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LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

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171–180 of 336 posts

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#171

I really admire the creative bullshit these execs come up with, AI can't compete: "This means adapting our organizational structures to improve agility and accountability, establishing unambiguous ownership and driving improved efficiency and transparency through reduced layering".

Kind of ironic of them to mention "improved transparency" while writing in the most possible opaque way. Just say it as it is.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#172
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very subtle. I watched a 2 minute clip of 5 men working together to save a dog from a river. And that was loosely connected to a generic post about how team work is effective. Sometime in the last 5 years LinkedIn just became a slightly more formal variant of FB/Instagram. >Can someone please develop hacker news type basic site but for jobs HN does have a job board: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs And mont…

> HN does have a job board: That’s not a generic job board. It’s only for YC companies.

Yeah, the linked job board is only for YC. The monthly threads are generic, though. And decently active.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#173

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…

The recruiter spam and self promoting content from people who talk like they got 3 mortgages and 4 ex-spouses or ... -the opposite- absolute silence and disdain of a crowd that never posts these thoughts under their real name (and rant on HN or twitter instead speaking their truth on LinkedIn) has always been deafening.

In the age of Musk's twitter it is somewhat peculiar that LinkedIn ended up as the last social media platform where interesting posts can be discovered provided you don't "blind-follow" and follow the right people. None of this will work for those who expect it to work as some kind of magic garden where recruiters will present only what is relevant to you. That LinkedIn though never existed in the first place.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read these stories, all I really hear is that these companies have lost all ability to innovate and invent. They've spent a fortune on these people, carefully choosing and then tuning them to be experts in the business and now they can't think of anything for them to do? They should be embarrassed.

That’s one way to look at it. Or, it could just be that, during the covid boom years they overhired to support growth that never materialized, and now they’re stuck with a bunch of overpaid freeloaders (sitting at the top of each salary band) who are neither experts in the business nor uniquely talented/useful/needed.

Growth that never materialized?!?

https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/revenue/

They're all bullshit factories. They grew like crazy and are still growing but depressing the tech job market is more important. Why have $1 million in profit per employee when you could have $1.05 million, lives be damned?

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindsight is 20/20. Looking back we see... that none of them were true.

[flagged]

Holy crap did this topic take a nosedive. My point wasn't even to "dismiss" COVID conspiracies, just point out that I didn't really want them on my LinkedIn wall.

But fine.

> Then there was the vaccine effectiveness, which was claimed as 100% but actually was well below that. Same for their preventing transmission, which was nonsensical.

I think there's literally no one that claimed the vaccine was 100% effective; certainly no one with any kind of medical credential. I don't think there's ever been any vaccine in history that's been 100% effective, the numbers I heard when I got my vaccine was between 80-90% effective, and due to Bayes theorem hijinks that means the actual likelihood of being immune is well below that. This was never a cover-up, the scientists were pretty up-front about this.

> Let's start with Wuhan being a likely origin point. This one gets bonus points, because it wasn't just a "conspiracy theory" but also "racist". All based on a Lancet paper that any smart reader could tell was bunk, and which turned out to be totally soaked with conflicts of interest.

I don't recall anyone saying it was racist for saying Wuhan was an origin point. What people called problematic was people trying to label it as "kung flu" or "Wuhan Flu".

> Then there was the "conspiracy theory" that natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity; again, turned out to be true.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but I don't think this was ever disputed. "Natural" immunity may indeed give you stronger immunity to COVID, but it has one major disadvantage: you have to catch COVID to get it, which is potentially lethal, and even if it wasn't "lethal", can have long-term side effects that we're still unsure about, not to mention that while you have COVID you're substantially more infectious than when you're not. Any reduction on infectiousness is a potential win.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#176
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for criticizing empty corpo talk, but that quote is actually pretty reasonable and not empty. They are just saying that they are simplifying their organizational chart so that they don't have teams with overlapping responsabilities. It's just a polite way to say "we noticed that we had 2 teams doing the same thing so we merged them and dropped the resulting excess headcount".

> that quote is actually pretty reasonable and not empty It does have an actual discernible message, which puts it above a lot of other corporate gobbledygook. But it's still corporate gobbledygook that requires careful deciphering to understand what it says. I don't consider it reasonable at all. It's slightly meaningful word vomit.

There can be several reasons why they (and their employees) would want that though. Being very honest is not a positive in this case. Duplicate work and ambiguous ownership is fuzzy and unclear. They won't come out and say "we overhired and now we are shedding our deadweight" because no one wins with that more crude statement.

The least you can do for the laid off employees in this situation is try and not make it harder for them to find new jobs, so you keep the message vague.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#177

The most surprising thing is that there's people who think LinkedIn used to be good. It was built by spamming people and grabbing contact books without consent. It's always been trash.

I dunno, it literally got me to a 180k salary (Eastern Europe based so astronomical) just by me having a profile there. I didn’t have to find a job since 2015 thanks to it. You might argue that the feed is shit, but to me it’s normal human behavior trying to stand out and abusing everything that you can (including feed algos), so I just don’t look at it.

I’ll be forever grateful to LinkedIn and I would never be in the situation I am right now if it hadn’t have been for it.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#178

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?

Way back in the day I used to get excited when I saw a notification from Facebook / Reddit / LinkedIn. Now, every notification is this kind of crap, so I make sure to block all notifications from these apps.

I'm sure these sorts of changes increase engagement in the short term but are detrimental to the product in the long term. I really think that change was the beginning of the end for Facebook in particular.

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#179

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…

I spent some time a while back to "unfollow" everyone on linkedin apart from a very few select individuals. I unfollow people by default everytime I have a new connection. My wall is uneventful, but at least I don't feel like I'm going to facebook everytime I connect (which is rare)

Re: LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

#180

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…

I spent some time a while back to "unfollow" everyone on linkedin apart from a very few select individuals. I unfollow people by default everytime I have a new connection. My wall is uneventful, but at least I don't feel like I'm going to facebook everytime I connect (which is rare)

I have to know/worked with the person or if they're a recruiter (to connect).
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