LinkedIn

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

—Bertrand Russell

A guilty pleasure. A window seat on the unfolding collective nervous breakdown of our times.

Being the sort of person who likes Ed Wood movies I love LinkedIn, despite its immutable hatefulness. Its sole virtue is the sparkling clarity with which it confirms every prejudice a cynic could possibly confect about the world of free enterprise and the men and women who inhabit it.

Whether modestly disclosing industry awards one has “won” for representing a prolific advertiser in the hosting organisation’s magazine, ejaculating words of insincere delight at disclosure of those awards from those in your network, virtue signalling your profound commitment to cosmopolitan equality and flexible working, brazenly brown-nosing LinkedIn “influencers” for their feeblest posts — those lionising Mohammad El-Erian's photos from his plane window of the sea, we’re looking at you — wondrously sharing moronic “inventions” dreamed up by CGI programmers — stop press: we are going to have to have a page for Moronic CGI inventions — or merely articulating your own pat advice on job interview technique, posting recycled logical conundrums from Facebook that “only a genius” could solve or desperately hunting for candidates — any candidates — to fill a paralegal role in one of the Emirates (fluency in Arabic preferable!), none of the terabytes put out by denizens of LinkedIn has a tenth of the merit, interest or distraction value of other social networks — yet, yet, yet — somehow the sum of LinkedIn’s mealy-mouthed parts is strangely compelling.

After all, however idiotic LinkedIn is, the Jolly Contrarian still publishes some of its snitty ramblings there. Do as I say, not as I do, folks.

A guide to LinkedIn’s best personal bio descriptions

Title	What it means
Section A: Bullshit artists
Thought leader	Git.
Digital prophet	Thought leader.
Keynote speaker	Thought leader.
Lateral Thinker	Unable to follow a sustained argument or complex syllogism. Prone to random outbursts.
Futurist	Dullard and liar (unless literally a clairvoyant, in which case this is market standard puffery)
Privileged to be leading customer-focused teams in an exciting network-centric IT services market	Either actually a GPT4 chatbot, or possessor of a job description written by one.
Speaker · Author · Mentor · Catalyst · Facilitator · Rebel	The thought leader’s thought leader
Futurist · Visionary Consultant · Quantitative Futurism · Authentic Innovation · Be the Architect of Your Future	God knows, but imagine getting stuck in a lift with this guy. Then again, if he is as good as his word, this is not likely to happen since being a futurist he should have anticipated it. So, come to think of it, an excellent guy to get into a lift with.
Award-winning Executive Leader Focused on Streamlining Processes, Driving Revenues, And Leading High-Performing Teams. Currently open to job opportunities at vice president level. (He/Him)	Reads a page of the dictionary before his tai chi and ice bath at dawn each day. Apparently hasn’t made it to “cognitive dissonance” yet.
Real Estate Broker who Specialises in Making the Impossible Possible	Liar and fantasist. Hopefully not also an architect or building engineer.
Leading the Digital Transformation of Economy	Possibly the Prime Minister? Not even The Economy? Alternatively, works for an airline, figuring out whether passengers in coach can WFH.
Section B: Lifers from personnel
Director of talent acquisition	In personnel.
Director of diversity and inclusion	In personnel. Caucasian, affluent, male, can spot a bandwagon at 200 yards, is adept at virtue-signalling and spends most of day tweeting shameless corporate speak.
Global Head of Client Experience, HR Business Partnering & Leadership, Learning, Talent and Culture, COO	In personnel. See also “Thought leader”. And “COO”, for that matter.
Section C: The temporarily employed, unemployed, and soon-to-be-unemployed
Executive coach	Recently made redundant from an operations role. Unable to find work contracting.
Intrapreneur	Shortly to be embarking on a new career as an executive coach but hasn’t realised it yet.
Entrepreneur	Used to be a managing director in sales, until the bottom of the barrel whacked her, literally, on the arse. Necessity is the mother of invention, right?
Serial entrepreneur	Unemployable fantasist.
Angel investor	Recently, belatedly, made redundant from an middle management role.
Experienced financial services professional	Recently made redundant from an operations role. In process of resigning themselves to a life of contracting, but not quite cool with it yet.
Board-level legal advisor	Recently laid off from a law firm after a long and defiant career in knowledge management. Still in denial about employment prospects but coming round to signing up for Axiom.
Founder and CEO	Recently laid off from an operations role. Now contracting.
Digital Thought and Program Leader running large end-to-end digital programs across multiple geographies.	Got laid off from a service-line role in operations at Fuji Bank. Now Founder and CEO of a legaltech start-up.
Results-driven executive with proven track record of success in programme management	Fish-food aspirant. Probably in the digestive system of a carp somewhere. It is all for the best. It was a mercy killing.
Experienced senior operations director with proven track record	Yet, here you are, “interested to hear of any opportunities. Will even consider contracting.” #OpenToWork
#OpenToWork and/or [Desperately] seeking new opportunities in ...	Possessed of charming candour but no common sense at all. Never admit you are out of work.
Workstream lead	Sounds glamorous; isn’t. Firstly, “lead”, in this context, means, “a thing you tie a misbehaving dog to” and not “what Moses did to the Children of Israel”. A “workstream lead” is one engaged, as a contractor, to prod unwilling employees along a manifestly pointless “business change” program, whereby outwardly useful staff will be distracted from whatever they are doing and instructed to strip paint off a bucket, so the bucket can be given to another employee to paint properly, so a third one can strip paint from it again. And so on. Requires experience organising all-hands conference calls, walking through action logs and compiling dashboards full of RAG statuses. Until your contract runs out.
Section D: Miscellaneous
Web developer	Invented the Internet.
Derivatives onboarding specialist	School leaver from Gdansk, seeking fortune in Krakow.
Social media advisor	(1) obsessed with twitter/instagram to the point of believing it a bona-fide commercial utility. (2) (Ergo) git.
Best-selling author of...	Greetings dear kind sir/madam I self publish my book i sincerely pray it will change your [I mean my] life. [It won’t. (Either of them).] Please review it on Amazon. I salute you thanks you!!! (sic)
Passionate about supporting and developing people in a way that is meaningful for them. Available immediately.	What. Just what. At a guess, underwear salesperson or photo lab assistant. Glass half-full type, anyways.
Facilitator, soul coach & channel at awakening lawyers	Laxative? Clairvoyant? Alarm Clock? Guessing here.
NFT missionary • Demystifying Web3 and guiding founders on their journey • GameFi • Meta • DeFi Educator • changing the world	Dropped on head, or deprived of oxygen at birth, but has more than made up for it and is presently wasting perfectly good lung fulls of the stuff. Mouth breather.

See also

• Moronic CGI inventions
• Rubbish maxims — the wit and wisdom of the IT crowd