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This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. > Nothing you post there is going to change your career. I can attribute millions o

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. > Nothing you post there is going to change your career. I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' > Doing work that matters might. This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. > Go for depth over frequency. Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. > If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there. Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc. With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.

throwaway4736 1y ago
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woooooo 1y ago
Engineering leader | ex-something ... Is that person more likely to be a leader or a follower and ass-kisser in your experience?
sigbottle 1y ago
Damn. I disagree with what should happen sometimes, but it's helpful to hear how it is.
zwnow 1y ago
LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.
- fnord77 1y ago
  where are the non-boomers looking for jobs these days?
  - giantg2 1y ago
    Retail - most of the good jobs are impossible to get. That's probably what I'll have to do when my current company finishes firing me with my disability. I have used a bunch of the regular job search boards - Dice, Ladders, Indeed, etc. I've also used LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Blind, Hackajob. The tech job market in my location seems abysmal.
  - elmo2you 1y ago
    gen-x here ... I'd say: anywhere/everywhere but LinkedIn. Be observant and creative. Personally, I think that using any service that claim to deliver, for which in the real world I just can't find much supporting evidence and otherwise mostly claims from (direct or indirect) stakeholders (incl. users themselves), feels rather dumb. LinkedIn, and the ecosystem developed around it, has every incentive to be dishonest. In such cases, the burden of evidence that proves otherwise needs to be high. I've not seen that bar ever reached for LinkedIn; not even remotely. At least not where I live. If my perspective leads to people claiming I'm "denying reality" (heard that a few times), it only suggests me how (practically or emotionally) invested some people apparently must be. To me it still looks and feels mostly like a huge fraud-machine. Nothing particularly new specific to LinkedIn though. Before LinkedIn, I've seen how recruitment and hiring agencies wiggled their way into the employment market, where I grew up in. It did not see it do any good. I'd say it shared plenty of characteristics with cancer. It may take considerable effort, but I'd recommend doing your own due diligence and find potential employers yourself, to then approach them directly. Still works quite well, even today and without needing questionable middlemen/services. Just my two cents; mileage may vary.
- 1y ago
baq 1y ago
Are you an employer or an employee?
saagarjha 1y ago
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. …and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.
- itronitron 1y ago
  I remember fondly visiting my grandmother in the accounting department of Acme Tool & Die in Cleveland, Ohio. After a snack of her homemade molasses cookies we would gather around the fax machine, carefully sending invoices and unrolling the printed confirmations before filing them away.
  - 2b3a51 1y ago
    How about invoices by telex and payments received by telegraphic transfer to the bank? No cookies though. I'm not sure how the invoicing method or payment channel affect the marketing discussion. In the case of the shipping company I then worked for the marketing process was somewhat old school and involved pubs.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Which is very cute, but where'd you put her after she started spouting conspiracy theories?
melvinroest 1y ago
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing. I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance. Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.
- nickfromseattle 1y ago
  I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice. But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0] [0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favorite-Marketing-Resources https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...
  - melvinroest 1y ago
    Thanks! Handy that you put it all together.
makeitdouble 1y ago
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. That's spot on. And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it. I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it. We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting. Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers. But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
  - Henchman21 1y ago
    Marketing is lying. Convincing someone to buy something they don’t actually need? Thats a drain on society. It’s become so pervasive we go to great lengths to justify it. But at its core its fundamentally dishonest.
    - paulcole 1y ago
      “1000 songs in your pocket.” Was that a lie when Apple said it about the iPod?
      - alansammarone 1y ago
        no,thats true and honest marketing. If the iPod stopped working after a year (low quality), or was easily hackable (low effort) - and they didn't include that in the marketing - then it would be lying (Windows).
oytis 1y ago
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity
- notahacker 1y ago
  Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT And written in a very specific way Not like that. Like this. The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging. And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined. It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks. And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps. I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment. That sounds like mediocrity to me. In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - oytis 1y ago
    Engagement slop is next level, I wouldn't even call this mediocrity. I rather meant genuine thought leaders. E.g. in my area of expertise (embedded systems) there are a couple of people who dominate LinkedIn on advice in that area. Their advice is not necessarily bad, but not particularly original either. They just beat their drums with half a dozen of opinions they paraphrase over and over. They seem to have certain experience as engineers, but I wouldn't expect them to be particularly good ones. On the other hand, I know a couple of outstandingly good engineers I have worked with, who also have some mindshare on private blogs and conferences, but nowhere near the thought leaders, and definitely not on LinkedIn
porridgeraisin 1y ago
> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc. Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion. > winning on linkedin > push them to * vomits * > millions of dollars dirty money. </rant>
- oytis 1y ago
  I must say, working on a project with weak marketing and sales support is pretty depressing, especially if the engineering itself is good
  - porridgeraisin 1y ago
    Yeah, the thing is that if one person starts doing it, everyone else must as well if they want to compete, regardless of intentions, so it becomes a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.
- sklargh 1y ago
  This is a prevailing opinion within a substantial minority of HN’s population. I am curious, how would you do it differently?
  - cpursley 1y ago
    They wouldn't, they work for someone else and are isolated from the revenue making part of the operation. And the largest anti marketing screamers are often high paid devs part of VC funded companies that don't actually make any money (this is a VC forum, after all). Outside of the valley bubble, for those of us running profitable business, we have to find sustainable channels that work and get the word out. That said, there's a reasonable middle ground between being sleazy and scammy and actually offering value.
NeutralCrane 1y ago
> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much). They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise. Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>. Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short. Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    Plato identified this 2400 years ago as a fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you end up with people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on getting elected and not people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on governing. The problem of marketers remains unsolved after millennia.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      is it unsolved? they seem to be doing very well for themselves.
      - 1y ago
antonvs 1y ago
> > Nothing you post there is going to change your career. > I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' Nothing you post there is going to change your career if your career involves producing real value.
ohdeargodno 1y ago
>The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed. >Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. LinkedIn rewards mediocrity. > your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc. LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity. >Building in public Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode". I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it. In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.
- fhd2 1y ago
  What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential. What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts. Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me. At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself? We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc. I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade. Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy. But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.
apwell23 1y ago
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?
- throwawaybob420 1y ago
  Yeah that was my first thought as well.
- cootsnuck 1y ago
  Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.) So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI. The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever. LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
  - mpeg 1y ago
    I have a bunch of LinkedIn connections claiming they get those fabled six and seven figure client engagements where the client “doesn’t care about the code, they just care about business results” and a lot of other buzzwords. I do data consulting part time, I do very much provide business centric solutions and measurable results (alongside code that your tech team won’t hate) and am an expert in marketing technology, applied AI and a bunch of other “hot” subjects like that. In my work with huge, billion dollar companies, the consulting dream that LI influencers sell feels like a fantasy world. I have to provide and justify a day rate, and when my clients do have a big CAPEX project I’m bidding against Accenture, Palantir, etc. and I don’t expect to win it. If anyone really consistently lands these amazing, big pocket clients, please let me be your intern.
1oooqooq 1y ago
wow. you weaponized medicrity to save a few bucks on an actual marketing campaign. so unique. good for you.
sgnelson 1y ago
Just going to throw this out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.
- fragmede 1y ago
  > If you're in marketing, "kill yourself" is not the insightful bit of wisdom you think it is, even if it did come from Bill Hicks
  - boccko 1y ago
    I try to avoid resorting to ad hominem, but maybe it's just you? In general, no marketing would dial back the economy drastically, which I think is a good idea. Depends on your goals of course.
tomas789 1y ago
I used to write actively on LinkedIn. Nothing big but still something. I couldn’t align with myself with the original post but I couldn’t tell why. This is aligned with my understanding of how LinkedIn works much more. Thank you for explaining that to me.
gchamonlive 1y ago
But that's the thing, revenue is a very poor metric for quality. It's a very good metric for marketing as you said, but focusing solely on that, which is what linkedin rewards, and potentially forgetting to invest time in becoming an objectively better developer is why linekdin rewards mediocrity as the article says. So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.
thomasahle 1y ago
> > Doing work that matters might. > This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. > > Go for depth over frequency. > Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here? If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters". Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.
- botacode 1y ago
  Actually, "quality-of-work" and "time-you-share-it" are both necessary to get on the flywheel of product improvement. Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.
- cootsnuck 1y ago
  It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual. If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary. And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that. Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system. You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging. You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love. You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets. And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all. Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts. It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it. That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).
scarface_74 1y ago
I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”. All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn. It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect. For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
I’d love to see your “million dollar linkedin” if you’re willing to share it
- gedy 1y ago
  TBH it's probably just lead-gen or sales outreach..
_swfb 1y ago
I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks? Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume. I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.
deleted 1y ago
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calmbonsai 1y ago
> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value. > Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one. > Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel... I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling. Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.
godot 1y ago
I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing. For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time. And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?
- aledalgrande 1y ago
  > Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt and funnily enough, this is still marketing "build it and they will come" doesn't work
- oytis 1y ago
  I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.
- RugnirViking 1y ago
  It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.
brcmthrowaway 1y ago
I need to make millions from a LinkedIn post
Xymist 1y ago
This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy. I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.
bravesoul2 1y ago
> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. Where do I find people posting such rare unicorns!
lambdasquirrel 1y ago
> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense. Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.
meow_mix 1y ago
This was going to be my comment, but I was going to be a lot more rude
scirob 1y ago
Great take, would love to see your Ln profile for the context in case this HN account is not Anon

throwaway4736 1y ago

[dead]

woooooo 1y ago

Engineering leader | ex-something ... Is that person more likely to be a leader or a follower and ass-kisser in your experience?

sigbottle 1y ago

Damn. I disagree with what should happen sometimes, but it's helpful to hear how it is.

zwnow 1y ago

LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.

fnord77 1y ago
where are the non-boomers looking for jobs these days?
- giantg2 1y ago
  Retail - most of the good jobs are impossible to get. That's probably what I'll have to do when my current company finishes firing me with my disability. I have used a bunch of the regular job search boards - Dice, Ladders, Indeed, etc. I've also used LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Blind, Hackajob. The tech job market in my location seems abysmal.
- elmo2you 1y ago
  gen-x here ... I'd say: anywhere/everywhere but LinkedIn. Be observant and creative. Personally, I think that using any service that claim to deliver, for which in the real world I just can't find much supporting evidence and otherwise mostly claims from (direct or indirect) stakeholders (incl. users themselves), feels rather dumb. LinkedIn, and the ecosystem developed around it, has every incentive to be dishonest. In such cases, the burden of evidence that proves otherwise needs to be high. I've not seen that bar ever reached for LinkedIn; not even remotely. At least not where I live. If my perspective leads to people claiming I'm "denying reality" (heard that a few times), it only suggests me how (practically or emotionally) invested some people apparently must be. To me it still looks and feels mostly like a huge fraud-machine. Nothing particularly new specific to LinkedIn though. Before LinkedIn, I've seen how recruitment and hiring agencies wiggled their way into the employment market, where I grew up in. It did not see it do any good. I'd say it shared plenty of characteristics with cancer. It may take considerable effort, but I'd recommend doing your own due diligence and find potential employers yourself, to then approach them directly. Still works quite well, even today and without needing questionable middlemen/services. Just my two cents; mileage may vary.
1y ago

baq 1y ago

Are you an employer or an employee?

saagarjha 1y ago

> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. …and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.

itronitron 1y ago
I remember fondly visiting my grandmother in the accounting department of Acme Tool & Die in Cleveland, Ohio. After a snack of her homemade molasses cookies we would gather around the fax machine, carefully sending invoices and unrolling the printed confirmations before filing them away.
- 2b3a51 1y ago
  How about invoices by telex and payments received by telegraphic transfer to the bank? No cookies though. I'm not sure how the invoicing method or payment channel affect the marketing discussion. In the case of the shipping company I then worked for the marketing process was somewhat old school and involved pubs.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Which is very cute, but where'd you put her after she started spouting conspiracy theories?

melvinroest 1y ago

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing. I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance. Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.

nickfromseattle 1y ago
I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice. But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0] [0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favorite-Marketing-Resources https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...
- melvinroest 1y ago
  Thanks! Handy that you put it all together.

makeitdouble 1y ago

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. That's spot on. And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it. I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it. We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting. Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers. But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.
- Henchman21 1y ago
  Marketing is lying. Convincing someone to buy something they don’t actually need? Thats a drain on society. It’s become so pervasive we go to great lengths to justify it. But at its core its fundamentally dishonest.
  - paulcole 1y ago
    “1000 songs in your pocket.” Was that a lie when Apple said it about the iPod?
    - alansammarone 1y ago
      no,thats true and honest marketing. If the iPod stopped working after a year (low quality), or was easily hackable (low effort) - and they didn't include that in the marketing - then it would be lying (Windows).

oytis 1y ago

> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity

notahacker 1y ago
Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT And written in a very specific way Not like that. Like this. The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging. And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined. It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks. And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps. I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment. That sounds like mediocrity to me. In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- oytis 1y ago
  Engagement slop is next level, I wouldn't even call this mediocrity. I rather meant genuine thought leaders. E.g. in my area of expertise (embedded systems) there are a couple of people who dominate LinkedIn on advice in that area. Their advice is not necessarily bad, but not particularly original either. They just beat their drums with half a dozen of opinions they paraphrase over and over. They seem to have certain experience as engineers, but I wouldn't expect them to be particularly good ones. On the other hand, I know a couple of outstandingly good engineers I have worked with, who also have some mindshare on private blogs and conferences, but nowhere near the thought leaders, and definitely not on LinkedIn

porridgeraisin 1y ago

> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc. Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion. > winning on linkedin > push them to * vomits * > millions of dollars dirty money. </rant>

oytis 1y ago
I must say, working on a project with weak marketing and sales support is pretty depressing, especially if the engineering itself is good
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  Yeah, the thing is that if one person starts doing it, everyone else must as well if they want to compete, regardless of intentions, so it becomes a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.
sklargh 1y ago
This is a prevailing opinion within a substantial minority of HN’s population. I am curious, how would you do it differently?
- cpursley 1y ago
  They wouldn't, they work for someone else and are isolated from the revenue making part of the operation. And the largest anti marketing screamers are often high paid devs part of VC funded companies that don't actually make any money (this is a VC forum, after all). Outside of the valley bubble, for those of us running profitable business, we have to find sustainable channels that work and get the word out. That said, there's a reasonable middle ground between being sleazy and scammy and actually offering value.

NeutralCrane 1y ago

> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much). They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise. Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.

Spooky23 1y ago
The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>. Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short. Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  Plato identified this 2400 years ago as a fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you end up with people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on getting elected and not people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on governing. The problem of marketers remains unsolved after millennia.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    is it unsolved? they seem to be doing very well for themselves.
    - 1y ago

antonvs 1y ago

> > Nothing you post there is going to change your career. > I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' Nothing you post there is going to change your career if your career involves producing real value.

ohdeargodno 1y ago

>The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed. >Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. LinkedIn rewards mediocrity. > your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc. LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity. >Building in public Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode". I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it. In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.

fhd2 1y ago
What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential. What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts. Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me. At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself? We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc. I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade. Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy. But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.

apwell23 1y ago

> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?

throwawaybob420 1y ago
Yeah that was my first thought as well.
cootsnuck 1y ago
Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.) So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI. The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever. LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.
- mpeg 1y ago
  I have a bunch of LinkedIn connections claiming they get those fabled six and seven figure client engagements where the client “doesn’t care about the code, they just care about business results” and a lot of other buzzwords. I do data consulting part time, I do very much provide business centric solutions and measurable results (alongside code that your tech team won’t hate) and am an expert in marketing technology, applied AI and a bunch of other “hot” subjects like that. In my work with huge, billion dollar companies, the consulting dream that LI influencers sell feels like a fantasy world. I have to provide and justify a day rate, and when my clients do have a big CAPEX project I’m bidding against Accenture, Palantir, etc. and I don’t expect to win it. If anyone really consistently lands these amazing, big pocket clients, please let me be your intern.

1oooqooq 1y ago

wow. you weaponized medicrity to save a few bucks on an actual marketing campaign. so unique. good for you.

sgnelson 1y ago

Just going to throw this out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.

fragmede 1y ago
> If you're in marketing, "kill yourself" is not the insightful bit of wisdom you think it is, even if it did come from Bill Hicks
- boccko 1y ago
  I try to avoid resorting to ad hominem, but maybe it's just you? In general, no marketing would dial back the economy drastically, which I think is a good idea. Depends on your goals of course.

tomas789 1y ago

I used to write actively on LinkedIn. Nothing big but still something. I couldn’t align with myself with the original post but I couldn’t tell why. This is aligned with my understanding of how LinkedIn works much more. Thank you for explaining that to me.

gchamonlive 1y ago

But that's the thing, revenue is a very poor metric for quality. It's a very good metric for marketing as you said, but focusing solely on that, which is what linkedin rewards, and potentially forgetting to invest time in becoming an objectively better developer is why linekdin rewards mediocrity as the article says. So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.

thomasahle 1y ago

> > Doing work that matters might. > This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. > > Go for depth over frequency. > Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here? If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters". Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.

botacode 1y ago
Actually, "quality-of-work" and "time-you-share-it" are both necessary to get on the flywheel of product improvement. Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.
cootsnuck 1y ago
It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual. If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary. And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that. Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system. You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging. You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love. You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets. And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all. Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts. It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it. That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).

scarface_74 1y ago

I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”. All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn. It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect. For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.

AndrewKemendo 1y ago

I’d love to see your “million dollar linkedin” if you’re willing to share it

gedy 1y ago
TBH it's probably just lead-gen or sales outreach..

_swfb 1y ago

I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks? Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume. I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

calmbonsai 1y ago

> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends' I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value. > Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one. > Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel... I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling. Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.

godot 1y ago

I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing. For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time. And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?

aledalgrande 1y ago
> Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt and funnily enough, this is still marketing "build it and they will come" doesn't work
oytis 1y ago
I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.
RugnirViking 1y ago
It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.

brcmthrowaway 1y ago

I need to make millions from a LinkedIn post

Xymist 1y ago

This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy. I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.

bravesoul2 1y ago

> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise. Where do I find people posting such rare unicorns!

lambdasquirrel 1y ago

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'. At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense. Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.

meow_mix 1y ago

This was going to be my comment, but I was going to be a lot more rude

scirob 1y ago

Great take, would love to see your Ln profile for the context in case this HN account is not Anon