Businessy

Someone posted a picture of a sign on LinkedIn that read: "Skilled labor isn't cheap; cheap labor isn't skilled." I was immediately reminded of a man I'd encountered panhandling near an expressway off-ramp who was offering his decades of experience in construction for what seemed like a pittance. Years of experience and consummate skill do not, by themselves, repeal the laws of economics. While it may require years to create a skilled worker, that doesn't mean that those skills are also rare, in comparison to the demand for them.

But as LinkedIn has drifted towards becoming a more general-purpose social-media site, as opposed to strictly business networking, these sorts of vaguely affirming postings have become more common. Posts exhorting people to stand up and hold out until they find someone who "sees their true worth" are so common as to be clichés. But I guess they count as "engagement" these days, and that's what matters to the site.

It's interesting to watch people who should understand enough about business to know better reduced to posting bland aphorisms to farm reactions from the site's general audience. It's a side-effect of modern society, I suppose, but for all of that it's still an interesting phenomenon to observe the process of wringing the complexity out of life. I understand the world to be a complex place, and therefore I tend to credit complex answers to questions as being more likely to be accurate than simple ones. I also understand, however, that this puts me at odds with a lot of the people around me, who may be looking for a less complicated worldview. In this sense, the shift in LinkedIn was perhaps inevitable, as people began to spend more time on the site and methods and styles honed in other parts of the Internet were imported. If nothing else, it's allowed the site to remain relevant.