On 30 September, I had coffee at Calligraph Coffee with someone I got to know on LinkedIn. An up-and-coming creator, she has been at it for a while now and it shows.
She told me she likes my content because it’s unfiltered. I get that a lot, although I’ve never figured out if it’s a compliment or a polite way of saying I have no editor.
Then she added that it’s much better than “some cringey influencers.”
I asked for names, but she hesitated. Nobody wants to be the one who says it out loud.
So I threw her two. Crystal Lim-Lange. Juliana Chan.
Bingo.
(A decade in recruitment teaches you one thing. If someone won’t tell you their salary, you guess a number and watch their face.)
Not the first time
Those 2 names come up a lot. Whenever someone tells me who they can’t stand, one of them usually makes the list. Sometimes both.
I don’t see much of their stuff myself. My feed these days is mostly people trying to be funny about work, because I find those much more fulfilling. At the very least, they made me laugh. Favikon currently ranks me #1 in corporate humour in Singapore.
(Yes, I know. I just slipped a ranking into the second section of a post about cringe. Keep that in mind. It comes back to bite me later.)
But this time I got curious. Are they really that insufferable or is this just what happens to anyone who gets big on LinkedIn?
So what is cringe, anyway?
Cringe is second-hand embarrassment. It’s the feeling you get at a wedding dinner when the uncle at your table starts reading out his CV. He thinks he’s impressing everyone. You’re staring at the fake shark’s fin soup, wishing it were deeper.
LinkedIn cringe is its own strain. Humble brags. Fake inspiration. A coffee spill that somehow teaches 5 lessons about leadership. A tree that fell over and grew back up, now a metaphor for your Q3.
Trung Phan wrote the best explanation I’ve read, back in 2022, in his newsletter SatPost: Why is LinkedIn so cringe? He blames 3 things. The persona LinkedIn asks you to be. Who actually pays LinkedIn. And what the algorithm rewards.
The persona bit is the one that stuck with me. He talks about the version of himself that lives on his resume:
“My least favourite version of Trung is ‘CV Trung’... Because CV Trung is a knob.”
We all have a CV version of ourselves. LinkedIn is the only platform that asks you to post as him every day.
Then there’s the money. LinkedIn’s biggest paying customers are recruiters and HR departments. Trung borrows a line from Fadeke Adegbuyi’s essay “LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe” that hit a bit too close to home:
“The depravity of a platform where HR Managers are the rockstars speaks for itself.”
I’m also an HR influencer. I read that line twice.
Which makes me wonder. If the platform is built to produce cringe, how much can you blame the people it produces?
How I got the data
I wasn’t going to judge 2 people on vibes and a coffee. So I went and got their posts.
