Every day, LinkedIn sends me job alerts. All of them are to train AI to write like a human. I don’t apply for these jobs.
I did click on one alert, thinking it might be something else. It wasn’t something else, but it did lead me to discover that I had messages from people I actually know. That never happens.
One was from a former student thanking me for introducing him to the music of the Talking Heads almost twenty years ago. I have no memory of playing the Talking Heads in class, but it changed his life. That’s a cool thing to know. It made visiting LinkedIn worth it.
I’ve never gotten a job through LinkedIn, but I did get the agent who sold my book through it. I sent her a connection request. She accepted and asked if I had an agent. I did not, at that moment, have an agent. She became my agent and sold my book. Another thing that made visiting LinkedIn worth it.
It’s hard for me to write about LinkedIn because I find it boring, mostly. I also associate it with a terrible boss I had years ago. He was super into LinkedIn. He was also a total idiot. Not everyone on LinkedIn is an idiot, obviously, but his posts were really popular, which made me skeptical about the folks who engage there a lot.
For a while, there was a sort of big shot tech CEO guy who liked to pull me into the discussions he would start on his page. He’d tag me in a “what do you think?” comment. I’d come up with some thoughtful, detailed opinion in the hopes that eventually this might lead to him offering me a job or something. It never did.
I look pretty impressive on LinkedIn. Sometimes I read through my Experience section just to psyche myself up. I’ve done a lot of stuff. If I was going to seriously pursue jobs there, I would pare it down. Streamline it. Optimize!
I don’t want to optimize. For what? To get a job training AI to take my job?