My real concern isn’t that this rando company decided to use this tactic–although it’s disgusting–but that without any research their scam was propagated here on BoingBoing and used to attack LinkedIn. I’m disappointed in a site I once loved.
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I was going to ask if you were the lady from The Queen of Versailles, but I think she was a software engineer turned model, turned trophy wife 
I think you are right that the ads are…spammy - I don’t know about morally objectionable but certainly tacky. I don’t like them. I was more interested in why only the ones with pictures of women were the issue - in the contact between the company and LinkedIn it was the images that were identified as the problem where as I thought the language was a problem.
I also objected to the company doing this at all when their own site is so devoid of women to the casual observer (they may have women working for them but they don’t appear on their site or in LinkedIn). I had to write directly to the company since there isn’t an article anywhere that I’m aware of about their actions.
I think this is where people like LinkedIn (and as pointed out somewhere above the people who report these things) need to be more careful. They objected to the ads with women in them but not men which leads to this kind of publicity. It reinforces the mindset that a beautiful women = women for sale.
I find this kind of post to be very low. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t mean they aren’t genuine, and this can be used a a very mean-spirited way to try to shut someone up.
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Very much agreed. I think Toptal are being awfully sketchy, but there’s an awfully thin line here and we all need to be careful to stay on the correct side of it. None of the people in Toptal’s ads are to blame for anything.
It’s a fair question. The best I can say is that, in my personal judgment, the pictures shown looked more like glamour shots and less like anything I’ve seen professional women wear to work. That’s an awfully subjective measure, and I was a lot more conflicted about it before it turned out that Toptal has been lying.
I was just about to ask if anyone had actually seen the male version of the ad. So far I’ve only seen the version referenced on Hacker news and then the Toptal blog. The blog claims there were ads with images of men. I’d like to compare those.
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I’m on linkedin pretty regularly.
Never saw the men’s ads. Saw two different women’s ads before they were cut. One with the lady pictured here and one with what turned out later to have been a model.
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I could spend my life on LinkedIn and I wouldn’t notice an ad. I’m pretty good at ignoring what I don’t need . But it is interesting that you didn’t see them…I wonder if anyone did…
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