Office | Our thoughts and musings

Has LinkedIn Lost Its Value? Navigating a Sea of Superficiality

Introduction

Disclaimer: All the opinions here are my own and I am not calling out anyone in particular but sharing my observations. I am not a leader, teacher or influencer and nor do I want to become one. I am happy to have a conversation on this topic or anyother that I have skills and experience if anyone is interested

As the internet matured and people started networking online more than in person via chat and email, it created a need for professionals for a platform where they could network, share ideas, have conversations, and advance their careers. Sort of like the old bulletin boards and usenet chat groups, but better. See, the usenets were good and actually useful and have actually hosted very stimulating conversations, but they were not very accessible to peole who were not comfortable finding their way around computers, internet, networking, and such. Remember that during that time, the internet was not as ubiquitous as it is today. As the World Wide Web (WWW) grew and became more and more user friendly and accessible (thank you Tim Berners-Lee), it started changing how people connected with each other. Social life moved from community centers and friends' living rooms to online giving rise to social media.

As a regular user of LinkedIn, I've noticed a shift in its value proposition over time. What began as a powerful platform for professional networking and idea-sharing now feels cluttered with superficial advice and over-inflated thought leadership.

Rise of LinkedIn

Amid the rise of social media platforms like Orkut, Google One, Facebook, Myspace, et al, there was a new kid on the block called LinkedIn which aimed at serving a very specific need of creating a platform for professionals to connect, network, share ideas, and grow their career. It opened up the doors for people to cross geographical boundaries to collaborate and search for their dream job or next big idea. It started as a "free" platform where the only entry fee was the users' information that LinkedIn could harvest and sell to earn money. It created a furore in the community, but Reid Hoffman - the founder of LinkedIn is famously known to dismiss the privacy concerns with the quote:

The value of being connected and transparent is so high that the roadbumps of privacy issues are much lower in actual experience than people’s fears.

As long as it was free, it was OK. The users knew what they were getting into and the platform itself fostered fantastic conversations and ideas. It also opened up the labor marketplace and provided unprecedented access to companies to a diverse workforce and at times cut out the middleman.

While LinkedIn started with a clear focus on professional networking, the platform has since evolved in ways that stray from this original vision.

Problems with LinkedIn Today

As the adoption of LinkedIn grew and the platform also evolved and created tiers of membership promising privacy in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. As the number of users grew, it started occurring to the members that they need to differentiate themselves from the rest and demonstrate thought leadership. What more could one ask than thought leadership and brilliant ideas, right?

Wrong! To show that they are different, leaders, and growth agents everyone started posting management lessons, work lessons, life lessons, and everything in between. You cannot spend five minutes on LinkedIn without someone telling you how you are doing everything wrong and how to improve your work life balance, manage your manager or some such things.

It also gave rise to the Influencers. I have some strong thoughts about it which I have discussed earlier. Look, I have nothing against people sharing advice and life lessons. Sometimes it helps. It also doesn't help that people share some click-bait style videos that trigger ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) in order to get impressions and views. My problem is that it becomes the only thing that we start seeing on the platform.

India won a cricket match, life lessons, India lost a cricket match, life lessons, someone famous died, life and management lessons, a new movie is released, life lessons. I mean, for God's sake, enjoy the event, pay your respects to the departed and grieve, why is everyone bent on teaching everyone else? When everyone is a teacher, then who's the student? It seems like LinkedIn is becoming a platform where every major event — whether it's a cricket match, a celebrity's death, or a new movie—sparks a wave of 'lessons learned' posts. The original spirit of meaningful networking and idea-sharing is diluted by superficial advice that often feels forced.

Privacy and Monetization

I recently changed my job. I didn't update my LinkedIn for some time and was seriously considering not updating. But then I gave in and updated it. LinkedIn asked me to verify my new work email address to gain more insights which I naively did. What I didn't realize that it was more about selling my email address to marketers than to provide me more insights. Of course, I started seeing posts from the new workplace that were not visible to me before, but I also started getting emails from product companies which might not be relevant to me. To be fair, I am not complaining that my address was sold (See the quote above from Mr. Hoffman about privacy) but the pretext under which my email address was obtained was questionable.

And oh! I am yet to see any meaningful conversation on LinkedIn that is being used to build something meaningful.

Conclusion:

A platform like LinkedIn is really powerful and has great potential in building great products and services for the people. If only people would stop teaching all the time and actually start thinking about what is important and solve some of the key problems, I think LinkedIn would actually become an Influencer. If not, it will soon become (if it has not already) the facebook of professionals where nothing meaningful can be found and it is just another way of wasting time with doomscrolling.

LinkedIn has the potential to return to its roots as a platform for meaningful professional exchange. To do so, it must encourage real dialogue and thought leadership rather than enabling a culture of performative advice. If it can shift its focus back to fostering genuine connections, it could avoid becoming the "Facebook of professionals".

Return to office v/s Remote work

Introduction

RTO or Remote — A person working in office and a person working at home

COVID! It was a less than once in a life time incident and it has changed a lot of things for humans, especially in tech jobs. COVID resulted in tech workers working remotely all the time. Tech workers had always been working from home either partially or after hours to get the job done. But the pandemic made that mandatory. This shift in working conditions created a sea-change in not only how we deliver our work, but also changed peoples' expectations, especially the folks who were just joining the workforce.

What changed?

Technology changed. That's for sure. Also people's work habits changed. But more on that later. Telecommuting includes endless conference calls, video calls which include whiteboarding, collaborating on documents in real time, screen sharing. All of which take a lot of bandwidth. With the internet connection most people had till recently, it made remote collaboration very difficult leading to productivity loss and frustration. It was better to do it in person in the office. Innovation and inventions drove a remarkable improvement in network equipment and network protocols giving rise to better, more reliable, and faster WiFi connections. Fast wireless connections meant that it was no longer needed to have wired connection to get a stable and fast internet access. At the same time the retail internet connection speeds and reliability also improved dramatically from few 10s Mbps to several 100s Mbps. All of these changes gave rise to a retail market for better collaboration platforms.

Rise of telecommuting platforms

For a long time now, companies have been advocating to reduce or avoid travel and use tele / video conferencing to conduct meetings as it not only saved costs but also was good for our planet. The introduction of Zoom, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans (now being sunset) and the like revolutionized the workplace interactions and made it easy to telecommute and still have the same office like experience when collaborating with colleagues. In fact it started becoming the preferred method to interact with global and local colleagues alike. But the working was still primarily office-centric.

Here comes COVID

In late 2019 and early 2020 COVID hit the world and everything was locked down and governments issues shelter-in-place advisories. All companies closed their offices and directed their employees to operate remotely. Initially it was expected the pandemic was expected to end within a few months. But it stretched in to couple of years and everyone was forced to work remotely and collaborate with their colleagues through online collaboration tools. Initially people had difficulties adjusting to working from home and were missing the human interaction and social connections at office. As the lockdowns continued into several phases, people started getting used to working from home and liked the convenience of no commute, sleeping in, working in pajamas etc. They also built their own social bubbles to meet with friends. They also started thinking that this was going to be a permanent arrangement.

On the other hand, the companies already had long term leases to their buildings and although a few started terminating their leases and not renewing other leases, return to office (RTO) was always going to be on the cards. As the impact of pandemic started to erode through vaccinations and herd immunity, companies started calling their employees back to office. As the calls to RTO began to grow so did the resistance from employees.

Resistance

Remote working was always going to be temporary arrangement while the pandemic was raging. But humans are wired in such a way that they always strive for local optima and extrapolate their current situation as being the long term or permanent solution giving rise to the term, "New normal" It was never going to be normal working remotely. Some companies like Tesla, or Broadcom took a hardline stand, a few like Amazon, Wells Fargo took a phased approach to ease the workforce back to office, and a few made their operations fully remote. With this we started seeing a lot of reactions / posts/ videos from people about the vices of working from office claiming there is loss of productivity by forcing the employees to return to office due to time spent in commute, hallway ambushes, noise in office, loud hallway conversation, etc. Some even state and rightly so that with the distributed workforce, none of their immediate teams are located in their location so what is the point in going to office.

Around the time the internet connections were improving, the work habits of millennials who were just entering the workforce were also changing giving rise to the Gig Economy where young people preferred freelancing to full time roles. The younger workforce was used to working remotely and when they wanted to.

Issues with the remote work

While it is good to have flexibility and not have to go office, it has a lot of detrimental effects, especially on the younger generations who are just entering the workforce as compared to the more experienced people. Working in office and interacting in person allows a wide variety of human dynamics. There are different types of personalities, different mental states, moods, etc which are kind of obfuscated by remote collaboration. You can't really understand the tone differences, body languages over a video call that you can understand in person. Even if none of the immediate team members are in the same location, but there are other employees who are working for the same company in the location and the human interaction along with the experience is invaluable. The younger generations are missing out on those experiences that shape and hone their own personalities teaching them how to interact with different people while handling varying situations. Everyone is now interacting online through social media where it is easy to ignore several things. Being able to handle situations and interacting with people while resolving conflict is an important skill that everyone should have and must be considered when defining productivity. Additionally, employees (even the individual contributors) can't always deliver their work product alone all the time. They need to interact with other people from their own teams and different teams, even other organizations to be effective. Asynchronous is not always the answer.

Conclusion

Work was always performed from office and it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Of course technology will continue to evolve and eventually it may make working in an office obsolete (but I don't think so). However till the time that happens going to office is going to be our reality. I support in-office (although hybrid) work. There is more accountability, better collaboration, improved communication, and effective working. Of course, this is my own humble opinion. I am not representing any company or group.

My views on 70 hour week

Bottom Line on Top (BLOT): I am against Mr. Murthy's missive that people should work for 70 hours or more to be productive. People can stop reading here. The rest of the narrative just explains my thought process. If interested, read on!

Background: The legendary Mr. Narayan Murthy - one of the founders and Chairman Emeritus of Infosys created a debate in the white collar professional world by stating that people should not think twice even they have to work 70 hours a week. He also mentioned that the young people today are lazy and India's productivity has gone down. Predictably, it created a huge uproar with folks coming out in support of and against Mr. Murthy in equal measure. Known personalities supported Mr. Murthy by quoting examples of Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, Amitabh Bachchan and how they created their position by working hard and not just for 8 hours a day. I agree. You can't be the GOAT without a great deal of sacrifice.

My Perspective: Let me first start by saying that I myself have worked for 80 hours or more with my previous company. Not for a month or two, but for 3-4 years at end. While I progressed professionally, I ended up moving out of that organization. So you can imagine how that ended. And it also hurt me personally. I missed a lot of events in my children's lives and my wife was left raise our children as a single parent which is not a good experience for anybody.

When I look back at those years, I ask myself, for whom did I work this hard and sacrificed what I did? What did I get in return for my sacrifices? Yes, I was promoted and my salary increased, but honestly was I compensated commensurate with the effort I put in? I was working for a global corporation who made impressive profits. All I got was 2-3% annual raise and a capped bonus. Sometimes not even that and we got maybe 70 cents on the dollar instead of the expected bonus.

As opposed to the majority of the workforce, Mr Murthy was working for himself after he quit his job and started Infosys with Rs. 10000. So he had everything to lose and couldn't afford to fail. Ironically, it was the same Mr. Murthy who had emailed all the Infosys staff to leave office at 5 pm and ensure that there is work-life balance. So you have to wonder what changed Mr. Murthy's opinion. Mr. Murthy's sage advice is spot on for entrepreneurs and startup employees who have a skin in the game in terms of equity as they stand to gain big if the startup turns out to be one of the rare unicorns that we hope. The average employee has no incentive to work for more than what they get paid. They have fixed salaries, the promotions are hard to come by, career prospects are bleak among other reasons. Yes, they also can work for themselves by picking up some freelance work, but companies put a clause in the employment contract and prohibit employees from doing independent work to safeguard proprietary information. They even put a no-compete clause in the contract. And wasn't it Mr. Murthy himself who spoke out against freelancing when the top leaders of the companies effectively do the same when they sit on the boards of various companies?

Conclusion: To be clear, I greatly respect Mr. Murthy and I believe he is one of the greatest minds India has ever produced. But that doesn't necessarily mean we all agree with all his views. This is just one small dissenting voice in the myriad of others. Finally I am happy to work extended hours when there is a need. But it cannot be standard operating environment.

Disclaimer: These are my own personal views and it does not represent views of my current or former employers, colleagues or even friends. If you disagree with me, I am OK with it.

Offside, Scott Adams

I subscribe to a lot of comics to be delivered in my mailbox (14 to be exact). They provide a welcome distraction from the sameness of my day and help me lighten up. The Dilbert strip from Monday 18th 2019 was in extremely poor taste and made me wince.

Even in jest, it targets a characteristic that is protected. Although, what Mr. Adams has portrayed might reflect reality, it might also justify this in some peoples' minds that it is OK to joke about peoples' ages as long as you are not serious.

As a part of my corporate training, I have undergone a lot of managerial trainings that has sensitized me in how things can be interpreted in a way that may not have been intended. I can see this thing happening in an office and some young worker get into trouble over this which is completely avoidable.

I urge young people to not joke about this and would expect Mr. Adams to remove this cartoon and not repeat that again.