> This is a pre-requisite for winning on LinkedIn. The kind of content that performs best are strong opinions informed by actual expertise.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.
The loudest voice is often not the best practitioner at <x>.
Marketing and connection is always about this. That is not unique to LinkedIn. People who feel the need to spend time and treasure to tell you how smart they are generally fall short.
Conversely, there are plenty of brilliant people who toil anonymously and nobody, even at their company, knows they exist.
Plato identified this 2400 years ago as a fundamental flaw of representative democracy: you end up with people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on getting elected and not people who are the best at and focus all of their efforts on governing.
The problem of marketers remains unsolved after millennia.
That's why engineers are engineers. As a profession, they are trained to find the optimal answer to the questions they are asked.
The problem is, people are independent agents and generally prioritize their own outcome. If "being humbled" by some nonsense on LinkedIn gets you a high paying job that you perform poorly at, that's a win -- for you. Even if you get fired, you just roll with it and move to bigger and better things to fail up with.
Is it the best way to solve the problem the company has? No. But linkedin guy dngaf and is not asking that question!
To me it's the most obvious sign that the person won't really be engaged with the work at your company. They're just using it as another bullet point in their "personal brand", while spending most time on outside activities. Then expect them to move on in 1-2 years anyway.
Definitely don’t agree with this. I have worked with a single person who is a LinkedIn “influencer”. They have a ton of followers, get a lot of engagement on every post, have been invited to speak on podcasts, have published a book, and have leveraged their internet reputation into jobs at large, well-known tech companies. But their reputation is entirely undeserved. They are a mediocre dev at best, and made absolutely no impact at the company I was with. In fact, once they left, a big chunk of work I was tasked with was basically stripping out/reworking much of what they had done (which frankly, wasn’t much).
They single-handedly killed the illusion that having an audience on LinkedIn is in any way connected with competence or expertise.
Doing good work is absolutely NOT a prerequisite for winning on LinkedIn.