Take linkedin with a big pile of salt
Linkedin plays an essential role in our professional lives. It often matches us with the next best job opportunity. But the content and interactions we have on there are about as real as instagram is
The motivational content, the flattery, the employer branding. It’s mostly fake.
That’s fine, as long as you are aware of it, but I doubt that someone joining the platform especially when starting their career can know that. They might buy into it the same way teenagers looking at instagram influencers might believe that that beauty generated by filters is attainable, real or a worthwhile pursuit.
It might not be toxic, but…
all this deception can’t be good for us, right? Take for example:
you aren’t as hot as recruiters might make you believe
most of the content comes from HR people and influencers - that’s not a representative sample of the workforce
most content from companies either advertises their product or themselves as suppliers or employers
certifications are a HUGE industry - some have value, many don’t
there is networking outside these platforms and many of the best opportunities never make it to LinkedIn
linkedin profiles don’t have to be honest - real careers are neither as clean nor as interesting, and sometimes, like with resumes, people flat-out lie
salary information you find here or on glassdoor gives you little indication about your earnings potential
At the end of the day, it’s a platform built for recruiters to have the biggest possible pool of CVs to search through. Almost all features are targeted at recruiters and sales people. Some of these things are relatively harmless, but I want to zoom in on the content authors.
Who posts on linked
I’d group most content into these buckets
press releases e.g. release announcements
company PR stuff e.g. look at our cool new office, or project we did or how super eco conscious our company is
influencer content - yes, linkedin is packed with this garbage
managers (esp. HR) expressing their opinion on things loosely related to their work
Content from managers is usually a humble brag about their company’s new progressive policy with a bit of debate in the comments, which ends up being very “employer-sided”. It’s execs, HR people, recruiters debating this stuff. You know that no-one has asked employees for their opinion when you hear stuff like:
people don’t quit because of money
flexible schedules mean you should just be cool with work creeping into evenings and weekends
quiet quitting is people being lazy / soft / dishonest
we shouldn’t raise salaries above the local market because we’ll turn our cities into dystopian shitholes
All this is normal manager talk offline already and now it’s become common on LinkedIn as well. If this is what you hear at work and see online, you might even believe it and that certainly isn’t to your benefit.
Let's look at two big topics, where the narrative doesn't reflect the reality.
Working hours
About 15 years ago, policies like “flex-time” were common in central Europe, especially in international companies. It enabled employees to leave a bit earlier today and start that much earlier e.g. on Friday. This was a huge benefit especially for anyone with a life outside of their jobs, who might be heavily constrained by strict working hours.
Today, knowledge workers are rarely required to count their hours. The company is trusting you to get your work done. Often there is a commitment to some core hours to ensure everyone is reachable at certain times and things can run smoothly, but everything outside that is up to you and your colleagues.
Things get a little weird when you start to feel some pressure in the air about working longer hours e.g. to compensate for some inefficiency or to meet a deadline.
The exploitive bit comes when you do your work, do your hours properly, but then, you need to attend some more evening calls and a hackathon and stay late for an all hands. You can’t balance the hours, because you have shit to do, and as hours are no longer counted, fulfilling your commitments is all that matters. So do you commit less or suck it up in the name of “flexibility” and “equity”, risking burnout in the near future?
Salaries
By far the biggest mess of a topic in my opinion are wages. Not only is it a legal minefield to speak about your salary with your colleagues, there are many countries including the Czech Republic where it’s culturally frowned upon to speak about money as it can appear boastful.
If you don’t happen to have a beer with someone who tells you otherwise, you might assume that all engineers earn more or less the same, let’s say within a ±25k CZK range. Within the Czech Republic, the range is actually around 50-150k. There are engineers with surprisingly low salaries, but there are people earning far more than you ever thought you could, without selling your soul and becoming a manager.
Because when you cross the border and a position that’s worth 100k here, pays 200k and 350k overseas.
This isn’t unique to software engineers either. UX, Product, Sales… same story.
These salaries were always available for agencies, but very rarely for the employees without giving a huge cut to the company.
Since COVID, the market has become far more open towards the west.
That puts local tech companies in an awkward position. Catch up to the Germans, or come up with an excuse not to. If you look at LinkedIn, it seems that they choose the latter with some rather phenomenal mental gymnastics.
I read a recruiter calling 10k / MD sci-fi, but these rates have existed on the Czech market for many years in certain niches, and they are becoming far more common as many western companies, eager for talent and now equipped to handle remote teams, are hunting in markets where they can offer people huge salary raises instead of in their own saturated market.
These companies don’t need to advertise a lot as they have a very easy time poaching top talent with the offers they can make. When that happens, people absolutely do quit because of money.
Summary
Everyone is selling something. It’s the internet in 2022 after all. But on LinkedIn, as the product being sold is often a job, it’s a lot more subtle and often deceiving. It’s worth keeping in mind who is advertising what and to take it with a grain of salt.