I read your column last week about whether coffee preferences are a good measure of character. I agreed that such a minor thing probably didn’t reflect something larger. But it made me think about one of my own recent experiences. I was going for a job that sounded like just my sort of thing. I was asked to do a formal interview. Beforehand, I did a bit of research about who would be interviewing me. As I researched I found one of my interviewers, someone I would work with if I got the job, was a prolific LinkedIn poster.

I found one of their posts quite interesting, but most of the rest seemed a bit overbearing, and a few were so dogmatic it made me nervous. This person seemed quite pleasant during the interview, but that post played on my mind; I was offered the job but declined. Could I have been too judgmental?

In some ways, I think what you’ve described is the opposite of the situation with the hot coffee drinker from last week’s Work Therapy.

A fondness for a beverage at a certain temperature struck me as an unlikely, although not a completely implausible, predictor of work competence. A predisposition to LinkedIn posturing and pontification, on the other hand, seems like a trait that could tell you a lot about what it might be like to work with someone – albeit, no substitute for actually observing them at work.

I’ve made a few disparaging remarks about LinkedIn on these pages over the years, but I don’t hate it. In fact, I find elements of it – and enclaves or oases within it – quite enjoyable. Enlightening even.

But there’s no doubt a certain kind of regular poster dominates the platform and, as a friend said recently in a discussion about LinkedIn on LinkedIn “there is a direct correlation between how [bad] someone is as an employee or co-worker and how active they are on LinkedIn. Lots of posts equals massive drainer.”

This person’s posts imply what they and their colleagues do is the same as saving premature babies or advancing Alzheimer’s treatments.

I generally agree. Although I think, like most things, enthusiastic LinkedIn posters exist on a spectrum. Or multiple spectrums. Irreverent to fawning. Whimsical to earnest. Cynical to uncritical. Someone who posts often in the irreverent, whimsical and cynical categories is all right by me (hello to early investor in Big Mouth Billy Bass, Chad Profitz, if you’re reading this).

It’s rare, of course, but not unheard of. In fact, in my quick browse of the platform before writing this I found a post that described a 1998 version of Jeff Bezos, who “worked 5 days+ per week in the office, his muscles atrophying like tender veal under fluorescent lights in his beige room.” That is nothing short of high art.