Career-ending advice

I post "career-ending" advice. People are taking it seriously.

Sep 29, 2023

Fridays on LinkedIn, I post "career-ending" advice. I don't expect anyone to follow this advice because it is satire. If you follow it, you'll likely cause your career to come tumbling down.

While they're mostly joking, there is a kernel of truth and a lesson in them. I want people to think, "If I shouldn't do this, what should I do?".

I end every post with:

Follow me for more career-ending 🛑 advice on Fridays and hit that 🛎️

Not everyone reads to the end before getting outraged at how stupid I must be to believe what I say.

The disturbing part is that the more ridiculous I make the posts, the more people think I'm serious.

Based on the reactions, this means there are people who think my career-ending advice is reasonable and not career-ending at all.

Reactions

From the LinkedIn reactions, it's hard to say what people think. The thing is, I can't tell if I myself am falling to Poe's Law.

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a {topic} in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

Here's how I can interpret the reactions:

😂 Funny: They get the joke and think it's funny.
👍 Like: Default reaction, so it can be a mix of people who understand the joke, people who click like on all my posts, and people who do not understand it's a joke and genuinely think it's good advice.
❤️ Love: Do they love the joke or love the advice?
💡Insightful: Seriously? What am I supposed to think here? You must be messing with me!
👏 Celebrate: 🤯
🫶 Support: Does this mean, "Nice try, better luck next time?"

I know some of the non-funny reactions are to troll me. (Looking at you Dariusz Sadowski). Now that I've pointed this out, I'm sure to get even less useful data as more people troll by giving non-funny reactions to my post.

(BTW, if you want to troll me by clicking random reactions on all my old posts that you haven't read yet, I support that 🫶.)

Diagram

To illustrate the point, here's a graph. Impressions and engagement are trending up, so my content is getting more attention over time. Presumably, this means it’s better. However, the Funny reaction percentage is trending down. It either means more people are taking this seriously and using non-Funny reactions, or it’s large-scale trolling.