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)
The highlights get reposted on
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.
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).
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 ?
However I am close to 30 and I am considering “retiring” from a tech career and moving onto something else. That’s why I put “retired” in quotes. I will still work, just not in this increasingly-bullshit industry, and I’ve already reduced my usage/reliance on technology as much as possible in my personal life (I’m still rocking an iPhone SE3 on an outdated iOS version for example, as nothing since then fits my requirements. Similarly my Mac OS is also outdated).
I assumed people can decide to “retire” from a job regardless of age (and move onto something else if their finances demand to).
> 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
I’m nowhere near retirement in the common meaning of the word but I have some money saved up which allows me to spend a year or so away from the increasingly-bullshit technology industry in which I started my career. Besides the day-to-day necessities and entertainment the only way I’ve found to “fight towards some purpose” at the moment is to argue with techbros on HN because I see nothing on the tech market that would allow me to put my skills to good use, and unfortunately short selling is unavailable to me since I’m not in the US and can’t trivially “just buy puts on the companies you believe will fail”, so yelling at the cloud and hoping something will change is the best bet I have right now tech-wise.
I don’t even see open-source/altruism as a way to achieve what I want; the blocker preventing what I want in tech isn’t code, it’s monopolies that have the law (or at least the lawyers) on their side. No amount of code is going to change that, and I don’t have the resources to set a legal precedent confirming adversarial interoperability as legal and take on the worldwide tech industry who will no doubt put their entire war chests towards litigating against such a precedent.
There's a whole big world out there that hasn't heard of Nvidia. Go find them, volunteer at a local non profit, help people you think need your help (Alan Watts has a bit on who not to help though). A human has to have a purpose, even if that purpose is planning the next cruise destination. That sounds boring as hell to me, personally, but that's at least got my friend doing things and leaving the house. Learn new skills. Travel. Make friends in strange new places. For the love of Dang, don't just sit at home on HN.
Or do. I'm just some rando on the Internet. (This message brought to you by someone who spent a year retired, posting on HN, and is now, back, gainful employed, trading hours for dollars. Email in profile if you wanna connect.)
One of the problems with being paid, is that it removes a lot of the joy from it.
Nobody on Reddit is desperately trying to remind the world they exist.
What the recruitment companies seemed to never post was actual jobs, the thing that they are supposed to be doing.
After that I barely look at LinkedIn.
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.
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.
> 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.
It feels like complaining that the strip bar has alcohol and nudity everywhere, why are you there?
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?
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.
ChatGPT takes on $globalevent are not examples of that. But they seem to be more favoured by the LinkedIn algorithm because of rather than despite how generic they are and how artificial their engagement boosting is.
As an employee, you do not get rich operating and maintaining a glorified contacts manager.
Don’t get me wrong, as a founder/shareholder of a globally-used Rolodex you can make decent money. But as an employee, you don’t get much benefit besides market rate salary for the work you do.
Which means the employees there have an incentive to game the system. If the “reward function” set by leadership is increased time spent on the platform (also known as “engagement”), then you will maximize that metric to advance your own career.
Similarly, until the end of ZIRP, “engagement” happened to be the currency of the technology industry, so even the executives and leaders of the company had an incentive to encourage maximization of this metric by their employees.
LinkedIn could absolutely detect the typical slop we associate with this platform (nowadays even easier with LLMs - turns out they work both ways). They could discourage low-effort posting by rate-limiting or charging for them. Social media companies absolutely can detect and discourage bad behaviour (despite their claims to the contrary), it’s just that for a long while there was no reason to, and even now there isn’t because their behavior during ZIRP cemented their monopoly.
At one of my past companies, I recall a recruiter disqualifying a candidate for a SWE role solely for having a "weird" headline banner image on their LinkedIn profile.
The "weird" image was a benign screenshot of a landscape backdrop of some Miyazaki film. No characters, no action sequences -- literally just trees, mountains, shit like that.
This is the kind of lunacy you're up against.
Nothing necessarily wrong with watching anime, but choosing to broadcast that on LinkedIn would generally demonstrate severely lacking judgement.
I think many if not most people will have negative associations when they think of adult anime enthusiasts, therefore most people with good social skills would not put anime on their LinkedIn.
I also probably wouldn’t want to hire someone who’s holding a gun in their LinkedIn photos (unless it was related to their work), even though I’m a hobbyist shooter myself. I think shooting is a cool hobby, but I understand that for many people it’s a weird enough hobby that it would be downright stupid to advertise it in an unrelated professional context.
The problem isn’t anime (or guns), it’s the poor judgement demonstrated by adding pointless question marks on what might otherwise be a good profile.
Though, I don't know: would putting any film background on a LinkedIn profile read as "unprofessional"? (I don't know; I've never used LinkedIn in any capacity.)
I think it really depends on the film. I doubt the expected value of putting a special background on your LinkedIn profile is very high.
people want to socialise in all sorts of contexts. think of it as hanging out at the bar after hours at a conference.
I think big business it's also a way of keeping in contact with former colleagues so that when you're interested in jumping to another company you can do it easily in one place.
Otherwise it's a place for sales people to pump out garbage posts.
If feels cringy and disgusting, apologies to engineers here who worked hard on that but that has no place in anything related to professionals and careers. I go there once every few years, do accept meaninglessly on all new connections and log off, ignoring all other parts. If I lose the job I'll update profile but otherwise the same.
In any case, the best advice I got on LinkedIn was from a mentor helping me find my first SE job who told me: You don't have to like it, but you would be stupid not to use it.
"As a third-year student in Computer Science at the University of Tzatziki, I would never use unwrap, I'd use expect, so then the error log that I skipped over would be accurate..." blahblahblah
Unfortunately I tend to miss people reaching out to me because I dont check it otherwise.
My issue with LinkedIn goes beyond the cringeworthy content. It's the best platform to stalk people and collect any info using OSINT. Unlike other platforms where you can have some nicknames etc., you are most likely to have legit info in there. I wouldn't be surprised later if digital ID in smartphones will be required to update/sign up there, "to make sure we fight fake accounts!!"
It's the main platform of interest if you ever talk to data brokers just because of the richness of personal information, employment history, and social network (connections) information present there. Microsoft is sitting on a goldmine of personally-identifiable information, and the platform is aggressively scraped every millisecond for new data.
And investors.
Then, it is like, things that are not good for you, but you do anyway like drinking sugary beverages, staying awake too late in the night, drinking that last couple beers that you didn't need to drink and didn't enjoy but then give you this morning headache.
then you find their profile and you're left with the question "Have they really been a manager at Arby's for twenty years, or were they a manager twenty years ago and then forgot they had a linkedin?"
But to achieve any usefulness from the platform I have to aggressively prune, by blocking every contact who ever posts something I don't find interesting. My block list is vast, and my threshold for blocking is incredibly low.
Ultimately, it's probably only a community of about 100 experts that post informatively on the energy industry.
So long as you don't mind doing the work, I find LinkedIn's algorithm to be the best of the main platforms at respecting my choices of who I want to hear from (although admittedly I should probably be using Bluesky instead).
I've also had tens of people tell me they really enjoy my posts on LinkedIn - I tend to post slightly against the mainstream opinions in my industry, and with humour, so I may not have developed a particularly professional reputation, but I've gained more publicity than anyone else in my company outside of the Exec level.
IDK if the vapid LLM slop is worse than this pit of despair and misery, hard to say.
Do you want to work in a company where HR is lazy to even work?
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.
I have no idea.
The linkedin cringe comes from this place.
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"
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.
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?
It’s making money to spend quality time with loved ones and pay the bills. For some people that’s enough (no judgement).
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.
I mean, yes, there are some people trying to use Twitter to show that they're smart. But my impression is that the overall vibe of it is trying to show that you're influential. People follow you. They retweet your posts. That's the "success metric".
Note well: I'm not actually on Twitter. This is my impression from outside.
(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.
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.
I _do_ have acquaintances I made outside of working life on LinkedIn, though - the only two that are really active are a mechanical engineer who mostly just posts about robotics and someone in marketing. I don't know if it's because I'm just really good friends with the latter person, but I've never felt annoyed reading their posts; they mostly seem to just talk about enjoying conferences or new externally facing projects - ad campaigns, large-scale promotions, etc - wherever they are currently working. I don't know if part of that is they're in the EU and the culture for marketers there is different?
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)
Yes, it can.
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.
When someone starts introducing themselves a “LinkedIn top voice” or whatever you’d do best to run away quickly.
Is that intentional and a joke? I hope so. I find it funny.
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.
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.
The whole thing is sickening
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.
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).
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.
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.
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..
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.
The feed is hell. The content is cringe. All true. But it’s a very good 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.
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.
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.
duxup•2mo ago
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•2mo ago
mnky9800n•2mo ago
kodama-lens•2mo ago