I have been skeptical about the usefulness of LinkedIn since, well, always. Truthfully, I've never really used it outside of job seeking. But then my theme park hero started making posts, and I found myself going there more often. Everything that he writes is gold, and it's not really even theme park-specific.
While there, I've had some random thoughts that I've posted about my line of work. It shows you how many people have seen your posts, so imagine my surprise when I would get a few hundreds views. More rarely, I'd see something get a thousand views! Not exactly dopamine hit territory, but obviously people use this thing more than I realized.
Then something weird happened. Last Friday, I wrote some ideas about the value of QA people in software, and that the industry largely letting go of that specialization may not have been the right choice. The next morning, I got an email about a few responses. That's pretty cool, because I didn't think that happened all that much. Even more surprising, the thing had over 2,000 views. I don't know what, algorithmically, is happening under the covers, but I thought it was neat, and then I went about my day.
Sunday morning, I went out for lunch (because Chipotle has some summer bonus program for points). Lunch by myself is me time, to catch up on tech news or whatever, and I value it a lot. For some reason, I looked at LinkedIn, and my little post had exceeded 10,000 views, and there were dozens of comments and hundreds of likes. The algorithm had not let go. I figured, I should write a follow-up, too.
As of now, four days later, that post has over 60,000 views, and it's still going. The follow-up post has 8,000 views in the first day, so who knows if that will continue.
I don't know if there's any value in any of this, but it does make me realize that my "work rep" and networking that I used to do in-person, pre-pandemic, has really faded away. Sure, I still do Code Camp every year, but I used to get involved a lot more among my local colleagues. That just doesn't translate well to remote work. In a wider scene, what you're really doing is marketing yourself, and that's borderline influencer nonsense. That seems exhausting and definitely not fulfilling the way that the in-person networking is.
I like sharing experience and hearing stories from others. I've been making it a point to talk to my directs more about stuff like that when we have the chance, because even after three years, I feel like I don't know them that well. Maybe I should read their LinkedIn profiles.
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