing and now I'd like to announce that I've accepted a position at your favorite FAANG, and I am so humbled to make more money than you, and to have had a degree from a brand-name university. #betterthanyouall"
I pretty much only look at messages or invites once per week and don't use it for anything else anymore. The constant self-congratulation is indeed exhausting. Whether it's people graduating from something, or finding their "dream job" (watch them change dream jobs a year later). The main feed is very facebook-like as well, its gotten very low quality. I suppose LinkedIn likes it that way, but for me its kind of lost its shine.
User engagement's siren song is irresistible to data-driven product orgs.
Is there a Law yet (like Zawinski's) that any app with enough users will attempt to become a social network?
[1] Not proper A/B testing. The variants get posted once a month or so, making the results meaningless to anything beyond my ego.
[2] Link available on request.
So I closed it to come here and talk about that, and when I opened the front page again, it was all full of posts from a week ago with friends posting about awards their companies won and press releases and stuff.
Why did it get so boring on the second try? Weird...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how-did-we-get-so-cring...
I once tried paid LinkedIn when I was job hunting, and all I could see were a bunch of unemployed people on there spending far too much time on it rather than looking for a job.
It’s a powerful tool if you can filter the 95% garbage out :-)
I guess this is applicable to most of the social networks out there. It really cleaned up my feed.
Corporate culture sucks. End of story.
www.shlinkedin.com
Ho hum.
"SHARE if you think it’s about time that LinkedIn allowed British people to join the site!"
wait...
6.5 billion dollars a year?
Really?