In general English, "secular" means "non-religious."

In MBA-speak, "secular" means "non-cyclical."

An example of cyclical growth would be ExxonMobil between 2004 and 2007. They couldn't keep up this growth, because it was due entirely to swings in the price of oil.

An example of secular growth would be Google between 2004 and 2007. They were able to ride the trend of advertising moving online. (Advertising is a cyclical business, but Google won't feel it until advertising stops moving online.)

Nadella is saying that he believes LinkedIn is riding a sustained trend.

It's not "MBA-speak"; this sense of the word "secular" is used in economics, time-series analysis, astronomy, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_variation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Games

A saeculum is a length of time roughly equal to the potential lifetime of a person or the equivalent of the complete renewal of a human population. The word has evolved within Romance languages (and Swedish) to mean "century".

Doesn't that come from centum (100) like cent and centurion?

Of course it's MBA-speak. MBA-speak does not mean that they invented the word, or that only MBAs use the word. It just means that MBAs prefer to use the word where another one would do.

Nadella could have talked about "long-term trends" or "ongoing trends" or "sustainable trends." However, he chose to use "secular trends." His fondness for jargon makes him harder to understand.

Another example of MBA-speak is "synergy." The OED traces "joint action, cooperation" to 1632, and "a combined effect which is greater than additive" to 1904 ("synergism"). The first listed MBA-speak usage of the term is a 1981 article in The Economist on brokerage mergers.

Does that mean that "synergy" is "not MBA-speak" because the term is also used by scientists? Of course not! It just means that the MBAs adopted a term that others had already been using.

I would place "secular" into the same category as "synergy." The OED traces its astronomical usage to 1801 and its economics usage to 1895. Its first appearance outside a scientific context is in 1973, in an article in The Daily Telegraph on interest rates.

I'm a recruiter, and fully understand reluctance to use recruiters (expensive, not to mention a host of other reputation issues).

I don't quite understand "I would't hire someone via...LinkedIn". 'Hire someone via LinkedIn' could mean a host of things.

The most obvious would be an ad - you might place an ad on LinkedIn, and that could be 'hiring via LinkedIn'. LinkedIn ads are relatively expensive, so I wouldn't fault you for not placing ads there either.

But to many, LinkedIn is just a database or catalog of people who you can reach out to (or who can reach out to you).

If you saw a LinkedIn profile that you thought would make a good addition to your team, would you not reach out to that person just because you found them on LinkedIn?

If someone approached you and said "I saw your profile on LinkedIn and I like what your company is doing, I'd like to get together and discuss the possibility of working with you", would you say no?

I expect the answers are "no" to both questions, but when we (in recruiting) talk about using LinkedIn for hires, we generally would agree that there are a handful of ways LinkedIn might be useful in the hiring process.

I'd never approach someone cold like that.

>If someone approached you and said "I saw your profile on LinkedIn and I like what your company is doing, I'd like to get together and discuss the possibility of working with you", would you say no?

I'd absolutely say no, because that kind of unsolicited approach means that you're just fishing, and that I happened to wind up in your net along with umpteen others. In other words, you approaching me via a LinkedIn profile doesn't mean you're actually interested.

Your answer to the 2nd question is a bit more troubling to me. If someone stumbles on your profile on LinkedIn, does some additional research to see about your company, finds out it's a place he/she might like, why do you say this is "fishing"? You may be the only person this job seeker reached out to - why would you assume otherwise?

LinkedIn can be a valuable tool for job seekers to find information about a company - usually a bit more informative technically than standard company PR (other than a tech blog).

I think if you're dismissing candidates simply because you happened to see them on LinkedIn, or simply because they learned about the existence of your company via LinkedIn, you aren't doing your employer any favors.

But this is the real world and standards aren't going to be kept that high. Even if you stick to doing things well, your competitors won't and they will turn us off you too.

I agree entirely with your second point. Identifying myself as a recruiter immediately is the end of conversation with many in the industry due to the actions of a growing percentage of recruiters. It's unfortunate, and one reason I'm expanding business into consulting with companies to help them attract job seekers without using recruiters. Candidates these days are often inclined to go directly without a middleman.

No it doesn't. I've contacted companies who weren't advertising jobs a few times and it was because I had a specific interest in working at the company in question. In my experience people are usually quite pleased to get these kinds of inquiries, whether or not they have a suitable position. Of course your initial inquiry has to be tailored and not just some kind of generic "gimme a job please" spam.

That aside, who exactly do you think you are? Most people who are going to be applying for jobs are naturally going to be applying for jobs at a bunch of different companies. After all, it would be a bit presumptuous to assume that the first company you contact is going to hire you, and most people are able to identify quite a number of companies where they would probably be happy to work. Is your outfit really so special that you can demand serial monogamy from job applicants?

You can search open jobs, but everyone is doing that.

If you want startups, you can look into PR and press releases about funding.

LinkedIn is great for this. As I wrote in another comment, go to LinkedIn and do an advanced search for some word that applies to your background (say 'Python') and within 30 miles of Philadelphia. You'll get a lot of profiles that come up, and many will currently work for companies that are using Python in your area.

Do a bit of research on those companies that come up, find an employee that does what you do (or a level up, or even a CTO at a small shop), find their email address (or ping thru Linked) and make a simple approach.

"Hey, I am currently exploring some new opportunities and while doing some research I came across $COMPANY. I'm not sure if you are currently hiring or not, but based on what I've read (ADD SOMETHING SPECIFIC HERE TO SHOW YOU DID AT LEAST A BIT OF HOMEWORK ON THEM) I'd certainly be interested in learning a bit more about the company. My background is $BRIEFBACKGROUND. If interested, I'd be happy to buy you a cup of coffee to learn some more."

That doesn't make me think you're interested in my particular talents. It makes me think you're desperate and a sociopath who has no respect for other people's time or wishes. If I wanted to talk to you, I would have responded after one of the first 10 attempts to contact me. Get a frickin' clue!

There's a good reason for me not to have a linkedin profile. Recruiters somehow still manage to find me but this is fortunately less of a problem than it would be otherwise (judging by my colleagues and friends).

It's a bit like not being visible in google: if you can't google it, it doesn't exist. And if you're not on linkedin the laziest contingent of the recruiting profession will be unable to locate you. Fine by me.

There used to be an "interested in" section at the bottom of profiles. It appears to be gone now, and you could check off things like "Career opportunities", "networking", etc. That section appears to be gone now.

Using LinkedIn isn't lazy for recruiters, it's smart - it's just the easiest way to find people. The easiest way to find active job seekers would be resume/job boards.

Recruiters who limit themselves to only using LinkedIn to identify potential candidates are lazy. Many devs could be found in a host of other places, and many like you don't want to be on LinkedIn.

The other reason recruiters tend to rely on LinkedIn is they can get quite a bit of value out of it even at the free level.

I think this is my problem with LinkedIn, that conversation doesn't happen. I get connection requests and I'm left baffled to what their angle is. I literally scan the bio of the one connecting for the words 'recruiter' or 'business development' and then reject them. It's because I'm not looking to use LinkedIn for that reason.

Turns out it was this exact frustration that sparked the motivation to create a startup in my daily vlog.

Link for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGTowTy88dEKxrFibOimY...

If you're a Python dev and you want to work within 30 miles of Dallas TX, you can do an advanced search on the word Python (maybe add a couple others) and then set location to Dallas metro. Your results will be individuals, and those individuals all should be working for local companies that are using Python (with some false positives obviously). That's a decent list to start off for someone, because it's not just companies that are currently listing open jobs - applying only to open jobs isn't the best way to find jobs.

  I get connection requests and I'm left baffled to what
  their angle is.

If someone is scanning the bio just to find out whether the messenger is a recruiter or in biz dev, chances are the difference between a free or paid account is trivial.

As a recruiter, I was reluctant for many years to use a paid account, as I received feedback from some candidates that seemed to equate a paid account with the most aggressive recruiters that overstepped bounds in LinkedIn. I eventually caved to get a paid account, but I don't know that the additional features are worth both (a) the expense and (b) any negative stigma that some may associate with having a paid account.

That said, I log into my LinkedIn account maybe a half-dozen times a year, so I doubt my usage is typical. Take the above with a grain of salt.

This. This the only reason im excited about the acquisition. LinkedIn UX is awful.

What makes me nervous though, is some things could get worse. (skype has gone downhill ever since the acquisition i feel).

I'm slowly migrating away from any Microsoft product. Luckily I closed my Linkedin account a while back. This is my new Linkedin: http://francisco.io/ (my own website).

Yeah well they acquired Skype and see what a mess that became. Even Windows itself sometimes...

I suppose it depends on which team gets the job?

I bet! The number of people in here that think a company with >118,000 employees is always going to make the same tech and design decisions is baffling.

This is actually documented on management literature, with empirical studies and quantitative results.

Would love to read some of these management studies; it sounds intuitive but (as always) it's much easier to grok the bigger picture with concrete examples. Can you point me to some of the literature?

About the microclimates, looks to me that how much of the environment is dictated by the top itself is one of those decisions affected by the environment. No idea how Microsoft is structured.

If anything, MS is starting to slowly take it to a better direction, even though it is nowhere near the ideology of the original Skype.

I believe that LinkedIn will end up being a similar case, where it will continue to suck, but you'll see some slow progress eventually.

EDIT: As pointed out, LinkedIn will likely continue operating independently, as did Skype, which explains the slow progress.

There are many holes in LI's UX which I'm hoping will get fixed after the purchase is complete. I just hope it doesn't break as Skype did (you're not the only one to feel that). Even though it's Microsoft, it's not Ballmer's MSFT anymore, so I'm hopeful. And if it does, there'll be a big gap for some other company to fill.

On the other hand, I absolutely hate Microsoft's UI on everything from their Flat Design, Xbox Menu, (everything except Office)

It might be pleasing to look at but it's quite horrible to use.

Imagine this scenario:

- User is logged in to LinkedIn

- User visits your website

- Their visit is logged by some JS to Dynamics CRM

- A record is created/updated in Dynamics CRM, populated with their name, job title and contact details from LinkedIn

Further down the line, I can see LinkedIn fully becoming part of Office 365.

This isn't Microsoft's attempt to get into the social networking game. This is Microsoft wanting accurate data to augment their enterprise collaboration/digital workplace platform.

You can't do it all at once, of course; you'll have some edge cases to deal with. But if you can manage it you'll have tremendous leverage.

Step 3 is you get an email (marketing or sales) because Dynamics notified assigned a task to a sales rep or started a job in marketing automation.

Then, based on you opening/ replying/ not opening the email, a whole new series of tasks are created.

If MSFT / Dynamics do this right, they will have a very strong Salesforce competitor.

Have you seen Windows 10 yet?

It's actually quite wonderful and usable OS, IMHO.

He's referring to whether usage is going mainstream, shifting from early adopters to the general market[1]. He's looking at technology that's already big but has the potential to get even bigger.

When usage is limited only to early adopters, it's not useful to Microsoft since it's such a large company. But when general folks are also beginning to adopt a piece of technology, it's a sign that things are going right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

I doubt there are any "get $26 billion dollars back" opportunities...

If managed right, over the lifetime of the investment, this could easily make back 10x what they paid.

Along those lines, maybe they'll fix the very broken email alerts for group postings. For quite a while, my experience has been that if I have it set to weekly digests I do get them weekly as expected, but if I set a group to daily digests I get nothing at all. So I get nothing at all for the groups that I have the most interest in. I opened a support ticket about it but got nowhere with it. I don't know if this impacts everyone or just some subset of users, but I've seen others complain about it.

This seems like a pretty arbitrary distinction.

Why? I don't care how someone got the interview, it's the person and their skills and abilities that I am going to assess (also recruiters get lots of work off my head, which is good, especially when our HR dept. isn't able to do it)

Sure, Microsoft don't have a great record with their acquisitions, but the opportunity for them to generate more revenue directly and indirectly from this is huge.

Why do you think that will happen? Azure had AWS as a model, yet the UX is not just worse but surprisingly worse. MS bought a product I was on, and I was excited to clean it up. The exact opposite happened; we were given no time to fix design problems, and instead had to pile on features. The MSDN site has been tired for almost two decades now. I feel as though we were talking about two different companies.

Wait, what? Are you saying you want Microsoft to "Metro-ify" LinkedIn? Forget the OS, even, for a minute... Just look at what they did to Skype and Office.

Are you saying you LIKE their current UX ideology?

* IRC: UX is pretty awful, any persistence of chats is ad-hoc and hand-rolled, plain text only, relatively high burden on sysadmins. * Jabber/MSN/Yahoo/etc.: very poor group chat support * Skype: very difficult to integrate with anything else, no support for self-hosting. * Slack/HipChat - good options, more or less contemporary, very much in direct competition with Yammer. Both more ephemeral though - IME Yammer ends up better than either, because it's just persistent enough that you can find old discussions/documentation when you need to.

MS's UX - Like the one where they consider closing a dialog box to be a consent to upgrade to Windows 10? ;)

You buy the shades, and I'll get ready to search the registry for a lower case hack.