LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees
npr.org
npr.org
I used to get decent use from it but stopped updating my profile because the site is cancer. Full of self patting on the back and people adding me to “grow their network”. Recruiters contacting me with “perfect fit” position in languages not on my profile.
Can someone please develop hacker news type basic site but for jobs? No memes, no dark patterns, no likes.
I appreciate Python started-off as a toy-like language - but its utility as a glue-language for serious number-crunching (see: how almost all ML projects involve Python somehow) and the admirable community surrounding it means its credibility is established. The worst thing anyone can say about Python is that it’s the new VBA.
Rust is the new C++ - Microsoft wouldn’t be investing tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars in enabling Rust for Windows drivers if it wasn’t serious. (Whereas it’s Zig and Carbon where I have concerns about adoption and longevity: the post-C ecosystem isn’t large enough to sustain three languages that overlap each other so much)
It did not. It started as a language do system administration for the Amoeba operating system.
Here's part of the README for the first public release (0.9p1, available from python.org):
"This is Python, an extensible interpreted programming language that combines remarkable power with very clear syntax."
"Python can be used instead of shell, Awk or Perl scripts, to write prototypes of real applications, or as an extension language of large systems, you name it."
What I meant was that - in the time after it was created for sysadmin tasks - but before it found it’s new home in data-science - Python was often used as a beginners’ language as a more modern and expressive alternative to BASIC - which led to its “toy” reputation - an undeserved reputation that it has successfully shed.
In 2002 it seemed that half the attendees of the Python conference were there because of Zope.
I was programming full-time by 1999.
So for me Python was well-established in several areas far before its wide-spread use in computer programming education or its use in data science.
I'm absolutely not arguing against your point about Rust, but I wouldn't take what Microsoft is investing in as a strong signal for anything.
Now I'm starting to wonder if I'm caught in a job-search bubble.
Can you list a few job posting sites you consider normal?
It can also help clarify your thinking. If you can't convince your dog that technical debt is widely misunderstood, then how will you convince your colleagues?
'The name Keysight is built from two English words: key, meaning indispensable or essential, a means of access; and insight, meaning the power of seeing, having vision and perception. The name connotes seeing what others cannot, having the critical or key insight to understand and unlock the changing technology landscape.
Keysight reflects what's in our DNA, what we strive to provide to our customers - the key measurement insights engineers need to accelerate innovation and ultimately achieve success - whether they see success as being first to market, increasing their differentiation, ramping up production, or achieving lower costs of test within a rapidly changing technology landscape.
According to Ron, the name Keysight "captures the spirit of our new company - innovative, insightful, and forward-looking, with the special kind of vision to sort through the rapid technological revolutions and anticipate customers' needs so they stay one step ahead."'[0]
So I'd say all bets are off.
[0] https://www.keysight.com/blogs/keys/2018/09/25/keysight-and-...
"Keysight" sounds like "key insight," which is what you get from decent test equipment. They could have done much worse.
Potential RIP in a matter of weeks/months ... frustrating.
I host a weekly open-mic at a local bar (mostly music but some standup and poetry) and more and more often I’ve had to figure out how to gracefully handle a performer using some of their 6-10 minutes to share their not-as-popular-as-they-might think political takes or commentary.
And it should be handled gracefully, because I’m not in the business of banning political content from the contents of poetry or standup or lyrics or whatever. Both from all sides I wish there was a bit more of a shared cultural understanding or reservation towards divisive political topics.
Don't hesitate to mute accounts. For example, blocking Gary Vee almost single-handedly made my LinkedIn feed usable again. I never followed him or any of his pages to begin with, but enough of my connections embarrassingly engage with those kinds of posts that it cluttered everything up. Go to the source and pull out the root of the problem.
re: politics, there are one or two LinkedIn entities that post the most mildly progressive of content, and it's the knuckle-draggers in the comments that made me block these pages.
Other than that, it’s still the way to contact anyone, I mean anyone I remotely know or knew.
Yeah. I usually try other means first but if I don't have or can't find what seems like a reliable email address, LinkedIn is a pretty good avenue--especially with so many people having largely migrated asway from Twitter and Facebook.
Though honestly the worst part is the "inspiration porn" that people post on there all the time, nearly all of which reduce to "the job market is tough, but don't give up because it gets easy!!!". When you point out that it, in fact, does not ever get "easy" to wake up to 30 rejection emails every morning, they either try and sell you on some meditation routine, tell you that you have a bad attitude, or just block you.
Honestly, it really is the absolute worst platform that I am stuck using. There are worse websites, obviously, but no one is forcing me to go to 4chan or The Daily Stormer every day.
I just feel like there should be somewhat of a boundary between personal and professional life. There are things I would say to my friends that I wouldn't tell anyone in charge of giving me money, at least not directly, and I feel like LinkedIn (purposefully or otherwise) is actively trying to erode that boundary. It's horrible.
But, yeah, I keep my LinkedIn--to the degree I use it at all--very anodyne except to the degree you have relatively extreme opinions on specific tech topics.
My political opinions are pretty normal (basically typical American lefty), and if my employer were to find a blog post I wrote about universal healthcare or something it's doubtful that they'd fire me. That's a little different than me plastering "BIDEN 2024!!!" all over my resume, and that's why I utterly hate LinkedIn.
I've never encountered this, but if I did, I'd be pretty thankful for the advance warning that I would not likely enjoy working there.
Now, I have no idea how much parsing they actually did; you might have been able to put "asdf" to make it validate.
www.linkedin.com##:matches-path(feed).scaffold-layout__main
www.linkedin.com##.global-nav__primary-link.global-nav__primary-link--active.app-aware-link
For years LinkedIn languished as the site everyone was on, but nobody actually used for anything. But I have actually gotten a couple of leads from it now.
The feed is trash though, for sure. And you have to laugh at the endless parade of bimbo pictures attached to accounts that are supposedly "recruiters." Unprofessional and insulting.
I had an experience where one of them reached out to me about a job over the phone. She had a hot-sounding voice and the job seemed intriguing, so I figured I would give it a shot. Her LinkedIn photo was stunning. Yes, I sheepishly admit that I was taken in by her and this influenced my decision to even consider a random job from a recruiter.
She was friendly but kinda ditzy, seemed to barely know what she was talking about, and once the easy stuff was over, I was abruptly handed over to some dude. It's like... I thought you were my recruiter, so who's this other guy? He pretty much handled my recruitment process from that point on, but she was allowed to be the first one to talk to me on each call and get the credit for "recruiting" me, although she turned out to be more like live-bait than anything else.
IMO, the tactic of many of these recruitment firms is to hire attractive women to fool male programmers into considering otherwise unappealing jobs and direct most of the profit to the male recruiters.
Part of me is glad the industry is in such a state that no recruiters are contacting me anymore. 99% of third party recruiters are blood sucking parasites.
It’s a similar complaint to how your Facebook and Instagram feeds barely contain the people you follow anymore, which encourages regular people to post less and attention seekers to post more.
The business model of ad-supported social media apparently doesn’t work under the paradigm of checking in on your friends for a reasonable amount of time (like 5 minutes a day) and calling it a day. Instead, it’s just optimized to be as much of an addiction as possible, and there’s no way your real respected work colleagues can provide that amount of content.
The site will be done for once they start putting trending topics in the jobs page.
But there’s a right way to use LinkedIn.
Keep in mind that the majority of people only want to network when they need something. You can use LinkedIn to do the opposite and create meaningful connections.
1. Judgment-free support. That lady you barely remember from your previous job is starting a business. Encourage her. Some person is starting yet another podcast? Ask a couple of kind questions.
2. A low effort contact list. Next time you go out to an event and meet with new people ask to connect on LinkedIn. You have a better chance of maintaining that connection with LinkedIn reminders than if you exchange phone number or email.
Why do this? Life is short.
Putting this out there so people don't think they need to join some absolutely shit random corporate social networks to get a job.
I'm curious what "decent use" you used to get from it? That you used to be contacted by better fit jobs? Were you finding contract positions? Or hopping from a full time to another full time?
It has to be tough, as I imagine that most folks aren't actively looking for a job except for when they don't have one. I try and respond politely to any contacts I get, but there have been times I was overwhelmed.
I am frankly at a point where I realized internet became an extremely toxic place full of dark patterns. I miss days of nerds making sites to share informations and hobbies.
I wonder what the strategic plan Microsoft had in mind originally was? Was it really as simple as “we are all about business, that is the business network”?
I thought that’s what they bought Yammer for - but then they also bought LinkedIn.
It's also gotten pretty political.
If I cared about your political hot takes - I'd be on Facebook.
Though this seems to be permeating everywhere, even to HN - even though the mods try their best to keep it out.
> PLEASE READ PROFILE. While some people use LinkedIn for "networking" and advertising their "personal brand," I use this site exclusively as a dating platform. If you are intelligent, attractive, female, in or visiting San Diego, and perhaps a bit out of the norm, I might be interested. Send me a message and invite me out for a drink! (and please make it clear you are asking me on a date) All non-dating related messages will be ignored.
But at the same time seems like it is a failed platform for him too:
> UPDATE. LinkedIn is too full of faux career climbers and not enough dating opportunity. Follow me on Instagram @georgehotz
I've been using »FirstName LastName« in my profile and when I get emails addressed to »FirstName I know they're from a machine
Yeah ok, people are sending me jobs... do they even know what I do? This looks automated, they probably send a million?
Isn't that what sites like indeed are?
As someone who didn't bother to curate their LinkedIn account all I can say is: This is great news! Now my career opportunities are again the same as everybody else's.
Being everyone’s free storage unit does not generally make money.
So they have to turn the resume storage part into a loss leader and turn a profit some other way. Being a place to list job postings is the most obvious but they have competition already.
Throwing on ads will make money but LinkedIn isn’t a site most people stick around on. Turning LinkedIn into a social media site keeps people on the site so the ads work, but it’s a pretty ugly way to do it. The type of people who are actually going to use LinkedIn like Facebook is probably the worst kind of people you want sticking around too.
LinkedIn could have stayed a small site with a small team but they got started by getting money from investors. Now they have other people to answer too.
Or as a self-updating Rolodex of which there were quite a few at one point. Obviously it can serve other purposes as well but that's all I've ever used it for.
This has been the case for years, IMO. I noticed a rampant increase in it through the 2016 election and everything that followed.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but not everybody is bothered by that. Most languages popular nowadays (C#, Javascript/Typescript, Java, C++, etc.) are popular partly because most devs can jump between them pretty easily.
Definitely not defending Linkedin, though. A coworker of mine writes posts about his stance on abortion. I don't know what Linkedin's policy is about it, but it's super awkward, and I just stay far away.
My current job is primarily using a new-to-me language (C#) on a platform I hadn't used in 10 years (Windows), and though I have some buyers remorse (Windows is still terrible), everybody was on the same page about my skills, I've picked up C# easily enough, and it's worked out fine so far.
Pro or against?
[That was a joke. Please don't answer.]
I have no idea why people would be willing to risk their jobs like that but I see people from Fortune 50 companies doing it. Crazy
Idk if they put a stop to it or not but it was madness
Lmk if you have any feedback as well!
>Can someone please develop hacker news type basic site but for jobs
HN does have a job board: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
And monthly there is a "Who's hiring" and "Who wants to be hired" thread automatically posted.
Nothing for my domain there but I check it a few times a year.
That’s not a generic job board. It’s only for YC companies.
For example, when I have a meeting with someone I always look them up on LI first, to see if we have something in common.
In the age of Musk's twitter it is somewhat peculiar that LinkedIn ended up as the last social media platform where interesting posts can be discovered provided you don't "blind-follow" and follow the right people. None of this will work for those who expect it to work as some kind of magic garden where recruiters will present only what is relevant to you. That LinkedIn though never existed in the first place.
One day I decided to rapid-fire dismiss all of the "suggested connections" that LinkedIn was putting in front of me. I probably dismissed 200 in a single sitting.
The next day(?), I got a warning from LinkedIn that my account was being audited for misuse or some such thing.
Although I was manually dismissing those suggestions, I'm guessing it tripped some bot-detector or something.
That massively improves the signal-to-noise ratio over e.g. Google, who's daily updates show me mostly the same jobs from one day to the next.
No idea what LinkedIn's reasons are, but I think grayed-out is good enough. If nothing else, it's light-years beyond Google's approach.
Seeing as it's somehow the only social network to spam my email (I never even touched LinkedIn) endlessly? Yeah, it's been shit for many years. Even by social media standards.
Anyway, in the last couple of years, Xing also mutated from a business contact network to a wanna-be Facebook social network, with memes, neurotic posting, outreach metrics etc. Instead of being a contact backbone, it's become an attention leech, basically the same experience as you describe for LinkedIn. At least in case of Xing, it's more or less known that they have been infested by product managers for a long time, whose only metric for success has ever been "innovation (tm)", so it's explainable, but still stupid. I suppose same could be happening at LinkedIn, even though they never have been good to begin with, palatable at most.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37417397
Until their privacy and visibility policies are put on par with other social media platforms, I'm going to use it strictly for job-hunting when needed.
It's always been a shitty social media platform. It's entirely performative; just people yeeting artificial pseudo blog posts out into the ether, all virtue-signalling past each other.
LinkedIn is one of the worst websites I can think of.
The last time I probably used LinkedIn for anything was networking some when I changed jobs (almost 10 years ago). Unless you hop jobs a lot, I just don’t see how it adds any value.
I'm building flexible.dev that eventually will be _exactly_ this!
Right now there are no comments, want to add those soon. The job feed is curated (manually, eventually automatically) from Reddit and HN "Who's hiring" posts.
I only look at it once every couple of months to check up on old colleagues. If I am looking for a job I am forced to use it more often, but mostly just the messaging part. The feed is something I think most people can safely ignore.
I’ll be forever grateful to LinkedIn and I would never be in the situation I am right now if it hadn’t have been for it.
"I only ever accept connection requests from people I 100% know to be honest, smart and good judges of character. That way, if I meet some new person, I look them up and see they are connected to someone I know: I immediately call the shared connection and ask their opinion."
In that sense, I think it worked as intended: people would only need to react to recruiting mail, and that only during the spans they cared about moving careers.
The whole "tell your life on linkedin !" promotion pushed by Microsoft clearly degraded that part.
My last role was gained by reaching out to a colleague I haven't talked to since college and asking about the role I applied to, and he was nice enough to give me a referral (I honestly wasn't expecting a referral. it was easily 5+ years since we last interacted, didn't talk that much in college, and I wasn't the best student to begin with). I doubt he posted his roles on Facebook so I never would have thought to contact him otherwise.
I got a notification to follow a podcast the other day. Not a person I follow asking me to follow it, it was a notification saying "here is a random podcast do you want to follow it."
How the hell is that a thing that companies can buy?
I'm sure these sorts of changes increase engagement in the short term but are detrimental to the product in the long term. I really think that change was the beginning of the end for Facebook in particular.
Agreed that it's user-hostile, but it's presumably effective as a retention tactic.
Simply unsubscribing isn't really feasible given the dark patterns in their notification settings page, nested trees of boxes to untick.
It's just a polite way to say "we noticed that we had 2 teams doing the same thing so we merged them and dropped the resulting excess headcount".
It does have an actual discernible message, which puts it above a lot of other corporate gobbledygook. But it's still corporate gobbledygook that requires careful deciphering to understand what it says.
I don't consider it reasonable at all. It's slightly meaningful word vomit.
The least you can do for the laid off employees in this situation is try and not make it harder for them to find new jobs, so you keep the message vague.
to be frank, we should probably stop pretending they "overhired". That term implies that these MBAs were somehow blindsided by the imminent recession that analysts have talked about as far back as 2020 and that this wasn't an intentional strategy to maximize growth while labor was "cheap" (or at least, the money to hire labor).
This was all calculated and most companies still came out of this larger than when they entered the pandemic. It was all calculated and workers were nothing more than expendable pawns. Not much we can do about it without stronger labor laws, but that's a multi-decade battle.
> adapting our organizational structures
"free money is gone so we need to downsize"
> to improve agility and accountability,
"we don't have money nor time to nurture juniors. they are gone"
> establishing unambiguous ownership
"We're dropping risky products and specializing towards the most profitable features, ".
> and driving improved efficiency and transparency through reduced layering".
"we're making the remaining workers work more to make up for the people we let go. And cutting out some key managers, producers, and middlemen that will slow things down in the process".
I honestly see is as corpo talk to justify all the usual things that happening as of late.
What’s this about? Do Scandinavians have a reputation of being fake or something?
What happens afterwards?
What happens afterwards?
Yeah, just fall asleep (probably in the chair).
The same thing has happened at other companies that make money from job postings.
> Final follow up, I'm excited to hear your thoughts regarding LibertyRock Forest. Any interest in finding out more?
Is there a way to design a site--at the UI/policy level--to end up with a community that doesn't suck?
For Hacker News, for example, is what we like about it just a consequence of the current set of members (in which, case, it might change eventually), or is it the moderation that keeps it good? If the latter, is there some way to automate the moderation (to make it scalable to LinkedIn-sized networks)?
I'm also thinking of Quora, which was once an amazing community, but eventually (though it took years) degraded into just another meme-fest/click-bait social network.
Another thing is user friendliness and maximizing engagement. Whatever Facebook did around 2015 or so to make everything bloated, animated reactions, and slower seemed to make things more user-friendly for a subset of less technical users, such that people who can't fact-check obviously fake articles and spam posts are enabled and incentivized to post as much as possible, and adding algorithms on top of that to maximize "engagement" make these things inevitable.
Twitter's chronological got turned off as the default at some point for a similar algorithmic "for you" page that I think has also made things worse for their platforms.
No idea about Quora, but eventually for ad-supported sites you start maximizing for time on the site and getting people to look at ads, rather than "quality" in the content on your social media site.
I think it’s absolutely possible to have a community that doesn’t suck if sucky behavior is punished instead of rewarded.
1. No need to drive engagement. 2. Heavy moderation to keep things on track.
#2 won't work without #1 because of what you said (the nature of getting engagement).
But is there some way for moderation to scale? Maybe this is where LLMs come in?
Ironically, LinkedIn should be the one experimenting with this. If they can get revenue from recruiters or job seekers, then they don't need the toxic kind of engagement.
And the design is important too. There's no followers here, no monetization, no flashy upvote count, essentially no identity with a capital I. HN and sites like it work to a large part because there's no status or financial grift involved in posting, people largely just post to communicate. The exact opposite of what Twitter is turning into.
I also suspect that moderation is heavy, but I have absolutely no idea about how it works, who does it, etc. I've never seen moderators engaging with the community here, which means that probably moderating itself does not add to your social score.
You will frequently see the top comment is by him when he describes merging / redirecting threads, explain title changes, or try to set expectations for hot/contentious topics.
What was the point of all this? There wasn't truth in any (or many of these) of these posts. Folks were sharing what they thought worth sharing, mostly to gain more attention.
That said, I think, we should see LinkedIn as a marketing platform targeting corporate employees.
This is what influencer culture does. There’s very little value actually shared on LI nowadays, most valuable content for me comes from tech-specific groups and a lot of that is just aggregated from newsletters.
Interesting how even though in this scenario it's the company that did the wrong thing, it's somehow not possible to mention it without putting some blame on, and insulting, the employees that were hired.
I use the term freeloader because the truth is…network effects exploit an inefficiency in human social dynamics that’s so powerful, it produces monopoly-level market capture and profits. So it’s a fair assumption to make that anyone hired at a network Monopoly money machine like LinkedIn will, inevitably, turn into a do-nothing freeloader (not necessarily through any fault of their own).
https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/revenue/
They're all bullshit factories. They grew like crazy and are still growing but depressing the tech job market is more important. Why have $1 million in profit per employee when you could have $1.05 million, lives be damned?
No access to internal tools like DopeFlows and Merlin but honestly that was over half a decade ago, I bet most people that work there didn't even know they existed.
There's no alternative anymore. I really hope something new comes along soon.
Easy to say flippantly, but my colleagues (let alone my network) are distributed across 10+ countries on four continents. My local 'meatspace' has nothing to offer me career-wise. A professional network needs to be online.
Hoping to get into to consulting
They could have easily gotten there with a hiring freeze and natural attrition, in very little time.
When someone loses their job, they may be particularly open to investing money to line up the next job ASAP.
I think it really comes down to the expected ROI.