7 ms·
LinkedIn is loud, and corporate is hell
- duxup 11mo agoIs LinkedIn ... worse because of this ChatGPT scenario? The negatives the author talks about, just sound like LinkedIn on a good day. Personally I'm never on there outside of when I'm looking for a job and I'm honestly not reading anyone's posts...
- fennec-posix 11mo agoI mean, LinkedIn was like this before ChatGPT. The advent of LLMs just made this sort of corporate shitposting explode as everyone could now write one with such little effort.
- mnky9800n 11mo agoI feel like for science it’s like how Twitter used to be with regards to finding new and interesting papers. But I wish people were banned from using LLMs for anything post related. You might as well replace those posts with ads.
- kodama-lens 11mo agoIt has gotten way worse since the Ai rise. Before it was the "how to be a winner" mindset now everything gets posted. Mostly AI garneted slop with glitchy AI images that advertise just plain false information. No one corrects stuff and barley anyone actually clicks a link an a post - no one cares. Just mindless self fap,fap,fap, like TikTok but for "professional" and business people
- Waterluvian 11mo agoFor me LinkedIn is the employee/colleague phone book. And like every phone book, it’s more ad filler each year.
- fennec-posix 11mo agoI do feel Ramon's (blog poster's) pain. I'm so lucky that I'm at a place that I can see my direct manager actively protecting us from a lot of these things like random busywork and solutions for the hell of a solution. As a result we can get some really good work done and actually deliver on the large projects we're given in the roadmap on time. I just hope Ramon can find somewhere that respects his talent and his time and allow him to do his best work without the stress. I really wish that for everyone (although, no perfect world exists)
- mannanj 11mo agoI had faced something similar as Roman and am now building many things with these AI tools that I’ve always wanted. Never simultaneously felt more uncertain and hopeful, and wonder if I would do well to be my own boss. The challenge/learning now is getting it monetized.
- Havoc 11mo agoWhy even read anything on linkedin at all? The highlights get reposted on https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/
- ChrisMarshallNY 11mo agoLove that one. I can't help but notice that LI helped the author to get the job he's about to lose. I really feel bad for folks still in early career, nowadays. I am grateful to be retired. When I was first let go of my job, and ran into the SV ageism, it infuriated me, but I think that it may have actually been one of the best outcomes I could have hoped for.
- Nextgrid 11mo ago> I really feel bad for folks still in early career, nowadays. I am grateful to be retired. I wonder if there’s an opportunity for a cohort of “retired” people to actually deliver things and eschew the performative bullshit. There’s presumably a lot of experience and skill that can be leveraged. I’d happily partake despite having nowhere near the right age for that, my feeling is the same and I’m not even 30 (hell, I’d learn a lot in such an environment).
- hopeful_coder 11mo agoYour comment is like un-comprehensible to me, I am 25 and I quit my last tech job 5 months ago thinking I would find the meaning of life only by having some time of thinking on my own and I also wanted to try out building things on my own since I don't find doing a job to be a good money making strategy for life, this is true for most people, not talking about folks with huge equity stake in companies. It didn't work out like I planned and I am still as clueless as possible and loosing money everyday, getting to be retired before 30 sounds both incredibly boring and heavenly at the same time. I want to know what do you think about life in general and how do you spend your young retirement days, does it ever feel like you have too much time but no reason to work towards anything since you have the money or are you still in the fight working towards some purpose ?
- knallfrosch 11mo agoLinkedIn has always been as if HR and PR agreed on a post.
- munk-a 11mo agoI wish LinkedIn was that good. In my eyes LinkedIn has become "Facebook but with resumes" - I accept that I should have a profile on there for resume visibility but there are so many features built into that site that just should not exist and so many genuinely valuable things around job seeking they could do that they're simply not. It's an excellent example of a product that could be massively improved by just removing things - look back to early linkedIn days where their email notifications actually meant there was likely something relevant that you care about there. Now they've created a platform where the valuable is buried in piles of irrelevant slop.
- dependency_2x 11mo agoYeah even on HN not everyone got to the real issue. It is not so obvious unless you have done SRE or like me just have to do oncall and have to do some SRE for your services. The obvious take is "there is a bug at line X" and especially with it being Rust the tempting lol Rust code is buggy it was meant to be safe. But code will have logical bugs so you need to know how to deal with that uncertainty in deployments. RE Linkedin - it's a good filter, see some BS post, add it to a list, then when you need a job and want to choose your boss, or when you want to hire someone, you have a filter :-). Maybe 3 strikes to allow for an honest mistake or something that looks like AI but turns out it wasn't.
- tofflos 11mo agoI wasn't familiar with the PIP acronym so I asked $AI: > A PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) is a formal document a company uses when they believe an employee isn’t meeting expectations. It’s framed as “support,” but depending on the environment, it can be anything from a genuine improvement tool to a pre-termination protocol.
- andy99 11mo agoIs there some legitimate thing people are doing on LinkedIn that the crap is getting in the way of? One can make a profile and (thought it’s terrible for this) search for jobs without ever scrolling the feed. If you don’t like it just don’t use it. It feels like complaining that the strip bar has alcohol and nudity everywhere, why are you there?
- munk-a 11mo agoI think it's more just a bizarre platform for us to gawk at. I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space and especially a professional space that is going to be your first impression for a new job prospect. Maybe having a loud profile is a positive to some sorts of recruiters but posting anything beside resume information on that site just seems like a guaranteed malus on future prospects. Even if you'd like to run a live blog on some project you're working on as a sort of portfolio - do it on a platform you have full control of in case you want to rescind it or modify it later.
- flatline 11mo ago> gawk at Exactly this, it’s just another outgrowth of the attention economy, and I assume there is a payoff for many people or they would not be engaged with the platform. I assume part of that is purely for the attention, but part of it must be remunerative from a professional standpoint as well. The lines get blurry fast in influencer spaces. What is work, what is personal, what is even real, and how much does any of that matter as long as you are getting attention?
- Tade0 11mo agoIt's really just people being terminally online, but with a thin veneer of professional growth. English speakers don't experience this, but in my language LinkedIn-speak has so many calques from English that, in order to understand it, I often have to translate words one by one to English and then the result back to my language.
- 11mo ago
- mannanj 11mo agoI was also placed on a PIP and yeah man, corporate hell at these big companies is definitely a thing. They’ve drank all the kool aid about AI and the execs have been taking the $AI board stinks up the moon to push AI down your throats. Then they are using fear and lack of transparency on decisions to get people to compete while pretending to be positive-sum (note: it’s zero-sum) these PIP and performance ranking stack cultures are so toxic.
- pram 11mo agoMy LinkedIn feed has been unrelentingly depressing recently, more than anything. Every time I log in it’s former coworkers posting about how they have been jobless for a year+ or posts like “I was diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer, goodbye!” IDK if the vapid LLM slop is worse than this pit of despair and misery, hard to say.
- hackerbeat 11mo agoLinkedIn needs to be burned to the ground.
- gnarlouse 11mo agoSo delete your account. I just got hired. Can confirm LinkedIn is irrelevant if you have a reference.
- koakuma-chan 11mo ago"Your LinkedIn profile URL (required):"
- NoiseBert69 11mo agoJust link to Reddit/r/LinkedinLunatics and lean back
- justsomehnguy 11mo agoHR is lazy. Do you want to work in a company where HR is lazy to even work?
- koakuma-chan 11mo agoDon't have the luxury to pick.
- saagarjha 11mo agoPut in N/a
- gnarlouse 11mo agoPut N/a -- see attached resume. If you have a reference, they will bother to review your Resume. You already have a high value endorsement from an individual on their team, plus internal hiring bonuses are good for team morale.
- elashri 11mo agoI only maintain a profile on LinkedIn because it is standard and expected. But I never open the website except when I get notification maybe on important message or to update significant part. I don't read posts or anything else. I even block the website on my AdGuard Home instance and added it to kagi seach blocked sites. I don't see any reason why would I try to engage with people there. And that's even before LLMs, they just made it much worse.
- koakuma-chan 11mo ago> How do these people stay motivated to do anything. I have no idea.
- mathgeek 11mo agoI really enjoy their daily games.
- markoa 11mo agoThe solution, as always, is doing more of what you want to see in the world. Maintain a personal blog and post more from the heart.
- blitzar 11mo ago> post more from the heart The linkedin cringe comes from this place.
- lmm 11mo agoI refuse to believe that. The Linkedin cringe is from posts that are optimised to go viral on Linkedin (consciously or not); no-one writes in that style sincerely.
- parpfish 11mo agoi think there's two main flavors of linkedin slop. there's the founder/ceo trying to brand themselves as a "thought leader" slop. stupid made up inspirational stories. grind/hustle motivational stuff. etc. then there's the slop from employees. this is usually a multi-paragraph missive where they announce that they've made the hard to decision to leave company X for company Y but they learned SOM MUCH and everybody at company Y are ABSOLUTE ROCKSTARS and on and on and you just wonder "if all that's true, why are you leaving"
- Nextgrid 11mo agoWhen’s the last time your heart told you to post “today I went for an interview. [insert bullshit here] I was rude to a passerby’s dog. [more bullshit] The dog was the interviewer.”? LinkedIn slop has a certain smell to it like no other spam does. I’m still puzzled as to why anyone does it - *surely* everyone from the cohort you wish to attract is familiar with it and sees right through it? Even for marketing positions I don’t see how this can translate to other, actually-profitable venues since this kind of content wouldn’t work anywhere else.
- blitzar 11mo ago
- Kim_Bruning 11mo agoI hadn't used linkedin for over a year, so I recently deleted it. It used to be useful as a kind of phone book/rolodex; but they pivoted somewhere, and I'm not sure why I hadn't deleted it sooner.
- zombiwoof 11mo ago[dead]
- skybrian 11mo agoThe author complains about duplication in social media. It's certainly not limited to LinkedIn. I wonder if part of the problem is that people don't see each other's posts and don't quite realize how repetitive they're being when they write them? You can't expect the same amount of coherence that you get in a small discussion where people actually read each other's posts. Alternative theory: perhaps they don't care?
- pedrolins 11mo ago> How do these people stay motivated to do anything. It can't just be money, right? It’s making money to spend quality time with loved ones and pay the bills. For some people that’s enough (no judgement).
- awesome_dude 11mo agoAnd to build a park with blackjack and hookers, in fact, forget the park!
- kovac 11mo agoI'm not convinced that we can spend quality time with loved ones outside work while spending most of our time at work pretending, and doing useless or unnatural things. I think what you practise shapes you.
- tamimio 11mo ago[dead]
- carimura 11mo agoi've always felt the social world order is as follows: Facebook/Insta: I'm cool! Twitter/X: I'm smart! LinkedIn: I'm successful! Tik Tok: (I have no idea) As long as you know this, it all makes more sense.
- kazinator 11mo agoHN: all of the above
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mattgreenrocks 11mo agoAka, which vanity is one most vulnerable to. Makes sense that they’d segment out like this, since the space tends to be winner take all.
- boznz 11mo agoI'm going to get the tee-shirt printed :-)
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 11mo agoOnly people over 60 think Facebook is cool. That's not to denigrate people over 60.
- carimura 11mo agoya i included insta. that's their bridge to.... 30s and 40s?
- jfengel 11mo agoTikTok: I'm bored (and have a short attention span)
- rpmisms 11mo agoFacebook has marketplace, which is insanely valuable.
- hekkle 11mo agoLinkedIn is hell. I had a redundancy about a year ago, and like the author tried using it to network and find another job. I swear half of the people on there are not copy/pasting from ChatGPT like the author speculates but are just straight up bots that use AI. Just use the traditional job bulletins like SEEK, you will have much more success.
- SerCe 11mo agoThe highest level of cringe you can feel is when you see people you know well in real life post on LinkedIn. The contrast between the way they speak in real life and on LinkedIn is often immense, you don't feel that level of contrast with random internet strangers.
- throwaway1389z 11mo agoThis is very helpful in setting the lens you need to see everything else online, or even published in print.
- dijit 11mo agoOn the other hand, people have commented (in real life to me) that my linkedin comments are bold, hilarious and entirely unprofessional- earning me a sort of credibility in their eyes for being authentic and having integrity. (and probably more privately, they believe I am too outspoken..) Pro’s/Con’s; just like with all public broadcast information. Also, its always embarrassing when someone talks about a linkedin comment I have made, not because I am ashamed but because I am sort of used to a semi-anonymous shouting into the void style forum like hackernews.
- yodsanklai 11mo agoI have a friend who behaves similarly on linkedin and in real life, and he's very blunt. I like how he calls out some crap on linkedin posts, and nobody dares to like his comments, even though I'm sure everybody approves. Overall, I don't see anyone I know being a cringe bootlicker on LinkedIn. These people are very visible, but probably a small minority of users.
- cm2012 11mo agoPersonally I run a company and pay someone to post for me on linkedin
- moogly 11mo agoI'm sure it's the same people who comment on porn videos.
- awesome_dude 11mo agoAlmost every comment on here is from the point of view of a candidate/applicant. 1. LinkedIn is an advertising pipeline, for employers, recruiters, and candidates 2. The main feed is helpful if you want to see people virtue signalling (recruiters claiming that they never ghost candidates) 3. The main feed is REALLY helpful to see what's happening on the other side of the fence (recruiters complaining about hiring managers ghosting/ripping them off) 4. The interactive part of the posts on the main feed is helpful for "correcting" poor assumptions (recruiters are often saying "Put X on your CV/Resume if you want to stand out" - which is good advice, except that candidates /don't/ put it on their resumes/CVs for a set of reasons that recruiters don't realise)
- webdevver 11mo agoidk i like linkedin. every week i get emails about jobs they think i might be interested in and its pretty on point. nice to have a centralized place for job advertisements. before that, youd have to go on each website individually which was a pain.
- malfist 11mo agoBy the time you get those emails, 1000 people using ai have submitted applications already
- yesitcan 11mo ago> It can't just be money, right? Yes, it can.
- adidoit 11mo agoThe biggest challenge with LinkedIn is the primacy of your linkage to your employer enforces a self-censorship that turns into corporate speak. The overton window on LinkedIn is actually quite small and because everyone there is really an employee rather than an employer, you get essentially slop that has been easily trained on and therefore is easily generatable by AI. It's just all low perplexity takes. There's mostly no room for nuance because of the performative takes. Unlike a forum like Hacker News where your identity is almost totally abstracted away, every LinkedIn post is a move in the status game of career visibility.
- DonHopkins 11mo agoIf you take a stand on tabs -vs- spaces (spaces obviously) or emacs -vs- vi (emacs obviously), you're black listed from half the jobs out there, but they were terrible tabs + vi jobs anyway.
- cmiles8 11mo agoLinkedIn is mostly people trying to impress folks that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. As such it just becomes an echo chamber of self-promotion and grifters while 99% of folks that are legit top tier in their field aren’t wasting any time there. When someone starts introducing themselves a “LinkedIn top voice” or whatever you’d do best to run away quickly.
- jrs235 11mo ago"An error occurred: API rate limit already exceeded" at the end... Is that intentional and a joke? I hope so. I find it funny.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mgaunard 11mo agoI'm on Linkedin a fair bit and I didn't see a single article about this.
- gchamonlive 11mo agoCorporate is hell, startups are insane. Is there any place to work as a developer and still keep my sanity?
- jwpapi 11mo agoIndie
- malfist 11mo agoWhat's the difference between indie and startup?
- gchamonlive 11mo agoIndie as freelancer or as making your own product?
- jwpapi 11mo agoMaking your own product
- epolanski 11mo agoCompanies where software is a cost and not an asset tend to be chilly. You have to help the warehouse workers to optimize their picking pathing by some priority, the e-commerce to release a configurator for their new shiny car, scrape competitor's products and report it as an excel, build some search tool to help customer care find information quicker, etc, etc. Nothing ground breaking that's gonna make your shareholders billions, but helps the business and pays you the bills without pyramid climbing or particular stress. Of course, the pay is rarely comparable, but we're still talking way above the average salaries that can give you a comfortable life.
- alganet 11mo agoYou're beating a dead horse here buddy. Show me a social platform that is not complete bullshit. You can't. I do agree with it, LinkedIn is bullshit. But c'mon, this is all the web is now.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo agoI knew society was a sham when I saw three star generals I worked for, with unmatched performance, putting #openforwork and translating military speak to corpo speak so they could get a middle management job doing sales for Raytheon or some other middling job after retirement The whole thing is sickening
- black_13 11mo ago[dead]
- sieep 11mo agoI agree with a lot of the sentiment here about the actual app itself but I'm surprised that people aren't seeing LinkedIn for what it is, a tool. If you're a founder, LinkedIn is a great place to find talent & drive inbound sales, at minimum. If you're not using it, I bet your competition is. Sure, the feed is terrible but look at it purely as a talent & sales pipeline. There isn't anything else like it out there.
- Nextgrid 11mo agoTrue, but it doesn’t mean we can’t complain about its deficiencies. I use it in the exact way you describe but I still wish all the bullshitters were banned to oblivion or that making a post cost $10 (as to enforce a minimum bar of ROI on a potentially bullshit post).
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- lippihom 11mo agoWish there was keyword muting. I actually have quite a few connections that are interesting to follow - it's just their content never shows up in my feed.
- everdrive 11mo agoIt's important to filter out 100% of Linkedin content. Sometimes someone will post a twitter screenshot, usually something offensive. It sometimes hooks me for a moment, but then I remember the golden rule: information posted on twitter is not worth noticing. It doesn't even rise of the level of outage; it's not even worth acknowledging. So the best thing to do is ignore it and move on. I would suggest the same is true for Linkedin and really any social media. If someone said something there, you're really the one at fault for knowing about it. Why did you read it? Having read it, why are you still thinking about it. It's a pure waste of your time, and the only positive course of action is to move beyond outage towards apathy and then finally towards total lack of awareness.
- technion 11mo agoThe "screenshot of my own tweet, but edited somehow so it fakes a blue checkmark" posts are definitely my favourite cringe content to see.
- 29athrowaway 11mo agoLinkedIn for job search is awful. It's just fake jobs and data harvesting.
- a_bonobo 11mo agoIn my niche, bioinformatics, linkedin has become somewhat of a force ever since many people left Twitter/X during the 'rebranding'? It's quite weird. They're mostly posts announcing new packages etc. but there seems to be more bioinformatics-y activity than, say, mastodon or bluesky. The posts definitely have a different tone than what OP decries.
- kfarr 11mo agoYes there are a bunch of weird niches that got a lot of Twitter traffic but found a home on LinkedIn when there's an overlap with professions. Another niche example that I see is applications for AI powered architectural visualization, many folks posting actually useful stuff there on a regular basis.
- epolanski 11mo agoHonestly I wish people stuck with good old forums. There's forums for everything out there, in every niche, gaming, modding, hardware, cars, boats. Every single community you can think of has likely a great forum out there, easily readable and searchable, where discussions on single topics last _years_ and go in extreme informative depth, the kind of depth that no platform like HN/Lobsters/LinkedIn can ever dream of. The closest surrogate we have are issue trackers (like GitHub) or mailing lists, but even those offer such a poor UX that I can't but wonder..
- a_bonobo 11mo agoBioinformatics has biostars :) https://www.biostars.org/ https://www.biostars.org/ The difference to linkedin is that biostars has 'in-domain experts' only; the postdocs, the staff bioinformaticians, etc. those are not the people who will hire you. The people who will hire you are on linkedin.
- kfarr 11mo agoYeah it's definitely a combination of posting for peers but also creating material that is helpful for finding the next gig
- habosa 11mo agoKinda sad but LinkedIn has fulfilled the original promise of Facebook for me. Almost all the people I’ve met in my career and at school have a verified profile under their real name and when I want to reach out to them, that’s a place I can start if I lost their number. The feed is hell. The content is cringe. All true. But it’s a very good directory.
- petesergeant 11mo agoMy life has been better since I used an ad blocker to remove the LI feed
- ulfw 11mo agoLinkedin like Facebook were ok when both were just a directory. One they started a feed it started going downhill. Once your feed wasn't showing you your friends/contacts updates but updates from random weirdos you don't follow, you never heard or seen of in your whole life - it went to utter fucking shit. Just trashy self promoting dumb shit. Both Meta and Microsoft are to blame for this enshitification of social.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- anal_reactor 11mo agoWhen I lose my job and need to search for a new one, I'll just use ChatGPT to create a bunch of useless apps to make it look like I have active Github presence, and then I'll ask him to create me a bunch of blog entries about tech in general. It doesn't need to be good, it needs to make me look good in the eyes of HR and the manager.
- JanTurnherr 11mo agomy account got hacked and is lost. i hear nothing from linkedin. i start to like the silence.
- donchuru 11mo agoI'm going to go against the grain and say that posting on LinkedIn is actually a good idea. It builds your brand and that is valuable. As cringe as it may be, it puts your name in the working memory of people who might be useful in your career (recruiters, hiring managers, potential collaborators, etc.) I also think this goes for all the analogous versions of LinkedIn (like Tiktok if you're a creator, or Instagram if you're an artist). Not having a place to show off your work will slow down your growth and progress. I'm a fairly private person but I've been considering the opportunity cost of it, and I think it's pretty high. Overall +EV: the risks of putting yourself out there are low (i.e. strangers think you're cringe), but the benefits are very high (new jobs/opportunities). I might just start embracing the cringe.
- GMoromisato 11mo agoI agree 100%. I've been posting more on LinkedIn on topics around my consulting service. I haven't done it enough to get new clients yet, but my posts are getting read, even if only by my connections, and that keeps my name in their minds. I honestly don't care if anyone thinks my content is cringe, but I do care that it is good/useful content. The key is to set a quality bar that is high enough so it's not slop, but not so high that it keeps you from posting.