X officially takes on LinkedIn with its new job posting feature | Hacker News Reader

X officially takes on LinkedIn with its new job posting feature

bgr.com

34 pointsWaitWaitWha56 comments

This kind of crazy feature creep is why I switched to Wayland.

I would but https://twitter.com/nvidia doesn't have an well-supported account on Wayland yet :(

Given the very different history and evolution of these two sites, is there ever a point of (even approximate) intersection where they are actually competitive? I myself don’t see that happening now, perhaps ever.

Anecdote: I've gotten all my work through twitter for the last several years without having to send a resume or fill out an application. I never use LinkedIn anymore.

The current leadership changes might upset this applecart -- time will tell? The recipe of do-work-publicly, receive job leads in DMs has been so much more effective than all the other things I've used in my career - indeed, linkedin, dice, direct applications etc.

The thought of logging into linkedin makes me feel ill. Last I saw, it was full of vacuous public demonstrations of people showing their dedication to the idea of working. Managerial medicine men claiming that they unlocked the true keys to business and that everyone else had fake keys. Lot of vague platitudes about team playing and working hard playing hard. Synergy, 300 articles about emotional intelligence. Innovation innovation innovation!

There's some of that on twitter, but critically, people post actual work product more. At least that's how it was, haven't been on in a few months.

This is the first time I’ve heard of someone using Twitter to obtain employment regularly.

I have heard of people using Facebook.

Follow game devs long enough, you will eventually see the, "I was laid off," "DM me," "I am now proud to be an employee of Game Studio," "I was laid off," loop. Occasionally broken by an indie turn.

I went from ML/fullstack web dev to.. fullstack... indie gamedev, so there's other loops ;D

I think it's relatively common for artists (especially digital artists and tattoo artists) to get a lot of work through social media. I haven't seen much of it on Twitter but it seems much more common on Instagram.

The article mentions Linkedin presumably due to mindshare reasons, but it is Indeed that is far bigger in casual (not tech nerd) hiring. If Twitter enters the market, it seems like Indeed will be completely demolished. Wonder if they have any defense plan (they are not a public company so don't necessarily need one but still...).

This is the sanest thin coming out of X. A lot of folks use Twitter to advance their career.

Or maybe Elon is just desperate to hire, and wants job postings.

Eh, seems like it's basically a random new stab at becoming The Everything App.

Job posting is a pretty saturated space already (see also: the fate of Google and Facebook's job listing products), so it's not necessarily an easy space to break into. Having already alienated a lot of his potential advertisers probably doesn't help either.

Recruiters will go where the people looking for jobs are. There might be a certain value for people still using X for whatever reason. I'm not sure what that demographic is because It's definitly not me.

Can we short private companies?? :)

To be fair, IMO this is probably the least foolhardy thing that Twitter has talked about doing in a _while_.

I can't imagine it'll be a huge success, but at least it's a feature _someone_ could want to use.

If LinkedIn adds an option to mark posts as "non work/professional" then Twitter would be in deep trouble.

If those could be filtered out then LinkedIn would be a wasteland.

Last I looked, it already was.

More likely to be a nothing platform than an everything platform.

I can’t imagine trying to navigate the horrific X/Twitter space to find a job, if I’m not directly targeting a single, specific company. This probably works fine for certain small subsets, but hard to imagine it working in aggregate (especially given the tiny portion of people who still regularly use Twitter/X in the first place).

By firing a majority of the staff, Elon has soured many engineers in US tech hubs on Twitter/X — many of us know people who were laid off, or who left in disgust.

Of course, we’re a very small minority of the total labour market in the world, but we’re the sort of people tech companies generally want to recruit and/or advertise to.

Twitter is doing just fine without those engineers

Would you rather have 1000 or so extra engineers or have to pay $800 million in interest per year and gain absolutely nothing in return? We know which option Musk picked...

Yes, according to Elon! We also know that he lies prodigiously.

Since X/Twitter is a private company now we don't have half as much insight as we did last year.

But there are a few clear warning signs that the company's ability to build features and maintain existing infra has been significantly degraded. De Santis's botched campaign launch was one such example.

Considering they changed their name to X like two weeks ago and still haven't figured out how to change their base domain, somehow I feel like they're a just a bit understaffed.

Not to mention their various downtime problems.

> By firing a majority of the staff, Elon has soured many engineers in US tech hubs on Twitter/X — many of us know people who were laid off, or who left in disgust.

The US is not the world and companies would gladly hire cheap engineers elsewhere when they can (and they will).

> but we’re the sort of people tech companies generally want to recruit and/or advertise to.

Nope.

Companies that have incurred such high operational costs have shifted to hire offshore to cheaper countries instead of hiring expensive employees, especially in an environment where borrowing money and access to capital is now more expensive.

So… who wants to trade spam from one kind of delusional people for spam from another kind of delusional people?

What’s the value add for using X as a platform? Do people job hunt there already?

It makes it easier to find work if you're a right-wing bigot

Or you can find work with sane people who don't think anyone on Twitter is a right wing bigot.

There's no right wing bigots on Twitter?

Assuming you have read the guidelines, don't be silly with such swipes. You know that not everyone on Twitter is a so-called 'right-wing bigot' as you're trying to project.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. [0]

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I got my current job by DMing someone on Twitter two and a half years ago.

In academia it's pretty common to advertise job openings on Twitter. In addition to posting them everywhere else, but Twitter is a good place to find them in my experience (more than LinkedIn). Especially because they often get rewteeted & quote-retweeted into networks of relevant people who might not have been directly reached by the initial posting.

Not sure if this is common with other types of jobs, but I wouldn't be that surprised.

Apparently Elon was more serious with that kitchen sink gag than we realized...

This is actually brilliant.

Alternate title: "dying social media company desperately grasps at new routes for monetization"

Is it actually dying or do you just wish for it to die?

It’s bleeding money and advertisers and have a ton of debt. What do you think?

Its death, if any, is primarily due to high burn rate, as you mention, which Musk moderated quite a bit, but the folks expecting its demise somehow blame it on Musk, ironically.

Well he did saddle the company with a significant amount of debt when he bought the company.

That's a very biased view. He could have multiple rounds of layoffs like Amazon or Meta without affecting the operations too much. I'm not sure who the remaining 10% are who are still willing to stick with it. Software is not like the hardware spaces. If the good engineers do not like what they are receiving they would just leave for other places.

He also killed the the ads revenue. Have you forgotten about that?

Last time I checked Twitter was quite operational with a fraction of the people. Like every other big tech company it was obviously bloated. Wouldn’t be surprised if it still is. You are suggesting a costlier alternative to what has worked beautifully and will be taught in HBS case studies ten years from now. Already inspired the rest of the valley.

Advertising revenue was on its way down pre-Elon and exacerbated by the macro conditions. Display ads is a tough business. Just look at competitors like Snap. Sure Elon image may have given some customers an easy out but that’s affecting revenue at the margin.

Musk has bought a shitty business in the hope of magic happening which may very well happen because of his changes, albeit still hard to see, but the stupidity, if any, lies in his acquisition of a dud, not his execution post-acquisition which has been arguably perfect up until the questionable brand change to X whose verdict is still up in the air.

> which Musk moderated quite a bit,

He had no choice because of all of them debt he offloaded to Twitter to fund the acquisition. Pretty much to pick between employees and making debt payments.

Not sure why would a corporation prefer to have to pay half a billion in interest per year to having an additional 1000 or more employees?

> somehow blame it on Musk

In large part because of the debt which pretty much doomed Twitter...

It was profitable when he bought it. It is unlikely to be profitable now, especially after the latest advertiser flight. People blaming Musk for Twitter's demise have good reason.

> It was profitable when he bought it

Nope.

[citation needed]

It was profitable, and it's trivially easy to verify that it was profitable, because it was a public company before it got bought.

Yes, it is trivially easy to verify (yet you asked for a citation!) in the last 10-Q filing by Twitter, Inc. available to the public, the preceding three months of June 2022 their net income/loss per share is negative ($0.35) and was facing declining revenue.

Citation: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001...

Over the entire operation of the company up and until Musk's acquisition in aggregate, Twitter has spent more money than it made.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/TWTR/twitter/eps...

That shows they lost money that year only because of of a one-time settlement for a 2016 lawsuit. Without that they’d have had a profitable year as in 2019 and 2021, as per your own link.

The problem they have now is that Musk’s instability cost them a lot of revenue but his poor management saddled them with significantly more debt. Now they need to make multiple times more profit than their best year just to pay his loan servicing.

Both, actually

Pretty sure they can't sell many ads, haven't bothered with paying bills, active users seem to be down, and they seem to be floundering for revenue.

Seems like it's dying and I want it to die but I'm not the person you replied to.

It's actually dying.

All anecdotal indications suggest advertising is dying on it (lower revenue, lower quality ads, lower relevance). Quality and relevance form a flywheel with user engagement, so a decline is worse than in isolation.

A range of anecdotes are still anecdotes, but the direction all being the same is something I’m drawing conclusions from.

2021 Twitter’s ad revenue was not sustainable. This suggests X’s likely lower ad revenue and declining in the mid to long term. An unsustainable platform cannot sustain indefinitely.

both. Open and interoperable protocols will supplant siloed services.

I love the smell of Musk apologists in the morning.

It managed to kill it’s only meaningful revenue stream.. so yes, it’s currently missing one of the core requirements of running a business, a way to make more money than they are spending.

The majority here are begging for the latter since last year. But it should have 'died' last year November as almost everyone here (incorrectly) predicted.

So they are just very angry that Twitter / X didn't 'die' as they expected or didn't die fast enough, so they are eternally still coping for the worst.

But at this point, they should just realise that these articles are essentially click farming for their attention for Twitter / X 's so called 'doom'.

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