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LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees
- ta1243 3y agosee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37901488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37901488
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brigleb 3y agoThis really feels like a prompt for one of those “write your own punchline” exercises.
- artursapek 3y agogoodbye LinkedInians, hello LinkedIndians!
- codeulike 3y ago"You appeared in 1 purge this week"
- hknmtt 3y agono surprise. the website is quite bad, to put it politely. the experience just really sucks.
- codeTired 3y agoHas anyone else noticed that LinkedIn is turning into a shitty social media platform? Memes and videos are now being posted. 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.
- vagab0nd 3y agoMy LinkedIn network is my biggest audience. I use it to post random thoughts and whatnot, because it's more fun when you know there's an audience. I rarely get any views or likes though.
- nostrademons 3y agoIs it actually an audience if nobody's viewing it?
- vagab0nd 3y agoI need to get it out anyway. If there's a better option I'd use it.
- digging 3y agoYou could just make your own blog if you don't care about readership. Would probably be better for the longevity.
- criddell 3y agoGet a dog and every day take it on a long walk-and-talk where you tell your dog all your hot takes and random thoughts. Your dog will look forward to this, will look for you on days when you forget or think you are too busy for the walk-and-talk, and as a side benefit, you will get a little exercise, some sunshine, and fresh air. 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?
- malfist 3y agoCan we expect folks impacted by these layoffs to post to linkedin about how great the experience of a layoff is?
- therein 3y agoI don't know if they are still doing it but very many years ago, they'd give you LinkedIn Premium for life. 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.
- Zaheer 3y agoOP was sarcastic but can confirm they give LI Premium for life for ex-employees.
- moneywoes 3y agoIs there some reason all of these layoffs are happening today?
- sbierwagen 3y agoQuarterly earnings.
- FanaHOVA 3y agoMSFT earnings are in 8 days
- cj 3y agoMicrosoft (who owns LinkedIn) reports quarterly earnings in ~1 week. For public companies, timing it around an earnings call can help control the narrative since the company will have a chance to explain to investors why the action wwill increase shareholder value.
- criddell 3y agoWhen I read these stories, all I really hear is that these companies have lost all ability to innovate and invent. They've spent a fortune on these people, carefully choosing and then tuning them to be experts in the business and now they can't think of anything for them to do? They should be embarrassed.
- pembrook 3y agoThat’s one way to look at it. Or, it could just be that, during the covid boom years they overhired to support growth that never materialized, and now they’re stuck with a bunch of overpaid freeloaders (sitting at the top of each salary band) who are neither experts in the business nor uniquely talented/useful/needed.
- JohnFen 3y ago> now they’re stuck with a bunch of overpaid freeloaders 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.
- francisofascii 3y agoOuch. And to think these people will have to to use their former product to get a new job. The only time you really need LinkedIn.
- chunk_waffle 3y agoOuch! That freaking sucks.
- kingTug 3y agoHaving a LinkedIn account still seems necessary to be taken seriously, but in my experience using LinkedIn to network and job search seems less useful than ever.
- coldcode 3y agoI really admire the creative bullshit these execs come up with, AI can't compete: "This means adapting our organizational structures to improve agility and accountability, establishing unambiguous ownership and driving improved efficiency and transparency through reduced layering".
- asynchronous 3y agoCan’t imagine being an exec and getting paid to “write” this dribble
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- __loam 3y agoThey're paid to be the hatchet man, not for writing this. When the shareholders tell them to swing the ax, that's their job.
- gopher2000 3y agoThat doesn't even read that bad IMO. They are recognizing that they're organizationally bloated today and are laying people off to be more cost-effective. Pretty straight forward.
- darkwater 3y agoYour translation IS pretty straightforward. The original text is straightforward as any corp-speak can be (so, not at all).
- orthecreedence 3y agoI love how the "leveraging resource to add value using laser-focused synergistic..." business double-speak euphamisms can also be used to fire people, not just take up air during management meetings.
- belval 3y agoI'm all for criticizing empty corpo talk, but that quote is actually pretty reasonable and not empty. They are just saying that they are simplifying their organizational chart so that they don't have teams with overlapping responsabilities. 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".
- zwilliamson 3y agoWhat is the next best platform to move to?
- densh 3y agoIf you haven’t tried fediverse apps yet, you should.
- constantly 3y ago“Hey sorry hiring manager but your instance isn’t peered with my instance so you can’t see my job history.”
- gaoshan 3y agoThis is actually a great question because LinkedIn has become ubiquitous in the professional world and I cannot, for the life of me, think of anything that is currently available to replace it. Could someone build it? Sure. Could someone gain the mindshare (and marketshare that it has)? Someday?
- izzydata 3y agoMeatspace. I don't think any digital platform is ever going to fill that role. By default anything online is already way less genuine feeling.
- deepspace 3y ago> Meatspace 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.
- iancmceachern 3y agoIt doesn't have to stay that way. You could work to build connections locally as well.
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- ThinkBeat 3y agoIt is one of those companies I wonder how many people you really need to run it.
- bonney_io 3y agoGonna be a bit awkward reaching out to new potential employers... using LinkedIn.
- shafyy 3y agoFucking hate LinkedIn and didn't have a profile for many years. Recently started a new company, and if you want to be taken "seriously" by investors and business customers, you need to have a LinkedIn profile. There's no alternative anymore. I really hope something new comes along soon.
- caspar_g 3y agoBiggest online corporate circle jerk there is.
- danny_taco 3y agoI'm surprised it took this long for LinkedIn to do layoffs. The amount of recruiters looking for candidates, tech companies hiring, etc. has gone down since the beginning of the year. As such, the income from LinkedIn that is tied to job postings has decreased. In order to continue looking good on paper they have decided then to layoff employees to cut costs. The same thing has happened at other companies that make money from job postings.
- jldugger 3y agoPlus, 90 percent of what recruiters do on LinkedIn is basically already automated by LLMs.
- __loam 3y agoGod please no. I already have to yell talk to a human to get my problem solved with support phone calls. I really would rather not get spammed by AI bullshit. If you're trying recruit me, at least have the respect for my time to get a human to talk to me.
- jldugger 3y agoYou are already being spammed by AI. You think those well written followups to your non-response were handcrafted? > Final follow up, I'm excited to hear your thoughts regarding LibertyRock Forest. Any interest in finding out more?
- selectout 3y agoThis isn't the first round of layoffs there
- switch007 3y ago4% in May this year according to https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
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- joshuamcginnis 3y agoI just paid for a "Premium Career" account and it was $250 for one year or $39.99/month. I've gotten my $250 back from consulting leads through LinkedIn, but it stills seems high for the value to the average person.
- imhoguy 3y agoThe first month is free to try and may be rather enough to find a permanent job. But indeed the pricing is high bar especially for an ocassional freelancing.
- packetslave 3y agoAlso, if you try to cancel and give "too expensive" as a reason, they'll give you a discounted rate.
- moneywoes 3y agoMay I ask what type of filters you used and how did you write messages? Hoping to get into to consulting
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoI don't do any outbound messaging. Someone just read one my posts and reached out. That's sort of the ideal way to land customers; have them come to you. It's still hard, just in a different way.
- GMoromisato 3y agoI agree with all the takes about LinkedIn turning into a bad social network, but is that intrinsic to its design or is it something that happens no matter what? 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.
- Willish42 3y agoupvotes and downvotes help, and I'd argue HN does a good enough job at preventing new accounts from being able to do disproportionate damage (discouraging bots, astroterfing, etc.) 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.
- nlh 3y agoI think it’s an intrinsic byproduct of any site/community that puts an algorithmic feed optimized for “engagement” front and center. By our nature, we engage with things that ping our extreme senses, which is the core reason Facebook and Twitter have gone to complete crap. Clickbait is truly bait and we are just angry raging fish if baited sufficiently. I think it’s absolutely possible to have a community that doesn’t suck if sucky behavior is punished instead of rewarded.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thisgoesnowhere 3y agoUnrelated, but linkedin has the most user hostile notifications of any site I have ever seen. 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?
- tornato7 3y agoWay back in the day I used to get excited when I saw a notification from Facebook / Reddit / LinkedIn. Now, every notification is this kind of crap, so I make sure to block all notifications from these apps. 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.
- edgyquant 3y agoI unsubscribed from LinkedIn notifications and they just keep finding creative ways to send me some more
- myaccountonhn 3y agoIt’s bananas how much they spam you
- _jab 3y agoI'm pretty sure that these companies always try to give you at least one notification a day, so that you never log on to see nothing new. Agreed that it's user-hostile, but it's presumably effective as a retention tactic.
- mkj 3y agoExactly. If you set your account to "Hibernated" it won't bother you again. Simply unsubscribing isn't really feasible given the dark patterns in their notification settings page, nested trees of boxes to untick.
- ceva 3y agoNot surprised, MS is big capitalistic mega machinery that will always look at the money first people are on 10th place or even further...
- orsenthil 3y agoI disliked LinkedIn during "layoff season". It was promoting a false narrative, folks were sharing that were "affected" and people who had the job, sharing their story of how difficult it was for people who were let go. 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.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago> Folks were sharing what they thought worth sharing, mostly to gain more attention. 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.
- gardenhedge 3y agoThe most surprising thing is that there's people who think LinkedIn used to be good. It was built by spamming people and grabbing contact books without consent. It's always been trash.
- fknorangesite 3y agoRight? There's a reason for all those old "I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn" memes. e.g., https://i.imgur.com/hwfYhHz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hwfYhHz.jpg
- silisili 3y agoYup. I installed LinkedIn not long after it was a thing, and just kinda clicked through the sign up flow. To my horror, it contacted every single person in my contact list telling them I was on LinkedIn.
- oblio 3y agoMicrosoft sort of cleaned it up, even. Says it all, really.
- koyote 3y agoYou're right, it's always been awful, but it's actually gotten worse which is something I did not think was possible (Facebook quality 'news' feed, constant awful captchas and popups to name a few). 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.
- djoletina 3y agoI dunno, it literally got me to a 180k salary (Eastern Europe based so astronomical) just by me having a profile there. I didn’t have to find a job since 2015 thanks to it. You might argue that the feed is shit, but to me it’s normal human behavior trying to stand out and abusing everything that you can (including feed algos), so I just don’t look at it. 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.
- colinrand 3y agoHas anyone else noticed that their connection count stays 'correct' but a significant number of people that I used to be connected to now are surfaced as recommendations for me to connect with? It's absurd! I doubt people regularly go through their networks and unconnect from people that they don't want to keep in touch with, kind of defeats the purpose. So wth?
- kostacoffee 3y agoThis is their third layoff this year. Whatever their plans are - they haven't been doing them well...
- say_it_as_it_is 3y agoIf you're a LinkedIn employee, or were recently laid off, please let everyone know whether you'd apply to jobs listed on LinkedIn, and if not why.
- SillyUsername 3y agoTelling jobseekers they needed a Premium subscription when they've probably just lost their job and burning through savings is not exactly a genius marketing idea.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI can see it going either way. 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.
- mehukatti 3y agoMy LinkedIn feed is pretty good, mostly relevant (semi-)technical content that helps me to stay up to date with the industry. However, I have spent quite a lot of time to make it like that by unfollowing people who post or like shit content.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoGuess they'll be #lookingforwork
- spicymaki 3y agoFirst off sorry for all of the employees that will be affected by the cuts. On one hand, it seems that if there is a contraction in the employment market, there would be less need for LinkedIn job boards and the staff around it. On the other hand, Microsoft is doling $69B for Activision Blizzard and I assume that money needs to be made up from some where. I can't imagine what is going to be like Activision Blizzard employees after the merger.
- satvikpendem 3y agoApparently LI had a reputation of being a rest-and-vest company, even chiller than Microsoft proper. Is there any truth to that?
- sharts 3y agoAll of these "rockstar" employees shouldn't have a problem finding new jobs. Right? Right?
- low_tech_love 3y agoThank god I'm in academia and can afford to not be in any social platform, especially that one. I hate social media in general but LinkedIn is just especially disgusting for me. In any other social media that is not linked directly to some kind of real-world reward I can at least understand that people are venting, or being assholes just for fun, or saying stupid things just because it's free and easy. But the roleplay that happens in LinkedIn is worse for me because it's like the Uncanny Valley: it pretends to be real. And what's even worse, it tells you between the lines: you also have to play your role in this sick theatre or risk being ignored. In other words, it's like living in a Nordic country. Yikes.
- omscs99 3y ago> In other words, it's like living in a Nordic country. What’s this about? Do Scandinavians have a reputation of being fake or something?
- low_tech_love 3y agoThey have a reputation of being real; that is the problem.
- jjgreen 3y agoThe Finnish word kalsarikännit means "that feeling when you are going to get drunk at home, alone, in your underwear — with no intention of going out" (I am given to understand)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 2143 3y agoI'm confused and curious. Please elaborate if you don't mind. What happens afterwards?
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- tyingq 3y ago700 of around 19,500, or 3.5%-ish. They could have easily gotten there with a hiring freeze and natural attrition, in very little time.
- Aleksdev 3y agoTech lay offs everywhere this week :(
- MichaelMoser123 3y agoon HN you never see any sympathy with anyone who lost his job...
- syngrog66 3y agowhy did they need 700+ in 1st place? wow
- Nellyz 3y ago[dead]