Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

The Coaching Pandemic

I have often been targeted on Microsoft’s LinkedIn by ads for and posts by people purporting to be able to coach users on how to be “successful.”

There is seldom much elaboration, other than to say they’ll teach you how to get lots of connections and build your network. I guess there are people who value that. I’m not one of them, as I am active in the real world.

I now see more and more translators who have gone into the coaching business, selling their potential colleague translator clients the secrets of success. Some of them present themselves as “founders,” which appears to have lots of value to some people. This often self-applied title often just announces that the title holder is seeking to curate their persona without the need for any discernible substance. But I digress.

When things go bad for your personal business activities, some people turn to taking money from others for teaching them how to succeed.
There are a number of translators who long ago turned to coaching, an activity that can turn into a one-on-one cult religion, depending upon the gullibility of their clients. The number appears to be growing, and it’s now being bolstered by translators in the global south, sometimes regarding European target languages.

This is the world of Microsoft’s LinkedIn, where substance takes a back seat to fantasy.

Desperation drives a lot of LinkedIn posts from the global south.

My LinkedIn feed is inundated with posts from people with whom I share no business or language interests. They are mostly from the Global South and mostly AI-generated slop, and the low value of the posts is disturbing.

Why is it that the majority of LinkedIn post mentioning Japan that are fed to me by Microsoft are from accounts of people who are not in Japan, including many in the Global South, who are very unlikely to ever be able to come to Japan?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, you need to spend a bit of time thinking about LinkedIn and the demographics of desperate LinkedIn users.

Many LinkedIn users in the global south will never have the opportunity to visit locations such as Japan, but post in the hope that AI-generated or even human-generated Japan-related slop will attract engagement and perhaps income. That is highly unlikely, but such is the LinkedIn world of desperation.

Enshittification of LinkedIn on the March

I have watched for some time the LinkedIn coaches selling coaching to desperate LinkedIn users who want to get jobs or achieve “LinkedIn success,” whatever that might mean (probably very little).

I now find from my LinkedIn slop feed that there are coaches on LinkedIn selling coaching to help people get work on, of all places, the click-work platform Upwork.

I am not surprised to see that numerous posts on LinkedIn to sell Upwork coaching are from people in places like Nigeria, Ghana, and Pakistan, which are probably home to many power users of click-work platforms like Upwork.

The proliferation of these Upwork coaching ads on LinkedIn says speaks about not only the people who use Upwork, but also the progressive enshittification of the platform LinkedIn itself. LinkedIn was never a good place for freelancers to find meaningful work, and now it is acting to promote coaching for users of an even less meaningful platform.

The end is near. No, wait, the end is not near. I think we might be seeing the end already, but these platforms are supported by countless desperate users trying to survive.