The Problem With LinkedIn
I've been job hunting the past two weeks. All of the jobs I've had was through somebody reaching out to me on LinkedIn. So naturally, when I went job hunting, the first place I checked out was LinkedIn.
Oh my how it has changed since 2015. There's a lot of things that don't make sense to me. And a lot of things that confused me. The way people post. The way people comment. The words they use to describe themselves. I couldn't quite understand what was wrong, but something felt off to me.
You see, when you login and get to the homepage, your feed will start to fill up with posts from "thought leaders". Normally, these are posts from people you follow in LinkedIn. But scroll past those posts long enough and you'll start to see other posts pop up, posts from people you don't even follow. And this is where I started to realize one thing, everyone acts like they are a "thought leader" in LinkedIn.
Everyone talks like they are in charge, or were in charge of something revolutionary in their respective field or industry. And it confused the heck of out of me because surely, not everyone posting on LinkedIn is a leader in their field, right? How can everyone posting on here be a "thought leader" in their field? If everyone is a leader, then where are the followers that actually do the hard work?
This weird environment of having "thought leaders" at every corner, at every scroll of my mouse, had an adverse effect on me. It ratcheted up my feelings of impostor syndrome. With everyone posting like they are the elite top 1% of their field, I felt small. I felt insignificant. I felt like I didn't know what I was doing in my profession. But I know, that I know what I know. While I certainly don't know everything about software development, I do know that I'm a good enough software developer that I can figure things out and get things done. I actually had to remind myself of that, because otherwise, I would have been swallowed up by impostor syndrome.
Then another thing I noticed on LinkedIn, is how everyone is so eager to share their knowledge. But don't be fooled by this. While I have no doubt these people think they are sharing their knowledge to help other people, what they're actually doing is just trying to make themselves look good.
This leads me to the part that confuses me the most. Why is everyone on LinkedIn posting like a "thought leader" and trying to make themselves look good? Don't they already have a job? I mean their profile subtitle says leader, innovator, director, expert, etc... Why are they posting like they still need to get a job?
But then a comment in a post about a certain way to handle conditional logic in programming, shed light on this. LinkedIn is filled to the brim and overflowing with influencers.
That post was stupid by the way and people in the comments called out the author for a click-bait post.
And now it makes sense. Just like social media was taken over by influencers, LinkedIn being a social media site for "professionals", could not escape the wrath of influencers. I honestly thought "professionals" were better than this, that they would not try to be influencers in a professional setting. But obviously I was wrong.
So is there even any value in using LinkedIn? I will say yes. If you stick to the job search part of the site, and only use it to communicate with recruiters and other people in your network, then yes there is still value in it. Just avoid the feed as much as you can.