I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned…
I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s a place where people post half baked nonsense all for the sake of building a personal brand that nobody really cares about.
I log in and see constant posting that I can only describe as toxic mediocrity. A seemingly endless stream of posts that are over fluffed, over produced and ultimately say nothing.
(I considered posting a screenshot here but will save the folks in my 'network' from potential doxxing. The LinkedIn Lunatics subreddit has no shortage of curated examples.)
I like writing on the internet, probably more than most. That doesn’t mean that I think its useful to post vapid nonsense on a regular schedule just for the sake of posting.
You’ve probably seen the posts, both the reality and the memes. Generic advice disguised as a story. What my divorce taught me about B2B sales kind of stuff. It seems to be encouraged in much the same way that SEO content is encouraged. Yeah, it probably increases some metric around views or whatever but honestly, what for?
The vast majority of it falls into a category I would describe as Toxic Mediocrity. It’s soft, warm and hard to publicly call out but if you’re not deep in the bubble it reads like nonsense. Unlike it’s cousins ‘Toxic Positivity’ and ‘Toxic Masculinity’ it isn’t as immediately obvious. It’s content that spins itself as meaningful and insightful while providing very little of either. Underneath the one hundred and fifty words is, well, nothing. It’s a post that lets you know that sunny days are warm or its better not to be a total psychopath. What is anyone supposed to learn from that.
What frustrates me the most about it is that the underlying premise of LinkedIn is still good. There’s some decent stuff on there in amongst all the noise. But, for whatever reason, that good stuff gets lost amongst a million posts of washed out nonsense.
Worse still is that those same lessons about ‘how to grow on LinkedIn’ encourage users to engage with this kind of content. Leave a pointless congratulatory comment and both you an the author will earn more professional network points.
As a result, the mysterious algorithm sees that same content as content that boosts time on site and the cycle continues. LinkedIn wants you on LinkedIn. Comments, likes and other engagement is a sign that you’re still online. It likely correlated well with clicks on ads and conversion to premium.
It annoys me in particular because I think people post this kind of stuff from a genuine place. They care about their careers and want to do better. I don’t want to shut that down. What is frustrating though is that unless you’re being hired by someone else who posts this way I am strongly convinced this behavior doesn’t work in your favor.
So what should someone do? Honestly, the best approach is to remember that LinkedIn is a website owned by Microsoft, trying to make money for Microsoft, based on time spent on the site. Nothing you post there is going to change your career. Doing work that matters might. Drawing attention to that might. Go for depth over frequency.
If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there. You’ll get less views and less engagement but there’s less temptation to post nonsense just for likes. You’re going to have a harder time getting people to stick around and read what you’re writing but that additional pressure raises the bar. Yeah, there are plenty of blogs that mostly go unread but even knowing that people will click away when they get bored should help distill your posts into content that matters.
Lots of people who write good content don’t live on LinkedIn, they might repurpose things for the platform but they exist elsewhere. If you’re more of a consumer than a producer and you want to help make things better the best thing you can do is reward the real stuff. Find those people who aren’t playing the game and promote that instead.
Or, failing all that, as with most nonsense on the internet, you can always your laptop for the day and go outside.
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Comments
By nickfromseattle 2025-08-1710:4432 reply This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
> Doing work that matters might.
This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> Go for depth over frequency.
Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.
Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.
By makeitdouble 2025-08-1711:323 reply > This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
That's spot on.
And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.
I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.
We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
By StopDisinfo910 2025-08-1713:182 reply As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting.
Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.
But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
By makeitdouble 2025-08-1719:391 reply > pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example
Pricing can definitely be marketing and is crucial to the company. The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.
Otherwise I agree bullshitting can be interesting and analytical, when looking at a full campaign promoting a life style or solely aimed at imprinting the brand, it's full on the fuzzy side but it is all extremely thought out, and grounded in relatively solid research when it comes to the bigger players.
By StopDisinfo910 2025-08-189:34 > The rest sounds more like operations and customer relations to me.
Marketing is not advertisement.
It definitely has a significant overlap with operations. I mean it’s in the name really: it’s about how you go to the market.
Every time someone wonders if they would make more by going for a subscription or a lump sum payment and how they should structure their pricing tiers and what should be put in them, they are unknowingly doing marketing.
By Henchman21 2025-08-1714:075 reply Marketing is lying. Convincing someone to buy something they don’t actually need? Thats a drain on society. It’s become so pervasive we go to great lengths to justify it. But at its core its fundamentally dishonest.
By dbmikus 2025-08-1715:36 You can market products that people need. A big part of this is explaining and educating someone about what your product does, another part is just getting the word out there. Every website homepage is more-or-less a marketing page.
If no one is marketing a product, then nobody knows about it.
So what are the people with worthwhile products and services supposed to do then? Just not engage in marketing? Sincere question.
By Henchman21 2025-08-1715:524 reply Yes, that's my take. I'm of the opinion we should outlaw advertising. If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.
But then, I don't exist to do business. Acquiring profit isn't my goal. Acquiring status, rank, or advantage over my fellows isn't my goal. Its the goal of those we let run roughshod over the rest of us justified by phrases like "well its just human nature to be greedy; nothing to be done!" or "If I don't do it someone else will!"
This is how low we've sunk: lying is so normalized that we can't envison a world without it.
By duckmysick 2025-08-1722:18 > If your product is good, word will spread via word-of-mouth.
Not necessarily. First, you somehow need to reach the initial batch of customers - whether by free samples or talking to power users, you're already engaging in marketing. Then, even when they like your product, they have no obligation to do the advertising for you, for free.
And it's possible the company folds before the product reaches the critical mass to rely just on word-of-mouth.
By cootsnuck 2025-08-1716:13 I mean I don't disagree. One of my favorite quotes I've been saying for years is "Advertising shits in your brain."
But at the same time I think only relying on word of mouth is a bit biased against people who aren't starting with an advantage of a pre-existing network for whatever worthwhile service they could be offering.
That being said, plenty of successful service based freelancers will tell you most of their business is from referrals at a certain point. It's just hard to get to that point. (I say this as someone who only gets business from referrals right now, but wants that to not be the case.)
Yea idk, I totally agree with you in spirit. But I care about practicality and I have found worthwhile services from solo-freelancers via marketing.
Good marketing doesn't have to equal garbage. But I feel ya. Most marketing is mind numbing.
By tmcdos 2025-08-1815:19 The book SELLING THE WHEEL by Jeff Cox and Howard Stevens is quite good in explaining the lifecycle of every product (not sure about services). Must-read for every product owner/seller/developer.
By pjmlp 2025-08-189:20 Lets say you're a freelancer, why is a company supposed to hire you then.
You are the product, how do you suggest to sell yourself?
Companies aren't going to waste time looking into Github, if that is your take.
By tacitusarc 2025-08-1715:571 reply I think if we strengthened fraud provision we eliminate many societal problems, including marketing. If marketers were required to be completely honest and transparent, a lot of this goes away.
you can lie (advertise) by omission... I see no way one can legislate all the things that marketing campaign must tell you about the product/service
By tacitusarc 2025-08-193:34 This is part of fraud (from Wikipedia):
> While the precise definitions and requirements of proof vary among jurisdictions, the requisite elements of fraud as a tort generally are the intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the detriment of the victim.
By SoftTalker 2025-08-1716:31 It can be this, but there are a lot of things that people actually do need, and they have choices in what to buy. Good marketing will catch their interest and convert it to sales.
By itsoktocry 2025-08-1715:103 reply Classic zero accountability take.
Why are you getting suckered into buying something you don't need because a commercials says so?
By Henchman21 2025-08-1715:421 reply Because a megacorporation hires psychologists (in the form of marketers) to gin up scenarios where class mobility is implied as a subtext in the acquisition of their goods? I mean, who doesn't want to have the fun/get the girls/get the money because they bought {insert product here}?
How is one to defend one's self against the constant onslaught of bullshit meant to part fools with their money? How is an individual supposed to have any defenses against that? When they're raised in an endless din of lying noise?
Yours is the classic _abusers take_. "If only you were a better person you could stand up for yourself"
People still have agency. It's like when you were a kid and your mother asked you - "would you jump off a cliff too?"
By piperswe 2025-08-1923:49 You'd be surprised how many people could be convinced to jump off the cliff, if billions of dollars were spent on manipulating them into jumping.
By tacitusarc 2025-08-1715:53 Because you are a generally honest and trusting person and so you believe them when they lie to you.
What? What does it mean for a comment on the internet to be non-zero accountability?
By Henchman21 2025-08-1716:03 I took it to mean my take an implied lack of agency when evaluating advertisements in one's life and if one should act on it.
My take would be that one does indeed lack the agency to be able to evaluate ads that way. The environment itself makes it impossible. SNR is way too low to find valid signals to evaluate. The number being purely honest and informative with zero spin must be close to zero.
“1000 songs in your pocket.”
Was that a lie when Apple said it about the iPod?
By alansammarone 2025-08-1714:58 no,thats true and honest marketing. If the iPod stopped working after a year (low quality), or was easily hackable (low effort) - and they didn't include that in the marketing - then it would be lying (Windows).
By pjmlp 2025-08-189:19 Correction, developers that only work on software products, because those of us doing freelancing, consulting or working in non-software companies, really get it.
We have to, if we want to stay in business.
> Many devs don't like "bullshitting”
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
By _swfb 2025-08-1717:27 I have noticed that, at least in the Java world, people lie a lot about stuff going "faster", and I think it's just justification to not fix their terrible code.
I have written a lot of JMH benchmarks in the last year to test out claims from developers (some are on my blog, a lot I haven't written about yet), and so much shit that's supposedly "faster" simply isn't.
For example, I had a coworker who would write all this logic into tons of nested and sequential `for` loops, and the logic was disgusting but lent itself well enough to the Java streams API. I brought this up to this coworker, and he said he wouldn't do that because the streams are "slower" and that he "benchmarked to check". I wrote my own JMH benchmark to check and it turns out that the streams (at least for an application like this) are not actually slower than the loops; the two versions ran within about 3% of each other's. I don't think he actually wrote benchmarks, I think he was just lying and wanted me to stop interrogating.
By makeitdouble 2025-08-1719:52 All technical fields sure have their bullshit, wrapped in a layer of something else.
Another one pretty common backing decisions with bullshit or misleading numbers. Like A/B tests that don't cover the whole behavior spectrum or metrics that don't match the point we're making but sound close enough.
By thomasahle 2025-08-1714:212 reply > > Doing work that matters might.
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
> > Go for depth over frequency.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?
If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".
Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.
By cootsnuck 2025-08-1715:45 It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual.
If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.
And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.
Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.
You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.
You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.
You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.
And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.
Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.
It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.
That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).
By botacode 2025-08-1715:43 Actually, "quality-of-work" and "time-you-share-it" are both necessary to get on the flywheel of product improvement.
Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.
By calmbonsai 2025-08-1717:50 > I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.
> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.
> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...
I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.
Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
By motorest 2025-08-1717:10 > You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.
I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?
By notahacker 2025-08-1713:343 reply Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT
And written in a very specific way
Not like that. Like this.
The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.
And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.
It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.
And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.
I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn
But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.
That sounds like mediocrity to me.
In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
My impression was all 'content' that does well on LinkedIn (including the stuff I like), is because people want to engage with the creator in hopes they get in their good graces which will somehow help them land a job, or they're in a pact with others and like each others' content.
Recommending others and getting recommended by folks whose word means something might be meaningful, but that's about it.
Regular (and often painfully below average) rubes with a dozen self-appointed titles (SaaS platform evnagelist, Innovator, Tinkerer, Father), who post articles like 'Here's what murdering a homeless man taught me about b2b sales' are the definition of cringe.
By notahacker 2025-08-1718:19 I think you're quite right that most content gets likes and engagement from people promoting their company, their mates in the industry and people whose attention they want to attract, and usually doesn't spread much beyond that. That's the case whether it's genuinely interesting or generic promotions.
But the "viral" content seems to be something else entirely: as you point out a lot of the people are rubes running pre-product start-ups or consulting, and surely there are more people wanting to impress people with actual budgets and teams and products. Feels like they're successfully catering to an algorithm calibrated for bored but easily impressed scrollers (as well as other rubes and bot-operated accounts that want to share their equally unlikely takes on B2B sales) rather than their network.
Recently I saw a recruiter posting side by side screenshots of the engagement with a high effort collection of industry info she'd compiled with infographics and links, and a copy/paste of an unfunny meme with a tagline applying it to her industry. You'll never guess which one had 10x the engagement...
Engagement slop is next level, I wouldn't even call this mediocrity. I rather meant genuine thought leaders. E.g. in my area of expertise (embedded systems) there are a couple of people who dominate LinkedIn on advice in that area.
Their advice is not necessarily bad, but not particularly original either. They just beat their drums with half a dozen of opinions they paraphrase over and over. They seem to have certain experience as engineers, but I wouldn't expect them to be particularly good ones.
On the other hand, I know a couple of outstandingly good engineers I have worked with, who also have some mindshare on private blogs and conferences, but nowhere near the thought leaders, and definitely not on LinkedIn
By cootsnuck 2025-08-1715:26 Now here's the question then...do you wish those outstandingly good engineers (who do seem to want to share their thoughts hence the blogs and conferences) were sharing some of their good thoughts on LinkedIn?
Do we wish more worthwhile people were posting on LinkedIn? Or do we think that posting on LI is incompatible with sharing worthwhile thoughts?
By NeutralCrane 2025-08-1711:512 reply > This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>.
Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.
Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
Plato identified this 2400 years ago as a fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you end up with people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on getting elected and not people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on governing.
The problem of marketers remains unsolved after millennia.
By Spooky23 2025-08-1717:37 That's why engineers are engineers. As a profession, they are trained to find the optimal answer to the questions they are asked.
The problem is, people are independent agents and generally prioritize their own outcome. If "being humbled" by some nonsense on LinkedIn gets you a high paying job that you perform poorly at, that's a win -- for you. Even if you get fired, you just roll with it and move to bigger and better things to fail up with.
Is it the best way to solve the problem the company has? No. But linkedin guy dngaf and is not asking that question!
By anon84873628 2025-08-1714:52 To me it's the most obvious sign that the person won't really be engaged with the work at your company. They're just using it as another bullet point in their "personal brand", while spending most time on outside activities. Then expect them to move on in 1-2 years anyway.
By melvinroest 2025-08-1711:201 reply > This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.
I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.
Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
By nickfromseattle 2025-08-1717:321 reply I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice.
But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]
[0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...
By melvinroest 2025-08-186:51 Thanks! Handy that you put it all together.
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
…and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.
By itronitron 2025-08-1712:002 reply I remember fondly visiting my grandmother in the accounting department of Acme Tool & Die in Cleveland, Ohio. After a snack of her homemade molasses cookies we would gather around the fax machine, carefully sending invoices and unrolling the printed confirmations before filing them away.
By 2b3a51 2025-08-1714:30 How about invoices by telex and payments received by telegraphic transfer to the bank? No cookies though. I'm not sure how the invoicing method or payment channel affect the marketing discussion.
In the case of the shipping company I then worked for the marketing process was somewhat old school and involved pubs.
By fragmede 2025-08-1714:55 Which is very cute, but where'd you put her after she started spouting conspiracy theories?
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?
By throwawaybob420 2025-08-1714:36 Yeah that was my first thought as well.
Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.)
So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.
The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.
LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
By mpeg 2025-08-1717:29 I have a bunch of LinkedIn connections claiming they get those fabled six and seven figure client engagements where the client “doesn’t care about the code, they just care about business results” and a lot of other buzzwords.
I do data consulting part time, I do very much provide business centric solutions and measurable results (alongside code that your tech team won’t hate) and am an expert in marketing technology, applied AI and a bunch of other “hot” subjects like that.
In my work with huge, billion dollar companies, the consulting dream that LI influencers sell feels like a fantasy world. I have to provide and justify a day rate, and when my clients do have a big CAPEX project I’m bidding against Accenture, Palantir, etc. and I don’t expect to win it.
If anyone really consistently lands these amazing, big pocket clients, please let me be your intern.
Just going to throw this out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.
> If you're in marketing, "kill yourself"
is not the insightful bit of wisdom you think it is, even if it did come from Bill Hicks
By boccko 2025-08-1715:50 I try to avoid resorting to ad hominem, but maybe it's just you? In general, no marketing would dial back the economy drastically, which I think is a good idea. Depends on your goals of course.
I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.
For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.
And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
By RugnirViking 2025-08-1718:56 It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.
By oytis 2025-08-1718:24 I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.
By aledalgrande 2025-08-1718:22 > Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt
and funnily enough, this is still marketing
"build it and they will come" doesn't work
By gchamonlive 2025-08-1714:13 But that's the thing, revenue is a very poor metric for quality. It's a very good metric for marketing as you said, but focusing solely on that, which is what linkedin rewards, and potentially forgetting to invest time in becoming an objectively better developer is why linekdin rewards mediocrity as the article says.
So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.
By baq 2025-08-1710:54 Are you an employer or an employee?
By tomas789 2025-08-1714:03 I used to write actively on LinkedIn. Nothing big but still something. I couldn’t align with myself with the original post but I couldn’t tell why. This is aligned with my understanding of how LinkedIn works much more. Thank you for explaining that to me.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-08-1712:51 If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc.
I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.
Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.
But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.
By porridgeraisin 2025-08-1711:493 reply > if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.
> winning on linkedin
> push them to
* vomits *
> millions of dollars
dirty money.
</rant>
I must say, working on a project with weak marketing and sales support is pretty depressing, especially if the engineering itself is good
By porridgeraisin 2025-08-1712:28 Yeah, the thing is that if one person starts doing it, everyone else must as well if they want to compete, regardless of intentions, so it becomes a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.
If it leads to someone purchasing a solution that solves a need, how is that zero value?
If someone has a legitimate need, they will look for a solution in appropriate locations (directories, search, magazines, what have you) and do not need someone to scream their marketing blurbs into the void in hopes of being noticed.
By donkers 2025-08-1716:17 And marketing folks would be involved in getting the product into directories, search, magazines, etc. What is it that you think marketing people do? They don't write ad copy all day.
By jmye 2025-08-1719:01 Right??? Why did Uber ever advertise! Everyone who needed a cab but was tired of cab companies could’ve just like, searched the internet for “service to connect me with normal people who will take me places in their own car” which was also obviously a solution that existed and everyone would’ve known to search for!
Brilliant.
By CER10TY 2025-08-1716:09 Or, far more likely, they'll reach out to someone in their network. To land in that network, you have to market your services. LinkedIn is somewhat useful for that, but less so nowadays.
By cpursley 2025-08-1717:05 Only a certain percentage of potential buyers activity look for a solution. Even Apple advertises.
By cma 2025-08-1713:57 As a counter example to the logic, not saying linkedin is this, smashing up someone's stuff could also make them need to buy new stuff to solve a need but wouldn't in any way provide value.
By spaqin 2025-08-1714:12 Are you sure they actually needed it, rather than got sold on something that wasn't really a problem before?
This is a prevailing opinion within a substantial minority of HN’s population. I am curious, how would you do it differently?
They wouldn't, they work for someone else and are isolated from the revenue making part of the operation. And the largest anti marketing screamers are often high paid devs part of VC funded companies that don't actually make any money (this is a VC forum, after all). Outside of the valley bubble, for those of us running profitable business, we have to find sustainable channels that work and get the word out. That said, there's a reasonable middle ground between being sleazy and scammy and actually offering value.
By spaqin 2025-08-1714:14 Turns out you can work on something you don't really believe in as long as the money is good.
By lambdasquirrel 2025-08-1721:26 > This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.
At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.
Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.
By Xymist 2025-08-1719:31 This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy.
I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.
By _swfb 2025-08-1717:16 I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks?
Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.
I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.
By bravesoul2 2025-08-1721:13 > The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Where do I find people posting such rare unicorns!
By scirob 2025-08-1723:52 Great take, would love to see your Ln profile for the context in case this HN account is not Anon
By sigbottle 2025-08-1713:46 Damn. I disagree with what should happen sometimes, but it's helpful to hear how it is.
By AndrewKemendo 2025-08-1714:491 reply I’d love to see your “million dollar linkedin” if you’re willing to share it
By gedy 2025-08-1714:51 TBH it's probably just lead-gen or sales outreach..
By meow_mix 2025-08-1723:40 This was going to be my comment, but I was going to be a lot more rude
By antonvs 2025-08-1711:55 > > Nothing you post there is going to change your career.
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'
Nothing you post there is going to change your career if your career involves producing real value.
By scarface_74 2025-08-1714:25 I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”.
All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.
It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.
For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.
By brcmthrowaway 2025-08-1717:56 I need to make millions from a LinkedIn post
By 1oooqooq 2025-08-1714:01 wow. you weaponized medicrity to save a few bucks on an actual marketing campaign. so unique. good for you.
By ohdeargodno 2025-08-1712:281 reply >The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed.
>Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.
LinkedIn rewards mediocrity.
> your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity.
>Building in public
Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode".
I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it.
In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.
What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential.
What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.
Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.
At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?
We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-08-1712:551 reply A guy who has morals in this age? Sign me up,
I really want to incentivize such honesty and morals in general It seems that you have your company listed in the about page of hackernews so that is nice.
I wish your company all the best! Seriously!
By fhd2 2025-08-1721:54 Not sure that post demonstrated any particular morals, but thanks :) So far I've had the luxury to get by well with mostly only doing what I think is right. I consider that a luxury indeed, I don't mind paying for it, much like I pay for other luxuries.
By woooooo 2025-08-1714:37 Engineering leader | ex-something
...
Is that person more likely to be a leader or a follower and ass-kisser in your experience?
LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-08-1712:46 Because ego's are fragile.
People might have envy for others success which would hurt their ego, but they are greedy enough to stroke someone else's ego, just so that they can get internet points or some "value creation" so that one day others can stroke their egos too.
> its just a gathering of pretentious people.
Tell us more about HN...
By zwnow 2025-08-185:56 Yea agree, same issue here.
By nathanaldensr 2025-08-1711:35 If you want to see how true this is, visit r/linkedinlunatics[1] on Reddit.
By roenxi 2025-08-1712:02 Haven't the boomers more or less aged out of jobseeking at this point? Even the youngest of the Baby Boomers are around 60 and most of them are in their 70s.
By refactor_master 2025-08-1711:01 There are a lot of boomers out there though, and you won’t reach them on TikTok.
By giantg2 2025-08-1711:45 Retail - most of the good jobs are impossible to get. That's probably what I'll have to do when my current company finishes firing me with my disability. I have used a bunch of the regular job search boards - Dice, Ladders, Indeed, etc. I've also used LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Blind, Hackajob. The tech job market in my location seems abysmal.
By elmo2you 2025-08-1712:14 gen-x here ... I'd say: anywhere/everywhere but LinkedIn. Be observant and creative.
Personally, I think that using any service that claim to deliver, for which in the real world I just can't find much supporting evidence and otherwise mostly claims from (direct or indirect) stakeholders (incl. users themselves), feels rather dumb. LinkedIn, and the ecosystem developed around it, has every incentive to be dishonest. In such cases, the burden of evidence that proves otherwise needs to be high. I've not seen that bar ever reached for LinkedIn; not even remotely. At least not where I live.
If my perspective leads to people claiming I'm "denying reality" (heard that a few times), it only suggests me how (practically or emotionally) invested some people apparently must be. To me it still looks and feels mostly like a huge fraud-machine. Nothing particularly new specific to LinkedIn though. Before LinkedIn, I've seen how recruitment and hiring agencies wiggled their way into the employment market, where I grew up in. It did not see it do any good. I'd say it shared plenty of characteristics with cancer.
It may take considerable effort, but I'd recommend doing your own due diligence and find potential employers yourself, to then approach them directly. Still works quite well, even today and without needing questionable middlemen/services.
Just my two cents; mileage may vary.
are retiring
lots of phenomena that get incessantly overtheorized and misattributed these days can be simply explained by this
By jibal 2025-08-1712:54 50-60% have retired. The rest soon will. In any case the claim I responded to is absurd.
Your second line is a non sequitur.
Gen X usually gets lumped in with boomers because they’re basically invisible. But Gen X DGAF either way.
By forgotoldacc 2025-08-1713:532 reply Boomer is now used to refer to a mindset and not just a generation.
Gen X very much became the boomers they hated. Half of the millennials I've known for years have become identical to the boomers they complained about 10 years ago. The millennials I know complain about zoomers being lazy and not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and using strange lingo and being addicted to things their generation wouldn't have tolerated. And they things they like suck but the thing millennials liked were "good".
Basically, boomer is anyone older than you and acts like a grumpy or entitled old person. Zoomer is anyone younger than you who makes you uncomfortable with your age.
By cootsnuck 2025-08-1716:04 I'm a millennial and I think you summed it up pretty well.
By jibal 2025-08-180:04 The ironic thing is that boomers--the generation that threw off dress codes and produced the anti-war, civil rights, environmental, women's, and LBGT+ movements didn't have that mindset, but their parents and grandparents did.
By jibal 2025-08-1712:55 That makes no sense and isn't relevant.
By throwaway4736 2025-08-1713:28 [dead]
LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for.
Things I don't find it useful for:
Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot
Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."
Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired
Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.
"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.
Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.
Awww cute videos with a baby or small animal.
By glitchcrab 2025-08-1717:234 reply A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.
Cool idea. I used to have
"[crab emoji] positions only - or get blocked"
in my profile and it did not deter anyone from offering me Java positions.
Okay, but maybe recruiters aren't up on rust iconography. Seems like an ineffective way to communicate a preference (vs it being a shibboleth with the GP).
I mean, unless the recruiter is a rust programmer they're going to have a hard time distinguishing your profile vs just "positions only - or get blocked" (ie don't contact me unless it's about recruitment).
That was very much the intention. I think good tech recruiters should know their field and I know some that do. It's just that LinkedIn is a swamp of bad ones and my little experiment proofed to me that signal noise ratio there is so low that it is useless for me.
By recursive 2025-08-1721:40 Telling someone not to contact you in a way you expect them not to understand seems like a mostly philosophical exercise.
By monkeyelite 2025-08-1719:422 reply Is it bad to use automation?
By internetter 2025-08-1720:11 Yes. If I want a job without a prior relationship there’s plenty of sites for that like indeed. I’m only interested in job offers from people who have read and valued my work.
Edit: and clearly this is the case because it’s not “Google bot”, it’s a robot pretending to be human like “Amy Bushwack from google” but really it’s a bot
TBH automation for finding/filtering candidates, but preferably personal email to my inbox. I can tell when you’ve used some cruddy software to send automated follow-ups four times after I didn’t respond to the first message.
By monkeyelite 2025-08-181:52 I agree - I would expect all follow-ups to be personalized. If my job was a recruiter, I would probably use templates for FAQs to save time.
By stalfosknight 2025-08-1717:35 Good idea! Thank you
LLMs have solved this at scale. Really you're just filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters at volume.
By glitchcrab 2025-08-1718:051 reply Yeah, it was never going to be a forever solution, but it's served me well for the last few years.
By ethbr1 2025-08-1719:26 Given the average LinkedIn recruiter, filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters is a decent value add.
By bartread 2025-08-1718:24 That's a pretty exhaustive list, but I think you forgot, "What X taught me about B2B sales..." type posts. These do seem to have died down but 2 - 3 years ago my feed was absolutely awash with them. They were like a really beige version of those daft TikTok crazes you see. Very much good riddance.
By darth_avocado 2025-08-1719:552 reply As a general rule, if you’re an engineering candidate that made a profile years ago and is missing updates and haven’t put in much description about your work experience beyond “I worked here from this date to that date”, you’re probably a good engineer.
That’s how I find LinkedIn useful.
By spauldo 2025-08-183:25 That doesn't jive with my experience.
When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.
Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.
By bravesoul2 2025-08-1721:11 That is in danger of being a typical "weird heuristic" that linked in loves to post about (with high p values).
I have seen people say for recruiting advise.
* They recommend you hustle. E.g. deliver your resume pretending to be a food delivery
* Don't follow up if explicitly not told to by your recruiters instructions.
* You must have an up to date linked in.
Usually in hot take format that if you dont do that you got no chance.
So everyone stick to measuring for the role!
By phendrenad2 2025-08-1719:321 reply The sad part is, a quick algorithm tweak would probably fix this, but I doubt they're interested in making any changes - Why would they, when LinkedIn is already the winner of the winner-take-all "business social media" market. Sure, they might make user experience better, but that doesn't increase their bottom line.
By ethbr1 2025-08-1720:21 I think I heard about something similar happening in the web search market too...
By ivape 2025-08-1719:34 The reason people are hurt by LinkedIn is we had hoped (somewhere deep down) it would be a modest community of professionals that didn’t descend into ostentatious self aggrandizement.
Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.
Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-08-1717:52 > Typical motivational/marketing stuff
Disproportionately, and predictably corny and insipid.
By Tier2Capital 2025-08-189:47 that sounds a bit rough on graduates. we all start from the bottom and some people are not born with well connected parents or schools with wide networks. I actually think linkedin is a good way to pay it forward (although NOT for low effort graduates who send the same template spam message to everybody)
By fHr 2025-08-1721:20 trys way to hard to be a social platform
Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.
I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.
My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
By gwbas1c 2025-08-1716:44 > I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
By Tade0 2025-08-1718:15 A while ago I had a recruiter try to, ahem, coach me on my CV, which apparently had too few details (apparently still enough to have this interview, but the irony was lost on her) and on my LinkedIn profile, which wasn't up to date and also had few details (deliberately BTW, as I was getting spam).
My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.
