Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous", i.e. I try to never interact with social media or news platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates, as I find this to be the primary mechanism by which these platforms try to suck people into their content machine (there are other mechanisms like notification spam). Most of these systems seem to target dopamine-releasing pleasure mechanisms in the brain, but some are built around darker psychosocial patterns (e.g. success relative to others, the feeling of adequacy and social confirmation).
HN is like a diet to my brain in comparison as it just presents a single page of news without inciting me to scroll to the next page and doesn't show any notifications to me either. Please keep it that way!
If you want to use LinkedIn and keep your sanity, I suggest disabling all notifications except the email notifications for new messages and then don't log back in unless you get an e-mail and you need to respond to that person.
I never scroll through the news feed.
i'm curious what others see as value from the platform.
in my narrow view:
- i have a list of connections id most likely be able to contact off platform
- a feed full of virtue signaling and mostly useless content
- messages from random recruiters. usually the full extent of the interaction is: phonecall, redo resume and send over, ghost (40+ interactions like this last year with 2 interviews resulting)
i spoke with someone in career services and their #1 suggestion was to start messaging people i don't know on linkedin looking for "connections" to expand my network.
perhaps i don't get "it" but it seems like for some its incredibly valuable and for the rest its actually a net negative all things considered.
By contrast, StackOverflow and Twitter have given me some really great work opportunities.
The discussion is generally informed, balanced and insightful . I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.
I...guess I knew there was a newsfeed, I just didn't know anyone actually looked at it.
It gave me nothing much.
Recent 'x mentioned u r reporting to Y' was the turning point for me. Too much fuss for nothing.
Extract the utility (eg. Facebook’s events and groups) without getting sucked into the cycle of shallow dopamine hits that is the news feed.
Could you please explain like what value you derive out of it. LinkedIn primary purpose is to build your professional network so that you can find your next job easily. It does not work out because programmers does not vouch for someone unless they have worked directly in my experience.
I like that way of looking at it.
I have to agree. I no longer even load the FB timeline. I have to have an FB account in order to interact with the community for one of my open-source projects, but I check it maybe once a day.
What it isn't great for is content. There's never anything remotely useful there, the whole feed is a weird corporate version of the self help section in a bookshop. A lot of stuff is written purely to get attention.
But I also don't see the tradeoff in as poor a light as say FB. What's so personal about where you work? If people can see what I've done they can offer relevant services, mainly they can try to recruit me.
Doesn't this apply to any social network feed? Most of the time people (or companies) just want your attention and LinkedIn is still a social network, therefore it makes total sense.
I would guess the reason it exists at all is that someone at LinkedIn figured out that, by its very nature, their site does not generate regular or frequent user engagement. What need is there to visit the site except to update your information occasionally or at select times when you want to make a change to your job situation?
But if you're LinkedIn, you don't want to run a site that people visit every now and then. You want users coming back all the time. More 30-day active users is better, right? So you try to create an artificial reason for them to do that. And it must be job-related, because that's what your site is about. So random user-generated job tips it is.
"never anything remotely useful" is... quite a blanket statement.
In terms of the actual social network... people use that sh? I've had my moments of Facebook addiction in the distant past, but there's nothing about LinkedIn that makes me look forward to logging in. My feed is mostly composed of inspirational quotes, people celebrating their anniversary at their current job, corporate brown-nosing, articles on productivity, articles about people quitting their job, etc. All generic, mostly low-effort junk. Let's not even get started on the recruiter spam!
Unfortunately, it we will have to wait for a serious decline of LinkedIn before a serious competitor can make headway.
My experience as well. Plus the UI itself is a nightmare to navigate. Even something that should be a no-brainer like the embedded messaging is confusing to use. And they keep adding "features" to it!
I can do 10 applications in 10 seconds for various tiers of jobs and various jobs in different locations and get an idea of what kind of interviews I can get going forward.
But yeah, I don’t get more interviews. I just get to lazily spam.
The good ones I consider worth my time and are basically the only value I see from interacting with LI. Seeing people's resume is a nice side benefit, but something like VisualCV or similar offer a better format.
As a social network? Nah, I'm old school -- the dark closets/water coolers of the interwebs shouldn't be in the same place as primary branding.
I'm using Firefox (beta) and uBlock Origin too, so that could be a common factor. But it varies from load to load. Sometimes it's completely fine. So I don't think it's likely to be a simple rendering bug.
I've been using Firefox and uBlock Origin for years, and LinkedIn more over the last year. I only noticed rendering problems in the last couple of months.
(Plenty of other bugs. Search is unreliable, and the mobile app is not without bugs either (some buttons don't do what they're supposed to), but rendering seems ok on mobile.)
Edit: it doesn't even work correctly using chrome without any ad blockers...
I joined Skype/Microsoft, then Skyscanner, then Uber: all after a LinkedIn recruiter reachout. They were opportunities I did not know or think about and I would have never applied to any of them at the time. I was very happy the time working in investment banking, and had zero reason or motivation to change this up. I needed that "nagging" from a recruiter to actually consider what if I was building the next Xbox that millions of gamers will use on day one, instead of a trading system that no more than a dozen of traders use.
In hindsight, all the positions were a step up in professionally, financially, and from a personal growth point of view. I even learned about Hacker News when I was working at Skype, from colleagues. If it wasn't for LinkedIn, I might have permanently been stuck in investment banking and my career would have turned out very differently.
I also check it maybe once every other week so it doesn't mostly doesn't have an impact on my life really.
The content is a bit of a influencer shit show these days. Too many bored executives trying to promote themselves. I mostly ignore that.
Recruiter spam is another nuisance and as recruiters are paying customers, technically us normal users end up being the the product. IMHO linkedin/ms could do more to balance that relation. A minor nuisance but sometimes there's some valuable conversations that convert to me finding gigs. So, room for improvement there but for now it's not optional for me to maintain my linkedin profile.
It’s already delivered a lot of value to me. I know they use lots of creepy/dark patterns and there are a lot of things I don’t like, like the news feed or teasing features behind paywalls. But it’s still worth it IMO. I have got tens (maybe hundreds?) of thousands of dollars of value out of it without paying a cent, just filtering through some spam
While YOU might hate it, there are some business folks who search LinkedIn first. They want to see consultants/contractors who've been used by other people in their network, been recommended, etc. I know it sounds odd to us - I would neeeever search LinkedIn first - but I've heard from prospects who have, and they've contacted me on LinkedIn first.
It's never worked out for me though - the billable rates on those kinds of gigs have been pretty low.
Most of the world's employees aren't software devs who get annoyed by regular cold calls from recruiters. So often non-software people are happy to talk to someone who speaks their language and values their advice. It can even lead to new relationships and your initial product sales.
While I don't like it too much, when I consider hiring someone it is the first place for a background check. It saved me once from a really, really bad hire (due to common colleagues).
At the same time - I am an independent consultant, and yet - I am not sure if there were a single contract that came through LinkedIn directly. Quite ironically, Facebook was much more productive with that respect.
Sure, I get a lot of messages, but rarely about offers, I am interested in.
When I buy a used car - I don't publish a "I'm looking for a used car" post and wait for car salespeople to approach me. I go and charactarize what I'm looking for and then go car-shopping.
When I look for a job - I don't publish a "I'm looking for a job". Talking to the recruiters (HR people) is very boring and often counterproductive.
Contributing to open source and meeting and talking to engineers and building things is a lot more fun and rewarding.
That's why I don't have a linkedin (well, only an account for the API). It always seemed like "opting in to a lot of spam" without getting any value as a developer. I don't even think I'm particularly good - but great developers probably have this x100.
Of course if I was not a developer but a sales person my situation would be completely different.
I personally get no enjoyment out of development besides it being a way to support my addiction to food and shelter. I don’t dislike development, but it is just a job.
When I am actively looking, it’s so much easier to send messages to local recruiters with my resume and wait for them to call me (pre-Covid they always did).
I completely agree and I do both of those. I used to do a lot more in open source, but had other life priorities take over. Meeting and talking to engineers, though, I liked that so much that I ran a physical space dedicated to it, and will likely do something like it again.
(Aside: The rapid shift to online meetups has been great lately - I've been to a number of meetings and even conferences with fellow engineers in countries I would not have realistically travelled to.)
However in my experience, and I know it's not the same for everyone, "contributing to open source and meeting and talking to engineers and building things", fun and rewarding as it is, has not tended to be a good route to paid work. If anything it's been a significant net expense!
The point of my comment is that, unfortunately, even for developers the "fun" approach doesn't work out everywhere.
> I never used LinkedIn... hadn't even updated my profile in the 9 months since I left my last software engineering job.
So you use LinkedIn only passively, never do anything on the platform and then write a rant on how it provides you no value? Maybe actually _try_ to use the strengths of LinkedIn before you dismiss it?
I imagine there are a lot of passive users of linkedIn. I found the article interesting as I have been considering deleting my account too and share similar emotions.
This is the moment it became spam. I do still use it for job searches.
I mean, that's really quite charming. She loves you!
The first time Linkedin jumped the shark for me when they suggested I add the random dude I sold a couch too on craigslist to My Professional Network. I'd used a throwaway email and only texted the dude 1x. I only randomly remembered who he was after Linkedin suggested him to me because his first and last name rhymed and when he picked up the couch I thought his name was kind of interesting. It was so weird and sketched me out quite a bit as we were in completely different industries and I had no idea how linkedin associated us.
The second time I decided I was over used linkedin was when I was a pitched a data analysis of industry trends in biopharma by a company that scraped and analyzed a bunch of my current and former coworkers linkedin profiles as well as what conferences they had recently attended. It was so creepy and invasive and accurate that I just decided I'd rather not supply my info to be a data point in some hedge fund analyst's report.
I have a shell profile but don't update because I see no benefit and have always gotten jobs without needing it.
Did you lie when you wrote you have the ability to do a DCF analysis?
I have not come across a single serious recruiter there for years and I closed my account 6 months ago or so. Perhaps it's still useful for freelancers.
yeah that's a real cancer... LinkedIn can be really useful, but it's flooded with so much corporate onanism that it just becomes painful. Hundreds of corporate climbers competing with each other to show how passionate and proactive they are about IT middle management
Even before that all of the local external recruiters I’ve found have been through LinkedIn.
I do look forward to closing my account again. There's a lot of "professional posting" that goes on -- professional signaling, and uplifting daily posts. Knowing the people who are posting these things, and how they go about their daily work lives -- it's a lot like fitspo/fitfam posts on Instagram.
And companies I have some back office knowledge of are flat out lying about their responses to the pandemic (No, you didn't respond to the pandemic by laying off any FTEs; yes, you did lay-off all your contractors on day 3; and actually, you did have a round of FTE layoffs subsequently but your posting army got their "I'm so proud of my company and the fact that they didn't do any FTE layoffs" posts out the day before the layoff round).
Glad some people get value out of it. Feels of our social times too much for me.
It was a weak signal that is now pure noise.
Of course you could do without Linkedin, but it makes your next job search much easier if you keep your profile updated.
Sure, there are other great online job boards and even physical job agencies but I find (LinkedIn) by being marketed and promoted as a professional job seeking / networking tool, even the type of conversations you have with your contacts tend to be of a professional nature.
Yes, there are some fluff on LinkedIn especially when it comes to variety of videos or feel-good or motivational messages being posted but I take them in stride -- not everybody is same and if some people are social and have desire to share their social feelings with others, then so be it.
I think value of LinkedIn increases as you progress in your career and/or into harder to fill roles. I've now passed the 20 YOE mark in my careers and have moved into management, and it's at this point where I'm really starting to find value from LinkedIn. Yes, there's tons of spam ("I've got a great entry-level role for you!"), but I was able to use it very effectively in my last job search. Of the 4 opportunities I pursued through the final interview/offer stage, 2 were initiated by someone finding my profile on LinkedIn and 1 was a process that got stuck that I was able to get unstuck by reaching out to a connection at the company. The two "inbound" opportunities were both Director/VP level roles at companies I was interested in working in.
My friend is a medical lab technician, for quite some time she was job-hopping a lot and was able to leverage her contacts to find open positions which are hardly advertised anywhere. In that industry it is quite important to have good recommendations so keeping a network of people you once worked with helps a lot.
The only reason I am on LinkedIn is just that every other person is on it.
And from [0] shared on HN yesterday, it will not work if just a couple of people move to a new platform, they need to move AND share that fact as loudly as possible.
I've been a nomad most of the last 5 years and everything I do professionally is over the internet.
They do provide tools, at least, so you can see what other people see.
If you think of it as a professional and self-presentation network which other people understand it to be as well, then it's fair game to play that to your advantage. Signal what you want to signal.
I only "like" things that I actually like, but each time I'm conscious that it's a signal others may browse later, so I'm also careful to only "like" things that overlap with my professional side enough that I'm happy for people to see.
So for example I'll happily "like" things in (e.g.) open source hardware or cool tech that I think adds to a better world. Including stuff that may not be commercial. After all I want to work more in those fields, and I also want certain things to be seen by others for non-selfish reasons (e.g. better prosthetic limbs, say).
Doing that shows my interest in particular fields and may (perhaps!) lead to interactions I'd like. And I'll interact with things posted by people I like or respect, because helping each other is a thing.
So it's all genuine. But it's not everything I think.
If someone posts something more "social media-ish", i.e. like Facebook, or some controversial commentary, I avoid interacting actively with it on LI regardless of my opinions, because that's not what I want people to see about me in the quasi-professional realm. And as it happens it's also not what I want to see more of on LI either.
One of the things I like about LinkedIn is you can actually get your personal data (when that feature isn't broken - it has bugs too), and you can easily browse what other people can see about you, including your trail of likes and comments etc. Being informed about my trail, I feel the platform is less misleading, and in some ways less abusive, than some other social media platforms.
I get that randoms invites and messages are annoying, but the inconvenience shouldn't outweigh the benefit from LI replacing resumes for professional branding.[1] The 1 page resume is an obsolete concept. LI is like a living resume, with the added benefit of having employers reach out to you.
The resume needs to die. LI should replace resumes. Maybe it will replace recruiters too (where hiring manager reach out to you directly).[2] But it won't happen if you think like the author.
The flip side is waisting time by applying to job, and you'll get ghosted either way.
Yes, the feed is annoying. Yes, sometimes recruiters suck. But those annoyances should be tolerable considering the benefits.
FWIW, I got a very good job from a recruiter that messaged me on LinkedIn. Great companies reach out to me bc I use LI effectively.[3]
[1] Yeah, I hate the word "brand" too. Pro tip - figure it out and use it to your advantage, bc you certainly wont be able to change it. This blog post is an example - the irony is that the author's blog post will do more harm to his image than his LI profile ever did.
[2] Recruiters are not bad people. They're hustling hard just like everyone else.
[3] How to use LI effectively: buzzwords, appropriate profile pic, readable, accept lots of recruiter connections so it looks like you're popular and special.
Speaking personally, the activity you're describing sounds like a major time sink, and doesn't align with the LinkedIn experience of anyone I know.
It shouldn't fall on the shoulders of a social network's users to learn how to optimize their representation on that one website.
To your credit, maybe you're getting contacted by well-off companies because they admire the effort and techniques you're using to boost your profile. If so, having everyone pour the same kind of effort into it would arguably help no one stand out, and only "add value" to the platform itself.
LinkedIn is also buggy in many areas too. Search is wild - search for the same thing twice and get completely different numbers of results. This is good to know, when a job search notification shows 5 results, it's not real. Just click the search button and get 100 the second time for the same search!
But the fact it's an SPA works really well I think. Clicking around within LinkedIn seems much faster than the initial load, and things like open message windows keep their state. I like that. You can still right-click just about everything that looks like it could be a link to open a new tab or save the link. So I think they've done a great job of SPA.
It's a shame it's so buggy that I have to reload it from time to time anyway. LinkedIn is probably the only company where I use a product with so many obvious low-hanging-fruit bugs I'd actually consider working there just for the satisfaction of fixing them.
Some of these recruiters apparently work for Amazon, which isn't unsurprising given their track record on other ethical concerns.
Worst thing, these recruiter emails rarely have an unsubscribe link or some sort of opt-out. I don't have a LinkedIn but I once accidentally set my email public on GitHub for a month or so, now every once in a while I get those kind of emails. I'm sure it's been scraped and added to some database/spreadsheet somewhere.
44KB for a scalable, looping blog graphic. Imagine if more of the web were like this.
If you kill off 90% of notifications, the inane "feed" and some of the duplicitous behaviour in trying to pilfer your contacts list then you end up with a solid platform for recruiters and professionals.
I have recommendations from people on my linkedin page that has much more merit than if I included such a thing on my CV.
I have people who endorsed me for skills, which when presented well can mean that people are vouching that I have at least some area of knowledge there.
This means that overall linkedin is a more standardised, searchable and credible source for my working history than my CV is.
So I think that if you treat linkedin simply as a 'live CV' then it has a lot of value, even if you do get some recruiter spam sometimes.
Isn't this true of your resume as well? What makes LinkedIn any worse than a public resume?
And if you don't have a good resume, that's totally fine, many companies will still call you in for an interview, however the companies that have a long queue of interviews, will use those resume for discriminating between potential candidates and there's no way around that.
If your online profile isn't good, then improve your online profile. Work on some public projects, write a blog, read some marketing books and apply that knowledge.
And on LinkedIn ... actively ask your former colleagues to recommend you on LinkedIn. People writing words about you is the best kind of endorsement you can get. Don't be ashamed of asking for it.
> Fear of scarcity. Not having a job when you need a job is a terrible feeling, I get it. It's why I joined LinkedIn in the first place.
> Fear of missing out. Maybe some magical opportunity might trickle down through your network of connections? The truth is, if you're relying on LinkedIn to manage your network, those relationships are thin as tinsel.
> The corporate work culture survives on people's fears. If you don't play by the rules of the people in power, how will you make money, how will you feed your family, how will you contribute to society?
...and social media played on similar fears around social life.
Quoting Vonnegut: "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
For me, having a LinkedIn is certainly out of fear however I haven’t had many benefits from it. I paid for premium for 2 months and didn’t get anything out of it in terms of getting a job.
I agree that Premium is useless. If you start spamming people you'll just look desperate. And I've not had a single job application go through with LI, I think employers just use it as "the new Monster" (post because you must show effort, then just ignore the thousands of CVs you get, as most real candidates will come through recommendations anyway). It's only useful to be there in case a recruiter calls with a good job (rare but it happens).
Every super hero needs an origin story. Social media encourages exhibitionism, and gone are the days of quiet accomplishment.
However, I still want to be connected to them, its useful for them to be able to reach out to me if they have something that aligns with my skillset, I just don't need them in my feed I guess.
If you're just looking for a payout, going to a bunch of startups for 1 year and then moving on and collecting equity from all of them is an interesting approach. It potentially improves your odds of a > 0 payout compared to going all in on one startup and staying in one place for many years. But I suspect if you're optimizing for a combination of expected value + downside risk, you really can't do better than FAANG or a large unicorn. I suspect a very, very small number of people who have worked at any combination of various startups for the past 5 years will have outperformed someone who worked at Google that whole time. And that's before even taking into account the time value/liquidity of the public stock - even if some of the startups over that time period do go on to be successful, you might have to wait 5+ years after you leave to cash it out.
I’ll be deleting my profile soon, as well.
As others have said, LinkedIn should have stopped as a digital rolodex.
I think I only use it as a digital Rolodex and it’s been helpful as that. I can’t think of another site as useful for that purpose.
(I previously deleted my account and then waited 12 months to see if anyone noticed. No one did. I did have to create a new one in order to create a company page.)
This is exactly the problem that sparked us starting https://otta.com - we speak to job seekers on a daily basis and the overwhelming feedback we hear is that LinkedIn really doesn't help people. We're doing our best to change that - just in London right now, and just for tech companies, but soon (hopefully) everywhere.
And yet recruiters keep finding me through LinkedIn, and I keep getting freelance positions through those recruiters. I put very little effort in finding new positions, but they're always available.
A coworker on my current project who is also a freelancer is much more active. He tries to contact people in companies he wants to work for and gets interesting jobs that way without having recruiters as middlemen. That takes more effort but saves money. Maybe I should do that too.
Maybe it's different for freelancers. Maybe the Dutch market is different from the author's market. I'm no fan of LinkedIn, but it seems to work for me.
I do like to have a platform where I’m not constantly reading troll screeds (but it’s starting to show cracks).
I mainly use it to reinforce my “personal brand,” and give people a place I can send them to, where they can find out about me, in a format with which they are comfortable.
I don’t treat it casually, as a lot of folks take it seriously, and treating it badly is disrespectful (IMO).
> Hiring is broken
Yup. Not LI’s fault, though.
I won’t even begin to address that, but, as an older techie, with an enormous portfolio and experience, and mediocre “schoolboy test” performance, I have encountered this in spades.
> But one thing I am sure about: no one will notice.
LinkedIn remains one of the largest and best data sets for the recruiting industry. I don't want to speak too broadly since my experience is limited to my current employer and personal experience, but if you remove your LinkedIn you will effectively be invisible to the recruiting agency I work at.
Many companies rely on outbound recruiting tactics since inbound is often too noisy; not having a LinkedIn would dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a recruiter finding you without prior contact (referral, application, former colleague, etc). And this is not just limited to recruiters reaching out via LinkedIn. There are companies that scrape LinkedIn and sell that data to recruiting agencies and VC's (and who knows who else).
As an anecdote, having recently complete a job search myself, I have to say that traditional inbound applications (e.g. apply via company website without any contacts) was shockingly ineffective. The difference in traction between self applications using my professional network, job boards, or recruiting markets (e.g. Triplebyte) was night and day.
Since the author seems privacy oriented, removing his LinkedIn is probably the right thing to do, but I don't think it's accurate to imply that there is no opportunity cost to doing so.
Why net positive? For my second start-up, I found our first customer through LinkedIn. After lots of attempts to source a paying customer that led to no conversions, one day a message arrived saying "You're the only ones in Europe doing this. We want to work with you.". No networking, no clever lead generation, just being there being found in a search did the job.
Never used it for jobs because I got these all conference networking and by personal email exchances or being headhunted. It also gave me lots of speaking engagements.
Recently, LinkedIn has had some issues with too much Facebook-like noise (people posting non-professional content), so I think if there was a more focused, mininmalist alternative, lots of people may switch. There is also the question of potential conflict of interest: LI sells to HR/Hiring functions and to people that already work for companies that use it for these functions. So if I was you, I wouldn't apply via LI to any kind of job in case you'd like to keep that fact from your current employer's HR.
My inbox is full of boring templated messages
"Hi XXX, #I noticed you work as XXX @XXXand it is why I send invitation to your LinkedIn. Looking forward to connect with you for open discussion about logging, monitoring, troubleshooting and cloud SIEM. #stayletsconnect"
"Hello XXX, I am a Success Manager of XXXHiring Platform. I will be glad to become a part of your professional connections and build collaboration with you. best regards XXX"
I found an extension to unfollow all my connections so I have no reason to stay on LinkedIn anymore than I need to.
I'm a hydraulic modelling engineer, and people in my field don't hang out on the internet together like software developers.
So when I write articles or develop some FOSS, I'll go to LinkedIn because I can reach thousands of other engineers doing the same type of work.
I don't believe I could get the same reach or engagement on any other platform.
I don't read much/any of the news feed, and only occasionally check in on it at all, but it's a fantastic passive job search platform.
The vast majority of recruiter contacts I get are not worth following up on, but that rare message that just happens to be the right time/place is invaluable.
No social networking. No fancy stuff (they don't even use icons, it's plain text everywhere). Just a simple, straightforward website.
It's not perfect though. Doesn't perform that well and the searching capabilities are poor even after some improvements they've attempted. But during my whole career (17 years) I've gotten 100% of my jobs there, despite having tried some other websites.
I wish that UX folks payed more attention to cases like that.
Just today, I wrote an introduction on a "federated linkedin" that we've been working on for the last few months: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/early-feedback-and-pre...
Basically, aiming to set up a "rolodex on steroids" or a "place to manange your business network" without all the privacy-issues, recruiterspam and duplicated social-network-features.
We are in early phase, currently working through problem interviews and market positioning.
Secondly I appreciate seeing my childhood, college, and ex-coworker friends' careers progress. I like knowing where they're at and what they're working on, and a LI update from someone I know has sparked lots of conversations.
As far as content, we all know it's worse than any other platform. I roll my eyes at over half of the things on my feed. But sometimes I find good article shares that aren't just marketing, and occasionally there's an actually interesting post. However I think they do a good job of showing you your connections' updates from a few weeks ago even, which is great for not following your feed constantly like Twitter.
I agree it is not at all necessary for finding a job, and I don't use it as a normal social media where I expect interesting content. So I definitely understand anyone who decides not to use it. But I've found value in it myself, and I certainly don't think it's doing me harm. The author never explains what the "harm" is.
I think this sentence in the article sums it up:
"It doesn't really matter, but that's not a world I want to participate in."
OP wrote an article about deleting an app that no one thinks is essential.
- My connections list would make a potential recruiter (and maybe even the Linkedin Algorithm) be slightly more confident that I am who I say I am, i.e. I did work at the companies and studied at the schools I listed) because there would be people in that list who have shared that history with me. I make sure these are the only people in my connections list, apart from a few recruiters I wouldn't mind chatting with again.
- I can be discoverable professionally/personally by a google search. I don't have any other social media accounts.
I take some effort to maximize this value and minimize the other irritations and distractions. Example: I unfollow everyone I connect, so my feed is mostly empty. I don't connect with people I don't know or those who don't bother interacting in any other way except just sending a request.
Some people could go a few steps further and use uBlock origin's element picker to permanently block the UI elements constituting the feed and anything else they don't want to see. This way all you get is maybe a few emails a month maximum, and potentially good job opportunities. Everyone else just sees a quasi-official page about my professional experience.
I would search a company that was interesting and then message an employee asking for questions about the company, if we had a good conversation, they would hook me up with the recruiter. Sometimes I would directly contact a startup founder with a pitch of how my expertise would be helpful to them (my field is pretty niche, so there aren't any job titles for it). I got my current job by directly approaching the recruiter responsible for the position I wanted. It escalated pretty quickly from the first contact.
I didn't need to manufacture my profile in an artificial way. I just put everything I did and know there. The platform gave me the visibility I didn't have, as I come from a small university. The single ability to find who works at a certain company, and how many insiders you already know has enormous value.
I’m there, but like the author I never really bother with it. Maybe every year or two I’ll check it’s up-to-date with work history but that’s about it.
I get a lot of calls from recruiters. I can only assume they’re cold-calling a list from linked in search results and I can’t think of a single incidence where the call has lead to anything.
The bizarre part is that I know several people on LinkedIn and Facebook (to be fair I haven’t signed in on Facebook either for about two years for lack of interest - if I haven’t bothered to call you in the last three years then I really don’t care what you’re eating for lunch these days).
On Facebook people post cat memes and talk about things they’re genuinely interested in, like how Janet’s friend Steve caught coronavirus from a telecom mast.
On LinkedIn the same people’s feeds are repost after repost of how they’re living their most Agile Scrum Synergy-driven Goal-oriented life.
As best I can tell, it’s a website for sucking up to employers you might some day have or hope to impress. Every post reads like the applicant side of a job interview where no-one even asked a question. Maybe it’s just me, and I don’t get it, but I just have better things to do with my time.
>> When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you.
A lot of what he says resonates really strongly. Fact of the matter though is that we are locked in this state of affairs. Specially if you are in a not-exactly-buzzing job market. I don't know if there is a will and a way to revert ourselves back to something more than a commodity. And I don't see a way to move forward to something beyond that.
Most people have a profile but few people I know spend any time on the site unless their activity fits the description above. Thus it’s never really clear to me what the point of it all is.
I used to leave it on "not interested in new work" because I already got so much spam, but then I flipped the switch in March because I temporarily lost all of my customers at once due to Coronascare and I had to scramble for new work.
Most leads that I get that I wouldn't get before are pretty high quality I have to say. I do see that once a new job lands that matches my profile multiple recruiters reach out on the same day for the same job and I see the same opening repeated several times over.
I don't understand why the job market needs to be so opaque.
This sucks, I am aware. But since people send fake / bullshit / impossible to verify CVs all the time, I'm not really sure what the alternative is.
So by all means delete your linkedin, but maybe instead consider just never logging in until you need to update your job history, once every couple of years. Or do delete it, but just be aware of the reality of how that may play out.
(cf Böll —he did work in statistics, so I think the irony is strong in this one— https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t... )
I have diabled all the distractions and focuse on the network though. I realized there is value in keeping in touch with potential decision makers and employers.
If you are an expat, live in a faraway place, lack community in your town, etc, LinkedIn could be valuable for you. If you are in a tech-hub, have access to lots of communities and potential employers, sure, LinkedIn looks useless to you.
> I'd go so far as to say that unless your profile is exceptional for some reason, it probably does more harm than good.
This can't possibly be true. LinkedIn is the go-to sourcing tool for every HR department in the world. Right now —even in the midst of a global recession —thousands of recruiters are trawling LinkedIn to fill a role. If you don't have a LinkedIn account, you are immediately disqualified from the pool. Moreover, a lot of HR departments will simply expect a LinkedIn profile. They like having a standard mode of comparison that's easily digestible.
> You and I are just another candidate in a tall stack
This is a false dichotomy. Having a LinkedIn profile isn't mutually exclusive with a portfolio, blog, github, kaggle account, stackoverflow profile etc. And if the recruiter is only going to look at your LinkedIn anyway, then how is your awesome blog going to help? I would go in an opposite direction, and describe LinkedIn as a sort of Pascal's wager. At worst it's a net neutral; at best you might get an interesting job offer.
> When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you.
Well put. It's definitely kind of depressing. But at the same time, I feel that it's possible that a centralized platform like LinkedIn can serve as an equalizing force (depending on its search/discovery capabilities). I suspect that a world where we are all using blogs and forums is much more siloed than one with LinkedIn. Information asymmetry in job markets is bad for workers. For all their faults, tools like LinkedIn and GlassDoor are (or at least could be) a force that alleviates this. I don't really have a final word here, I can see benefits to both worlds.
I mostly use it as some other people have mentioned - having notifications for messages, and ignoring the News Feed and most other features. Once a twice a year, I update my resume, and update my LinkedIn as well, which is not much extra work, but is essentially really low-cost marketing of my skills and experience.
Of the messages I get, some aren't worth responding to - the "I have a job to fill using Java, and you used Java once, you should apply" type - but some are from recruiters who are willing to build a relationship and place you when the time is right, even if that isn't right away. It's often worth taking a 30 minute phone call with them, or meeting up for coffee or lunch.
As a hiring manager, I immediately get red flags when someone doesn't have a LinkedIn. Its easy to create and keep updated, so to me it seems like they are hiding something. Not that its an instant deny, but it is a part of the decision.
Ironically I created a LinkedIn again after starting this job, I think mostly to flex on my exciting new job and measuring myself against my peers from college, while some small part of me also thought it could be important for networking. If you really want to keep in touch with peers from college you will find a better and much more genuine way of doing so. If you want to network maybe it can be a useful tool but I'm not sure stroking each other's ego is the best way to do that.
Once again I was coming to the conclusion that it's a useless and pointless platform (like most social networks, but that's another topic). My feed right now is nothing but cringe memes, humblebrags, and weird flexing. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I think I will delete it for real this time.
LinkedIn is one of the few apps I still allow notifications from. In retrospect I probably turned them on in fear of missing an opportunity when looking for a job. I can confidently say I haven’t missed out on any opportunity and the content notifications are mostly terrible. It’s so bad I’m considering following the author’s lead and getting off the platform altogether.
What does the future look like? I can only assume someone at LinkedIn is looking at daily active users and trying to juice that number with app notification spam. In theory LinkedIn is perfect: keeps business and personal separate, a dedicated platform for work-related everything after the Microsoft acquisition. In practice it’s awful. Is there any future where a social media company like LinkedIn could coalesce around something useful instead of chasing metrics (DAUs, etc)?
And I completely get the sentiment that much of the rest is just somebody amplifying an opinion for likes, clicks or connections. But consider this alternative scenario.
If you're dissatisfied with your professional lot in life, LinkedIn is a way to vent. LinkedIn posts don't have to be of the 'please consider hiring me' variety - they may be somebody who doesn't have another outlet for their creativity or feelings on how a topic is being handled by the world at large.
I'm in this category. I use Li to show that I'm out here, alive, and have some value. I strenuously try to avoid the whole "thought leader" vibe.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
One of the things I do that I don't see much is to reach out and stay in contact with people occasionally. Sometimes I'll make a referral too. Networking works many ways and you have to give to get. (#givefirst) Sometimes just replying to the anniversary, new job, or giving a technology kudo means something to some people (maybe more so in a pandemic world).
I also like the points that a few other folks made that customers almost always look at the Linked-In profile.
I got my current job and wake up incredibly happy every day, and this opportunity only came because I glossed-up my linked-in profile and a few recruiters expressed interest.
Linked-In networking might be a terrible and sometimes cringe-y game to play, but trust me, you'll be glad you expended the few braincells it took to fake it when employers and recruiters start knocking.
Clearly, LinkedIn does have its share of warts. And if isn't for you, there is nothing wrong with not participating. But you get out of it what you put into it.
At the same time, though, recruiters find me there. Despite my CV being years out of date, and me ignoring LinkedIn most of the time, recruiters keep finding me there and offering me interesting freelance positions.
A co-worker who is also a freelancer uses LinkedIn more actively, and uses it to connect to hiring managers of companies he might want to work for. That way he finds work without middlemen.
> You and I are just another candidate in a tall stack—ie. our profiles are more useless information they can use to cross our name off.
That seems a very naive interpretation. Or maybe my profile is truly exceptional (who knows)
I've came across several potential good job opportunities in LinkedIn, and of course, while you won't jump hoops too frequently and most of them might be not great opportunities, I can totally see the value.
And those are not only through direct recruiter contacts, but also through friends sharing job posts (or candidates).
(Yes, recruiters still ask for CVs sometimes sigh )
I couldn't imagine not having LinkedIn nowadays, it's invaluable.
I've never used it for job hunting, but for the feeling that i might be able to get back in touch with someone i was close with at one point in my life. Basically, i just want Facebook without the feed. Linkedin admirably fits that niche.
Admittedly, I hardly use it - but it's the ultimate fallback for when all other options run out.
Apparently people post things there. But i don't think anyone holds it against you if you do not interact.
Also, it's been a way to get my next best deal via job hopping and starting conversations with recruiters telling them how much Im making (which is really how much i want for my next job). Either the conversation continues or I went to high and it doesnt. Now out of 100 times doing this I've landed 5 to 10 jobs over many years. A lot of the times I'm not looking, but interested in what the market will bear for my experience.
Personally, couldn't imagine deleting Linkedin.
I've been on LinkedIn for years and it did nothing but good for me. I found nothing but quality jobs on it, I stopped visiting job websites as a result, I'm getting approached by companies as a result instead of me applying. I don't understand what the author was doing to find LinkedIn "bad" and "more harm than good". I think this is nonsense.
Granted I have some social accounts(reddit) that are doxxable but mostly they're not... I don't attack people I'm just weird/can't really be me with my name. YouTube is almost borderline but thankfully as of yet I'm not aware of an easy/public way to scan YouTube comments.
I opened it up a bit because I'm looking for a job. It's still spammy, but the pandemic has really slowed things down.
IMO: LinkedIn is bad at managing spam.
All I have to do on LinkedIn is exist and it's led to some useful job connections and a few offers (which I ended up not taking).
Honestly, the tone in the post tells me this person is at a point in their career where they feel confident they can walk in anywhere and get a job. I don't know if I'll ever feel that way and I like recruiters reaching out to me.
Just don't read the News Feed, and LinkedIn is good.
What would be the downside of keeping a LinkedIn profile?
I'm not a huge fan of LinkedIn, but the most it helps me is with understanding the background of someone I'm about to meet (even if internally since I'm at a huge company at the moment), or at least see what kinds of jobs are out there when I'm casually looking.
From another POV I understand the criticism, it's been a while I haven't visited LinkedIn, nor have I updated the profile, and it's mostly caused by the "noise" I feel on social networks. But, it still can be beneficial for some professionals at a certain phase of their career.
“As everyone knows, LinkedIn is a glorified resume site. Nothing actually happens there (unless you are a recruiter or in enterprise sales?).”
This means op could not get any benefit out of an online tool, this does not mean nothing happens there. LinkedIn has been tremendously helpful to find my last 2 jobs. You have to know how to use it, specially the premium account. The market research aspect of it is amazing. I do not enjoy the social media aspect and the timeline approach. Stay away from that.
The second time? https://collantes.us/2019/07/29/closing-linkedin/
Let's put it this way, in the beginning LinkedIn was useful - very useful, but as many commenters are noting here, it's now become something wholly different from what it started out as.
I deleted my account a good few years ago now and I don't regret it. And I doubt now that I would ever go back - even if I needed to find another job.
https://theoutline.com/post/5495/how-to-beat-linked-in-the-g...
I closed my account over 8 years ago. Sometimes a business partner of mine is bitching that I don't have a profile but that's about it. I am not very successful but the successful people I know (speak XX-XXX MM USD) don't have a profile there.
Linkedin has helped me find and secure new roles. I do agree that its becoming that sort of FOMO experience when I think about. In fact thats why I deleted Facebook, Twitter and Instagram many years ago, which has positively helped me. But, I do feel like its turning into that Facebook experience. I do often reject those random Linkedin connection requests from time to time. Other than that I just play along with it. Use it when I need to use.
Years ago I started "leaving" facebook by just: not visiting it. I didn't delete my account, I didn't explicitly posted anything announcing what I was going to do. I just stopped visiting it.
Now, it wasn't a trivial as that, because facebook will notify you, will email you, will send you messages reminding of everything I was missing out. So, along with the decision of "leaving" facebook I had to manually go and disable every way facebook could reach my attention. It took a while but it wasn't hard: I disabled email alerts (or just filtered them straight to trash) whenever I received one. For years I didn't have fb or messenger apps on my phone, or I would just disable them if I couldn't remove them. Now, with more granular control over notification I may install them but disable notifications entirely. In fact, I take a similar approach to email. While I do receive visual notifications of email, I don't get sound of vibration. In fact, my phone is in silent mode practically all day (I do have some rules that allow certain calls to breakthrough)
To me, gaining back control was about removing the ability of apps (and people) to digitally reach me whenever they felt like. And this is the core of my attitude with "leaving" social networks: it's about controlling when I want to actively use them (as little as needed). So, deleting account feels (to me) as I gave up having control (and extracting the little benefit of a network).
Also, it's not just about control how apps reach us.
It's also about establishing the social boundaries with friends, family and acquaintances: socials networks are NOT how you can get my attention. you may get my attention, but don't count on it. if you really need to find me you probably know how.
I still extract value from facebook/ig/linkedin on my own terms. But those companies probably get much less value out of me given their business models. I feel it's alright. In fact, I feel (maliciously?) better in this approach.
I still get linkedin job offers, and I do respond to them, probably after a few days when I feel like checking.
In my experience, if you send a connection request to someone, they accept and you message them, you might receive a response in 5% of engagements.
My best guess is that people are accepting connections as a pavlovian response.
[0] https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
I think it’s healthy to question what value if any the network provides. Plus what kind of personal info you give away about yourself. Social network news feeds are designed like slot machines with random awards, so that you login and check it every now and then.
It's been a proven strategy that works time and time again compared to the void that eats up bugs reported to large companies (if you can even figure out how to report one).
How could I figure out who knew who to give me warm intro w/o Linkedin? For that reason I'm probably going to keep my Linkedin until I find it unnecessary.
5-6 years ago, I started a website/service (also closed, now) at the intersection of LinkedIn and GitHub. Then Microsoft bought the former. A few years passed, and they also bought the latter. It kind of justified my idea (not that those two services are being merged), but nonetheless I had to close my little initiative.
> "Hey, who is this random person contacting me? What does he really want? I better not entertain the possibilities."
If you're on LinkedIn but you don't wish to meet new people, you probably should do as the author did and close your account.
another thing i have found is that some job searching platforms (like indeed) allow you to import your linked in profile instead of uploading a resume. then you can import your indeed profile into ziprecruiter.
so when i was looking looking for a job, the first thing i did was get my linkedin profile updated and corrected. next i signed up for indeed and imported my linkedin profile to it. after that, i signed up for ziprecruiter and imported my indeed profile into that. now all my information was correct and up to date across all platforms.
not only that, but there are so many linkedin to resume builders out there.
That said, LinkedIn got me my first job out of college and continues to provide opportunities, so I drop in once in a while to like colleagues' accomplishments when prompted. I see value in it.
Ha! I had probably an order of magnitude fewer when I closed my account in 2013. My motivation was their underhanded spamming of all my contacts with connection requests, but I guess it's nice to know I didn't miss out on anything.
Recently a recruiter who didn't get a response on LinkedIn itself wrote an email, which began:
I'm writing because I found your Hacker News profile from your LinkedIn...
That just felt right somehow.
As always YMMV.
My solution to all social media is treat it as a rolodex and not GAF about it the rest of the time.
Why do people blame these companies for being the problem when there's an element of personal responsibility involved?
It's a privacy nightmare basically.
This goes for any social networking site btw.
The bad: I didn't really understand what to post there
The ugly: I got a bunch of messages by recruiters who didn't read my profile and offered me crap.
After being on the site for many years, I don't think it helped me find a job or attract recruits.
I'm one of the founders and it's a super simple web resume builder. You can import your LinkedIn profile, pick a resume design that you like and publish it as a responsive website, in minutes.
We make money by charging for our product, not selling your personal information.
And what's wrong with that ?
Is this true? Does anyone care about this? Serious question.
Should I close my read-only Twitter account as well?
I’ve found LinkedIn useful for learning about where previous colleagues are now working. I’ve also found it useful as a quick way to learn about people’s past experiences that might be relevant to the issue at hand.
I have turned off all notifications and only visit it when I need something. That is normally to add a contact to my Rolodex or to look someone up I’m meeting with.
That is false; one thing that happens on LinkedIn is that you can find people from your distant past.
That said, it got me two jobs, so it's not ALL bad.
I remember to close all my social networks when my daughter was two years old, about 12 years ago.
I will never know what I missed.
The only obvious difference that's made to my life is that I never get emails from my "CEO" asking me to drop what I'm doing and buy him some iTunes gift cards. Which is something my LinkedIn-using colleagues get fairly regularly.
LinkedIn is a huge centralised database of phishing targets. Whatever upside it might provide to the world, that's a pretty big downside.
The funny meta-thing about his post, is that the content he feels adds 0 value, is in fact his own post. He is literally making a post about a tool he doesn't use. It's the equivalent of a person making a blog post about a tv series they don't watch but have seen the trailer for; no actual value to add to the discussion about the topic.
This is valueless content.
I've never worked for someone that didn't love me for anything longer than a weekend gig. Was amazing in school all the way into the #1 ranked grad school for my major and when I got there... I realized even my assigned "mentor" did not care for me. I spilled my soul to her, after experiencing so much contempt and hate, and she had no fucking reaction whatsoever. No advice, no... nothing! These hateful fucks wanted over $60,000 a year to give me no advice, consolation, compassion, NOTHING!
After recovering from that, as a last ditch effort to obtain a career where I could afford a family I tried get a CS degree at the local uni that I could afford.
It's a complete shitshow of no standards and professors would open their lectures with emails from graduates explaining how employers saw a degree from this school as worse than NOTHING. The "weed out" filter test after 2 years was such a fucking joke they gave us 3 hours and I aced it in 10 minutes and then resigned myself to taking a nap for the next 2 hours and 50 minutes until someone asked to leave and was let out so I learned even the bluff about not letting people out early so that they could message people still taking the exam was bullshit, too.
There were over 80 people taking CS in my cohort... I was one of only 3 that seemed competent, top guy, only one that actually stayed in CS was a sociopath who was constantly hacking and stealing from the university and local businesses and expecting to be lauded despite taking his plunder. Then there was a gal who decided to stick with mathematics and give up on the creepy CS department, prolly most of all for the creepy lecturer trying to get a Ph.D. talking about how the only real way to get money he could manage with the knowledge he was teaching us was with his porn sites, and how his personal hero is Howard Stern. After he was already under investigation for gender bias, she decided to stop trying in CS and just focus on math. So during the final exam, this guy realizes that there are only 3 females in this class of about 85 because any female willing and able to learn all this would be accepted and paid to go to far better schools... he's been told that if the grades of the 82+ guys are much better than the 3 gals he will lose his job and Ph.D. spot... and then as he walks the room during the final he walks right to her and sees she hasn't studied and doesn't give a fuck because she finally decided on Math and not CS.
So he panics and starts just outright literally in earshot of the whole room telling her every answer and begging her to write it down on her test.
That's when I decided to nope out of the major. They offered me a job Ph.D. spot and I went back to my janitor job for people who love me.
When they die I have no idea what I'll do. My best friend is someone ten years older than me that I've never been within 2500 miles of, and sometimes he really creeps me out, but I have no one else to voice chat with or watch movies with IRL or online.
At work... lately I mostly think about how I'm drowning in sweat having to wear a mask all the time but also I often feel glad I'm not working on some tech thing I oppose, or having to hear hate speech against me like at school...
The bad thing is not being able to have an IRL relationship, much less family, but that's due to a ton of factors... in the US, it was guaranteed by NSC 68, which reacted to the Soviet, communist goal of full employment of both men and women with trying to keep women in the workforce permanently (for the ultimate purpose of winning an arms race with the USSR) as they had been forced into it during WWII. According to this plan, the US dollar was devalued so that men AND women would have to work an hour each to obtain roughly the same relative purchasing power as one hour of work by a man before.
If someone wanted to keep goosing up the stock market and employment numbers further by various extrapolations upon this theme... anyone see where I'm going?
It's not the hiring that is broken, but the tech industry itself. There is nothing that compares in how low a measurable value is priced in any other domain. It seems that the less you can put a price on something, the more people speculate that it is worth. There is probably some fancy economical law to follow, idk.
