a demonstration of not only the farce of LinkedIn recommendations, but also the sickening insincerity of my idiotic previous manager.
“It was a pleasure to work with Andrew, he is a very dedicated IT professional and is committed to the delivery high quality work all the time. He has an excellent technical expertise that helps him deliver projects that have value to the business units.” — Recommendation from Xavier Romanet to Andrew Lindsay, Nov 16 2010
I just love the term “business units.” it evokes images of a gaggling cacophony of soulless, suited automatons, warbling corporate platitudes at the office house plants. but I digress. poking around, I then find:
“It was a pleasure to work with Xavier, he is a very dedicated IT professional and is committed to the delivery high quality work all the time. He has a good balance of technical expertise and business awareness that helps him deliver projects that have value to the business units.” — Recommendation from Stephen M. to Xavier Romanet, Jul 31 2010
meep meep, bzzt crackle, recommendation-generation business-unit adjunct alpha 3 activated.
I implore anyone who stumbles across this post, googling Xavier for recruitment purposes, to exercise great caution in hiring him. his inauthenticity extends to his professional work. he drove the entire project into the ground upon joining, by forcing surviving developers, who had already been paid irregularly and made to do vicious amounts of irrelevant busy-work, to do even more overtime for abstract and irrelevant business-imposed deadlines that, ultimately, had zero market effect whatsoever.
we, as engineers, have come to expect stupidity from the “business units,” but we expect our technical management to grow a pair (of tits or of balls, as appropriate for your sexual identity) and fight our case.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, he even reproduced the grammatical error in the above recommendation!
Couldn't agree more, I really like LinkedIn as a social networking tool, but I think the recommendation system is flawed at best, and otherwise a complete farce. I've often been asked for recommendations from people, both those whose experience and expertise I admire, and those whose aptitude and work ethic is worth less (see example above) than the time it'd take me to write a fake two liner about them.
ReplyDeleteUnless there's some accreditation or control to who can and cannot write those recommendations I'd rather not write one at all. LinkedIn should remove the feature completely!