The Best Way to Use LinkedIn is to Not Use It at All

The ROI of LinkedIn for depth-first creators is zero.

Every minute spent on LinkedIn me feel one minute dumber.

InMail

99% of InMail is spam, bots, or people that are just plain out-of-touch.

An InMail exchange I had with a man who brands himself as “Former CIO turned Executive Branding Strategist” (whatever the fuck an “Executive Branding Strategist” is, I haven’t the faintest idea) illustrates this well. My brand btw is that I have a foul mouth, am a recovering control freak, and love building cool shit all day. I’m not interested in changing that even if I’m named “King and CEO of Shit Mountain” tomorrow. Let’s call him Art. Art sent me an invite in March to “just connect”. A couple days later, the false pretense faded and he pushed to meet with me so he could help me “strategize my brand”. Again I have no idea what the fuck that even means. I politely, but firmly and with no ambiguity, said “no thanks”.

Art has proceeded to message me over 9 months and 7 messages despite the fact I haven’t replied to a single one. I could be lying dead in a ditch somewhere and Art wouldn’t even care? He’s probably writing me a fucking message as I write this!

Crazier revelation though, ready for it?

There’s at least 20 people that are doing the same thing in my InMail right now! Let’s walk through some of the InMail phenotypes I have sitting on unread right now.

MBA Fest

Look, I don’t have anything fundamentally against MBA-holders…

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…other than the fact that the sheer number of them have mostly ruined the tech industry. Once a tech company gets over, oh, 500-1000 people, the number of MBAs in their employ goes way the fuck up. What was originally a cool creative place to work becomes dystopian corporate hellscape of grey walls and Excel sheets instead of a place where people build quality shit. There are a few companies that somehow manage to survive this and come out the other end of scaling with their engineering culture in tact but it takes one or more strong voices at the top. I’ve been extremely fortunate to work at two companies that did this successfully. Most do not.

LinkedIn is crammed with these guys and here’s my issue with it. I’ve seen an engineer learn business — usually by force and a with a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. I’ve actually seen that happen a few times to great success. I have never seen a business person become a brilliant technologist. You can draw whatever conclusions you want there but that’s my observation. Steve Jobs was a ruthless businessman but he was a designer and technologist before that.

Business-folks focus a mile wide and an inch deep. They need to track a bajillion things in their head that are not that complex. It’s the breadth and ability to context switch that defines their thinking style. Builders need to go deep on a problem though. LinkedIn is optimized for the former thinking style. Not only is that not my audience, it’s antithetical to the way I think.

Where I’m Putting My Effort

I’m leaving LinkedIn. I’ll keep my account up though, I’m just not checking it anymore, at all. 5-10 times a year a real human reaches out to me about something genuinely real/interesting/important. If you’re seeing this by way of LinkedIn and you want to get in touch you can do so here. An AI reads your form submissions that’s set to my set of criteria so it’ll bin all messages by the “Arts” of the world before they reach me.

Otherwise, I’ve found my audience on my blog and on YouTube. If you’re genuinely interested in my ideas and not just what you can get out of me, check me out on those platforms.

https://blog.drjoshcsimmons.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@drjoshcsimmons