Yes all probably very true and helpful, still the fact that this exists and might be necessary makes me want to put a screwdriver through my eyeballs. I hate LinkedIn so much, it's such a...
Yes all probably very true and helpful, still the fact that this exists and might be necessary makes me want to put a screwdriver through my eyeballs. I hate LinkedIn so much, it's such a cesspool. Interaction with this platform is bad for your soul. A cancerous blend of HR insects encouraged by Satan's spawn doing some sort of American Psycho bit to impress users of the world's most deluded social media. I can't wait for it to die and rot and implode and free us from its theater of uncanny valley vibes, although I imagine whatever marketing/recruiting abomination emerges from its corpse will somehow be worse.
What do you do for work that requires you to have LinkedIn and does it actually require you to have one or do you just feel obligated to do so? I have never had a profile there, when asked for my...
What do you do for work that requires you to have LinkedIn and does it actually require you to have one or do you just feel obligated to do so?
I have never had a profile there, when asked for my profile link I say I don't have one, just as I don't have any other social media profile and never had difficulty finding a job without it. I've only ever had one potential job that said having one was a requirement and I just ended the interview right then and there.
I don't know what tobii's profession is, but I'm a software engineer, and in my field linkedin is pretty critical. If you're a software engineer without one then I'd guess either you're on the...
I don't know what tobii's profession is, but I'm a software engineer, and in my field linkedin is pretty critical. If you're a software engineer without one then I'd guess either you're on the extreme high end of proficiency (so you don't need one), or you are merely normal highly proficient and not very picky about what job you get. Or maybe you're just really lucky, or early career and so haven't embraced the darkness yet (or late career, and not using linkedin is par for the course for recruiters looking for stodgy old COBOL programmers or something).
My career began around the end of the aughts/beginning of the tens, but I was in a stable position for a decade. Since covid I've been in the job market twice, and it sucked balls, but if I had chosen not to use linkedin it would have sucked more balls. Now don't get me wrong, linkedin sucks giant balls too, but not as big as the balls of being long-term unemployed with a mortgage etc. I hope it dies, but until it does I'll keep stabbing my soul with linkedin whenever I need to.
Yeah, I'm also a software engineer. I originally created my profile because I felt obligated. For my current job it's not a requirement, but for landing the job it was. My first interactions with...
Yeah, I'm also a software engineer.
I originally created my profile because I felt obligated. For my current job it's not a requirement, but for landing the job it was.
My first interactions with LinkedIn were to find an internship (I'm in Europe). I'd agree: it's pretty critical, and we were told so as students entering the workforce.
I remember during the last year of university we had an event on campus, something like a job fair. At the end of all the companies presentations, one of our professors have a talk where she offered us some wisdom and encouragement (a lot of platitudes you'd already have heard a hundred times at that point). During that, she asked us to raise our hand if we had created a LinkedIn profile, all hands were up. Next: how many people had updated their profile just before the event, and still most hands stayed up, which got an approving nod from her. At the time that really surprised me, I remember this kind of depressing thought of "oh no, this garbage might really be necessary?".
It might not be a requirement if you already have a good job or connections to a role you want. However, it's likely that you don't, and if you're looking for a job, then LinkedIn is sadly the default (at least in software), where recruiters will try to find you, the first place where companies advertise open roles, and where people advertise that they are looking for a role. It is a shame because it's also flooded with fake jobs and incredible amounts of other bullshit, which makes it awful.
I created a profile out of a feeling of obligation, but for the path that I have taken (mediocre software engineer) I'd say it was required, it wouldn't have been possible without it. I'm lucky enough to have an OK job right now, so I can stay far away, and only update the profile if I start looking again.
Fascinating, I've never actually met a COBOL programmer! At my first internship I wrote perl, java EE, and I think it was asp pre-dotnet. Do you really write COBOL professionally?
Fascinating, I've never actually met a COBOL programmer! At my first internship I wrote perl, java EE, and I think it was asp pre-dotnet. Do you really write COBOL professionally?
Sure. Been at it since the 80s. My college course covered it as its main language. We learned on ICL DRS 20 equipment with big 8” floppies. We had to write our programs on coding sheets, and send...
Sure. Been at it since the 80s. My college course covered it as its main language. We learned on ICL DRS 20 equipment with big 8” floppies.
We had to write our programs on coding sheets, and send them to a typing room, where they’d get saved on to the discs.
We were only allowed two compiles of each program before losing a mandatory 10% mark per compile. One compile to catch syntax errors then run. One compile to catch the logic errors.
It really behooved one to eyeball the typed program first to catch all the syntax and typos before even running that precious first compile.
I worked on a funeral system in COBOL on ICL DRS/nx UNIX, and financial systems on a more traditional IBM Mainframe CICS DL/1 , then in ‘91, sideways into COBOL on Dynix/ptx, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and AS/400 and eventually Linux.
The multi platforms have all faded away now, like melting snow, and we’re left with COBOL on Linux which is running the same code base as back in the 90s, but now deployed as microservice containers with modern web front ends instead of 3270 BMS maps.
And I’m only in my mid 50s, lol. Probably (hopefully?) not quite yet the grizzled old COBOL hack. Nearly though, huh?
I might be biased, but I don’t see anything wrong with COBOL really. It’s object oriented if you need it to be, easy to read, it’s just a language. I’ve written rust and golang modules with appropriate calling conventions and built those in, as well as the more traditional C.
Anyway I’m starting to ramble. Is this the right time to say get off my lawn? Bah. (Am I doing this right?!)
Thanks for taking the time to reply, so interesting. I've peeked at modern versions of cobol and fortran and agree that with modern extensions they don't seem like they'd be too bad to work with.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, so interesting. I've peeked at modern versions of cobol and fortran and agree that with modern extensions they don't seem like they'd be too bad to work with.
I got my first developer job a decade ago and never left. Really don't want to have to interact with Linkedin besides my fake account to have access in case there's something I want to read (He's...
I got my first developer job a decade ago and never left. Really don't want to have to interact with Linkedin besides my fake account to have access in case there's something I want to read (He's a sitting US Congressman!).
I don't understand the LinkedIn hate. My experience has been: Connect with everyone at each new job Periodically say hi to people I like in my job and ask what's new (the extent of my networking)...
I don't understand the LinkedIn hate. My experience has been:
Connect with everyone at each new job
Periodically say hi to people I like in my job and ask what's new (the extent of my networking)
Get messages from recruiters (not as often any more), sometimes fruitful, mostly junk
I skip the posting/sharing/following/feed stuff. I skip verification and proficiency tests. I ignore the junk recruiters, but the ratio of junk offers seems lower to me than any other job sites.
What is it people hate about LinkedIn? I'm not doubting that it can be awful, but am curious how much my experience differs from others'.
In a word: Privacy I don't use my real name anywhere it's not absolutely required (bank, physicians, mortgage, voting is nearly all that really needs it). Even my favorite coffee shop calls me by...
In a word: Privacy
I don't use my real name anywhere it's not absolutely required (bank, physicians, mortgage, voting is nearly all that really needs it). Even my favorite coffee shop calls me by an alias when I walk in.
Anyone that needs "connecting" to at a job can be contacted through the usual means at that job. A job is a place where I exchange labor for cash, nothing more; we're not friends, we're coworkers. Yes, I've made work friends I've kept in contact with after leaving a job, but none of that required giving up the vast quantities of privacy that is (and to the likes of) Linked In.
People on Linked In, and no offense to you, feel the need to "connect" with others/me. If I needed to talk to someone at work, I would via work channels, not social media. If I wanted to talk to someone from work outside of work, I'd exchange non-social media contact info.
Haha I'm almost afraid to ask, but I'm curious what you do that you don't need to network with people for job security. Because as much as I would love to stand by and practice everything you...
Haha I'm almost afraid to ask, but I'm curious what you do that you don't need to network with people for job security.
Because as much as I would love to stand by and practice everything you said, the reality is the job market's tough and if I did I'd be homeless, and I'm no good to anyone or anything if I'm homeless. It's one of the tradeoffs I've had to make in order to survive.
People are out there being unemployed for months, even years, homelessness and unemployement is on the rise, people are being laid off in droves, job markets are growing more and more saturated and competition is the most cut-throat it's been in decades. At least that's the case here in the US. I've got to use absolutely everything to my advantage so I don't lose everything I've worked for.
I have to contend with the idealistic fantasy of how things obviously should be, and the harsh reality of how things actually are, at least for a lot of people.
No offense taken. I get it. When I engage in LinkedIn I definitely feel like I'm "playing the game" more than engaging in meaningful socialization, and I don't love it. LinkedIn is the only social...
No offense taken. I get it.
When I engage in LinkedIn I definitely feel like I'm "playing the game" more than engaging in meaningful socialization, and I don't love it. LinkedIn is the only social media platform I'm on, and I'm only there because it helps me keep in touch with professional references.
I see it as an extension of my career, but not my job. I work on LinkedIn the way I work on my resume.
If I'd been able to keep my career going without it, I probably wouldn't use it either.
What I hate most about linkedin is how fake it is. On real social media there's tons of people using it for fake to get paid, but there's also tons of people using it for real to be entertained or...
What I hate most about linkedin is how fake it is.
On real social media there's tons of people using it for fake to get paid, but there's also tons of people using it for real to be entertained or informed.
On linkedin, the whole social media aspect of the platform is fake. Very few people are putting things into or consuming that feed for fun, but it's presented in the same way as other social media sites that are supposed to be fun. It makes me feel the same way that it would feel to go to an HR seminar and watch someone pretend to enjoy themselves. And I say this as someone with a very low bar for what counts as fun.
Also, I feel like I shouldn't be trying to convince you to hate linkedin - using it is good for you professionally, so if it's not emotionally damaging for you like it is for me then that's probably a good thing :)
I work in a field where LinkedIn isn't strictly required per se, but having an updated and optimized profile is the difference between you sending out 1000 applications with few or no callbacks...
I work in a field where LinkedIn isn't strictly required per se, but having an updated and optimized profile is the difference between you sending out 1000 applications with few or no callbacks and recruiters hitting you up about once a month with opportunities when you're not even looking yet. Not every field is like this, certainly, but for a lot of tech and tech-adjacent areas it's very important to maintain an active(ish) profile.
I don't like LinkedIn at all, and I resent a little bit that in my career it's pretty much the only place you can rely on for recruiters to ever know you exist, and I resent a lot that it takes a nontrivial amount of time to ensure your profile is optimized to whatever the keyword meta is this year--not least because the UX is cumbersome as hell. The "social" aspect is godawful, the few rare times I scan my feed (usually by accident as I'm checking my direct messages or friend requests) I want to put bleach in my eyes. I never post except maybe once a year where I'm boosting something related to my job, I will occasionaly hit an emoji button on a post from an industry colleague that I actually like, I otherwise avoid my news feed entirely. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the linked blog post at all, but I don't personally mess with being a wide-eyed, font-of-positivity, grind-hustle-lifestyle influencer.
But I'm serious when I say that I have not actively applied to a single job since my career started in 2006, and pretty much every role came from a recruiter cold-contacting me from LinkedIn when I wasn't even looking for a move yet from my existing job. (The rest just came through conventional networking.) I do focus on industry-related keywords and update them about twice a year, and I make sure my experience only lists my role title and a bulleted list of accomplishments, i.e., "what did I do during my time there that proved this company was lucky to have me".
I don't really have a specific argument here, I'm just offering a counterpoint as someone who basically would not have a career without LinkedIn. Whether I like it or not. And I don't! :V
To give a very different example (I unfortunately can't give more details without being too revealing about my identity): LinkedIn seems to be popular for EU research projects (along with Teams...
What do you do for work that requires you to have LinkedIn and does it actually require you to have one or do you just feel obligated to do so?
To give a very different example (I unfortunately can't give more details without being too revealing about my identity): LinkedIn seems to be popular for EU research projects (along with Teams and Microsoft cloud services: parts of the EU administration are surprisingly aggressive about demanding everyone use only US cloud services). I'm aware of one collaborative research project that intentionally gives information, announcements, public seminar schedules, etc through LinkedIn. They have no website: they give out their LinkedIn page instead. This is a project where public outreach is nominally a key goal, and has a budget in the high tens of millions. This is also not a field where LinkedIn use is common.
My circumstances are such that I can simply refuse to use LinkedIn, and expect them to handle letting me know about things separately, but I expect many others can't.
There was a time where it worked. So I used it. Connected with people in college. My first and second jobs weren't gotten via LinkedIn, but I still keep coworkers on there that I wouldn't be able...
There was a time where it worked. So I used it. Connected with people in college. My first and second jobs weren't gotten via LinkedIn, but I still keep coworkers on there that I wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. My 3rd job was from contacting a college colleague and getting a referral. Then I got a decent freelancing job from a blind message from someone with a project looking local and liking my resume.
It has been genuinely helpful. But those feel like a bygone era a mere 3 years later. It's still helpful for connecting with people i meet IRL in professional meetups, but its ptjerwose transformed into its own special flavor of all the things I hate in mainstream social media.
I'm resuming my search for full time work in 2026 (I've been floating on 2-3 part time jobs between gigs, freelancing, and tutoring). I'm simply not going to apply on LinkedIn. I'll keep it open...
I'm resuming my search for full time work in 2026 (I've been floating on 2-3 part time jobs between gigs, freelancing, and tutoring).
I'm simply not going to apply on LinkedIn. I'll keep it open for messages and use it to point to websites to apply on, but the rush to the bottom with the situation described here just isn't worth it for me. I'll use smaller job boards, and remaining word of mouth that also wasn't laid off, and family. I won't go through the Social media drek again when I simply want to provide my decade of services to someone who actually needs problems solved.
Oh! I also have a couple tips I'd be happy to elaborate on. I almost purely have gotten most if not all of my jobs through recruiters on Linkedin, and it's all about being attractive to them and...
Oh! I also have a couple tips I'd be happy to elaborate on. I almost purely have gotten most if not all of my jobs through recruiters on Linkedin, and it's all about being attractive to them and therefor attractive to their clients. I've never been out of work for more than a couple of months at a time throughout my career and I'm always in the top few people in the interviews.
Some context is that I didn't actually finish college, I dropped out of community college because I didn't want to take the core classes and waste money. I wanted to work in the entertainment industry so I decided to just start working instead of going into education debt. I ended up completing all the classes I needed to for Digital Media Arts & Design and Entertainment Technology electives, I just didn't finish any of the core classes to qualify for graduating. I have ADHD and autism and I love learning things, but hate structured education and those classes didn't work for me.
The entertainment industry was all about networking not education, so it wasn't a big deal initially.
However my lack of college degree started to become an issue when I wanted to transition out of the entertainment industry and into more corporate and stable positions, so I had to learn to game the system because any applications I tried to submit would get immediately passed on due to my lack of college degree.
And my Trojan horse strategy was using recruiters and not application systems. I have submitted very very very few applications.
It's worked because I was eventually recruited to work at NBC Universal, Netflix corporate, The Walt Disney Company HQ in Glendale, and Popsockets. I was unfortunately laid off from Disney during the infamous COVID layoffs though, and have since transitioned out of the entertainment industry.
In fact, I had a roommate at the time who was stubborn and was applying to like everything under the sun with applications, and constantly refused to take my advice or help because he had a weird stubborn competitive thing with me, and finally after being unemployed for a year he gave in and let me redo his linkedin, and within 3 months he'd been recruited for a job at Apple TV. Unfortunately this was also a catalyst for a falling out between us, I think he resented me for it actually working and had some inadequacy issues. Still works at Apple though. lol
Personally over the past couple years I've made a decision to stop going after huge companies like Disney, and found I much prefer smaller businesses. But that's another story.
So here's some of my tips.
First and foremost: Remember that when working with recruiters, it's the recruiter's job to make you look like the best candidate to their clients, so the more work you do for them to that goal, the more likely a recruiter will find you.
Take off the "Open to Work" profile image label if you have it. It sucks, but this can be seen as you being unemployed already. Already hired people are more attractive to recruiters than unemployed people. Remain "Open to work" just don't make it public, make it visible to recruiters only.
In a similar vein, if you got laid off, hold off on updating an end date for your last position as long as you can or at least until you start your next position. If a recruiter reaches out to you, you can mention you're no longer in that position and have yet to update, but your foot is in the door with them now so you're further than if they'd just passed you up.
Look up ideal job postings you'd like to get recruited for, look for others already in those positions, and model your profile after that. Try to use keywords and skills that frequently show up in those job postings.
Do whatever you can to get more than 500+ connections. After 500, Linkedin will just say 500+ connections and this looks better than having less, makes you look well connected. LinkedIn is not Facebook where you're just supposed to only add people you know, it's a networking platform. So do not hesitate to send a connection request to anyone and everyone related to your job, even if you've never met them. Add people at companies you want to work at, because they may also post internal job openings, or see something you post and think you're a good fit. Add your real estate agent, add your professors, add old friends from high school, add your vendors, your clients, your roommates, neighbors, anyone. Look up companies you like and add people on those teams. Also if you're mutual connections with a recruiter or someone hiring, even if it's not even related to the job, it boosts your credibility to the recruiter.
On this note, my most recent job I just got was because I randomly added a bunch of print shop owners in Seattle like 5 years ago when I was still living in LA and looking to move to Seattle, and a couple years later I ended up moving up to Seattle. Then when I got laid off a couple months ago, I started posting about the projects I had worked on, and the owner of this company commented and wanted to talk. One thing lead to another and now I have a job and was only unemployed for 2.5 months.
In the same vein, look up and add recruiters and recruiting agencies in your area. Look up on recruiting websites for job listings you like, then find the recruiter on linkedin and let them know your interested. This is kind of a numbers game, even if they don't have anything right now, they might come back later with something.
Depending on the culture of the position you're looking for, get a nice profile picture to match. Only do selfies if that's the culture of people in your industry like with marketing or laid back startups, otherwise get a nice business headshot done. If this is out of budget, AI Headshot generators now exist where you upload a picture of yourself and it takes that and creates a nice looking headshot, and my friend had good luck with one called DreamWave AI Headshot generator. You do you, just make your profile picture look professional.
Give and receive recommendations. Get some from friends if you need to, doesn't matter no one is going to be sleuthing into it. Ask to trade recommendations with coworkers or people you've worked with. This is just table dressing but does make you look reputable.
This is more just for my case, but if you didn't finish college like I did, but on linkedin and your resume, list the years you went there but don't mention graduated or a degree. Let it be technically true. My resume just has my college, my area of study and the years 2010-2014.
Post occasionally. I didn't need to post constantly. I usually posted about projects I worked on and described some challenges I had and overcame. Or I'd repost someone else's project and say how cool it was. I never really did anything real fancy. It wasn't a 24/7 job either, I'd just log on once or twice a week.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, but if anyone has any questions let me know. I'm by no means an expert, but I just had to learn to survive when I can't pass any application system that requires me to put a college degree.
Edited to add: So I didn't get into this, but just an FYI despite everything I wrote, I am a huge anti-capitalist and hate corporate cultures, and I'm extremely critical of Social Media. So I don't exactly personally support everything I just outlined, it's why I refer to it as gaming the system and why I don't see any issues with using slight of hand or lies by omission to get jobs. It sucks and I'd love to live in a world where these ridiculous corporate talent shows didn't exist, but I'm not good to anyone if I'm unemployed so I'd rather not shoot myself in the foot out of stubbornness. A lot of my work recently has been supporting non-profits and political causes related to democratic socialism and indigenous communities.
Thanks for the tips, this was a great reminder for me to start posting occasionally on my LinkedIn since it's been mostly dead and only ever used for job hunting when I needed it. I don't have...
Thanks for the tips, this was a great reminder for me to start posting occasionally on my LinkedIn since it's been mostly dead and only ever used for job hunting when I needed it. I don't have social media (though I guess a Reddit account and Tildes sort of count) besides LinkedIn, and I almost never interact with it.
I'm taking your tips as a bit of preparedness, I enjoy my job and hope to get moved up internally in some way soon, but after it was hard finding a job during my last hunt I'm wanting to make sure I can shorten the time I'm unemployed again since we're hoping to get to the point where I'm able to support our family and my wife doesn't need to work/she can move to something she is more passionate about or work part-time.
Since this is just algorithm farming for a specific goal, it seems reasonable to be churning things through AI. But, I would make a few more detailed suggestions. Make a list of the topics and...
Since this is just algorithm farming for a specific goal, it seems reasonable to be churning things through AI. But, I would make a few more detailed suggestions.
Make a list of the topics and positions you want to take and use that list with your prompts to make your posts more consistent. Engage the AI in a conversation to identify ideas for related topics, and pick ones that seem interesting.
When you generate content, take a minute to read what the AI has written. Just one editing pass. If there's something that you wouldn't say, change it. Take out the really over the top adjectives. Try to give it your voice.
For cover letters, do a serious editing pass to weed out the slop. It will improve your uptake, but also, I had a friend using AI who ended up with a letter that said something about armadillos because there was white in white text buried in the job description that said, "You're so excited about armadillos, you can't resist mentioning them at least once."
Save all the edited pieces with the original text, feed the pairs back through the LLM, and tell it to extract a list of rules to follow to make the writing sound more like you. Use those rules as part of future prompts. Rinse and repeat.
At this point my goal is to never again seek any sort of position that would require being on LinkedIn. If that consigns me to low wages doing menial tasks at some local business, then so be it, I...
At this point my goal is to never again seek any sort of position that would require being on LinkedIn. If that consigns me to low wages doing menial tasks at some local business, then so be it, I suppose. I would rather stick my hand in a woodchipper than rejoin.
Having previously worked in some form of tech for over 15 years (helpdesk, desktop support, systems administration), I am not sure I want to re-enter the field at all anyway. I am so damn sick of tech these days.
Same, my spouse has been out of work for 5 months now. They were ~10 years from retirement in the tech industry and if I learned anything from the great recession, this probably just means they...
Same, my spouse has been out of work for 5 months now.
They were ~10 years from retirement in the tech industry and if I learned anything from the great recession, this probably just means they wont ever make the same salary as they were making, if they do actually find another position.
They’re getting interviews, so its not the resume, I’m not sure what it is.
Yes all probably very true and helpful, still the fact that this exists and might be necessary makes me want to put a screwdriver through my eyeballs. I hate LinkedIn so much, it's such a cesspool. Interaction with this platform is bad for your soul. A cancerous blend of HR insects encouraged by Satan's spawn doing some sort of American Psycho bit to impress users of the world's most deluded social media. I can't wait for it to die and rot and implode and free us from its theater of uncanny valley vibes, although I imagine whatever marketing/recruiting abomination emerges from its corpse will somehow be worse.
What do you do for work that requires you to have LinkedIn and does it actually require you to have one or do you just feel obligated to do so?
I have never had a profile there, when asked for my profile link I say I don't have one, just as I don't have any other social media profile and never had difficulty finding a job without it. I've only ever had one potential job that said having one was a requirement and I just ended the interview right then and there.
I don't know what tobii's profession is, but I'm a software engineer, and in my field linkedin is pretty critical. If you're a software engineer without one then I'd guess either you're on the extreme high end of proficiency (so you don't need one), or you are merely normal highly proficient and not very picky about what job you get. Or maybe you're just really lucky, or early career and so haven't embraced the darkness yet (or late career, and not using linkedin is par for the course for recruiters looking for stodgy old COBOL programmers or something).
My career began around the end of the aughts/beginning of the tens, but I was in a stable position for a decade. Since covid I've been in the job market twice, and it sucked balls, but if I had chosen not to use linkedin it would have sucked more balls. Now don't get me wrong, linkedin sucks giant balls too, but not as big as the balls of being long-term unemployed with a mortgage etc. I hope it dies, but until it does I'll keep stabbing my soul with linkedin whenever I need to.
Yeah, I'm also a software engineer.
I originally created my profile because I felt obligated. For my current job it's not a requirement, but for landing the job it was.
My first interactions with LinkedIn were to find an internship (I'm in Europe). I'd agree: it's pretty critical, and we were told so as students entering the workforce.
I remember during the last year of university we had an event on campus, something like a job fair. At the end of all the companies presentations, one of our professors have a talk where she offered us some wisdom and encouragement (a lot of platitudes you'd already have heard a hundred times at that point). During that, she asked us to raise our hand if we had created a LinkedIn profile, all hands were up. Next: how many people had updated their profile just before the event, and still most hands stayed up, which got an approving nod from her. At the time that really surprised me, I remember this kind of depressing thought of "oh no, this garbage might really be necessary?".
It might not be a requirement if you already have a good job or connections to a role you want. However, it's likely that you don't, and if you're looking for a job, then LinkedIn is sadly the default (at least in software), where recruiters will try to find you, the first place where companies advertise open roles, and where people advertise that they are looking for a role. It is a shame because it's also flooded with fake jobs and incredible amounts of other bullshit, which makes it awful.
I created a profile out of a feeling of obligation, but for the path that I have taken (mediocre software engineer) I'd say it was required, it wouldn't have been possible without it. I'm lucky enough to have an OK job right now, so I can stay far away, and only update the profile if I start looking again.
Oi! I resemble that remark
Fascinating, I've never actually met a COBOL programmer! At my first internship I wrote perl, java EE, and I think it was asp pre-dotnet. Do you really write COBOL professionally?
Sure. Been at it since the 80s. My college course covered it as its main language. We learned on ICL DRS 20 equipment with big 8” floppies.
We had to write our programs on coding sheets, and send them to a typing room, where they’d get saved on to the discs.
We were only allowed two compiles of each program before losing a mandatory 10% mark per compile. One compile to catch syntax errors then run. One compile to catch the logic errors.
It really behooved one to eyeball the typed program first to catch all the syntax and typos before even running that precious first compile.
I worked on a funeral system in COBOL on ICL DRS/nx UNIX, and financial systems on a more traditional IBM Mainframe CICS DL/1 , then in ‘91, sideways into COBOL on Dynix/ptx, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and AS/400 and eventually Linux.
The multi platforms have all faded away now, like melting snow, and we’re left with COBOL on Linux which is running the same code base as back in the 90s, but now deployed as microservice containers with modern web front ends instead of 3270 BMS maps.
And I’m only in my mid 50s, lol. Probably (hopefully?) not quite yet the grizzled old COBOL hack. Nearly though, huh?
I might be biased, but I don’t see anything wrong with COBOL really. It’s object oriented if you need it to be, easy to read, it’s just a language. I’ve written rust and golang modules with appropriate calling conventions and built those in, as well as the more traditional C.
Anyway I’m starting to ramble. Is this the right time to say get off my lawn? Bah. (Am I doing this right?!)
Thanks for taking the time to reply, so interesting. I've peeked at modern versions of cobol and fortran and agree that with modern extensions they don't seem like they'd be too bad to work with.
I got my first developer job a decade ago and never left. Really don't want to have to interact with Linkedin besides my fake account to have access in case there's something I want to read (He's a sitting US Congressman!).
I don't understand the LinkedIn hate. My experience has been:
I skip the posting/sharing/following/feed stuff. I skip verification and proficiency tests. I ignore the junk recruiters, but the ratio of junk offers seems lower to me than any other job sites.
What is it people hate about LinkedIn? I'm not doubting that it can be awful, but am curious how much my experience differs from others'.
In a word: Privacy
Haha I'm almost afraid to ask, but I'm curious what you do that you don't need to network with people for job security.
Because as much as I would love to stand by and practice everything you said, the reality is the job market's tough and if I did I'd be homeless, and I'm no good to anyone or anything if I'm homeless. It's one of the tradeoffs I've had to make in order to survive.
People are out there being unemployed for months, even years, homelessness and unemployement is on the rise, people are being laid off in droves, job markets are growing more and more saturated and competition is the most cut-throat it's been in decades. At least that's the case here in the US. I've got to use absolutely everything to my advantage so I don't lose everything I've worked for.
I have to contend with the idealistic fantasy of how things obviously should be, and the harsh reality of how things actually are, at least for a lot of people.
No offense taken. I get it.
When I engage in LinkedIn I definitely feel like I'm "playing the game" more than engaging in meaningful socialization, and I don't love it. LinkedIn is the only social media platform I'm on, and I'm only there because it helps me keep in touch with professional references.
I see it as an extension of my career, but not my job. I work on LinkedIn the way I work on my resume.
If I'd been able to keep my career going without it, I probably wouldn't use it either.
What I hate most about linkedin is how fake it is.
On real social media there's tons of people using it for fake to get paid, but there's also tons of people using it for real to be entertained or informed.
On linkedin, the whole social media aspect of the platform is fake. Very few people are putting things into or consuming that feed for fun, but it's presented in the same way as other social media sites that are supposed to be fun. It makes me feel the same way that it would feel to go to an HR seminar and watch someone pretend to enjoy themselves. And I say this as someone with a very low bar for what counts as fun.
Also, I feel like I shouldn't be trying to convince you to hate linkedin - using it is good for you professionally, so if it's not emotionally damaging for you like it is for me then that's probably a good thing :)
I work in a field where LinkedIn isn't strictly required per se, but having an updated and optimized profile is the difference between you sending out 1000 applications with few or no callbacks and recruiters hitting you up about once a month with opportunities when you're not even looking yet. Not every field is like this, certainly, but for a lot of tech and tech-adjacent areas it's very important to maintain an active(ish) profile.
I don't like LinkedIn at all, and I resent a little bit that in my career it's pretty much the only place you can rely on for recruiters to ever know you exist, and I resent a lot that it takes a nontrivial amount of time to ensure your profile is optimized to whatever the keyword meta is this year--not least because the UX is cumbersome as hell. The "social" aspect is godawful, the few rare times I scan my feed (usually by accident as I'm checking my direct messages or friend requests) I want to put bleach in my eyes. I never post except maybe once a year where I'm boosting something related to my job, I will occasionaly hit an emoji button on a post from an industry colleague that I actually like, I otherwise avoid my news feed entirely. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the linked blog post at all, but I don't personally mess with being a wide-eyed, font-of-positivity, grind-hustle-lifestyle influencer.
But I'm serious when I say that I have not actively applied to a single job since my career started in 2006, and pretty much every role came from a recruiter cold-contacting me from LinkedIn when I wasn't even looking for a move yet from my existing job. (The rest just came through conventional networking.) I do focus on industry-related keywords and update them about twice a year, and I make sure my experience only lists my role title and a bulleted list of accomplishments, i.e., "what did I do during my time there that proved this company was lucky to have me".
I don't really have a specific argument here, I'm just offering a counterpoint as someone who basically would not have a career without LinkedIn. Whether I like it or not. And I don't! :V
To give a very different example (I unfortunately can't give more details without being too revealing about my identity): LinkedIn seems to be popular for EU research projects (along with Teams and Microsoft cloud services: parts of the EU administration are surprisingly aggressive about demanding everyone use only US cloud services). I'm aware of one collaborative research project that intentionally gives information, announcements, public seminar schedules, etc through LinkedIn. They have no website: they give out their LinkedIn page instead. This is a project where public outreach is nominally a key goal, and has a budget in the high tens of millions. This is also not a field where LinkedIn use is common.
My circumstances are such that I can simply refuse to use LinkedIn, and expect them to handle letting me know about things separately, but I expect many others can't.
There was a time where it worked. So I used it. Connected with people in college. My first and second jobs weren't gotten via LinkedIn, but I still keep coworkers on there that I wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. My 3rd job was from contacting a college colleague and getting a referral. Then I got a decent freelancing job from a blind message from someone with a project looking local and liking my resume.
It has been genuinely helpful. But those feel like a bygone era a mere 3 years later. It's still helpful for connecting with people i meet IRL in professional meetups, but its ptjerwose transformed into its own special flavor of all the things I hate in mainstream social media.
I'm resuming my search for full time work in 2026 (I've been floating on 2-3 part time jobs between gigs, freelancing, and tutoring).
I'm simply not going to apply on LinkedIn. I'll keep it open for messages and use it to point to websites to apply on, but the rush to the bottom with the situation described here just isn't worth it for me. I'll use smaller job boards, and remaining word of mouth that also wasn't laid off, and family. I won't go through the Social media drek again when I simply want to provide my decade of services to someone who actually needs problems solved.
Oh! I also have a couple tips I'd be happy to elaborate on. I almost purely have gotten most if not all of my jobs through recruiters on Linkedin, and it's all about being attractive to them and therefor attractive to their clients. I've never been out of work for more than a couple of months at a time throughout my career and I'm always in the top few people in the interviews.
Some context is that I didn't actually finish college, I dropped out of community college because I didn't want to take the core classes and waste money. I wanted to work in the entertainment industry so I decided to just start working instead of going into education debt. I ended up completing all the classes I needed to for Digital Media Arts & Design and Entertainment Technology electives, I just didn't finish any of the core classes to qualify for graduating. I have ADHD and autism and I love learning things, but hate structured education and those classes didn't work for me.
The entertainment industry was all about networking not education, so it wasn't a big deal initially.
However my lack of college degree started to become an issue when I wanted to transition out of the entertainment industry and into more corporate and stable positions, so I had to learn to game the system because any applications I tried to submit would get immediately passed on due to my lack of college degree.
And my Trojan horse strategy was using recruiters and not application systems. I have submitted very very very few applications.
It's worked because I was eventually recruited to work at NBC Universal, Netflix corporate, The Walt Disney Company HQ in Glendale, and Popsockets. I was unfortunately laid off from Disney during the infamous COVID layoffs though, and have since transitioned out of the entertainment industry.
In fact, I had a roommate at the time who was stubborn and was applying to like everything under the sun with applications, and constantly refused to take my advice or help because he had a weird stubborn competitive thing with me, and finally after being unemployed for a year he gave in and let me redo his linkedin, and within 3 months he'd been recruited for a job at Apple TV. Unfortunately this was also a catalyst for a falling out between us, I think he resented me for it actually working and had some inadequacy issues. Still works at Apple though. lol
Personally over the past couple years I've made a decision to stop going after huge companies like Disney, and found I much prefer smaller businesses. But that's another story.
So here's some of my tips.
First and foremost: Remember that when working with recruiters, it's the recruiter's job to make you look like the best candidate to their clients, so the more work you do for them to that goal, the more likely a recruiter will find you.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, but if anyone has any questions let me know. I'm by no means an expert, but I just had to learn to survive when I can't pass any application system that requires me to put a college degree.
Edited to add: So I didn't get into this, but just an FYI despite everything I wrote, I am a huge anti-capitalist and hate corporate cultures, and I'm extremely critical of Social Media. So I don't exactly personally support everything I just outlined, it's why I refer to it as gaming the system and why I don't see any issues with using slight of hand or lies by omission to get jobs. It sucks and I'd love to live in a world where these ridiculous corporate talent shows didn't exist, but I'm not good to anyone if I'm unemployed so I'd rather not shoot myself in the foot out of stubbornness. A lot of my work recently has been supporting non-profits and political causes related to democratic socialism and indigenous communities.
Thanks for the tips, this was a great reminder for me to start posting occasionally on my LinkedIn since it's been mostly dead and only ever used for job hunting when I needed it. I don't have social media (though I guess a Reddit account and Tildes sort of count) besides LinkedIn, and I almost never interact with it.
I'm taking your tips as a bit of preparedness, I enjoy my job and hope to get moved up internally in some way soon, but after it was hard finding a job during my last hunt I'm wanting to make sure I can shorten the time I'm unemployed again since we're hoping to get to the point where I'm able to support our family and my wife doesn't need to work/she can move to something she is more passionate about or work part-time.
Since this is just algorithm farming for a specific goal, it seems reasonable to be churning things through AI. But, I would make a few more detailed suggestions.
Make a list of the topics and positions you want to take and use that list with your prompts to make your posts more consistent. Engage the AI in a conversation to identify ideas for related topics, and pick ones that seem interesting.
When you generate content, take a minute to read what the AI has written. Just one editing pass. If there's something that you wouldn't say, change it. Take out the really over the top adjectives. Try to give it your voice.
For cover letters, do a serious editing pass to weed out the slop. It will improve your uptake, but also, I had a friend using AI who ended up with a letter that said something about armadillos because there was white in white text buried in the job description that said, "You're so excited about armadillos, you can't resist mentioning them at least once."
Save all the edited pieces with the original text, feed the pairs back through the LLM, and tell it to extract a list of rules to follow to make the writing sound more like you. Use those rules as part of future prompts. Rinse and repeat.
So I'll just stay jobless.
At this point my goal is to never again seek any sort of position that would require being on LinkedIn. If that consigns me to low wages doing menial tasks at some local business, then so be it, I suppose. I would rather stick my hand in a woodchipper than rejoin.
Having previously worked in some form of tech for over 15 years (helpdesk, desktop support, systems administration), I am not sure I want to re-enter the field at all anyway. I am so damn sick of tech these days.
This is timely for me. Thanks for sharing.
Same, my spouse has been out of work for 5 months now.
They were ~10 years from retirement in the tech industry and if I learned anything from the great recession, this probably just means they wont ever make the same salary as they were making, if they do actually find another position.
They’re getting interviews, so its not the resume, I’m not sure what it is.