One of the first things we were told to do when looking for a job before the internet was to network, network, network. Let all your friends and family know you are looking for work. Join professional associations and attend their events to meet people in your desired field and learn who might be hiring. Search the newspaper classifieds for job openings. But if you wanted a good job, conventional wisdom held that you could circumvent the human resources process by finding someone who knows the hiring manager for the real jobs rather than the advertised ones. Finding a job has always been about who you know.

My first job came from doing an internship for school. I worked in community mental health in a group home for teenage boys who were in the custody of the State of Rhode Island. At that time, jobs like that were advertised in the newspaper and were mostly filled by people willing to do the job who passed a criminal background check. For the eight years I worked in human services, most of my jobs were like that. There wasn’t a hidden job market that networking would uncover unless I were looking to become an administrator somewhere. But even then, most of those jobs were advertised in the newspaper, or people were promoted from within.

I switched jobs about every two years and earned a master’s degree in between. It became evident that I wasn’t getting what I needed out of work, so I went to a career counselor, took a DISC assessment, and was told I was in the wrong line of work. I needed to be in marketing or human resources. My Dad handed me a copy of “What Color is Your Parachute” by Nelson Bolles and told me I needed to start networking. This was before businesses became interested in behavioral science, so my degree or experience wasn’t going to open any doors if I applied to HR departments. The challenges with networking for me were many. My college connections were focused on academia or working in human services. My childhood friend network was underdeveloped because my family moved every eighteen months, and my relatives lived so far away that there were no real connections there either. In short, using my limited network made finding the hidden job market a real challenge.

Eventually, I ended up working in customer service for CellularOne. They paid for web development classes, which led to getting a job with a boutique web development firm in Boston, and then doing inside sales for a software company. I was fired from both jobs for insubordination and then fell back into building websites when an internet business idea I had fell apart. I didn’t acquire any of my jobs through networking. That may be why none of them were a good fit for me, but it’s more likely that is why I became insubordinate and got fired.

Most career advice of the 80s and 90s assumed you had a network worth activating. Mine wasn't.

LinkedIn started when I was working on my inside sales job selling Lotus Notes project management software. It was a tough sell at the time because companies were moving away from Notes, so I was always looking for somewhere else to go. I got an email one day from a potential customer letting me know he was on LinkedIn and was inviting me to join his network there. One of the outside salespeople for the enterprise software group for the company said, “Don’t join that, it’s a pyramid scheme. You’ll start getting more unwanted emails from people you don’t know.” He equated it with how Hotmail operated to get new users, with your email being loaded with ads.

This was not long after the dotcom bubble burst, so people tended to be skeptical of internet businesses like this that didn’t have a clear monetization model. But for people like me, finding a way to develop loose connections was appealing. I resisted the urge to join LinkedIn during my short time in the sales role, but shortly after being fired in January 2006, I joined LinkedIn. I believe my initial intent was to stay connected with the salespeople I had worked with at Datawatch. Oddly enough, the first two people I made connections with are people I have never met and haven’t had much contact with in the 20 years I have been a LinkedIn member. One is an HR professional, and the other was a social media guru from the UK at the time. I have no idea why we became connected.

Contrast that with today: most of the connection requests I receive are either from someone trying to sell me something or from fundraisers for one of the two colleges I attended. I can safely say that I have derived no networking benefit from being a member of LinkedIn. When I was a freelancer, it did not generate any business. The biggest benefit was when I paid to post jobs, email newsletters, and other content for a recruiter client I had for most of the 17 years I was a freelancer.

Unbeknownst to me, my daughter joined in 2022. She is finishing a couple of classes for her B.S. in Electrical Engineering Technology. A LinkedIn profile was important for her to have for the job fairs she attended at R.I.T. She has over 100 connections and used LinkedIn to apply for one job for which she never got a response. In May, she walked for graduation and landed her first job two months later. She will be working for the company where she completed a co-op in 2024. When I asked her about LinkedIn, she said she didn’t have a great experience using it and didn’t like how it uses AI. Her professors talked a little bit about it, but had mixed feelings about its use of AI as well. She also conducted an impromptu, unscientific poll on a Discord server with some of her classmates, which showed an almost 50-50 split between students who found it sometimes useful and those who used it only sparingly. As always, there were a couple of outliers who either really loved or really hated it.

My wife, on the other hand, has a LinkedIn profile she hasn’t updated since creating it in 2008. She’s worked for the same company for 25 years and has a handful of connections. Networking and staying in touch with past colleagues aren’t much of a priority for her or the people she has worked with over the years.

Who Was Networking Advice Actually Written For?

Since nobody in my household uses LinkedIn for its originally intended purpose, I am curious about a few things. How are people using it today vs the early years? How has LinkedIn affected the job market through the years? What are some of the unintended consequences of LinkedIn? How has LinkedIn helped people with their careers or Business Development if they are an entrepreneur?

Please reach out if you have any LinkedIn experiences you’d like to share, past or present.

I am here on Substack largely because I don’t know what to do with myself. A little over a year ago, I started playing around with ChatGPT and Gemini to see if I could figure out a new business to start that fit my personality and find a market gap I couldn’t see. In 2023, I gave up on my freelance web development business when it became clear to me that hacking was going to get worse, the market for websites had become more commoditized, and I didn’t have the network to find clients for more strategic work.

I tried my hand at triathlon coaching in 2021, but I have only managed to gain an active roster of two clients at a time over the last five years. While it is fulfilling on one level, having only two athletes diminishes it. I have a Master of Science in Applied Psychology, but my 40 years of work experience have been varied. From working in community mental health to customer service and software sales, I never found work that utilized my talents in such a way that made the bad parts of a job tolerable. So I turned to AI to see if, by providing it with a pattern of me, it could match me with a business or career I was better suited for and give me something to make me want to get out of bed in the morning.

It has been an enlightening and frustrating experience. In short, don’t use AI for career advice. I fed it as much data about me as I could, and it gave me an analysis of who the real Brian is and why he had such a hard time finding a job. On one level, it revealed that I think in systems, explained why my previous jobs weren’t good fits, and finally, there was no hope for me. I should just take solace in how I was a good guy, smart, but ultimately a square peg in a round peg world. When I tried to force it to concede that it was telling me I was a never-bloomer, it suggested I seek advice from a mental health professional.

I’ve spent the better part of a year trying to attach the problem from different angles. Mostly because I don’t fully understand all the nuances of how to get the best out of AI, what its true limitations are, and the idea that I just haven’t discovered the right prompt to get what I wanted from it. If I just prompted it differently, I wouldn’t back it into a corner and end up with the same circular solution. That circular solution of coming up with business ideas that there is no market for, things that were made up to fit my strengths and weaknesses, but can’t exist in the real world. In short, it was a syncophant, and what it came up with only stroked my ego. There is no market for a decision auditor for small business owners from a 59-year-old guy with varied work experience who ran two failed businesses. When I prompted it not to be a sycophant, it turned into a drill sergeant who told me to suck it up and “Coffee’s for closers,” as Alec Baldwin’s character, Blake, declared in the 1992 film adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

My idea was flawed because the different AIs tried to strictly match my pattern with a low-resolution template of careers. At least that is what it told me when I asked it why it failed to present careers that were imperfect fits, but still matched a large enough portion of my pattern. The problem was that I never defined a large enough portion to be a possible match. So I was just flailing around, trying to get it to do something it couldn’t.

I have a tendency to keep going on things like this because I think I may not have asked the right question or need to ask it differently. Then it dawned on me, maybe the issue is that the data it is trained on prevents it from doing the pattern matching I am looking for. Where does AI learn what the ingredients for a successful career or business are? What happens when a person or business doesn’t fit that pattern cleanly? Will it give you approximate matches to help narrow down my options, or create something that doesn’t exist just to appease me?

I’m not willing to accept that I am a never-bloomer. AI evaluated me based on historical career patterns, homogenized job descriptions, and my ability to be performative. Does that suggest it doesn’t have a pattern for potential? Which ultimately led me to wonder: where is the place most people go for career information online, LinkedIn? How much does LinkedIn influence AI? If it does, what are the unintended consequences of that influence? LinkedIn is obviously not the only data source for AI. They actively block AI from scraping their data, but they are a place to start.

Any time I go out my front door to go for a walk beyond a half a mile, I take my life in my hands. I live in New Hampshire’s largest city, but on the outskirts, where there are no sidewalks and little to no shoulder to walk on. I walk on the opposite side of the road, so I can see cars and bikes coming and can get out of the way if I can see that the driver isn’t going to move over.

On any given day, I experience four types of drivers. The first one acts as though I am not even there. They maintain their speed and don’t move over. The second one overreacts and moves over into the other lane. They often do this going into a blind corner putting both of us in danger. The third tries to move over but then they are faced with a dilemma of an oncoming car and must decide what to do next. Often, their speed stays the same and they move into my space on the asphalt. The last type slows down and waits until it is safe to pass. They are the exception rather than the rule. Most never change their speed or their position on the road.

I’ve been walking more recently because of a hamstring injury that has prevented me from running and biking as much as I have over the last thirteen years. Until recently, I competed in long-distance triathlons and trained on roads near and far from my home. My experience running and biking has been similar, but biking seems to elicit significantly more anger from drivers. I’ve been sworn at, given the middle finger, and once had a passenger in a Jeep Wrangler try to kick me as they drove by. Luckily, the driver moved over to prevent his passenger from connecting with me. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last close call with a car. About a year later, someone took a left turn in front of me as I was traveling down a main road going about thirty miles an hour. I was able to avoid hitting the car, but I braked hard, went over the handlebars, and subsequently used my face to stop before hitting the car. At least that is what I am told. I have no recollection of what happened that day nine years ago.

Subscribe now

I woke up in a hospital the next day with a nurse pulling a tube out of my throat, telling me I had been in a bike crash, that I had hit a pothole in the road. However, there were no potholes and not even a crack in the asphalt where the crash occurred. Several weeks later, I met the policeman who responded to the call. He told me there was no car involved and couldn’t explain what happened to me.

I spoke to one of the people who witnessed the crash. She was in a car behind the car that took a left turn. She saw me coming because I had a flashing light on the front of my bike. I believe she is the one who called the police. According to her, a car in front of her took the left turn and continued as if nothing happened. I can only assume the policeman who interviewed the witnesses asked his questions in such a way that allowed him to rule out car involvement. In other words, no one saw the car hit me or vice versa. I was incredulous when the cop told me there wasn’t a car involved. Even though I couldn’t remember what happened, I still had a witness tell me a car took a left turn in front of me and kept on going. Was I to believe I just randomly freaked out and crashed on a bike that I had put 10,000 miles on?

Why bring up the dangers of walking, running, and biking on New Hampshire roads or any roads for that matter? Because ninety-seven days after my crash I had an experience that crystalized for me why our roads are unfriendly to everyone who uses them. I was still planning to compete in a Half Ironman in September and a Full Ironman in November and needed to figure out if I could mentally manage riding on the roads again. During my first ride outside, on a four-lane section of road, an SUV moved over from the left lane into the right lane and came very close to me. He sped up and took a right turn about a half mile down the road. I took the same right and caught up to him in a parking lot as he was getting out of his SUV. I laid into him about almost hitting me. His response was that he moved over because he needed to turn right up ahead, that’s why.

I recount these experiences, not to point out all the assholes I encounter on the road, but to look at how the systems we create to shape behavior ignore human nature. They assume that we are all rational, logical people. We assume that when presented with rules, we follow them because we see how we benefit from treating other people the way we would want to be treated. The people who have almost hit me while out walking, running, or biking surely wouldn’t want me to do the same to them if they were engaged in the same activity. But in the moment, their goal of getting to where they need to be superseded mine. For some, being on the road walking, running, or biking means I am putting my needs before theirs, it makes them angry, and some act on that anger.

Our roads are dangerous because people need to get from point A to point B in the fastest way possible. Speed limits and signs demanding a driver to give three feet of room to a cyclist doesn’t change that need. So, what is the answer? To believe there is an easy fix or if we only did this one thing is a fool’s errand. People and the roads they travel are part of a complex system. We do not have the ability to predict all the factors that go into why people do what they do when faced with the choice over waiting until it is safe to pass vs get there as fast as you can by any means possible. But we can do a better job of factoring in human nature, and add some friction, other than my body being in the way, to force people to slow down and pass safely. In my experience, I don’t provide enough friction to accomplish that task. We need to iterate interventions, use the marginal improvements, and jettison the rest. We must recognize that adding more signs for people to ignore and doing something for the sake of doing something won’t make the system better.

My goal with this Substack is to explore why systems fail. If that interests you too, please subscribe.