LinkedIn is a useful tool in several areas: contact management, networking, job searching, brand promotion. Some people even use it for seeking help and gathering tutorials. All of it shows up in your feed, so even people that you aren't connected to occasionally show up on your home page, usually from posting in some group that you're a part of. This can sometimes give you a great opportunity to rage against the current state of programming.

Take this screen grab for example:

I've blacked out the person's picture and name, but look at the person's title: "Consultant (.NET Specialist)." Now look at the message that this person posted:

I am new to the coding game and would love some developer feedback on courses to take to gain exp and knowledge in the .net coding space…

This person is selling his or herself as a .NET specialist on LinkedIn--title visible to all recruiters and hiring managers, yet apparently he or she is brand new to programming and looking for some courses. That is not a specialist.

In the same week, I received the following email from a recruiter:

Want to know what one of my biggest pet peeves is? Recruiters looking for ninjas, rock stars, samurais, wizards, and just about everything else but actual programmers. Usually wording like this is because the job doesn't pay crap, but the recruiter or company wants to make it look like a cool environment to attract young talent mesmerized by the potential of a startup lifestyle. This particular message is looking for:

Web API 2 Wizardry
Sorcerer of ADO.NET

I didn't realize that recruiters were so hip on Dungeons & Dragons. Good for them.

This brings up another (more serious) point though: by using marketing speak for these jobs--descriptions that are communicated back to hiring managers that might not be technical people--it promotes this idea that programming is somehow magical, not that it's something hard that people have worked for years and years to master. It devalues the discipline of programming by assuming that just a few incantations from the right framework is enough to make an enterprise application go.