LinkedIn's "only useful function" is insufficient to overcome its "deal killer": it's a farce. I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality. They all claim the same B.S. (detail oriented, results driven, digital transformation, blah blah blah blah blah blah), enabling them to get hired into roles that ruin the lives of programmers like me. Better they should just be honest and say, "Switch jobs every 3 years when they find out I'm a total poser but I promise to stay out of the programmers' way".
> I have never met an I.T. manager whose LinkedIn profile was remotely close to reality.
I really wish there was a way to flag false information in someone's profile.
I had a guy last year that we fired for substantial cause. He was hired as a mid-level engineer, but honestly was borderline-junior level when we got him. That's fine, he clearly "overstated" his resume. I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.
So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing. I figured we could train him on stuff we needed. No big deal, he has at least foundational experience so its fine.
Fast forward 8 months. It has been nothing but a disaster. His personal attitude has been toxic enough that it drove me to consider leaving and we lost two other employees to his toxic attitude. Furthermore, he had already overstayed his welcome from a performance perspective. He directly caused multiple outages in our system in his short tenure and had failed to complete any significant projects by himself without it needing to be rescued by other teammates. In fact we had a junior engineer during his time that was outperforming this mid-level and used the fact that he outperformed this engineer in order to (reasonably) get a promotion.
After the sixth performance review warning in 8 months, I finally fire him for performance and creating a toxic work environment. Remember, he was a mid-level engineer that was being outperformed by our junior engineers.
Anyway, he was fired and I move on. The department significantly turned around for the better after he left. I really regretted not firing him sooner and spending so much effort trying to save him. The entire team was relieved when he left and happy.
Then one day, about a month later, I am having a 1x1 with an employee in my team who asked why that fired employee was a senior engineer and thought that it should justify a promotion for himself. I explained that he wasn't a senior, not even close and I was then pointed to his linkedin page.
On that page I read what the fired employee wrote about himself. First of all, he gave himself a promotion to "Senior / Lead Engineer". Keep in mind, this was someone who couldn't be trusted for basic junior level tasks by himself. Now he is presenting as a lead engineer.
In his accomplishments he said he lowered our AWS bill by 38.5%. Sounds great. Except that he wasn't even priviledged to our AWS expenses during that time, and furthermore our AWS bill had actually increased by over 20% during the same time period. He didn't just "inflate" his contribution (which is normal on resumes/CVs), but he was in no-way involved in managing the AWS expenses whatsoever.
Another bulletpoint said he had helped "integrate ChatGPT and AI tools into our platform to improve developer effeciency by 26%". Except that our company has (and still does) have a compliance regulation against using ChatGPT at all (we deal with sensitive government data that is restricted) and we were explicitly banned from using AI developer tools during his time here. So this is another entirely false claim.
He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released. No such product was ever released, let along him running it. The companies revenues were mostly flat during his time there.
That wasn't even it, but i've made my point. I went down the 8-10 bullet points on his LinkedIn and only 1 was even based in reality (although exaggerated). The rest were entirely false. On top of that he promoted himself as a lead engineer, of which he was closer to a Junior.
Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.
It's fine. I was happy to not have him in my life or organization anymore. I wasn't going to sue him over it or anything. But it does bother me that someone else would potentially hire him based on information that is essentially entirely fabricated. Yes they could try to get references. I assume he would cheat or lie his way through that as well, using friends that pose as past managers or something. If they called for an employment verification, the most any company would do is verify the employment dates and _maybe_ job title. But most companies in tech don't even bother with that.
Of course I don't know how much of this is a LinkedIn problem, as just hiring in general. Even if LinkedIn enforced community moderated accuracy, there's nothing to stop him from typing up stuff on his Resume that he sends around.
Then again, for anyone listening that works at LinkedIn, having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers. It would probably be more real and trusted than a reference check and make LinkedIn an indispensable tool for employers.
> I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.
Yikes. I have a great cost-cutting proposal for your company, then: don't bother with interviews. Just let HR hire directly based on resumes without ever talking to the candidate. Why would you bother with the interview if this is happening anyway?
> He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released
If you're a public company, this should be easily falsified by the next employer doing due diligence. If not, yeah, hard to know.
> Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.
This is the one he really should always get caught on. If companies say nothing else when asked about a former employees, they at least say what their tenure was.
> Having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers.
Which dating site was it that admitted that they really didn't want their users to find their soulmates, because then they stopped using the dating site? LinkedIn doesn't want you to find your perfect job and work there happily until retirement. Then why would you bother using LinkedIn anymore?
LinkedIn (and resumes / CVs) exist for you to lie to HR and fit into the automated systems to so you can get a job. They don't exist to be uniquely useful. If they were anything but lies then you wouldn't need to deal with technical interviews as you could go off of the candidates LinkedIn or resume. As you say, it's a system that when games gets you through HR. HR doesn't know shit from anything so they pass the candidate along. If you convince HR that your shit doesn't stink they'll be convinced you're the second coming of Christ. That's the game to play.
3 Days late but this is a funny comic! (I'm more WandaWant than say, alGorithm so some of the coding references go over my head but the jokes are funny all the same!)
Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)
Nice catch, ExtraRoulette! You're the first to notice.
This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.
It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.
Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.
So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.
I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.
I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
I prefer to share my experience here:
https://eddiots.com/1038
https://eddiots.com/28
https://eddiots.com/1840
https://eddiots.com/983