Comment by tombert

19 hours ago

I agree with most of what you said, but LinkedIn, at least at a superficial level, is the absolute worst to me. It's full of a bunch of inspiration-porn bullshit that I find unbelievably mind-numbing, but also people treat it like Facebook and post a bunch of political and divisive shit on there as well.

I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit, and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I've debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one" or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the reject pile.

So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to be fair.

7 comments

tombert

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kelnos  15 hours ago

Agreed. There are lots of people posting shitty things on Facebook, Twitter, etc., but on LinkedIn, everyone is so fake. They're putting their best professional face on, heavily self-censoring themselves, and their content plays to the whole "employment culture". It's not even a little bit genuine.

  • tombert  15 hours ago

    I don't even know why they do it. Everyone knows it's fake and performative, this couldn't possibly actually help their careers could it?

    AI has made it worse, but they were always horrible.

userbinator  15 hours ago

now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.

What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.

  • joombaga  11 hours ago

    Software jobs for sure, but I've been applying for jobs with employers that have other types of jobs too (nursing, accounting, industrial engineering, etc.) and the requirement is not solely for their software jobs. Some have fields that pattern match (for these I put something like "https://linkedin.com/I_DO_NOT_USE_LINKEDIN") while others use an integration that actually require you to sign in to Linkedin (some of these I've created accounts for and then deleted them, some I've managed to bypass by hacking on the POST a bit, and others I've decided not to apply for).