LinkedinLunatics

They are a fake as the people who use them?

They perfectly illustrate the Corporate Mindset. I like to imagine they were designed by a conclave of neurotypical and painfully unfunny and uncreative MBAs who got together in a coworking space and brainstormed the most consensual and least offensive avatar tech they could fathom. Likely none of them ever had a passing thought about what makes for compelling character design. Certainly none of them can stomach the idea of emergent phenomenon in communication. And above all nothing must stick out; to them the idea that users would want to make a non-human, cyborg, furry, green-skinned, or whatever avatar is abhorrent. Jane's quirky facial expression is the full extent of allowable creativity (and even then you know they had a 30 minute debate about including it).

These avatars do a better job of inspiring dread in me than half the shit in Severance.

Tangentially, it reminds me of when we went from Geocities/MySpace/custom reddit CSS/custom youtube pages to "you can change your PP and banner". ..... okay? Was a unified design language really worth crushing all visual creativity?
... and now I think it's a shame that Lemmy and Mastodon's default clients don't support (AFAIK) custom CSS for communities/user pages. I think that would be very iconic for the Free Web. Is someone working on this? I feel like someone should be working on this.

They look like they're designed for young children

Yes they do. You're sane. Most people aren't.

Never thought about them, I guess it is weird that someone would take time out of their day to use the built in tool to create an avatar for work like in teams or outlook

I feel the same.

Well the thing is that, similarly to dating apps, people who are actually successful in their career don't have to use LinkedIn to get around.

But the wisdom not to do so.

A friend who is Indian told me that they reckon it's linked to colonialism — now that I'm reflecting on it, I'm inclined to call it "post-colonialism" (a separate thing from neocolonialism, which exists alongside it). My friend described it as an especially toxic form of hustle culture. There's a lot of pressure to be the best — not the best that you can be, but the best. It leads to a lot of burnout.

Indian culture also values seniority/age quite highly, which means that compared to places like the US, it can be less socially acceptable to disagree with your boss. Apparently this has led to India having a lot more assholish middle manager type bosses. I can imagine in that world that being the CEO of something that's not real is basically just a fantasy of being out from the thumb of asshole managers. Plus if you feel very pressured to always be working and being Productive, then making your hobbies seem like businesses may serve to legitimise a hobby that you feel guilty to even have.

I think it's less of a "cargo cult" capitalism, because that term implies people going through the motions with no understanding of the underlying mechanisms. I think that the Indian CEO types you describe probably understand capitalism pretty damn well, because it sort of feels like a 'roided up version of capitalism, so to speak. It makes sense when I consider the population density of India, and the hustle culture competitiveness. It's probably useful to consider that profiles like this aren't necessarily aimed at us, and and are likely just operating under different social conventions. There's a lot of objectively silly stuff that I have to do as part of playing by societal expectations, so perhaps this is just something like that. It sounds like a rough experience though; Burnout due to the pressures of capitalism is definitely a worldwide phenomenon, but it sounds like Indian workers are having an especially rough time with it.

Used to run a discord server. Does that make me an experienced CEO too?

Eh, maybe it was our fault a while back but these places have been independent long enough for their problems to be their own fault now. They only blame us as a distraction, pretty much like the pre-Brexit British govt used to blame the EU.

India is especially notorious for their turbo-capitalism, but quite a few post-colonial countries have similar features in their society. The rich elite owns and controls the country, the working class struggles and the poor ones suffer. Government doesnt care to actually provide services for its citizens or better their lifes.

As a Brit, it was probably our fault in the not too distant past.

Yep. You deserve that honor for almost every frigging nation in the Commonweath, lol.

We had to fill out a “personal biography” at work

What reasoning did mgmt give for this? I'm weirded out

People who were born in 2007 will be adults now. As we age, it will become a more rare achievement to have been "Time Magazine Person of the Year, 2006". What a weird thought.

That's a fun thing to put in your bio though. It's edgy enough to be clear that you were exasperated to have to fill out a bio, but not so much that it makes you seem like an asshole. Very wry

When in LinkedIn, do as the LinkedInLunatics do? Try to out lunatic the lunatics?

Lying, the secret to success that THEY don't want you to know

If you go to the right company, they'll adjust to whatever you enjoy and are good at. We hired a couple "full stack" engineers and now one's a frontend and the other is backend. They'll occasionally work on the other end, but we keep them where they prefer to be as much as possible.

I'm probably the closest to a full stack we have, and I spend maybe 10% of my time on FE.

Why did you not like full stack work, I used to work in full stack roles years ago but that was before all the front end framework boom. Recently I've mostly been working as a backend engineer and now that I got laid off I'm looking for new roles but I find most roles are either full stack or expect you to have some knowledge of front end work like react or typescript etc. I'm debating if I should try to go for these roles just to have the experience on my resume and make it more future proof or stick to backend