[etra0]

LinkedIn posts really read like an alternative reality (which I would not like to be a part of, lol).

I cannot take seriously most of what I read over there. The comments are also often toxic, the whole business is... just weird.

What's funny as a personal anecdote, I've found more jobs through Twitter (pre-X) than through LinkedIn.

Seriously. And I've tried using LinkedIn for job hunt.

[_fat_santa]

LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.

1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.

2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.

My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"

[parpfish]

I like it as a “place that hosts resumes in a standardized format that can be imported to other applications correctly”

[parpfish]

Also good for “hey whatever happened to that guy from high school”

[filoleg]

Yup, agreed heavily with your take.

I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).

For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.

As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.

[deepsquirrelnet]

I’m pretty sure it is an alternate reality, fueled mostly by bot interaction. If you look at the comment history on a post, much of the time it appears to be flocks of bots posting “Very Insightful”, and often identically duplicated comments.

The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.

I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.

[grues-dinner]

Or worse, it's a biobot using the little palette of cringey prebaked replies you can post: "very insightful, thanks for posting", "interesting thought", etc.

[LeftHandPath]

The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.

Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.

Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

[rekenaut]

> Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.

Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.

[genewitch]

which music skills? you can learn enough music theory and pop-song writing skills in a few weekends to pump out club/pop music. Sure, playing instruments is a skill that takes a long time to hone, but anyone can download openMPT or something and toss out music. If money comes in and they want orchestra, there's been things like the Vienna Symphonic Library and the like for decades.

i've written and recorded about a dozen hours worth of music in my life and i assuredly did not go to school for it. The quote is about education, not practice. It also mentions "half-assed job" which is what you get in "six weeks" of work.

[danparsonson]

Someone like you is likely not intended to be the subject of that quotation...

[appease7727]

LinkedIn has the single worst search function out of any job board or website in general I've ever seen. It's astonishingly bad.

The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.

Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.

[daxfohl]

Yeah, I think the "pro-linkedin" comments here are probably valid, with the caveat that eventually everyone will quit using linkedin if there isn't more substance on these things at some point.

The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.