Let us be frank: your LinkedIn endorsement means nothing to me, you disgusting and withered old sot. I neither solicited nor encouraged your endorsement in any way, and the idea that you think I require your stamp of approval in order to succeed in my chosen field is laughable. I find you to be beneath contempt. You would not know project management skills if project management skills set your house on fire in the middle of the night. Endorse me all you like. Endorse me every day. Endorse me in areas I have yet to conquer, for all it will help you now.
You disgust me.
From the very beginning, our relationship on LinkedIn has been a sham. I have smiled, and bowed, and scraped; I have played the game and observed the niceties, all the while laughing up my sleeve at your transparent antics. You invited me to “connect”: I saw all.
“I’d like to add you to my professional network,” you said. Of course you did. Who now would not? But it was not I who was added to your professional network. It was you who was added to mine, you grasping cur.
You felt yourself beginning to slip, and you panicked, and you sought to ally yourself with me. For months, you have noticed my meteoric rise in the project management industry, as your fair-weather friends and servile hangers-on began to desert you and sought protection under my broad and vital canopy.
In your weakness you committed the fatal error of making the first move. You sought the favor. I carefully considered and I allowed you to become indebted to me. Who are you to me? No one. What are you to me? Nothing. What need have I of your endorsement? None. Are not my project management skills known far and wide? Are not the merits of my spreadsheet spoken of with hushed reverence in the halls of great men? I outgrew you long ago, you old fool, and yet you persist in believing that your transparent, servile attempts at flattery will restore you to an honored place at my side. Where once you led me, you are now led. Where once you mastered, now you are forgotten.
We all laugh at you, you know. Every time one of us receives a new, meaningless endorsement from you, he waves it in front of his fellows in the marketplace and we laugh and laugh and laugh.
There is nothing a strong man abhors more than an old and toothless dog. He can no longer fight, nor make himself useful to the household, nor even feed himself. The best he can do is crawl under a tree and wait for death to claim him. This is the last and best dignity available to him. This is what I offer to you now: embrace your own death, and receive it with honor.
“Congratulations,” the message read, as if I were somehow lucky to receive your promiscuous endorsement. I have watched you carefully these few weeks. You will endorse anyone. You endorse wildly, profligately, without care or concern for whose name you allow to be associated with your own. I have seen you endorse the vilest of men in the most ludicrous of fields, all in the hopes of saving your own neck.
“Your connection ______ has endorsed you for the following skills and expertise.”
I do not need your permission to excel in the following skills. I have excelled without you for a long time now, and I will continue to excel long after you are gone. Take your endorsements and go. Bestow them upon someone who has asked for them. Your endorsement is not welcome here.
Tell me: who do you think you can influence either for or against me, at this late hour? Who do you think will see your endorsement and change their resultant opinion of me by even the slightest hair’s breadth? Whose regard for me do you believe you are still capable of swaying? What phantoms haunt your dreams? What echoes of your former power whisper lies to you, telling you that you are still a leader of men?
I take no leave of you. I will not like your page on Facebook, despite your repeated and pathetic requests that I do so. I will not participate in your upcoming Google hangout. I will not list you as an Influencer. I care not how many times you thumbs-up my latest profile picture. I will delete your messages unread.
The taste of your feeble endorsement is like vomit and ashes in my mouth. I will rinse you away, and be cleansed.
Tags: linkedin, scornful laughter, self-sufficiency, whimsically held positions
Who even has time to go on LinkedIn when there are things to be reblogged on Tumblr
The unemployed…who are on there every damn day and mentally begging you to check your mail so you can see that they want you to introduce them to that person in your network who is head of the department for a job opening they applied for…and even if you see the message and forward it on, then there’s ANOTHER wait to see if the department head will ever see or respond to YOUR message and meanwhile the position has been filled and your poor unemployed friend is curled up in a ball of worthlessness. DAMN YOU, LINKEDIN! #alittletoorevelant
Also, recruitment consultants.
I’m going to use this space to bitch about the girl who unfriended me on Facebook for no reason but still wanted to join my professional network on LinkedIn. YOU CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS, LINDSEY!
True that! In my case she went a step further and BLOCKED me on FB. No way I’m going to add you to my professional network. Go away!
I appreciate the filing of this under, “Business.”
Also: my friend was asking me the other day was “SEO” meant. When I told her she responded, “Oh, like 17 people have endorsed me for it on Linkedin.”
Strangely, I have an ex who unfriended me on facebook, but still apparently checks in on my LinkedIn page from time to time. An odd bit of stalking, that.
I love that they don’t know that you can see those things. Some random dude on twitter kept checking out my linked in profile. It was highly satisfying to send him a DM saying “Finding anything interesting on my linked in?” and to have him sheepishly reply, “Oh…I didn’t realize you could see that.”
This is brilliant, and I’m totally going to steal it. (Though now I feel silly that I didn’t think of something so simple.)
I have a former employee who checks my LinkedIn profile all the time, ever since my position was eliminated at my old job. We didn’t get along well, so I wasn’t sure if she was gloating or curious or what. No matter. I found a better job in a better (for me) city, and I’m quite happy to not have to manage her anymore. I just wish she’d stop with the stalking. It got creepy after she checked it a dozen or so times.
I have THE HARDEST time not checking in on my ex’s page! We’re not friends on FB anymore, but time has healed all those old wounds and now I just want him to be well! and happy! and successful but sliiiiiightly less successful than me! He keeps popping up in “People you may know” and it drives me bonkers but I’m not quite willing to “x” him.
Uh yeah, what about people who for some reason let their mother join their network (she worked in a semi related field, ok?? And gave birth to me, I GUESS) and now their mother is retired and endorsing them for shit all the time? I’m like Mom, how the hell would you know I’m good at SPSS? STOP IT.
This would definitely be my mother, if my mother were on LinkedIn.
This is in fact my mother, although she has thus far declined my invitation to endorse me for Teeth (26 endorsements) or Hand To Hand Combat (3 endorsements) or even Propane (5). Which is a pity.
Seems unfair, I’m sure she’s aware you have teeth and can vouch to your expertise in that field.
My mom does that too.
I really do not like that LinkedIn encourages you to endorse 4 random connections with the 1 skill that they have probably been endorsed for the most often – it completely trivializes the concept of endorsing. No, I’m not going to endorse my college friends for skills they’ve developed since we graduated – I’m sure many of them are deserving, but how could it possibly mean anything for me to endorse it?
Related: I have refused to connect with a few former coworkers, because I thought they were bad at their jobs and have no interest in supporting their careers, on the off chance it reflects badly on me. Is this terrible? Am I missing the point of LinkedIn, are we supposed to lie about who we are “connected” with, as we often do in our “friendships” on Facebook?
Yeah, I don’t know that there is really a point in adding my friends who don’t work in my field. You endorsed me in Classroom Management? You work in IT and have never seen me teach, but sure, fine, I guess.
I also really hate the rando endorsements. I basically never endorse anyone and rarely even log on, but when my HS friends endorse me for “Corporate Law,” I’m going 1) how could you possibly have enough information to make this judgment? and 2) what does that even MEAN to you? Because I basically have no idea what it means to me, and I’m not even really sure it’s an appropriate description of what I do. So yeah. No.
But same question re: LinkedIn vs. Facebook. I tend to be more profligate on LinkedIn than FB because I post vacation pictures and stuff occasionally on FB and my “professional connections” don’t need to know that much about my personal life, such as it is (and such as they are distinct). But what’s the right approach? I also reject people I don’t like / don’t trust / don’t know on LinkedIn (or at least leave them in purgatory indefinitely). But I really don’t know what, if anything, people read into your network, besides the obviously “how can I use you to help me” kind of info.
I think you’ve understood the purpose of LinkedIn better than most; what you haven’t understood is the actual use to which LinkedIn is put nowadays; i.e a tool for recruitment consultants to send spam.
“Does your ex who keeps viewing your profile like he doesn’t know you’re informed of this action know about SEO? Does Vicky, the recruiter who rejected you a year ago from a job you really wanted, know about Marketing? Does Professor Williams whose class you dropped in the middle of the semester after accidentally missing the midterm know about Excel? Do the employers that you hope are perusing your LinkedIn profile (ha!) know that everyone on this forsaken site is just carelessly endorsing each other for skills no one knows if anyone actually possesses?”
OMG, endorsements on LinkedIn give me as much social anxiety as Follow Friday on Twitter. Are you supposed to thank them? Reciprocate? I get so worked up about it I do nothing.
THEY MEAN NOTHING
SPIT ON THEM
Congratulations! The Toast users have endorsed you for: SPITTING Would you like to endorse users of The Toast for: Enabler?
Don’t get worked up about it; doing nothing is the right decision.
I would pay vast quantities of currency to hear Dame Judi Dench read this out loud.
I had a LinkedIn profile and then I promptly forgot the username and password so I hope no one is using it to look me up because that shit hasn’t been updated in centuries. On the bright side I’ve literally never encountered it being used in a professional context.
I’m job searching right now, and it’s actually really useful for seeing what second-tier connections you have to people working at the companies with job openings you’re applying to. However, their internal communications tools are something awful (unless you upgrade, of course!), so good luck actually connecting with those useful people or getting a referral.
I got my first full-time job through LinkedIn and stayed there for two and a half years. I think LinkedIn is a useful tool for a very, VERY specific line of work–copywriting for ecommerce sites–and probably not that much else.
I have friends who may not even be able to spell pharmacovigilance endorse me for Pharmacovigilance.
what’s that, making sure there are enough drugs at the party? 😉
yes, i would genuinely like to know what this is, because it sounds like something that would be taught at hogwarts
Seems unfair, I'm sure she's aware you have teeth and can vouch to your expertise in that field.
My insurance agent (a lovely woman) endorses me all the time for game industry stuff. Nice to know someone still observes the ancient Business rites of oblivious back-slapping. But hey, call me old fashioned.
My insurance agent (a lovely woman) endorses me all the time for game industry stuff. Nice to know someone still observes the ancient Business rites of oblivious back-slapping. But hey, call me old fashioned.
mallory ortberg, you are a force of nature.
True that! In my case she went a step further and BLOCKED me on FB. No way I'm going to add you to my professional network. Go away!
There’s an administrative assistant in Canada I once worked with that endorsed me for “Public Speaking.”
However, we’ve never met.
There's an administrative assistant in Canada I once worked with that endorsed me for "Public Speaking."
However, we've never met.
“I take no leave of you. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously UNINTERESTED.”