Imposter scrolling on LinkedIn

2024-11-23

I found myself endlessly scrolling LinkedIn the past few weeks. I was job searching somewhat recently before landing at Read AI and I’ve been taking the light rail into work, which lends to additional phone time. I don’t have any social media outside of LinkedIn so beyond reading the news or anonomously reading some subreddits (r/sauna, r/seattle, r/liverpoolfc), LinkedIn filled that unhealthy void in my brain that yells for the doom scroll.

My feed on LinkedIn is mostly just posturing about leet code, pushing back against leet code (yet still somehow bragging about being leet at leet code), layoffs and AI, and the random promoted Google internship post that makes you wonder if you should be working in FAANG. It’s a really discouraging place to be as an individual contributor. Even with a full time job I feel stressed about my career and all of the wrong decisions I’ve made or how inferior I am at traversing a binary Christmas tree in Go.

Ultimately LinkedIn is a place for fostering impostor syndrome by way of doom scrolling. Let’s call it imposter scrolling for now.

I realized my Chrome app was highlighting LinkedIn as as frequently visited site, which led me to visiting it more when opening a new tab, but all I really wanted was to learn more about Finish saunas. So, it’s been removed from sight for the time being.

To be clear, I didn’t delete LinkedIn. I do find it valuable for resume hosting and candidate interview preparations. The social posting aspect is just a place for me to avoid.