Other common content is regurgitating blog / Twitter folks from "AI influencers", associated with statements like, "Boris McAI said software engineering is dead. Here's 5 reasons why he's right."
I felt this way a bit when cryptocurrency was at its height, but it never got this embarrassing or self-fellating. How do so many of my connections (more than 800 at this point) have literally zero shame? Hell it's not even first-degree connections.
* "Independent Thought Leader and Consultant"
* "Strategy, Innovation, and Distruptive Technology thought leader in the Hyperscale/Cloud business"
* "AI Thought Leader + Founder at <company name>.ai"
* "C++ expert and agile process thought leader"
When expanded to 2nd degree connections, I get more than 10 pages of results when searching for the phrase "Thought Leader" (in quotes, so it's not a fuzzy search phrase).
(That and the normal herd of grifters who pile on to every fad.)
The fundamental behind AI is the same thing behind traditional software systems. So for the “AI evangelists” — the needs to be recognized is much stronger than the needs to be a great software engineer.
I am using a metaphor, do you want to play soccer in the playground? Or do you want to be a great fan of soccer? Have you seen soccer evangelists to be great soccer players?
... or was it just my feed?
Do you seriously use that?
That's your problem right there.
When has anyone's LinkedIn feed been anything else than blatant attempts at self-promotion, spam, cliche business advice and empty work-related platitudes (a lot of it AI generated itself nowadays, for extra-slopiness).
Well, that and based on my experience, most AI 'evangelists' tend to be pretty bad at coming up with creative ideas in general. Many of them are basically the same grifters that tried to cash in on crypto and NFTs, except with a new fad of choice.
Enough said.
They're just jumping on the hype train but can you really blame them? They've been hearing about how their job will be replaced, how they need to upskill with AI, and they see everyone else doing it. Many probably have no real skills so they're just trying to survive.
Because linkdin is shit? Ez.
I often wondered: Is this how you get promotions? No way does that actually work or do anything... And then I'm like holy shit is it genuine??? Is this really coming from the heart and I'm the cold, dead, psychopath who can't appreciate a genuinely thoughtful update from a corporate peer?
I had to get out of there.
I'm not on LinkedIn anymore... but I imagine it's even worse now that all the b2b saas posters have gone full agentic.
You never go full agentic.
In the crypto bubble I used the opportunity to remove all that noise from my stream. Unsubbed from everyone with Crypto in their job title with no regrets. Doing the same for AI thought leaders helped reduce the noise a bit further.
I like to keep my LinkedIn stream non AI generated, so if I see an AI generated post with all those shitty unicode bold letters, I'm just unfollowing and removing them from my connections.
Now I get the real value out of LinkedIn, which is spammers and advertisers that have a LinkedIn Pro subscription that I cannot unsubscribe from. Yay! /s
Jokes aside, you should reflect on how and for what you are using social media. Every second you spend reading there is likely a second wasted that you can spend building or doing what you enjoy. Social media is an attention grabbing business model, and your lifetime is too precious to waste it on...that.
Every time I was opening social media in the past I am now doing a little bit of sports outside to reset my brain. Much more fun to be in the green than in the digital noise world.