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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 gr

• p_j_w 3y ago
  > LinkedIn is aging like fine wine 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.
  • graphe 3y ago
    Good for Microsoft doesn't mean good for you.
    • digging 3y ago
      Poor turn of phrase then? Certainly wouldn't call the bloated, parasite-riddle LinkedIn "like fine wine".
      • hot_gril 3y ago
        It's keeping the users and making money, that's what matters.
      • klyrs 3y ago
        In this economy, the users are the product. If LinkedIn is fine wine, we're the grapes.
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
        You're thinking in the lens of a consumer, that's the issue. I'm sure to Nadella MSFT is making off like a bandit. The users looking for a job aren't the customers of LinkedIn.
    • MaxBarraclough 3y ago
      LinkedIn seems to have been at Stage 2 of Doctorow's enshittification pattern for years now: blatantly hostile to its users, but (as far as I know) doing right by advertisers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
  • lostlogin 3y ago
    The endless email spam by LinkedIn is impressive too.
    • hbn 3y ago
      Email spam where they put the sender name as a person you know and write the subject line like it was written by that person you know. Incredibly deceptive.
  • jmye 3y ago
    > Is there a non-shitty version of LinkedIn somewhere 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).
    • hot_gril 3y ago
      I have an account that sits there and gets emails from recruiters, which is good. Am I missing something by not using the other "features"?
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • vidarh 3y ago
        My favourite use of LinkedIn is when a company "wrongs me" in some way, as a means to find a suitable VP/SVP on LinkedIn, see if LinkedIn wil give me another free month of premium in desperation to try to get me back as a paying user like I was once many years ago, and then Inmail said people. 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)
        • hot_gril 3y ago
  • antupis 3y ago
    There is unfollow button which works very well and changes your experience somewhat. Of course it does not matter that much because most LinkedIn content is rather bad.
    • technion 3y ago
      It's only been the last few weeks that LinkedIn started laying out so many "suggested " posts that every person you unfollow only creates more room for more "trending" crap.
  • bryanlarsen 3y ago
    I assumed that when m_a_g said "LinkedIn is aging like fine wine in Microsoft’s cellar." he was talking about what happens to fine wine when you put it in a crappy cellar: it slowly turns to vinegar.
  • orzig 3y ago
    About 3 hours of dedicated feedback to the algorithm (including plenty of unfollowing, which is different from removing connection) has turned made it quite bearable. I don't _love_ it but OTOH I appreciate a place that I can be reminded of my weak connections without doom scrolling.
  • freitasm 3y ago
    The amount of crazy conspiracy theorists and politics on LinkedIn is growing very quickly. It's competing for the large share of cringe posts with selfies.
    • phs318u 3y ago
      I'll suggest that a) a lot of that content is bot generated (uncontroversial), and b) perhaps those behind the bots are seeing a greater "return" on their investment targeting LinkedIn users rather than say FB/X/TT/IG/YT users. 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?
• hot_gril 3y ago
  If the point of engineering is to accomplish the business objective, I'd say their engineering practices are fine.
• aaronbrethorst 3y ago
  I spent a significant amount of time on LinkedIn this past year. I don't think I'd really engaged in the platform in any meaningful way in over a decade. I found the rise and grind culture really off-putting and was delighted to delete it from my phone last week.
• bruce511 3y ago
  Aren't that great? 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.
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    It _used_ to be appalling (on release, XP was the most security-holey thing you can imagine, and Vista barely worked at all, say), but it does seem to be generally improved these days.
  • jwestbury 3y ago
    Have you worked at Microsoft? I have. Their engineering practices are suspect at best. Nobody in Office actually knows what's going on -- it's difficult to find anyone who actually understands more than a tiny, tiny fragment of the stack. And the not-my-problem culture from the days of Gates and Ballmer stack-ranking is absolutely still present -- I found what looked like a pretty major security bug (expired user certs being accepted, including those for a service admin account), and was told by multiple long-tenured, senior engineers, that since it wasn't our service misbehaving, I shouldn't worry about it. (I ignored them, dug in more, discovered it was a totally unrelated -- and less scary -- bug, and still found the owning team to let them know.) 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.
• poisonborz 3y ago
  I find it increasingly repulsive to read. I'm not even surprised on the FB-like newsfeed full of ads (all suggested/promoted), but the happy-go-lucky, ignorant, agressively positive tone people strike there is hard to bear. As if everyone were a CEO TED speaker, everything is positive learning and growth, nothing remotely controversial. This could have been a platform for professional exchange, hell, even something Substack-like.