The week before this last vacation, I wrote an at-length post on LinkedIn discussing the Crowdstrike RCA report that I thought was helpful in explaining some of the details of the report and actions you should or should not take as a Crowdstrike customer, and how I thought the future of this thing was going to go down with their customer base.
That post got almost no engagement, likes, reposts, comments, or anything spurring further genuine discussion, or things I had missed.
It was at this point that I devised a theory – that if I wrote a post about Hawk Tuah Girl AKA Hailey Welch, it would generate better engagement than the illustrative and professional content I wrote about a recent cyber event.
I didn’t use the words “hawk tuah girl” in the post, but I barely disguised the fact that I was talking about this woman, and used her full name. I pre-empted any accusation of unprofessional content by citing the Vanity Fair and NYMag articles about her.
Sure enough, hawk tuah generated significantly more engagement than my Crowdstrike RCA writeup. It was at this point, and among many other reasons, that I decided I’d had enough and closed my LinkedIn account.
There are people I connected with on LinkedIn that I genuinely did enjoy interacting with, and I will miss that. I felt the same way about Twitter/X. I have not had a Twitter account in a number of years. But, when I ask myself the question: “what have I really gotten out of this platform” – in the long run I just can’t come up with a good answer other than “actually, I think this may have been a colossal waste of my time.”
I have never networked my way into a job from LinkedIn. I came close once, when a very good recruiter came across my profile and reached out, but I ended up withdrawing and took the job I’m in now that I got from old-fashioned networking. All of the other jobs I’ve gotten have either been through applying directly or from in-person networking.
The vast, vast majority of recruiters who reached out to me on LinkedIn seemed like they were following a spray-and-pray strategy, often advertising jobs to me that – had they actually read my profile – which was 1:1 with my resume, they would’ve known I was not qualified for.
When I closed my account, I had 176 open requests to connect. Almost all of them were from salespeople. I have worked with some great salespeople, however:
1) I’m really not interested in talking to a stranger about their product. I am aware that BDRs/SDRs make money based on the number of appointments they book, and that is the endgame here. It’s cliché, but I’m well aware of what my pain points are. I will come to you if I need a problem solved.
2) When you connect with salespeople on LinkedIn, your feed fills up with content for salespeople. Ultimately, this is probably doing salespeople a disservice.
I know people find career success on LinkedIn, but it has never worked for me personally. I am not interested in sales calls.
I am also appalled at the amount of straight-up bad behavior there is on LinkedIn, including the stolen and re-hashed content, content obviously generated by AI (it’s really obvious), grifters, and a frankly disturbing number of people who use mental illness as a shield to deflect any claim that they’re being rude and shitty.
So, I am gone now. I maintain a private Instagram account with a small number of followers for the use of my close friends and family, and have no other social media presence.
And I’m upset about this, mostly at myself, for the wasted time I invested in another ARR generator for Microsoft. For the time I could’ve spent with my family, coding, or working on a side project, or even this website, which I operate and maintain entirely on my own.
I’m upset about the value they captured that I didn’t.