INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Thanks to John Biggs for inspiring this piece; I cosign most of what he says here
I have long been mystified by LinkedIn, because of its spectacular uselessness (for me) as a professional social network
But I also assumed it was useful for someone
Now, though, I&m beginning to wonder if the emperor is naked after all, and LinkedIn is purely a fantasy social network for people
cosplaying that game called success.
Let me hasten to stress that LinkedIn isn''t useless full stop
It a very good CV repository, and, I am given to understand, a very good recruiting site
(And per Biggs post, about as good a content site as most recruiting sites, which is to say, bad.) But it supposed to be much more than just
a fancied-up Hired or Indeed, right It supposed to be ''the professional social network.& So I&ve long been baffled: why have I never even
heard of anyone I know deriving any professional benefit from it whatsoever
Ironically I have actually had reason to be grateful for
LinkedIn fairly recently: it was the sole remaining connection between me and a long-ago ex, and after she sent me a LinkedIn message out of
the blue, we re-established a warm and cordial friendship
However this heartwarming tale a) is the complete antithesis of the professionalism that LinkedIn is supposed to be all about b) happened
because neither of us cared enough about LinkedIn to bother severing that connection after our bad breakup.
I was a fairly early adopter,
but LinkedIn was useless to me when I returned to tech after my detour as a full-time novelist, useless to me in the subsequent years, and
now it is useless to me as a CTO
I would estimate fully half of the connection requests / messages I get are from people trying to sell to my company the exact services we
Most of the rest are from cryptocurrency people who never say anything again, which is fine by me
My LinkedIn policy for the last few years has been to accept all connection requests and respond to any messages which actually seem
never.
But just because it useless to me doesn''t mean it useless
I always imagined the existence of LinkedIn People, who used it, somehow, to make connections which led to sales and jobs, to advance their
careers, to turn chance conference meetings into partnerships and employment
That how it supposed to work, right I imagined them being very … enterprise-y
Very buttoned-down, and driven, and goal-oriented, but not in a startup way, more in a big-business, office-politics, get-that-promotion way
People who climbed into upper-middle-management positions using LinkedIn as a vital tool.
Except I&ve never even heard of any of that
I keep encountering more and more successful people, and see more people from my own social cohort achieving success … and as far as I can
tell LinkedIn was not a remotely relevant factor in the careers of even a single one of them
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course
Maybe LinkedIn People are real after all, just cut off from my own world due to a profound mismatch of taste and priorities.
But maybe they
Maybe they&re as mythical as elves
Maybe LinkedIn users collect contacts in the same way that pathological hoarders collect newspapers; not because they&re useful, but because
they can''t let go of the notion that maybe this is the one that could be useful … one day
Maybe LinkedIn is really a fantasy social network for people cosplaying the game of success
Nothing wrong with cosplay
I&m sure it rewarding in its own way
But confusing it with reality is unfortunate at best.
