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Gen Z LinkedIn Is Full of Parodies and Snark (bloomberg.com) 62

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
There is a corner of LinkedIn free from humble brags, self-promotion, thought leadership and strict decorum. You just need to connect with a zoomer. Although LinkedIn is not a popular online hangout for Generation Z, some of their most viral posts are parodies of LinkedIn itself. From a report: Shiv Sharma graduated from the University of Southern California last year, according to his LinkedIn. A few months ago, he updated his profile listing himself as the assistant chef at the fictional restaurant from Sponge Bob Square Pants. "I have accepted an offer to work for The Krusty Krab Restaurant as part of their Entry Level Chef Program in Bikini Bottom," he wrote. The post garnered more than 5,000 reactions and dozens of comments. Harry Tong is a software development intern at a tech company. But, according to a popular post on his profile: "I am officially the CEO of a BILLION dollar company," he wrote. "For my series Z, my mom invested $10 for 0.000001% of my company, giving it a $1 billion valuation."

This subculture of subversion on LinkedIn has inspired countless TikTok videos, a Twitter account called @LinkedinFlex and a devoted Reddit community called LinkedInLunatics. The memes reflect the weariness people feel toward the site -- "primarily a place for bragging," said Jake Zhang, a Toronto-based college student. "People tell stories about how their entire lives have built up to this one moment of getting a job or a promotion, or experts claim they'll change your life with a piece of advice," Tong said. "And I'm just here to poke at the facade a little bit." Most young people treat LinkedIn as a "purely transactional job hunting tool" to be used sparingly, said AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, an advertising agency that specializes in the Microsoft Corp.-owned professional networking site. Maintaining a profile is a "necessary evil," Zhang said. "Everyone I know creates an account due to school or peer pressure," Zhang said. "We use it because there's no alternative for job hunting. But with all the toxic content and bragging, no one I know really likes it." Which is what makes the parodies on LinkedIn so interesting. Most people wouldn't put a joke on their resume. The posts are a byproduct of a generation that lives fearlessly on the internet, eager to entertain and call out any whiff of inauthenticity.
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Gen Z LinkedIn Is Full of Parodies and Snark More

Gen Z LinkedIn Is Full of Parodies and Snark

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  • My linked in profile states:

    "If you have to ask, you don't need to know."

  • "We use it because there's no alternative for job hunting. But with all the toxic content and bragging, no one I know really likes it."

    Trust will always be an issue. Even paper resumes back in the day could be filled with fiction. It's a people problem that technology can't fix. Only other people.

    • But with all the toxic content and bragging, no one I know really likes it.

      I don't really know what "toxic content and bragging" he's talking about. Maybe I'm not looking at the right profiles for this, but I haven't seen stuff like that. Then again, I have only ever used/looked at the resume parts of the site not all the other, um, stuff. I can agree that many (most?) people I know aren't thrilled with LinkedIn, but it's kind of a necessary evil as a professional job-hunting resource.

      Trust will always be an issue. Even paper resumes back in the day could be filled with fiction. It's a people problem that technology can't fix. Only other people.

      In general, I think people padding their resumes are setting themselves up for disappointment i

  • I used to like LinkedIn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @10:10AM (#61700907) Homepage Journal

    Until it became "Facebook for professionals"

    • Re:I used to like LinkedIn (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @11:01AM (#61701137)

      Its not even facebook for professionals, its facebook for employment agents and marketing types. The kids aint wrong, linked in is a hellworld

      I mean, I cant fathom anyone using it to relax or browse cat memes or whatever.

      Mindyou watching middle aged advertising execs implode their careers by posting racist claptrap all over a website scanned religiously by the HR department never gets old. On twitter, teenagers cancel each other over the stupidest things. On linked in adults cancel themselves by letting their boss and his clients know what they REALLY think.

    • I keep everyone I meet through work on Linked in and friends and family on facebook.Very few work friends have become real friends who I add to facebook. On facebook I dont talk about work and on linkedin I dont post my vacation pictures

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Baleet ( 4705757 )
      This. It used to be a place where you could network with people you might want to actually network with. I remember when LinkedIn used to suggest that you connect only with people you know or want to know who might be relevant to your career. Between jobs I attended a workshop on using LinkedIn and the emphasis was on connection-count. The complete opposite of when I first signed up. I check in occasionally and it has become a bit of a parody of itself. Which I guess is the point of TFA.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Jb7274 ( 8552737 )
      Visit My Blog: https://www.simplejb.in/ [simplejb.in]

  • Sadly No Longer Young But... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crunchygranola ( 1954152 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @10:25AM (#61700949)

    Most young people treat LinkedIn as a "purely transactional job hunting tool" to be used sparingly,

    I have been on LinkedIn about as long as it has existed, and have not been young for a long time (I must sadly admit) but I treat linked in as a "purely transactional job hunting tool" .

    I have been staying away from logging in to LinkedIn more recently as it becomes increasingly hyperactive at trying to push me to "engage with content" I could not possibly care less about.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmccue ( 834797 )

      Same here, but now I will actually log into it and update my profile.

      I think what gen Z is doing is great, absurd profiles for one of the most absurd web sites out there. Now what to put in my profile :)

    • "engage with content"

      Quite possibly the most emetic phrase in the English language.

    • I'm pushing 40 now* and the only reasons I get on LinkedIn are to:
      1) Check in on how past colleagues whom I admired seem to be getting along at new companies. This is one of the simplest techniques for keeping a pulse on which places may be worth checking out if things go sideways at my current employer. Rapid, meaningful advancement is a good sign that the company recognizes and rewards competence. Slow career advancement for someone who I know is driven and capable is not a good look for a company. A quic

  • anything they try to do to effect and improve their broader situation will be cock blocked by the boomers (and Gen X to a lesser extent) who are terrified of anything that might upset their apple carts ("I got mine, f you").

    Meanwhile Wall Street keeps buying up all the single family homes while using the economic crashes that happen every 10 years like clockwork to remove trillions of dollars from the economy, turning anyone under 40 into an indentured serf.

    And we're all just supposed to smile and p
    • Your foolish enough to blame the problems on a couple generations and not the financially privileged. There are plenty of people from all generations doing this to you, just depends on the material that spoon in your mouth is made of. There are more average to lower income earners that are boomers and gen x than the ones you like to blame for how life is treating you, keep blaming them while the real issue goes unsolved. There is a reason people speak of the 1%, if you just do the math it is not that hard t
      • 1%. They couldn't do the things they do without the active participation of the previous generations, who themselves aren't all that privileged. 70% of them live paycheck to paycheck. It's their insistence on clinging to a mythic past that's causing these problems.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by garett_spencley ( 193892 )

      You used a lot of words to say next to nothing.

      anything they try to do to effect and improve their broader situation will be cock blocked by the boomers

      How? Is it all boomers? I'm not a boomer, but I have kids, and I want my kids to be happy and prosperous. My mom is a boomer, I like to believe that she wants the same for me.

      Meanwhile Wall Street keeps buying up all the single family homes

      Wall Street is a literal street in New York City. Usually when people use the name symbolically they're talking about the stock market and stock brokers. I've never heard it used to describe real estate investors before. Though, as a home owner, I am rather tired of the "Dear homeowner, I

    • > And we're all just supposed to smile and pull our
      > bootstraps, even as automation destroyed 70% of
      > our jobs [businessinsider.com].

      That's not a particularly valuable number though. For probably the last 10 years or so; you could fairly accurately describe my jobs as: "Automate away the job I had 10 years ago." And, quite frankly, I don't miss many of those old tasks. AWS, GCP, CloudFormation, Terraform, Chef, and Mesos are much more interesting and engaging than the old tedium of dealing with

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arQon ( 447508 )

      I've never understood why half the links you post are just search engine queries rather than, yknow, actual links to actual content that doesn't randomly change based on the time of day, where you are, and so on. Why DO you do that?

      And unless it's for a very good reason, can you please stop? It's not helping the conversation when people who try to follow the links end up with different results than what you intended.

  • Yes, I completely agree... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Thank you for posting this.

    I was talking similarly to some professional colleagues, who emphasize that LinkedIn is the place to "be" -- my counter to this is (crudely) LinkedIn has become a GIANT TOILET... of egos and condescending commentary. My personal profile has been curiously forced to follow people and interests I have nothing to do with. I don't feel obligated to sift through it; certainly, that doesn't engender a desire to pay for the service.

    The only value I see, is the instructional content ser

  • I've wanted to do this HARD for a loong time but always felt afraid to mess up my professional profile.

  • Echo chamber by design (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The whole thing is an echo chamber of positivity for those who need that. It's a place where the rubes go to hear that being a rube is okay and it will get you far in life. Then they praise themselves by all joining together and assuming the absent voices or opinions are absent because they are wrong or unsuccessful.

    But in reality people like me who drop out of school, skip all the "positive" crap, call out the elephant in the room, and build stereotypic biases are the ones who actually succeed in life....

    • Dude or dudette, you're an AC. Nothing you wrote is anything better than pure fabrication brag.

    • I agree with much of what you said about LinkedIn being an echo chamber of positivity for rube ladder climbers. However, one thing a formal education could have taught you about is basic statistics. Assuming your story is true, it makes you an extreme outlier. The fact is, most people do not know how to teach themselves things and even that is a skill you probably acquired somehow. Autodidacts are not rare. An autodidact that can self-teach as efficiently and effectively as a formal education is extremely r

  • LinkedIn is so odd (Score:3)

    by TJHook3r ( 4699685 ) on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @11:38AM (#61701351)
    It's primarily a place for advertising yourself - either by writing articles/messages you think enhance your reputation or by liking/sharing the same. I mean, it's good to connect with fellow professionals and Facebook is far too immature to deal with networking-type posts... I just don't have the drive to sell myself on social media. I'd rather have an honest conversation with some degree of anonymity.

  • The posts are a byproduct of a generation that lives fearlessly on the internet, eager to entertain and call out any whiff of inauthenticity .

  • The commenters who are looking down their privileged noses at someone who jokes on LinkedIn are pretty funny, and probably represent the root cause of most diversity and inclusion problems in corporations today. But what I really came here to complain about... the summaries on my /. home page are getting ridiculous. This one has the *entire* article except for the last paragraph. Is that really what we're looking for in a tech news aggregator?

  • Most young people treat LinkedIn as a "purely transactional job hunting tool" to be used sparingly, said AJ Wilcox

    Um, yeah, that's how this old person treats it too. And every other old person I know.

  • A resume came across my desk (Not usually involved in hiring, so haven't seen a resume in a long time). Here is a list of the 'positions' on this person's Linkedin resume:

    -liquid handling grandmaster

    -liquid handling wizard tableau senpai

    -liquid handling guru

    -liquid handling maestro man of multiple hats

    -solidworks senpai

    -solidworks shifu assay

  • About 90% of the invites I get from LinkedIn are spam from people I don't know. That's by design. They intentionally make it easier to accept an invite than to reject it. There's a link to accept it right in the email, but if you want to reject it you have to go to the site. It's optimized to encourage spamming.

    If they cared about making it useful for tracking real professional contacts, each email would have three links: accept, reject, and report spam. People who got reported a lot for spamming would

  • A story ostensibly about Funny and not an example to be found anywhere.

    LOL. Whimper.

  • People can say what they will about Gen-Z poking fun at LinkedIn - but they're right about the overall summary. It's chocked full of recruiters just trying to make a buck signing any warm body on to a job that's willing to talk to them, and a bunch of people blogging about their workplace accomplishments, hoping someone will see it and pay them more than they make now.

    I was on it for a long time and found it pretty useless. People are always trying to get connected to your "network" of contacts just to sel

  • LinkedIn can also be used as an industry Rolodex, even when not looking for a job. The list of people I have worked (or linked) with is an ever growing network and long ago lost track of. I use LinkedIn to remember people and solicit partnerships for product development. I also like to read articles that people in my network curate and in general, know what they are up to. These are the cross-industry colleagues that I have much in common with. LinkedIn is just one tool in the quiver that sometimes com
  • Thats really a good quote: "For my series Z, my mom invested $10 for 0.000001% of my company, giving it a $1 billion valuation"
  • Make your profile, keep it professional, use it to get a job. That's really all it's good for. Log in every so often so you don't get locked out. I don't need to see what new youtube course you took, or what funny job meme you have.

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