Notes for Week 50, 2024

Song of the week:

Notes

Oh my word, it's nearly the end of the year. Which is equal parts exciting because I have a bunch of time off before the year wraps, and in the new year (literally the 2nd or 3rd of Jan) I get my new car... and also terrifying because where did the year ago? It's still 2019, right?!

One thing that's been bugging me is the world of LinkedIn. No, not the feed that's somehow slowly become an unprofessional generalist social network influencer hellscape. But the DMs and the actual 'business' end of it.

I noticed this week that I got a "DM" from a sponsored post. I don't have the mobile app with notifications or emails turned on, but I imagine a significant portion of the userbase does. So getting a notification on your phone, or an email (or both!) because someone is selling something into your DMs must be a starkly grim reality to land into.

And the world of AI slop seems to have found true footing in LinkedIn's DM sphere. Now, maybe some of this is on me as I'm pretty trigger-happy with allowing people to make connections to me. But I get a dozen or so messages every single week from different people asking to make a connection followed by 3 or 4 increasingly desperate messages.

First message is a hello, nice to e-meet. I don't reply. Second message is a brief intro to the service offered, and why it's valuable to my industry with a link for me to do the work to book time. Third is a much longer message going into more detail about the product/service (which is almost always basically just outsourcing). Fourth and fifth broadly fit into the desperation category of asking if this is too much, it's a last ditch attempt at contacting, etc. etc.

And while this graduate-level basic SDR style outreach is common in sales, the 'match' to my work, my career, my company, etc. is so utterly laughably poor that it blows my mind. To the point that I have to assume it's AI slop.

I work for one of the world's largest fintech companies. You might not be a customer. You might have never knowingly used it. But you definitely know the brand name, especially in Ireland. So how am I getting DMs asking to assess the business need for outsourcing javascript engineers?! One, the business obviously wouldn't be interested in that given it's size/scale/capabilities. And two, more importantly, I am personally not hiring javascript engineers. Because I do not run a development team.

Any decently capable human would quickly navigate good/bad fits or tailor the message a bit. But instead, I'm either getting loads of AI-powered bots, or just really bad judgement messages.

I don't get a lot of value from LinkedIn, so don't really use it much anyway (I am definitely not someone who contributes to the timeline!). But this really drives the value down another notch or two.

(via my flickr)