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Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

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Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#161
post #35

Makes perfect sense. In one of my previous roles, we used to keep track of SSI (Social Selling Index), and we would be gently nudged into posting about a few things (events, launches, etc.) I decided to game the system and shot up to the top of the rankings by simply posting actual useful stuff (pretty much the same commentary I would post on my personal link blog, but with some bearing on work topics). I quit doing…

How did you predict the best hashtags? That sounds interesting.

I trained it by tokenizing my post history with nltk and using the number of likes (scraped via JS) as the target metric. Then I built a simple recommender that would take my draft and list the most interesting tags for it.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#162
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use the same sort of polite etiquette in well crafted form to undermine these polite attacks. It takes quick thinking and usually works best in the form of an open ended question that sets the BS in its place. No one says anything explicitly but everyone internally acknowledges it. It may be a bit passive aggressive but such is most modern business culture and meetings.

Can you elaborate a bit on what this would look like?

Someone passive aggressively gives you with a backhanded compliment to set you up for failure. They stroke your ego, build you up in front if people, then offer a trove of BS that needs to be accomplished that only you are capable of accomplishing and makes it difficult for you to refute.

Instead of being pressured into saying yes, you quickly think about the information and ask a general question like, "well that might be possible, I'm personally not sure how, perhaps you had some ideas on how we can accomplish that in the proposed timeline?" and so forth.

If someone is marketing you a BS solution, you can usually dip down to a kernel of truth and quickly form a well crafted open ended question to ask how they address some problem their solution clearly couldn't. "With our application, you can easily interface with any platform" -- "that's awesome, how much effort is typically required to do that? Do you have example cases?" And so on.

You could also use an even more general/vague question similar to the one you just posed: asking someone to elaborate on something that's clearly BS usually catches them off guard if they were just making up nonsense and had no thought behind their statement. If they had some thought, it's going to be pretty clear. All that's needed is to pepper on some politeness to make it: "that sounds intriguing and thought provoking, could you elaborate on that idea more?"

These are benign on the surface but can be used offensively and without any clarity of the genuine intent to pass the BS baton around.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#163
post #22

I find LinkedIn really cringy. And I haven't seen ONE post there that actually added value to my life. It is also toxic as hell. But I know people who got employment offers from LinkedIn. So it adds value in that sense. I just mute and block those influencers. And check LinkedIn maybe twice a week. One of the things I cannot find any excuse for is how fake people are. They are behaving in a fake manner even when they…

at $job (inside a NOC), we used to joke that linkedin was the worst professional network,and the local network operator group IRC channel was the best channel.

It makes a ton of sense if you think about it, the people you want to connect with professionaly are people in the same workfield and their bosses. These people have A) far more intresting tidbits to share then recruitment and HR folk, and B) getting a job at their company is far easier if you they have some kind of clue of what you actually do during your previous job on a very fundemental level.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#164

Do LinkedIn influencers get hired more than the rest of us? The article seems to make that assumption. But if recruiters and hiring managers don’t like this influencer content either, maybe none of this matters and we can all just relax and ignore the LinkedIn newsfeed.

Recruiters and hiring managers are the influencers. LinkedIn is a social network for HR first and everyone else second.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#165

It's the faux-thentic trope pieces on LinkedIn that annoy me. "I was working so hard I forgot to be me" or "after years of constant success my daughter showed me what success really means". Apparently it means getting likes from strangers. And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and lande…

LinkedIn is now just Facebook which opens at Work and China.

It's sad because I did find some quality talent from LinkedIn during my recruitment drives for previous startup couple of years back, Also since someone looking for a job is de-facto expected to have a LinkedIn profile helped that.

But now when I recently logged in, I saw something akin to sharing video status like in other social-media chat apps and my profile page is asking me to upload a '30 second video intro'; I feel this is going increase inequality as someone who was able to project their qualifications and experience first without distractions is now made to compete with someone who's good with TikToking.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#166

It's the faux-thentic trope pieces on LinkedIn that annoy me. "I was working so hard I forgot to be me" or "after years of constant success my daughter showed me what success really means". Apparently it means getting likes from strangers. And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and lande…

A friend and I have a mini-hobby of sharing these with each other under the title of “Today in Thanking Myself”. The highest level are the ones where people pimp out their own families for LinkedIn karma

Like the VCs Congratulating Themselves account

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#167
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use the same sort of polite etiquette in well crafted form to undermine these polite attacks. It takes quick thinking and usually works best in the form of an open ended question that sets the BS in its place. No one says anything explicitly but everyone internally acknowledges it. It may be a bit passive aggressive but such is most modern business culture and meetings.

The problem with this is well-stated in Brandolini's Law [0]: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." So, effectively, this means that given equivalent amounts of effort, you've got 10 people producing bullshit for every 1 refuting it effectively. Thus the bullshit continues to spread. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

The trick to that problem is to pass the burden of proof on the one producing the BS (as it should be), which is similar to what Bertrand Russell does in Russell's Teapot:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#168
I think the greatest privilege is actually being able to interact with LinkedIn posts consequence free

Many employees have their speech chilled because commenting would not necessarily “align with their employers values”, so they dont

So you get some really odd takes from all founders and entreprenuers instead. Its more useful to network with those kind of people anyway.

Re: Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

#170

It's the faux-thentic trope pieces on LinkedIn that annoy me. "I was working so hard I forgot to be me" or "after years of constant success my daughter showed me what success really means". Apparently it means getting likes from strangers. And then there's the business tall tales: "I hired a guy with no qualifications other than a big heart and now he's running a multinational". "I made 10k job applications and lande…

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