LinkedIn's Whole Purpose Is to Be Found. Ask Someone You Found There for a Resume and You're the Asshole. That Inversion Is Class War Dressed as Etiquette.
Updated: Aug 11
Here's a thing that happens ten thousand times a day and nobody names it. A hiring manager finds a promising person on LinkedIn — the one thing LinkedIn exists to let them do — reaches out, and asks for a resume. And the response, from the candidate and the whole ambient etiquette of professional life, is: how dare you. It's all on the profile. Asking is lazy, redundant, insulting. You, the one who did the finding, are the asshole.
Sit with how backwards that is. A platform whose entire business is selling recruiters the ability to find you has produced a culture where using it as designed is a faux pas. That inversion isn't a glitch. It's a confession.
The profile already is the resume — a bigger one
The profile is a resume. It's an app resume — living, digital — and it holds more of your career than any single page could ever carry. Every role, every project, the writing, the recommendations, the whole shape of a fifteen-year career, none of it crushed down to one sheet with half-inch margins. More data, not less.
So look at what's actually being demanded. Someone finds you through that richer version, then makes you go manufacture a separate, one-page PDF — re-typed, reformatted, flattened to fit, then hand-keyed again into a form that mangles it on the way in. Not for the information. They already have more of it than a page holds, and it's the exact thing they found you with. They want the ritual — the flattened artifact the machine downstream is built to swallow. Why would I render myself into a worse format when the better one is literally how you came in the door?
Because the whole point is to keep you apart
That question has an answer. Nobody in the process will say it out loud, so I will: the friction is the product. The point of making you duplicate and downgrade your own career is to keep the two people who actually matter — the one who can do the work, the one who needs it done — from ever dealing with each other directly. Because the second they do, there's no toll left to charge.
That's the recruiter's entire business. An intermediary class whose value evaporates the instant two humans just talk. So of course they're the loudest enforcers of the etiquette — every rule about "the process," every scold for going around it, is a fence around the one human moment that would make them unnecessary. Keep the parties apart; charge for the gap. The manners are a moat, and the moat has a payroll.
The patron saint wrote the manual
And the man who built the apparatus wrote its instruction book. Reid Hoffman literally authored The Start-Up of You, telling every worker to become a perpetual business in permanent beta — always marketing, never off the clock. Then he built the machine to monetize that anxiety, reduced a human being to a keyword grid, sold it to Microsoft for $26 billion, and took the money off to become one of the biggest political megadonors in the country — the same billionaire-funding-both-tables move I laid out in the Thiel piece last week. The man who convinced a generation their identity was unpaid, always-on labor is the patron saint of the filter that now rejects them. That's not irony. That's the business model closing its loop.
And it doesn't even work
Here's the punchline. In 2026 the job post is written by an AI. The resume is screened by an AI. The rejection is written by an AI. The candidate uses an AI to mass-generate the applications going in. Machines talking to machines, tokens burned on both sides of a war whose entire objective is to keep two humans from ever having a conversation — and the person it filters out hardest is the one who never fit the template to begin with: the non-linear career, the self-taught operator, the mind that thinks sideways. The exact people worth finding. After all the rent, all the make-work, all the keeping-apart, the machine's actual output is filtering out the best people and making everyone miserable. It extracts everything and delivers garbage. It's broken.
So stop begging it
I used the antidote this week. I found someone on LinkedIn — a peer — and sent them real work: an actual security dossier on something that mattered to them. No form, no filter, no portal, no resume asked for and none required. Just I found you, here's something valuable, let's talk like people. That's what the platform was before the filter ate it.
So I'm done arguing with the machine, and here's the whole point: quit begging the filter and go build the thing it says you can't. I did. This entire platform — the live threat feed, the institutional memory, the AI-security tooling — built by one self-taught guy and an AI partner, in public, with receipts you can read line by line. That's my resume. It's a running system, not a PDF, and it found its own customers without asking a single recruiter's permission.
You think you can build like I do with AI? Fucking prove it. I sure as hell did.
Pinned to LinkedIn, naturally. Use the tool as designed.
This one's on the house. Murphy was an optimist.
Continues the argument from "Inhuman Resources: A Considered Response to Every Recruiter Who Filtered Me Out" and the billionaire-funding throughline from the Peter Thiel piece — both at dugganusa.com.
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