On Hating LinkedIn

I was going to post this on Sean’s guestbook as a response to his post about hating LinkedIn. Instead, Occasional Reader, I’ll inflict the following on you...

I don’t blame Sean at all for loathing LinkedIn. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the Ashley Madison of job hunting. All of the recruiters and job listings on LinkedIn are as fake as the women on Ashley Madison were reputed to have been.

Merely having an account there is bad OPSEC if you already have a job but are looking for a better deal. Unless you’re one of the lunatics who mistakes LinkedIn for LiveJournal in business casual you probably aren’t there in the first place unless you’re looking for a new job. If you are there, chances are your boss knows it, and so does their boss, and so on. If they want to, they will know if you’re looking to jump ship.

In fact, one of the reasons I’ve put off looking for a new job myself is the expectation to create an account on that hellsite and reach out to people I don’t know from Adam or Lilith — and I probably wouldn’t care to know them either. It isn’t necessarily that they’re bad people; the problem is me. Despite my efforts to be less so, I’m a cynical and misanthropic asshole — as you’ve doubtless noticed, Occasional Reader — and keeping that to myself isn’t quite as simple as keeping my libido in my pants. All I would want from such people is a way to bypass the utterly Byzantine hazing ritual that getting a job has become nowadays, and I’m not quite sociopathic enough to pretend otherwise.

Unless it’s Patrick Bateman interviewing me for a job. Then again, given how fake managers generally are, having to convince the protagonist of American Psycho to grant me the dubious privilege of racking my brain for at least forty hours a week to further enrich his overprivileged ass might be an improvement. Worse, maybe workers must become more like Bateman merely to successfully perform employability?

I use the word Byzantine and call the hiring process a hazing ritual in all seriousness: I’ve heard of developers facing seven rounds of interviews to get a job pushing around React widgets. I’d compare this to joining a secret society, but the Freemasons aren’t nearly as picky — you’d think developers were trying to penetrate the mystery cult of Eleusis or the inner circle of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Or, for that matter, trying to reach OT III in Scientology. Maybe that’s next — if it isn’t already here — employment as a “pay to play” proposition, a privilege reserved to those with more money than sense. Regardless, if somebody asks me to implement quicksort on a whiteboard, that’s a sure sign that I am trying to work for a bunch of utter clowns — or people who either want to engage in legal and socially-acceptable discrimination or people looking to pretend to try to hire Americans so they can then instead hire a more easily-exploitable guest worker on a H-1B visa. Even if I was interviewing for a full-stack devops role, the only realistic scenario in which I would be implementing such fundamental algorithms in my day-to-day work is if I was working for people who have no idea what in Crom’s name they’re doing.

However, such pretense seems all but obligatory, as is the pretense that I as a worker actually give a damn about the company’s mission, its products, or what its leadership thinks about anything. I certainly have no intention of mistaking my employer for family unless I’m working for the Mafia. I worked for family once — never fucking again. Nor do I expect my coworkers to be my friends, and the only community I want to find at work is a union. It’s bad enough that my access to healthcare depends on having a job; my social life shouldn’t also be dependent on my employment status. No wonder so many Americans are supposedly lonely!

Let’s be honest: unless you’re going to use the code I write to do nefarious shit like...

• expose people to even more advertising than they already suffer
• store information about people and sell it to advertisers or government agencies who won’t take “judicial warrant or GTFO” for a answer
• deport non-citizens without due process
• carpet bomb cities with no regard to civilian casualties
• train a machine learning model using mass automated copyright infringement
• maintain a database of “undesireables” so that they can be rounded up

Unfortunately, being openly mercenary is simply not done in the US. If we were honest with ourselves about how work works, we’d probably see more people trying to do what Luigi Mangione allegedly did. We’d see more unions, more wildcat strikes, and more mobs of workers kicking down their bosses’ doors and beating the undead Christ out of them in front of their families — as supposedly happened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Instead, I’m supposed to pretend that I care about anything but how much I’m going to get paid per hour and how many hours per week I must offer up — as if any wage could adequately compensate me for a fraction of the finite time remaining in the one life I’m likely to get. I’m supposed to do the unpaid emotional labor of being employable. Part of that emotional labor is best expressed by an old Russian joke — if being from the 1970s is old — that often gets rendered in English as, They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. I lie for a living despite not being a professional novelist. Worse, I find myself obliged to act as if my self-styled superiors’ lies were truth as part of the emotional labor I do at my job.

I’d say that I’ve had enough and I want out, but I’ve felt that way for years. But I can just hear Smudge saying, with a sinister chuckle, You can’t walk away now... — despite being a cat. (If you think that’s crazy, it could be worse; I could be getting writing advice from my bicycle.) Frankly, I’ve come to think that becoming unemployable is the first step toward becoming ungovernable. If I were still single, and had bigger balls than the set I let Catherine keep in her purse (hey, it’s warm and cozy in there), I’d like to think I’ve have done so already.

Long story short: if it even seems more straightforward to become a Mafia associate than it is to get a legitimate job — if there is more performative bullshit involved — then there is something profoundly wrong with how work and business are done in this country. LinkedIn is part of the problem. There’s nothing wrong with it that can’t be fixed by aiming a few ICBMs at Microsoft’s corporate campus.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Microsoft has crossed the Ripley Threshold. They are, after all, a convicted monopolist. LinkedIn is just one more reason to nuke the entire corporation from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

The only problem would be the resulting collateral damage to civilians in the Pacific Northwest. Most of them aren’t techies or “human resources” apparatchiks, so I don’t have a beef with them. Perhaps we could instead place bets on when LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman will die of natural causes. 😉