Sick to death

'A cesspool': Laid-off California tech workers are sick to death of LinkedIn

Tech workers hate the Bay Area company's site. But more than ever, they need it.

By Stephen Council

Over the past few years, scores of California tech workers have ended up in the exact same position: laid-off, looking for work on LinkedIn and sick of it. 

LinkedIn, part job site and part social network, has become an all but necessary tool for the office-job-seeking masses in the Bay Area and beyond. As tech companies gut their workforces, people who would otherwise give the blue-and-white site a wide berth feel compelled to scroll for hours every day for job opportunities. LinkedIn is a dominant force in the professional world, with more than 1 billion users and 67 million weekly job searchers. That scale, plus the torrent of self-promotion and corporate platitudes fueling the platform, has long made it a symbol of modern capitalism. Now, in the age of tech’s layoffs, it’s also a symbol of dread.

The platform’s specter looms so large because it does exactly what it needs to. Tech workers are stuck on Linkedin: In a competitive job market rife with spam listings, the free platform’s networking-focused features set it a peg above competitors like Indeed, Dice and Levels.fyi in the search for full-time work. Since February, SFGATE has spoken with 10 recently laid-off tech workers; most of them see LinkedIn as painful but necessary and have locked up new jobs in part thanks to the platform.

That group includes Peter Hollander. The Bay Area native quit his first post-grad job and moved to Berkeley in the middle of 2022, months before tech’s tsunami of layoffs began. With little in savings, he toiled through applications and snagged a job at San Francisco e-commerce company Wish. When Wish started laying off workers, Hollander’s anxiety mounted, he told SFGATE, and he began working more and stressing out over tiny mistakes. Finally, come August 2023, Wish let him go.

Out of work again, Hollander said he used LinkedIn to do “everything simultaneously” to get a new job. He messaged acquaintances, sprayed off applications without leaving the site using the “Easy Apply” function and hunted his list of connections for mission-driven companies. He “got lucky,” he said, securing a job at maternity health startup Pomelo Care in October.

Though he’s working more hours than he was at Wish for less money, he loves the job. Plus, he went only three weeks between Wish’s final severance payments and his first new paycheck. Hollander has LinkedIn to thank for that — he only applied to Pomelo Care after he found an employee’s recruiting message in his LinkedIn inbox. But after two job searches in two years, Hollander has a grim view of the platform.

“LinkedIn has become ...” Hollander trailed off, looking for the right words, “a cesspool of business-themed s—t-posting.”

220 million American users, one ‘cesspool’

Founded in 2003 and based in Sunnyvale, LinkedIn is now among the rarified ranks of the tech juggernauts, boasting offices in more than a dozen countries and a tower in San Francisco’s SoMa. The company’s website and spokesperson tout its colossal scale: 18,500 employees support over 1 billion users, with 220 million in the United States and 67 million looking for jobs each week. Six people are hired every minute on LinkedIn, the company claims. 

The platform is fairly easy to navigate, and its job-hunting features are useful — though bettered by the pay-for-upgrades Premium offering (starting at $29.99 per month). Users can search for roles based on location, skills, salary, industry and more, as well as check a personalized feed of listings. The “Network” function links people who’ve worked or studied together, pushing users to build long lists of “Connections.” “Messaging” makes it easy to ask a connection or hiring manager about a job opening. LinkedIn has also become a popular tool for salespeople, who find targets with the platform’s many search filters. SFGATE reported last year that the cannabis industry had come to rely on LinkedIn as an alternative to social media sites that restrict cannabis content.

Still, Hollander is far from alone in his LinkedIn disdain, or even in the way he described it. Over the past few years, folks online have repeatedly called the platform a “cesspool,” whether in a viral TikTok video’s caption, a popular Reddit post or even on LinkedIn itself. (In fact, “cesspool” has swung into fashion as a way to dig at just about every social media network, but people aren’t exactly combing Snapchat for jobs.)

Much of the ire focuses on LinkedIn’s “Home” feed, an endless and personalized scroll that has just enough job listings to be useful but also a cacophony of viral and not-so-viral clickbait, ads and corporate-speaky announcements. These posts are the fodder for the 606,000-member subreddit r/LinkedInLunatics; the forum’s description says LinkedIn scrollers will find “rampant virtue signaling” and unlikely stories.

LinkedIn says it’s trying to make that content more personalized, by prioritizing advice and expertise over virality. Facing complaints about “humblebrags” in 2023, the company decided to boost posts with career-help tips, per a blog. A February update announced “suggested posts” for the feed, based on the LinkedIn algorithm’s understanding of each person’s “professional identity, actions and goals on the platform.” 

Spokesperson Greg Snapper told SFGATE that LinkedIn delivers value to every professional.

“We know each person’s experience on LinkedIn is going to vary, but what’s consistent and undeniable is the advantage of networking, acquiring advice and career tips you can’t get anywhere else, plus help from others in your shoes looking for work, or trying to assist someone else looking to land that next big opportunity,” Snapper wrote in a statement. He pointed to the fact that tens of millions of people use LinkedIn’s #OpenToWork signal.

Tech worker Kyle Kohlheyer agrees that LinkedIn is useful but finds much of its content grating. He told SFGATE that returning to LinkedIn after losing his job at Cruise in December felt like “salt in the wound” and called the job site a “cesspool” of wannabe thought leaders and “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

“I found success on their platform, but I f—king hate LinkedIn,” Kohlheyer said. “It sucks. It is a terrible place to exist every day and depend on a job for.”

The user experience researcher was laid off from Indeed in April 2023, just a week after top brass had been bragging to staff about how many million dollars the company was making every day by lunchtime, Kohlheyer said. That number was “spiraling” in his mind as he scrolled through job listings and corporate-speaky posts.

Kohlheyer said the competition was getting “increasingly scarier” as slews of researchers at other companies also got axed. He was planning to propose to his girlfriend and, worried about money, finding his cold applications “entirely unfruitful.” So Kohlheyer started messaging hiring managers who posted jobs on LinkedIn. A boss at Cruise got back to him, and he landed a contract gig by June.

The pay was good, he said, and he thought he’d be able to parlay the hourly contract into a full-time job. But after a Cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco on Oct. 2, the startup began to spiral and money dried up. Kohlheyer’s contract ended, and after a break, he was back unhappily “trolling LinkedIn all day” by late February. Again, the self-aggrandizing, corporate-speaky posts really bothered him. 

“There’s just such a capitalist-centric mindset on there that is so annoying as a worker who has been fundamentally screwed by companies,” he said. “Wading” through LinkedIn, he said, it’s hard to tell if people feel like an alternative to the top-heavy, precarious tech economy is even possible.

Josh Lee, who was laid off from San Francisco-based Amplitude in 2023 after just three months at the software company, also felt some angst against executive types on the platform after losing his job. 

He told SFGATE that it was frustrating to see the company’s vice presidents post apologies and commiserative messages about Amplitude’s layoff on LinkedIn. In the end, they were empty platitudes from the very leaders whose “bad decisions led to people getting laid off,” Lee said.

“It starts to feel really self-serving,” he added. “Are you taking a zero-dollar salary to keep more people on your team? No.”

Complaints like these, about tone-deaf apologies and bizarre corporate messaging, pop up on the platform too. Earlier in July, Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin backtracked on her plan to create human resources records for AI-based “digital workers” after getting flamed in her LinkedIn comments. “When will Lattice have an AI CEO?” one much-liked comment said; another said, “Okay, that's enough LinkedIn for today.”

Back in 2022, a startup CEO named Braden Wallake posted a selfie of himself crying on LinkedIn, to cap off a post about laying off employees. He had also cut his salary, he said in the comments, but the damage was done — users were rankled by the executive’s seeming bid for attention. The viral moment stuck with Wallake; his bio, on the site, now reads, “Just your friendly neighborhood viral crying CEO.”

A ‘girl’s gotta eat’

In a video call with SFGATE, Eric Ly, one of LinkedIn’s co-founders, said the “Home” feed was conceived, from the beginning, as a way to boost engagement on the platform and keep people interacting with each other. Ly, who left the company in 2006, sees the feed as useful; in his thinking, job seekers are more likely to find opportunities if they’re actively staying in touch with employers and industry trends. 

He also sees the feed as a chance for unemployed people to gain visibility and be seen as experts. But the “thought leader” types are among Hollander’s and Kohlheyer’s issues with LinkedIn — people like Bryan Shankman, who represents, to many, a kind of modern LinkedIn villain. Shankman garnered 30,000 reactions and 4,300 comments on LinkedIn with one May post, which opened: “I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend. Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales.”

What followed was a bizarrely earnest list of tactics, like “Prospecting” (“You can't be afraid to say ‘No’ to find the person you know will value your offer most”) and “Demo” (“Include a trial so they can try the product and get a feel for it”). The comment section was predictably bemused. One person wrote, to the tune of 432 likes, “This is the most LinkedIn thing I have ever LinkedIn.”

Shankman told SFGATE in a video call — with his now-fiancée delivering him his earbuds — that the post was meant to be “slightly tongue in cheek” but that there are “real parallels” between dating and sales. He wasn’t surprised at the vitriol he saw in response, he said, and he didn’t take it personally. Shankman said his follower count has doubled since the post, and he even got a few new clients for his sales agency. The post irked some, but it ultimately benefited him.

And that’s LinkedIn’s fundamental advantage. Even as it annoys its users, and even within an online culture ready to roast the platform at any turn, it works. Two tech workers told SFGATE that they feel like job postings seem more up to date on LinkedIn than on Indeed. And more tech-specific job boards, like those run by salary aggregator Levels.fyi and startup incubator Y Combinator, don’t have anything close to LinkedIn’s scale. 

In a tight job market, those extra listings are particularly valuable, according to Loyd Jones. He worked remotely for Indeed until he was laid off from his director position in May. He told SFGATE that he spends 80% of his current job search on LinkedIn. The senior-level postings are higher quality than Indeed’s, he said, and though he gets annoying solicitations from random salespeople, he appreciates LinkedIn’s wide range of automated job alerts.

Also deep in his career, Mark Harris has been through two job searches in the past few years. He left Twitter in early 2022 and then worked at Flexport (getting the job through LinkedIn) for almost two years before the San Francisco logistics company slashed staff. As his eight weeks of severance pay dwindled, he got “kind of obsessed,” he said, spending six hours a day on LinkedIn.

The engineer described LinkedIn’s desktop site as “ugly as sin” but admitted that it does what it needs to by providing the foundation for all-important career networking. He got a new job at the San Francisco nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation a week before the checks from Flexport stopped arriving.

“Is [LinkedIn] a terrible sign that we live in a capitalist hellscape?” he asked. “Hell yes! But we do live in a capitalist hellscape, and girl’s gotta eat.”