[edit] ok this is news to me So what are Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)?
Employee Resource Groups are voluntary, employee-led groups whose aim is to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace aligned with the organizations they serve.
I’m not saying I would want to, but I find that ERGs for every other combination starts to feel like a way for organized preferential treatment to happen for all those other combinations, and all their various interests to be promoted, to the exclusion of a handful of other combinations.
No conspiracy theory here, also no prejudice here, just how it seems to work, and how I sometimes perceive these interest groups.
What preferential treatment are your peers getting that are advancing their interests beyond yours? What are their interests that don't align with your own?
…and it’s absolutely vile. Leave me alone at work. Work is not your place to advocate for whatever agenda you happen to have. Whether I agree or not isn’t relevant to the mission of the company, and it’s not the company’s job to support your cause.
Except only certain views are allowed to be expressed.
And of course, dating among coworkers is heavily discouraged and risks your career, but isn't that part of your "authentic self" too?
Funny that "activism" now just means arguing via text without any intention of convincing the other side of anything.
Self promotion partly via virtue signaling by "supporting the current thing" (war, politics), everyone's making their gender or race their whole identity even in work context, oh I'm a GDE now, wannabe influencers churning out "my top 20 books about coding interviews" posts twice a day, rehashing the landing page of a popular technology in a 10 page PDF, some fake house building technology (from 2004) that somehow will revolutionize housing, code snippets that do trivial things with 5 arrows on them, reposting poor quality work memes and cartoons from reddit with ten emojies and a caption "wdyt".
My LinkedIn experience is insufferable, and honestly, I don't even know what would make it better. Now that I'm happy at my workplace and extremely busy in my personal life, I check in once a month, scroll a minute, and feel somehow sick, so close the window immediately.
The irony is that all the extra nonsense keeps a lot of us away even more. I think even the next time I want to change jobs, there are platforms I'll use before I go back to LinkedIn.
I guess it's like any social media platform. Once you invite too many people, you dilute the original purpose and community, and just end up with memes and cat photos.
There's an entire industry around claiming it's important, using it, optimizing it, etc.
But all of that is orthogonal to getting actual work done and the skills to do so.
... or in other words, LinkedIn is what would have happened to Craigslist, if CL had decided they wanted people to spend more time on the site, instead of concluding their business as quickly as possible.
Citation needed.
Seriously though, what alternatives should we consider?
It's what I believe recruiting should be. Potential applicants upload their bio and skills, say what they're interested in (in terms of salary range, WFH vs WFO, etc). Potential recruiters list jobs, with somewhat decent transparency (at least for the UK, where salary is rarely listed). Then one party or the other initiates a conversation.
The best applications I've been through all started via cord, and the interactions all felt genuine and were all with internal recruiters rather than agencies.
Like what? I'm genuinely curious because I've found my last two jobs through LinkedIn recruiters and I would like to know if there's a better platform out there to be my digital resume / recruiter spam dumping ground
I watch our sales people use LinkedIn heavily for prospecting and cold reach outs. They rely on tools like Lusha which are basically databases of contact information that are sold on a subscription basis.
If you work in management or any sort of position where it's possible you're involved in procurement and that is reflected in your job title you will get hounded incessantly by people - sometimes directly on LinkedIn but more often they /found/ you on LinkedIn and then paid Lusha or one of the other contact database tools for your email address and contact info.
Fwiw you can opt out of Lusha. I tried it and the number of inbound calls and emails I got dropped significantly.
Right, but this is not so much the social network aspect of LinkedIn.
I don't want to ignore the feed cause there's always been useful stuff in it. Like links to interesting blog posts, new model/paper/repo announcements, etc. It's just that there's a lot of other crap as well, like marketing posts, which are annoying but at least make sense given the professional audience on the platform. I'm specifically asking about the rest - posts about politics, personal life updates, etc.
the only value i see is job postings
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/23/media/linkedin-journalist...
I say this because your dangling comment seems to imply that LinkedIn's employment of journalists is so that they may practice their journalistic dark-arts on unsuspecting users in a ploy for them to spend more time on the site.
It’s totally normal for social networking websites to establish newsrooms and hire lots of journalists. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook… and now LinkedIn.
Sorry, Dad. /s
Beyond that, why would normal have anything to do with what you're offering your users? Do you think Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook thought "what's a normal social media product we can offer"? I guess the whole "go fast and break things" ethos ends with "but totes don't hire journalists and create a newsroom as a possible profit center because some people don't know how to evaluate disparate sources of information on the internet".
At one point I had followed all of the CEOs in India because they were claiming there were so many great jobs in India. Since they followed me back I started conversations with all of them in an attempt to get a work visa for India --- near the end of an entire year searching for a job in America on Linkedin I was pretty disillusioned with the local job market. All of these CEOs in India ghosted me! Finally a friend from India explained that there is no work visa for American programmers and that is why they were dropping the conversation.
After that I decided to delete the account since it seemed to be mostly wasting my time.
At local meetups everyone tells me to get on there, that it is the only way I'll find a job. Then I ask them: well, what job have you found on there? But they are looking for a job, so they explain to me that is why they are on Linkedin. After this the other party tends to offer to diagnose me with depression or autism if I do not find someone else to IRL network with.
Does anyone have professional networking site recommendations beyond LinkedIn and HN Who's Hiring? Leave recommendations below!
Obviously LI has an incentive to add engagement, and users want interaction, but LI provides tools to help you get rid of the garbage. I am amazed by how many people adamantly refuse to use those tools.
Content is delivered equally to all platforms, aside from a couple of experiments here and there.
Here are the numbers from a couple of weeks ago…
LinkedIn is by far the leader in the house, with 538 followers outpacing our 440 Substack subscribers followed by Instagram with 103, Twitter/X with 85, YouTube with 55, Threads with 30, Facebook with 18 and Mastodon with 16 followers. YouTube didn’t have any content until September, so that’s encouraging. Facebook has been a real disappointment so far.
Probably going to be shuttering the Threads and Facebook accounts soon to focus our efforts where it makes sense.
Despite the low follower counts, Mastodon has seen pretty good engagement from the followers that are there at least.
Posting about a code conference is a lot different than an app but I’m curious if your follower counts and interactions translate to conversions / conference attendees.
This is true, they pull people in, but it's the why of it that counts.
LinkedIn, once it became the defacto job board, had no where to grow.
They need more users, more members, more engagement, so that their numbers look ever greater, and therefore their stock continues to rise.
A plateau is a horror to such companies. It's never enough to do a thing, and do it well.
Even if every person on the planet logged on daily, and spent 16 hours doing things, someone at LinkedIn would be going bananas because it wasn't 16.2 hrs.
And thus, it turns to trash.
It probably is because of the constant search for "engagement" so they either copy same dynamics or discover the same triggers.
Point is, given the same objective function you get similar solutions.
I wished it was otherwise, particularly for LinkedIn. The combo of a social graph with everyone's CV should be a treasure for say advising on career advancement, crafting educational programs, bypassing traditional hiring, and what not. Instead, we have the Nth iteration of MySpace.
It very much still is focused on employment, you just have to use it to that end and avoid their 'feed'.
As a way of maintaining a social graph with other professionals and keeping a publicly available resume, it is fine.
But the feed and the posts? Can't imagine why anyone would care for that part if it.
Are you following people who are pushing politics on their LinkedIns?
I've found following relevant VCs, PMs, Academics, and corporate leadership has drastically improved my LinkedIn with almost zero noise.
Mute and unfollow people who post too much politics on LinkedIn, and engage with content that is more relevant to you. The algorithm will tune itself for you accordingly
If your network is filled with people who liked stunting on LinkedIn or doing unnecessary arguments it will come up on your feed.
The assumption is you will keep your LinkedIn trimmed and managed with only people you care about.
Make your LinkedIn curate better content by following people who generate actually insightful content.
Also, I am connects with actual politicians and staffers on LinkedIn because of my previous career and they almost never post any political flamewars on there. It's basically used as a constructive Twitter for those of us who don't need the noise that comes from Twitter.
I find it annoying that I can’t tell LinkedIn to show me less of this, like I can with other social networks.
Like content you find relevant and X out the content you find useless. In 1 week your LinkedIn will be completely tuned
Also, as someone who I think might be a 2nd or 3rd degree connect of yours, the Bay Area Asian American HS network has been fairly high quality. Leverage and optimize for the network of friends and alums who ended up becoming IBs, PEs, Engineers who deliver, VCs, Academics, etc. And then optimize to follow whoever they follow in turn.
One good application is finding someone you USED to work with (if they have email notifications turned on, of course). And hearing where your friends are working now.
As for revenue: job listings. That's it.
This is literally the only thing I care to use it for so of course it’s nearly impossible to use it this way.
Would love to log in once a year and see a simple list of “person X is now working at company Y”
Other than perhaps meeting a recruiter for a job change, I can't imagine why one would really spend time there. It's always been gross and clingy.
Good data organizations acknowledge that all metrics can be manipulated and take changes in metrics with a grain of salt. They combine a/b testing with first principles thinking and make imperfect decisions based on imperfect information. They don't always get it right, but they embrace uncertainty and critically evaluate outcomes both "good" and "bad", because they know a/b test metrics don't tell the full story.
Bad data organizations focus on the a/b test metrics and ignore common sense logic, because short term metric wins are rewarded. Rinse and repeat for years on end and the product evolves to puzzling place like you mention. It was all the result of someone winning an a/b test over and over, and not critically thinking about the long term.
Also see: expedia, quora, facebook, instagram, etc.
0. https://9to5google.com/2024/01/03/microsoft-edge-ai-browser/
1. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/ai-comes-for-your-pc...
2. https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/fed-up-with-wind...
"You don't understand scale.
Use $50 to buy 10 tomato plants.
In 6 months you have 250 tomatoes.
Plant those into 250 plants.
6 months you have 6250 plants.
Plant them.
6 months you have 156k tomatoes.
Plant them.
6 months you have 3.9MM tomatoes.
Sell them for $1 each."
Another genius went on with this motivational piece:
"If you double $1 every day, you will be a millionaire in 20 days. What's your excuse?"
And such.