Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

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It's a prisoner's dilemma degenerating into a tragedy of the commons.

This is how I feel about LinkedIn. I've seen so many losers and fuckups (people I've worked with who have destroyed teams and companies) with large numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts. I haven't played that game (and have an extremely boring LI profile, with past employers not listed) and my numbers are embarrassing.

It's more like the "tragedy of the uncommons": bland people fighting to establish themselves as somehow special or superior, and fucking up everything for everyone. It just generates noise, and the winners are the people who are best at making the right kind of noise.

LinkedIn also tricked a generation into giving up one of their most important professional rights: the right to reinvent themselves. I use it, because the information is useful, but I feel like the world was a much better place when professional oversharing wasn't expected. When labor overshares and capital doesn't change what it does, who should one expect to win?

As far as I'm concerned, I don't have an ethical problem with social proof arbitrage. Even if I did, that'd just mean losing to others who don't follow such rules. The main reason I don't do it is that I don't care. I'm apathetic about "social proof" in general because, in humans, sociality is inversely proportional to quality. I certainly wouldn't want to work at a job where the difference between a 2000 and a 6000 follower count mattered.

Actually, this applies to any sort of endeavor which brushes up against professions.

Case in point: open source. Over the past year, there have been a few articles exhorting the need to put considerable amounts of time marketing your open source project. Remember, it's not enough to release your code with decent docs, no, you have to buy a domain, put together a flat-themed bootstrap teaser page, make grandiose claims, blog regularly about it, set up a Twitter account, and so on.

Why didn't we feel the need to do all of this the decade before? Oh, right: we weren't all ubiquitously self-promoting to each other via social.

Worker harder, peon! Prove your worth to the world, which might reward you with more influence that you can eventually exchange for a job at $MEGACORP! Then you'll have made it!

Articles:

1. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/open-source-marketing-with...

2. http://zachholman.com/posts/open-source-marketing/

> I've seen so many losers and fuckups (people I've worked with who have destroyed teams and companies) with large numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts

I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.

> I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.

Yep, we had an engineer who spent 40 hours a week going around and building social connections.. Where did he find the time?

Maybe do ask him: he might actually have useful tips on working smarter and freeing up time by avoiding repetitive or redondant tasks.

Even the engineer who freed up his time by outsourcing had the common decency to spend his time looking at pictures of kittens..

If managers could account for the hours of utility he stole from others, I think it would be a separate reason to put him on probation. (I know he was on probation for his own output since that was the topic of many of his visits to one of my neighbors who in turn wasted my time complaining about his tedious visits just as I waste yours now. So ends my postmodern fable.)

I was merely responding to the "Where did he find the time?" sentence because I often hear it from people misunderstanding highly organized engineers, but obviously I don't know that specific guy so I can't hazard a guess as to his specific situation, sorry if you felt misunderstood.

I didn't mean to sound overly harsh or upset about it, since I do recognize there is a spectrum and you need to fall somewhere in the middle if you want to be able to learn from more than just your own actions and have opportunities if your current project gets cancelled, etc.

But I think it is an ironic part of social nature that we continue to reward those who take it too far on the social side of the spectrum (just complaining about them we seem to make them into a necessary quirk of the place or create a miscommunication that gets them a new position) while we let a lot of brilliant people go just because they look like they are on the other side of the spectrum to people who don't see their quieter exchanges.

> glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts

I don't know anyone that takes these seriously as a signal for hiring someone. You just do what you usually do -- call people you know that have worked with them before to get the scoop. But I don't blame LinkedIn for building and promoting these features. They're like Facebook Pokes -- light touch interactions that promote engagement with connections, and revisits back to the site. Anecdotal observations suggest that they work.

You just do what you usually do -- call people you know that have worked with them before to get the scoop.

That's even worse. Back-channel references are unreliable and if you ding someone on a back-channel, you better hope it's not someone like me who will litigate just to show the world the right.

Back-channel references are crucial.

I can't imagine a scenario where I wouldn't do a number of them for a key hire. Hiring managers is very hard. It's important that you make sure it's a good fit. Back-channel references are one really strong way to help make sure it's a great fit for both people. And usually, references help to surface some of the persons' strengths you might not really have known, as well as some blind spots you can code your behavior around.

Crucial. crucial. crucial.

Back-channel references are one of those things that seems like a great idea but they quietly cause a world of problems.

Long term they create highly insular organisations that overpay for lower levels of talent. Worse, they tend to quickly be gamed by the type of people who tend to be vary good at getting promoted without actually being competent.

People invent "social proof" schemes like back-channel references because they think they'll guard them against unethical people, but they do the reverse. You end up getting more smooth operator types (who can game any social proof system set up against them) and rejecting normal people.

Now, I agree that unethical people do an incredible amount of damage and that you want to do everything you can to avoid hiring them. However, the data is extremely clear that once you're beyond 3 or 4 references, you're actually selecting for unethical behavior. If someone has 10 glowing references covering the past 5 years, he probably extorted his way into that. I've done my fair of "fixer" work (nothing unethical) and had a unique view into the ethical underbelly of the corporate world, and I see that shit all the time.

If someone passes an intensive back-channel reference check, it's because he's scared the living shit out of people. Do you really want that kind of toxicity in your company?

You're suggesting that 8 people giving references are lying, or are scared of the candidate.

I find that hypothesis totally absurd.

How so?

I think it's very hard to identify quality of people based on recommendations on LinkedIn. Having a well written (not too verbose, and gives a view of who you are) LinkedIn profile does send a signal - that you want people to have information about you.

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