Live data from Hacker News

LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

npr.org

101–110 of 336 posts

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#101

What is the next best platform to move to?

Meatspace. I don't think any digital platform is ever going to fill that role. By default anything online is already way less genuine feeling.

Meatspace isn’t going to work that well going forward because of wfh making physical proximity irrelevant. I’m contemplating a move to a company located in NYC but I live in Dallas (it’s wfh obviously). I wouldn’t have been able to make that relationship in meatspace as I’d never even heard of the company before let alone shook the hands of someone who worked there.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#102
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely frustrating, because in 2023 you're sort of expected to have a linkedin (some job applications even require it!), but people have started treating it like the next FaceBook. From 2020-2022 I saw a lot of COVID conspiracy theories and political memes being posted, and I wanted to respond to them, but since LinkedIn is basically a resume, I withheld responding, for the same reason that I don't put my vot…

Further to that, my feed have been filled with Certification posts. Folks would boast about their 3 hour Certification courses with long cringe posts! And LinkedIn would not stop it, because they need to sell LinkedIn Learning!

Honestly, if it were just people bragging about how they took a 3 hour class and got a useless certification, I don't think it would bother me. LinkedIn markets itself as a glorified resume, and it's pretty common for people to fluff up their meaningless certs.

I just feel like there should be somewhat of a boundary between personal and professional life. There are things I would say to my friends that I wouldn't tell anyone in charge of giving me money, at least not directly, and I feel like LinkedIn (purposefully or otherwise) is actively trying to erode that boundary. It's horrible.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#103

Has anyone else noticed that LinkedIn is turning into a shitty social media platform? Memes and videos are now being posted. I used to get decent use from it but stopped updating my profile because the site is cancer. Full of self patting on the back and people adding me to “grow their network”. Recruiters contacting me with “perfect fit” position in languages not on my profile. Can someone please develop hacker news…

It’s been like this for many years now. I can’t really remember it otherwise. I’ve lost respect for some colleagues after seeing all the self congratulatory posting that exaggerates what happened and long-winded work stories on their profiles. I’m done with giving folks a pass at this stage on their Linkedin ladder climbing nonsense. Like most social media it’s a giant circlejerk just with a white collar lean.

I think it's even worse than that. I've seen a lot of crazy political discussions there where people, fully identifiable, are just losing their minds, saying racist stuff even.

I have no idea why people would be willing to risk their jobs like that but I see people from Fortune 50 companies doing it. Crazy

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#104
Unrelated, but linkedin has the most user hostile notifications of any site I have ever seen.

I got a notification to follow a podcast the other day. Not a person I follow asking me to follow it, it was a notification saying "here is a random podcast do you want to follow it."

How the hell is that a thing that companies can buy?

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#105

Has anyone else noticed that LinkedIn is turning into a shitty social media platform? Memes and videos are now being posted. I used to get decent use from it but stopped updating my profile because the site is cancer. Full of self patting on the back and people adding me to “grow their network”. Recruiters contacting me with “perfect fit” position in languages not on my profile. Can someone please develop hacker news…

People are now posting about politics there. That's the death knell imo.

People have been posting about politics there for a very long time; it's only just starting to bubble up into your timeline, I suppose.

Don't hesitate to mute accounts. For example, blocking Gary Vee almost single-handedly made my LinkedIn feed usable again. I never followed him or any of his pages to begin with, but enough of my connections embarrassingly engage with those kinds of posts that it cluttered everything up. Go to the source and pull out the root of the problem.

re: politics, there are one or two LinkedIn entities that post the most mildly progressive of content, and it's the knuckle-draggers in the comments that made me block these pages.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#106

I agree with all the takes about LinkedIn turning into a bad social network, but is that intrinsic to its design or is it something that happens no matter what? Is there a way to design a site--at the UI/policy level--to end up with a community that doesn't suck? For Hacker News, for example, is what we like about it just a consequence of the current set of members (in which, case, it might change eventually), or is…

upvotes and downvotes help, and I'd argue HN does a good enough job at preventing new accounts from being able to do disproportionate damage (discouraging bots, astroterfing, etc.)

Another thing is user friendliness and maximizing engagement. Whatever Facebook did around 2015 or so to make everything bloated, animated reactions, and slower seemed to make things more user-friendly for a subset of less technical users, such that people who can't fact-check obviously fake articles and spam posts are enabled and incentivized to post as much as possible, and adding algorithms on top of that to maximize "engagement" make these things inevitable.

Twitter's chronological got turned off as the default at some point for a similar algorithmic "for you" page that I think has also made things worse for their platforms.

No idea about Quora, but eventually for ad-supported sites you start maximizing for time on the site and getting people to look at ads, rather than "quality" in the content on your social media site.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point is valid though. While I see C# listed all the time on normal job posting sites, on HN it's always the sexy meme languages like Rust and Python.

None of those are “meme” languages. I appreciate Python started-off as a toy-like language - but its utility as a glue-language for serious number-crunching (see: how almost all ML projects involve Python somehow) and the admirable community surrounding it means its credibility is established. The worst thing anyone can say about Python is that it’s the new VBA. Rust is the new C++ - Microsoft wouldn’t be investing t…

> Microsoft wouldn’t be investing tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars in enabling Rust for Windows drivers if it wasn’t serious.

I'm absolutely not arguing against your point about Rust, but I wouldn't take what Microsoft is investing in as a strong signal for anything.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point is valid though. While I see C# listed all the time on normal job posting sites, on HN it's always the sexy meme languages like Rust and Python.

None of those are “meme” languages. I appreciate Python started-off as a toy-like language - but its utility as a glue-language for serious number-crunching (see: how almost all ML projects involve Python somehow) and the admirable community surrounding it means its credibility is established. The worst thing anyone can say about Python is that it’s the new VBA. Rust is the new C++ - Microsoft wouldn’t be investing t…

I'm just messing around, I use Python and Rust all the time and I love them. But the larger point is that these are not representative of the average tech job. Most of them are C#, Java, C++, JavaScript, etc. You pretty much only see Rust postings for startups. Python is more common these days, but it was also a HN meme at one point:

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#109

Has anyone else noticed that LinkedIn is turning into a shitty social media platform? Memes and videos are now being posted. I used to get decent use from it but stopped updating my profile because the site is cancer. Full of self patting on the back and people adding me to “grow their network”. Recruiters contacting me with “perfect fit” position in languages not on my profile. Can someone please develop hacker news…

Hacker news is already the hacker news type site for jobs IMO.
Post reply on HN