LinkedIn is aging like fine wine in Microsoft’s cellar.
Microsoft surprises me with OpenAI, LinkedIn and GitHub. Their own engineering practices aren’t that great but they seem to excel at what to acquire and what to invest in.
Microsoft surprises me with OpenAI, LinkedIn and GitHub. Their own engineering practices aren’t that great but they seem to excel at what to acquire and what to invest in.
Is there a non-shitty version of LinkedIn somewhere that I don’t know about? The one I use seems to have turned into a version of Facebook with rants trying to get me to buy into glorifying the grind instead of photos of kids and political rants.
Sure - it's the version you get if you stop connecting with people who post 'grind' rants and whatever else you don't want to see (or at least unfollow them, if you can't avoid connecting with them).
My best result was when DHL had flat out lied to me and claimed my package was on a ship back to the US from Europe and would be back with the sender in a month (it had been misaddressed; we'd told them that before the package had even left the US, but they insisted there was nothing they could do).
Messaged an SVP, who seemed appalled, and got copied on an e-mail thread from said SVPs executive assistant who pointedly remarked that her boss wanted to be kept updated. This happened Friday evening, right before the end of the day. A flurry of emails ensued. Monday morning the package that was supposedly crossing the Atlantic arrived at my office, delivered from the DHL depot 5 minutes down the road.
It's a bit up and down, but really the larger layer of middle management a company has, the easier it seems to be to find someone on LinkedIn who is sufficiently insulated from customer complaints normally that they'll take a personal interest when one manages to slip through and reveals things might not be how they thought they were (finding SVPs at DHL was like shooting fish in a barrel; the sheer number to choose from was ridiculous)
It's also helped me help other people I used to work with get jobs where I could connect them with a recruiter/manager.
I don't think the news feed has particular value (though I do see some interesting folks migrating away from X to posting things on LinkedIn), but I think pretending the site sucks because you've connected with/followed boring or uninteresting people is kind of weird and indicates a failure to understand that it's still essentially self-curated social media.
My LinkedIn account is curated once a week: I am linked to less than 100 people that I have personally met, but I only see the posts from friends and nice coworkers. Best of both worlds IMHO.
I imagine for fields like marketing and design that LinkedIn is as important as Github is to a programmer, though. Also Freelance types of work. Fields where who you know can be almost as important as what you know, and where most hires are made based on gut feelings. Someone
If b) is true, perhaps this means that LinkedIn users are more "valuable" as targets to influence because they are typically white-collar workers, a significant subset of which will have some influence within their workplace?
Making Windows work across the diversity of hardware it does, in basically every language, is impressive to me. Azure seems to work pretty impressively at scale, Xbox is no slouch, and Bing is the only credible alternative to Google.
Office is everywhere, Email is done at scale, OneDrive is simple and effective, again at scale.
Or we can look at the deep levels of Enterprise integrations (Active Directory, SQL Server, Group Policies et al)
Or what about development tools like Visual Studio, languages like C++ or C#, or a bunch of other stuff in that lin
I get the "Microsoft is evil" mantra from the Open Source community, and thats certainly well deserved. They're far from perfect, their business practices in the past have been down right bad, but I'm not sure their Engineering is the area I'd fault them for.
I've worked at -- including Microsoft -- three major tech companies and a quant hedge fund, and Microsoft's engineering practices -- at least within the Office org, where I worked -- are appalling by almost any measure, in comparison with their competitors. Their success is largely down to three things, IMO:
1. First-/early-mover advantage in many spaces.
2. Excellent business management.
3. Some very, very strong engineers at the principal level and higher.
I found the rise and grind culture really off-putting and was delighted to delete it from my phone last week.
This could have been a platform for professional exchange, hell, even something Substack-like.