There’s a meme I love that nails this topic perfectly. I don't know who came up with it, but it is surely funny as it gets:
On the left: a black-and-white photo of Darth Vader with the caption:
Reality
Anakin Skywalker
Assistant to the Emperor
On the right: the same photo, this time under the LinkedIn logo:
LinkedIn
Darth Vader, LORD
CEO, Death Star 1 & 2 | Chief of Staff to the Supreme Chancellor | Dark Lord of the Sith | Chosen One, Jedi Order | Jedi Ghost | Ex-General, Grand Army of the Republic | …
You get the idea.
It’s funny because it’s true. On social media, especially on LinkedIn, reality and performance are often miles apart. Titles inflate, stories are polished into legend, and everyone looks like they’re running at Death Star scale 24/7.
And in the middle of that circus, there’s you: doing real work, trying to build a real career, trying to attract real opportunities without pretending to be “Darth Vader, LORD of 17 buzzwords.”
That’s what this article is about.
How do we use social media, LinkedIn included, in a way that actually helps our careers, brings in contracts, and increases our visibility, without becoming prisoners of the algorithm or actors in someone else’s game?
1. The LinkedIn Illusion
Let’s start with the obvious: something is off with LinkedIn.
You and I have both seen it. Posts that used to reach thousands of people suddenly crawl. Carefully crafted, high-signal content gets buried while low-effort “engagement hacks” go viral. You pay for Premium, expecting at least a modest uplift in visibility or opportunity, and what you actually get is a higher credit card bill and more frustration.
In my own case, two full years of Premium cost me over €1,600. During that same period:
My reach and impressions shrunk, despite posting consistently and staying laser-focused on topics I deeply understand.
My content received stronger, more meaningful engagement on platforms with zero paid features.
Most serious recruiters and opportunities came from outside LinkedIn altogether, including my current employment at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
I don’t think this is a conspiracy; it’s just how the machine is built.
LinkedIn’s incentives are not “help Leonardo grow a meaningful network and get good jobs.” LinkedIn’s incentives are:
Keep you on the platform as long as possible.
Maximize clicks, comments, and ad impressions.
Sell Recruiter seats and Premium plans.
The algorithm is optimized for engagement, not depth; virality, not expertise; broad appeal, not narrow competence. If the market suddenly decides that dancing in front of a whiteboard is “engaging,” the algorithm will happily reward that, even if the actual content is nonsense.
The danger is when we forget that and start treating LinkedIn like our career operating system instead of what it really is: a noisy, useful, but unreliable channel.
Once you really internalize that, your entire strategy changes.
2. What LinkedIn Is Actually Good At
Let’s be fair: LinkedIn isn’t useless, far from it.
In some ways, it’s the best global directory of professionals we’ve ever had. You can discover people’s backgrounds, see where they work, which teams they’re on, and what kind of work they’ve done. You can sanity-check a recruiter, look up a hiring manager before an interview, or understand how an organization is structured.
It’s also a powerful way to make a first contact:
You can follow people you respect and engage with their posts.
You can send a concise message to a hiring manager with a relevant link to your work.
You can keep weak ties alive over the years by occasionally popping into someone’s feed with a comment or a note.
And when someone hears your name, through a conference, a referral, or seeing your work somewhere else, LinkedIn is often their first stop to verify:
“Who is this person?”
“Does their story hang together?”
“Is there evidence they’ve done what they say they’ve done?”
In other words, LinkedIn is a shop window and a verification layer.
Where people get burned is when they expect it to be:
Their primary distribution channel for deep content.
Their main source of job leads.
A meritocratic system where “good work” naturally reaches the right people.
It isn’t, and I strongly doubt it ever was.
Once you demote LinkedIn from “career lifeline” to “useful storefront,” your relationship with it becomes much healthier and much more strategic.
Let’s address Premium directly.
If you’re expecting Premium to:
Boost your organic reach,
Surface your posts to more people, or
Give you significantly better opportunities…
…you are likely to be disappointed.
In my experience, Premium does a few things reasonably well (like extended search, seeing who viewed your profile, and sending InMail), but none of that fundamentally changes the core issue: content distribution is still governed by an opaque algorithm that you do not control.
Worse, LinkedIn’s culture increasingly rewards performance over substance:
Title inflation: everyone is a “Global Head,” “Chief Evangelist,” or “Fractional VP of X.”
Content inflation: generic “10 tips to be a leader” posts do better than a sharp, specific breakdown of a real technical problem.
Engagement farming: polls, controversial hot takes, and “like if you agree” posts crowd out thoughtful, nuanced writing.
If you’re a deeply technical person or a specialist in a niche like network engineering, this environment can make you feel invisible.
You have three options:
Play the game fully—optimize for virality and volume.
Complain about the game and keep doing the same thing.
Redefine the game by treating LinkedIn as one input into a broader platform you control.
I vote for option three.
4. Build Signal, Not a Cosplay Persona
This is where the Vader meme bites.
The temptation on LinkedIn is to turn yourself into “Darth Vader, LORD”:
Exaggerated titles.
Buzzword salad headlines.
“Thought leader” branding disconnected from actual, demonstrable work.
It might get you some shallow attention in the short term, but serious hiring managers and technical leaders spot it instantly and quietly move on.
Instead, aim to build a sharp, authentic signal:
Be very clear about what you do and what you’re good at.
Write and share things that only someone with your lived experience could write.
Don’t pretend to be everything. Pick a lane.
In my case, for example, that might be:
Hyperscale, data center, and service provider network engineering.
Modern routing, BGP, EVPN, SR, routing security, and observability.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN), network automation.
Career growth and mindset for serious engineers.
My headline and “About” section should read like a truthful, sharp summary, not a movie poster. Something like:
“Principal Network Development Engineer | Hyperscale & Service Provider Architectures | BGP, EVPN, SR, Routing Security | I help teams design and operate large-scale, reliable networks.”
Is it as flashy as “Darth Vader, LORD”? No.
Is it honest, clear, and compelling to the right people? Absolutely.
I am not trying to impress everyone.
I am trying to be instantly recognizable to the few people who actually matter for my career.
5. Think “Portfolio of Surfaces”, Not “One Platform to Rule Them All”
Once you stop expecting LinkedIn to be the whole universe, you can start thinking in terms of surfaces: different places where people can discover you, evaluate you, and follow your work.
You might have:
An owned surface: your newsletter, blog, or personal site. This is critical. Your mailing list and domain are yours; no algorithm can take them away.
A searchable surface: long-form articles on your site, Medium, Dev.to, or similar; GitHub repos; long-lived YouTube talks; all indexed by Google, discoverable for years.
Social surfaces: LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, etc., where you share your work, interact with others, and test ideas.
Community surfaces: conferences, meetups, NANOG/RIPE meetings, operator mailing lists, niche Slack/Discord groups, podcasts.
The roles are different:
Your owned surface is where your best, deepest work lives.
Searchable surfaces are how people find that work months or years later.
Social surfaces are how you amplify and humanize that work.
Community surfaces are where you build trust and relationships.
LinkedIn becomes one doorway into this ecosystem rather than the entire building.
6. Depth First, Distribution Second
In an algorithm-driven world, it’s tempting to optimize for “What will get likes today?”
That’s a trap.
A single high-quality, deeply insightful piece of work, like a serious article, a lab, a tool, a talk, can generate opportunities for years:
People share it in private Slack channels.
It gets bookmarked and referenced in design docs.
It gets linked from blog posts and internal wikis.
Hiring managers send it to their team with “this is how we should think.”
Meanwhile, the viral post of the week is forgotten by Monday.
So flip your priorities:
Create depth: something that genuinely teaches, explains, or demonstrates expertise.
Then distribute it across your surfaces.
For example:
You write a full article on “How BGP actually behaves at hyperscale” for your newsletter.
You publish it on your site, so Google indexes it.
You share a condensed version as a LinkedIn post.
You turn the key takeaways into a short X thread.
You submit a talk proposal to a conference based on it.
You open-source a lab environment or config snippets on GitHub to go with it.
One piece of deep work, many doors into it.
Platforms may come and go. Good work, well-packaged, has a much longer half-life.
7. A Practical LinkedIn Playbook (Without Paying for Premium)
So, given all that, how do you use LinkedIn well, without obsessing over it or throwing money at Premium?
Here’s a sane, sustainable approach:
1. Make your profile a strong, honest landing page.
Tell a clear story: who you are, what kind of problems you solve, and what results you’ve helped deliver. Use your “Featured” section to point to your best work: key articles, talks, repos, case studies, or your newsletter.
2. Post less often, but with more weight.
You don’t need to post daily. One to three solid posts a week is plenty. Focus on:
Short, sharp lessons from real projects.
Breakdowns of tricky problems you’ve solved.
Career reflections that speak directly to your niche (network engineers, SREs, etc.).
3. Treat comments as conversation, not obligation.
Instead of trying to “engage” with 50 posts a day, leave a few thoughtful comments on posts from people you genuinely respect. Add something, an example, a nuance, a counterpoint. Many people will forget the original post, but remember you.
4. Use DMs surgically.
If you want to reach someone, reference something specific they did, share something specific you did, and keep it short. “Loved your post on X” plus a meaningful follow-up is more powerful than spray-and-pray InMail to 100 recruiters.
5. Skip Premium, unless you have a very specific experiment.
If you’re intensely job-hunting and want to try one month of Premium to send a few targeted InMails, fine. But don’t expect Premium to magically solve visibility or opportunity. It won’t.
LinkedIn is your shop window, not your employer, not your savior, and definitely not your measuring stick for self-worth.
8. Beyond LinkedIn: Where Serious Opportunities Actually Hide
Some of the best opportunities never show up as “jobs” on LinkedIn.
They start as:
A maintainer noticing your pull request.
Someone forwarding your newsletter to their VP with “we should talk to this person.”
A panel discussion where you say something that makes three people come up to you afterward.
A Slack DM in a niche community: “Hey, we’re trying to do something similar, are you open to consulting?”
For engineers and technical professionals, here are a few high-leverage places to invest:
Your newsletter / blog – This is your long-term asset. It showcases your thinking, builds a loyal audience, and gives you a direct line to people who care about your work.
GitHub / GitLab – If you build tools, labs, or even well-documented examples, this is where other engineers evaluate you.
X/Twitter / Mastodon / Bluesky – Still very strong for tech, especially for quick insights, linking to deeper work, and following conversations across companies and projects.
Specialized communities – NANOG, RIPE, network automation Slacks, Discord communities, r/networking, etc. These are full of practitioners, not algorithmic tourists.
Conferences, meetups, podcasts – Speaking or even just participating actively often leads to higher-quality, higher-trust connections than a year of passive posting.
LinkedIn might be where someone checks you.
These other places are where they often find you and decide they want to work with you.
9. Showing Up Online Without Losing Yourself
There’s one more dimension we can’t ignore: mental health and integrity.
It’s easy to start playing a character online. To round off the rough edges, to polish every story, to subtly inflate every number until your profile looks like a Marvel origin story.
The problem is that living as “Darth Vader, LORD” online while feeling like “Anakin, slightly tired engineer” offline creates a constant, low-grade sense of fraud.
You don’t need that.
Set a few simple rules for yourself:
No invented titles. If you didn’t lead it, don’t claim you did. If you were a contributor, say so and explain your role.
No fake clients or fake logos. If you freelanced or consulted for someone, great. Tell the story, anonymized if needed, but don’t decorate your profile with brands you never meaningfully worked with.
No “I’m fine” mask 24/7. You don’t have to share every struggle publicly, but you also don’t need to pretend everything is effortless. Real stories resonate more with serious people than airbrushed perfection.
Remember: you’re not trying to win a one-week popularity contest. You’re building a multi-year reputation.
People will forget how many likes your post got.
They will remember:
Whether you were helpful.
Whether your work was solid.
Whether your stories were believable.
Whether they felt they could trust you.
10. Stop Waiting for the Algorithm. Start Building Your Platform.
Let’s bring it home.
You’ve seen the weirdness: collapsing reach, broken notifications, Premium that doesn’t deliver. You’ve felt the frustration of pouring genuine effort into thoughtful posts, only to see them buried under a wave of generic content.
It’s tempting to rage at LinkedIn, or to walk away completely.
There’s a better path:
Use LinkedIn for what it’s good at: a clean storefront, a people directory, a way to stay loosely connected to a broad network.
Refuse to stake your self-worth or career prospects on an algorithm you don’t control.
Invest in assets you do control: your writing, your talks, your code, your newsletter, your relationships.
Show up consistently as a real person with real expertise, not a cosplay character in glossy armor.
The goal is not to recreate Amazon, Meta, or any other brand on your profile.
The goal is to build your platform, in your voice, across channels that together make you findable, understandable, and trustworthy.
If LinkedIn vanished tomorrow, would people still know where to find you?
Would they still have a way to follow your work, to read your thinking, to reach out?
If the answer is “not yet,” that’s your mission.
Start small. One honest headline. One strong article. One portfolio page. One newsletter issue. One talk.
Piece by piece, you’re building something no algorithm can take away.
And when the right hiring manager, founder, or client asks, “Who should we talk to about this kind of work?” you won’t need to hope the LinkedIn feed is kind to you that day.
Your body of work will already be out there, doing quiet, powerful marketing on your behalf.
Get it done!
Leonardo Furtado