So there I am, minding my own darn business, doing some reading on my favorite feed reader, Flipboard while commuting, when I stumble across this delightful nugget of a post from the bros at LinkedIn.

Linky Dinky was very proud of themselves, because they raked in two. freaking. billion. dollars. in premium subscriptions last year.

Two billion.

Premium subscriptions.

From us poor job seeking individuals.

For a platform that somehow manages to be the worst parts of Facebook and Excel mashed together by a sad, suit-wearing algorithm. And no, this ain’t satire.

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This is reality, 2025-style.

Now before we go any further, let’s clear something up, LinkedIn isn’t a professional network anymore. Nope. It’s a full-blown influencer theme park where CEOs cosplay as humble thought leaders and people share their lunch breaks like they’re giving a TED Talk on emotional resilience.

It’s basically Facebook, but with more buzzwords and fewer grandmas.

Anyway, I asked a guy, also called Marco, a tech CEO, decent guy, unfortunately still alive in this timeline, and I axed him – how hiring’s going?

He says, “We stopped using (and paying) for LinkedIn a couple of years ago”.

I say, “You mean when it went full social network?”

And he goes all blank stare, like I just told him his toaster’s been spying on him for North Korea. “LinkedIn is a social network?” he says.

Buddy.

My dude.

It’s a cult.

And here’s where the fun really starts, because LinkedIn, that glorious glorious Colosseum of Career Combat, is profiting from your hiring process burn.

On both sides.

They could totally fix it though.

Yet they won’t.

They have the infrastructure, the data, the pipeline, the AI that supposedly “connects you to opportunity” (barf). But fixing it would mean people actually get jobs they want. Which would mean they stop paying. Which would mean the influencer-follower economy collapses.

And we can’t have that now, can we?

Huh? Say whatnow?

Let’s break it down for the suits in the back.

LinkedIn’s whole model relies on not solving the hiring crisis.

That’s the twist.

Their big dirty secret.

They are making heaps of money off of people being miserable and desperate and unemployed or underemployed or trapped in a crummy job where their manager’s Slack avatar is a minion meme.

They need your thirst.

They feed off it.

Like lil’ vampires with MBA’s.

And Marco. . . Poor sweet Marco.

Turns out some of his own HR folks were posting roles on LinkedIn behind his back because “that’s what everybody does”.

And this triggered a tsunami of chaos. Recruiters scraping his career page, reposting his listings under their companies, inflating salaries, inventing job perks, reselling him his own damn candidates through LinkedIn DMs like some kind of black market talent laundering scheme.

It’s like pirating your own wedding video and paying for it twice.

Hahahaha.

Sorry – it’s cynical laughter.

Let’s not forget the spam. Because now, every time Marco’s company posts an opening, they get flooded with inbound pitches from SaaS vendors and offshore solutioneers. All because someone’s scraping job listings and selling that data to every sales team with a CRM, a cold algorithmic heart and a dream.

That “InMail” perk you get with your subscription, yeah, that’s not a feature, that’s a threat vector.

But sure, let’s all keep pretending this ain’t a hiring crisis but just a little “skills mismatch”. Meanwhile LinkedIn’s CEO is out here bragging that they bet big on AI to “accelerate connection to opportunity”, which I think is code for “we built a machine that sells you back your own problems with a smile”.

So let me end this the way I started. With maximum snark and minimum hope.

LinkedIn made two billion dollars last year.

Not fixing hiring.

Not helping people.

Not solving anything.

They made it selling subscriptions to a broken machine, draped in a professional selfie, dunked in motivational sludge, and filtered through a spreadsheet.

And we keep paying for it.

Congratulations, you’re the product and the punchline.

Signing off from my premium account (really did)

Marco

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I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.

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