[nickfromseattle]

This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

> Nothing you post there is going to change your career.

I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

> Doing work that matters might.

This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

> Go for depth over frequency.

Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

> If writing online matters to you, you’re probably better off starting a blog and building things there.

Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

With that said, while LinkedIn is responsible for a significant % of my total revenue, it's also responsible for a significant % of my anxiety. Building in public invites folks to publicly blast you if they don't agree with your ideas. 'Getting ratio'd' happens. LinkedIn eventually becomes a mentally exhausting slog. But as a career driven individual the upside has been very high and I think the trade off was worth it. I would do it again knowing everything I know now.

[makeitdouble]

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

That's spot on.

And it will be a very common sentiment regarding marketing. Many devs don't like "bullshitting", it's the exact opposite of how we're supposed to do our job. And while it's understood marketing has a huge impact on sales, one can still take a healthy distance from it.

I think this post is about linkedin moving from a generic work focused SNS to a business/marketing eldorado, and how the author isn't happy about it.

We'd see probably see the same kind of rant if Salesforce pivoted to become a Github competitor.

[StopDisinfo910]

As an aside, marketing isn’t bullshitting.

Peddling non sense on LinkedIn mostly is bullshitting. It can be very lucrative bullshitting and I’m happy to fork the money to people devoid of any sort of ethics when I have to leverage it while sharing your overall opinions on LinkedIn influencers.

But there is significantly more to marketing than that and some of it (pricing strategy, distribution, understanding your sales channels and building relationships with your key customers for example) is actually interesting and can be very analytical and factually grounded.

[pjmlp]

Correction, developers that only work on software products, because those of us doing freelancing, consulting or working in non-software companies, really get it.

We have to, if we want to stay in business.

[paulcole]

> Many devs don't like "bullshitting”

In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.

[thomasahle]

> > Doing work that matters might.

> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

> > Go for depth over frequency.

> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

Don't you think there's a contradiction or trade-off here?

If you've written about your content 1,000x, you could have spent that time on doing more "work that matters".

Perhaps the "practical impact" is something like `quality-of-work * times-you-share-it`, but let's not pretend optimizing one doesn't take time away from the other.

[cootsnuck]

It's not some zero sum game. And "work that matters" or "practical impact" are deeply subjective and contextual.

If someone is a freelancer that makes websites more accessible then what qualifies as "practical impact" will change. Finding clients who need your service, sharing your work with others so they can see what you do, actually doing the work, dealing with boring but necessary business admin, etc... All of that is necessary.

And optimizing one precisely does mean avoiding taking time away from the others. If you work for yourself then you have to get clients / sell products -- there's no way around that.

Anyone who is serious about that type of marketing knows you treat it like a system.

You have evergreen content that you evaluate to see if people find it useful and engaging.

You slowly build up to having a library of that evergreen content. Maybe it's something like 30 long-form blog posts that people really love.

You then chop up those 30 blog posts into useful nuggets for posting on whatever social channels your audience is on (e.g. LI). Say you end up with 150 actually useful nuggets.

And then you rotate through those. Maybe you post three a week. It will take about a year to get through them all.

Then you rinse and repeat. That's an oversimplification, but you get the point. And this is clearly amenable to partial or full automation or delegation after you've written the original blog posts.

It works because not everyone sees your posts. If your most popular nugget is #57 and you only post it once, you can bet it will be popular again next time you post it and that new people will see it.

That's how you get your 1000x of content in a way that doesn't really take any extra time if you already were wanting to do long form writing anyway (which anyone with expertise really should do, if they enjoy writing).

[botacode]

Actually, "quality-of-work" and "time-you-share-it" are both necessary to get on the flywheel of product improvement.

Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.

[calmbonsai]

> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

I suspect everyone will need some citation and clarification on this statement before accepting it a face value.

> Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works. 95% of your audience is not 'in-market' and ready to buy when they see your content. Sometime over the next 3-5 years they may move into a buying lifecycle, and they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

Having developed marketing software and promotion optimizers, that generalized percentage doesn't exist. It's highly market, channel, and business-cycle specific. Also having a negative/spammy impression will have a long-lasting (~20x) negative impact versus having a neutral impression or a positive one.

> Your long form, in-depth content lives on your blog, and your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel...

I completely concur on this funneling principle. Aside from having a horrid document viewer, I'm still amazed that people post long-form detailed documents on LI. That feed is not designed for that consumption model and you're sacrificing the all aforementioned benefits of personal platform funneling.

Truth re:ratio'd and sure, build in public, but build-lite on LinkedIn and build-heavy on platforms you can control and on interfaces that are designed for "heavy" content consumption.

[oytis]

> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

I agree on the strong opinions, but not that a real expertise is a prerequisite. You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity

[motorest]

> You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity

I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.

I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?

[notahacker]

Judging by the content I get served, the kind of content that performs best is outsourced to ChatGPT

And written in a very specific way

Not like that. Like this.

The aversion to conventional paragraph structures is as important as the bragging.

And it's not that that opinions are strong, or genuinely held, or even that well-defined.

It's just the AI favourite "not this, this" pattern you get when you ask it to write persuasively or express a strong opinion. And a lot of line breaks.

And the stories are the sort where at the start, the individual makes it clear just how committed to hustle culture they are, and at the end, everyone claps.

I work in a field that is actually quite interesting even to people outside it, and some of the people I'm connected with have actual expertise, reputation and sometimes strong opinions they even sometimes express on LinkedIn

But the algorithm prefers GPT-written fake stories with lots of one sentence paragraphs, most of them focused on recruitment.

That sounds like mediocrity to me.

In most cases it probably doesn't even need expertise on ragebait. LLMs can do that bit

[NeutralCrane]

> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).

They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.

Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.

[Spooky23]

The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>.

Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.

Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.

[anon84873628]

To me it's the most obvious sign that the person won't really be engaged with the work at your company. They're just using it as another bullet point in their "personal brand", while spending most time on outside activities. Then expect them to move on in 1-2 years anyway.

[melvinroest]

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

I'm a dev, and I'm interested in marketing.

I'm currently working as a data analyst in a marketing team (and a secret software engineer - don't tell the marketers, haha). While I do learn a thing or two, mostly by automating some of their things, I would like to know how to go from 0 to 100K users. I work for a corporate and I really notice that they do "corporate marketing". So it's much more about maintenance.

Would you know how to get started on learning that? It's hard to know what information is solid info versus what isn't.

[nickfromseattle]

I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice.

But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]

[0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...

[saagarjha]

> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

…and here's what it taught me about B2B sales.

[itronitron]

I remember fondly visiting my grandmother in the accounting department of Acme Tool & Die in Cleveland, Ohio. After a snack of her homemade molasses cookies we would gather around the fax machine, carefully sending invoices and unrolling the printed confirmations before filing them away.

[apwell23]

> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

I think you are BS-ing ( like you probably do on linkedin). What is the name of your company ?

[throwawaybob420]

Yeah that was my first thought as well.

[cootsnuck]

Y'all must live in a bubble. There are quite a lot of people who work for themselves and sell their expertise and skills to other businesses. And there are plenty of folks who have been doing that for awhile and mainly have client engagements in the six figure and seven figure range. (In those scenarios they may only do a handful of engagements each year of course.)

So yes, for some people, if they have decided to focus on LI as a marketing channel, then they absolutely can attribute millions of revenue to LI.

The same would be said if they instead chose billboards, or YouTube, or in-person networking events, whatever.

LI isn't special, it's just another place to market services.

[sgnelson]

Just going to throw this out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

I do not fully endorse the message. However, there is very much some truth in there.

[fragmede]

> If you're in marketing, "kill yourself"

is not the insightful bit of wisdom you think it is, even if it did come from Bill Hicks

[godot]

I agree, there seems to be a level of criticism of marketing bordering on irrational among devs, it's almost like it's trendy to hate on marketing.

For devs who currently think this way, I suggest thinking about it more deeply from the perspective of a developer: Let's say you want to start a company/startup from a passionate idea you had. What do you think happens when you build it? In reality, do you truly expect "build it and they will come"? What happens when you bought a domain, put up your product on the web, or the app store? I can tell you what will happen: there will be zero people signing up to use it. Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt is an illusion of ease to publicize a product. A PH launch is a carefully planned and curated process involving hours and hours of marketing work to prepare for. A Show HN post will go unnoticed with no clicks 99.9% of the time.

And if you just work in a bigger company, as a non-founder, and say "this isn't my problem, I just build stuff for a job", what do you think the founders did to build their company so there are users who sign up and pay?

[RugnirViking]

It's literally an arms race. If nobody put effort into marketing; quality would bubble to the top. If everyone spends some amount of time optimising their seo, tweaking for the algorithm, etc, then in essence, nobody has (and thus, in theory, quality would bubble to the top). The situation we actually have is worse than both of these; bad actors spend the most on marketing, with the more marketing and the more effective marketing being for the worst products.

[oytis]

I can agree that marketing is necessary, but it's not irrational to resent that one's attention is being manipulated with or that internet - which is an amazing technology by itself - has become a lot less useful than it could be basically because so many people decided to do marketing and sales on it.

[aledalgrande]

> Posting it on a Show HN or Product Hunt

and funnily enough, this is still marketing

"build it and they will come" doesn't work

[gchamonlive]

But that's the thing, revenue is a very poor metric for quality. It's a very good metric for marketing as you said, but focusing solely on that, which is what linkedin rewards, and potentially forgetting to invest time in becoming an objectively better developer is why linekdin rewards mediocrity as the article says.

So while you are disagreeing, you are actually reinforcing the article's central argument.

[baq]

Are you an employer or an employee?

[tomas789]

I used to write actively on LinkedIn. Nothing big but still something. I couldn’t align with myself with the original post but I couldn’t tell why. This is aligned with my understanding of how LinkedIn works much more. Thank you for explaining that to me.

[Imustaskforhelp]

If something makes you money while being legal while its kinda promoted by saying the words like _career_oriented_ etc.

I felt the above statement from your comment and I mean I agree that its okay but I mean idk :/ lets just call a spade a spade.

Also I do understand why people will have such opinions. People say corporations are greedy, but I might suggest that people working at the top of corporations are just as greedy.

But sometimes it might not even be about greed but rather just need, you feel like you need millions of dollar, you deserve it... and by doing this, you actually get it. I feel like in this world, the needs and desires are getting blurred and its causing rise to greed and suffering.

[porridgeraisin]

> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.

> winning on linkedin

> push them to

* vomits *

> millions of dollars

dirty money.

</rant>

[oytis]

I must say, working on a project with weak marketing and sales support is pretty depressing, especially if the engineering itself is good

[cpursley]

If it leads to someone purchasing a solution that solves a need, how is that zero value?

[sklargh]

This is a prevailing opinion within a substantial minority of HN’s population. I am curious, how would you do it differently?

[lambdasquirrel]

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.

Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.

[Xymist]

This factor (95% of "your audience" not being interested at the time) is the core of why all marketing is unavoidably scummy.

I don't want to hear about your product _ever_, except on the day I am looking for a product which provides the function your product does. On that day, I don't want to hear about it from you or anyone you have anything to do with; I want a list of products in that space, curated by an independent third party you have never spoken to and cannot influence in any way, with a clear featureset and upfront costs comparison table that does not have any variant on "talk to their sales team" anywhere near it.

[_swfb]

I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks?

Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.

I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.

[bravesoul2]

> The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

Where do I find people posting such rare unicorns!

[scirob]

Great take, would love to see your Ln profile for the context in case this HN account is not Anon

[sigbottle]

Damn. I disagree with what should happen sometimes, but it's helpful to hear how it is.

[AndrewKemendo]

I’d love to see your “million dollar linkedin” if you’re willing to share it

[gedy]

TBH it's probably just lead-gen or sales outreach..

[meow_mix]

This was going to be my comment, but I was going to be a lot more rude

[antonvs]

> > Nothing you post there is going to change your career.

> I can attribute millions of dollars in revenue to LinkedIn, as can a lot of my 'LinkedIn friends'

Nothing you post there is going to change your career if your career involves producing real value.

[scarface_74]

I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”.

All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.

It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.

For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.

[brcmthrowaway]

I need to make millions from a LinkedIn post

[1oooqooq]

wow. you weaponized medicrity to save a few bucks on an actual marketing campaign. so unique. good for you.

[ohdeargodno]

>The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.

So... mediocre posts that combine a strong opinion along with a perceived position of authority. No actual knowledge needed.

>Unfortunately that's not the way marketing works [...] they are much more likely to trust you, and therefore buy from you, if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads.

LinkedIn rewards mediocrity.

> your LinkedIn profile should act as a funnel, moving people from newsfeed --> your profile --> the most important piece of content you want them to read. From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

LinkedIn. rewards. mediocrity.

>Building in public

Is the most mediocrity filled drivel that gets pushed out, somewhere between "blogspam" and "here's how i succeeded at leetcode".

I can personally guarantee that 99% of what you've posted on LinkedIn has been boring, formatted, mediocre shit. And cool, it's made you money, I'm glad for you. Linkedin rewarded your mediocre posts. It's literally what you've written. That you've spammed people enough that they somehow associate you with a good thing. Not because they've read useful information from you: just because your name has popped up often. And for names to pop up often, it requires you to either be a "thought leader" (read: posting mediocre shit to linkedin every day), or be simple enough and short enough that the poepl that don't spend more than 3 minutes reading mediocre shit in LinkedIn will repost it.

In good news, it's not just you! People like Eric Schmidt that are already a million times more renowned than you already post mediocre, stupid shit every day.

[fhd2]

What you quote could be summarised as "frequent small posts work better than long infrequent ones". I kinda agree that's an incentive for lower quality (since quality takes time), but it's still a bit tangential.

What LinkedIn rewards are posts that get a lot of reactions and comments, which in theory sounds like a good metric. But when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, and that's quite visible with all the cringe "comment $keyword to get my free guide" posts.

Personally, I take the conscious hit on my business and don't play that game. But I'm pretty convinced that I would be more successful if I played it, and I'm still looking for a way to do it that doesn't feel wrong to me.

At the end of the day, marketing is not about reaching people just like myself. It's about reaching potential buyers. And the key question to me becomes what the "LinkedIn" in "LinkedIn rewards mediocrity" really is. Is it the platform with its algorithms? Or is it rather the audience itself?

We all gotta find buyers. Sometimes in the form of employers, sometimes in the form of clients, sometimes consumers. But whatever we have to offer, we need to find people interested in it. And while I have a good network that got me buyers throughout my career, not everybody gets lucky like that, so I try not to look down on them for using LinkedIn to that end.

[woooooo]

Engineering leader | ex-something

...

Is that person more likely to be a leader or a follower and ass-kisser in your experience?

[zwnow]

LinkedIn is basically a marketplace for boomers. Facebook but for jobs pretty much. Im sorry to hear u think this highly of it, as its just a gathering of pretentious people.

[kkirsche]

This has been my experience. Just a bunch of ego stroking

[fragmede]

> its just a gathering of pretentious people.

Tell us more about HN...

[nathanaldensr]

If you want to see how true this is, visit r/linkedinlunatics[1] on Reddit.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/

[roenxi]

Haven't the boomers more or less aged out of jobseeking at this point? Even the youngest of the Baby Boomers are around 60 and most of them are in their 70s.

[refactor_master]

There are a lot of boomers out there though, and you won’t reach them on TikTok.

[fnord77]

where are the non-boomers looking for jobs these days?

[jibal]

The boomers have retired.