For me, like many I'm sure, it turned recruitment completely on it's head.
Previously I would spend hours trawling job boards, composing cover letters and get excited at the prospect of one successful reply. It was soul destroying.
Now I can construct a post, complete with trendy hashtags, and passively watch _hundreds_ of recruiters reach out to me in 24hrs. Now I can sit with a coffee and easy filter out the crap. It's taken some time to build up the 8,000+ contacts, mostly of senior tech people amd recruiters.
Every job in the last 5yrs has been through LinkedIn and due to the ease by which I could change jobs, salary has sky rocketed too.
Maybe I am in the minority of people who use it as a tool this way?
Edit: I also have an emoji as the first "letter" in the string of my first name. This instantly allows me to visually/programmatically filter out genuine "human" messages from bots. I also reply to these messages, as let's be honest, a human took time to compose the message to me. A quick "thank you" (one button click!) goes a long way.
Do you make a post looking for a job while you're still working at another company? Wouldn't this raise red flags at your existing workplace? I've been told that it's a good idea to look for your next job while you're already working somewhere else, and I'm curious how the 'writing posts' strategy would hold up in this situation.
+1 to the hundreds of views that posts get. LinkedIn is insane that way.
> Do you make a post looking for a job while you're still working at another company? Wouldn't this raise red flags at your existing workplace?
I’m not OP, but as I read it OP just makes a post saying e.g. “my experience with #cryptocurrency and #blockchain combined with #ai on #iot devices has taught me...” etc.
In other words, not a text that says “I’m looking for a job”, but just something that reveals areas of expertise.
What sort of posts are you writing that get recruiters to come to you in the post? I feel like all the posts I see are just people going in like vultures to raw meat trying to get some scrap
Social media hashtags exist for people to follow. By finding out the current trendy hashtags that recruiters themselves use/follow, your post pops up on their feed.
Do you ever talk to your peers about this? I get grossed out by this kind of behavior generally because it seems so artificial and narcissistic. Hearing your perspective is interesting because it at least adds the nuance of gamesmanship to the list.
Have you ever tried declaring yourself a thought leader? What kind of mileage does that get you?
I've begun doing recruitment in a professional capacity recently, after having been the type of dev that dismissed this kind of social media, LinkedIn hashtag feed nonsense for the same reasons you do.
And I still don't love it, but I have to admit it's got a place in the strategy. Posting a job req with some focused hashtags seems to help get more responses. Posting a few industry-appropriate articles does seem to help keep our company in folks' minds.
In an ideal world every company I work for will be so amazing and so well known that I don't have to sell it to folks because the right folks are coming straight to us. Or that all of my friends and all of their friends will magically be capable of switching jobs to come build a new team with me whenever I need to grow.
But reality doesn't work like that, and so things like LinkedIn end up being table stakes. It isn't the whole of my recruitment strategy, but certainly it's a functional part.
There are recruiters who spend their days following tags like “#iot” or “#blockchain” or “#machinelearning” and think that the people who posted them are good targets for recruitment?
Dear god...
Self promotion is a skill directly translated into $$$ in terms of raw compensation.
It's one of the biggest blocks I see from developers who are otherwise qualified for positions like that but they don't know how to advocate for themselves.
There is a games element to hiring and you have to put aside the thoughts of it being gross because at the end of the day it's a major component in earning more which for most people is one of the reasons they work.
Wrong lesson: "I have seen stupid and incompetent people do X to get prestigious roles and big salaries. As a smart and competent person with self-esteem, I would never do X, lest people accidentally think I am one of them."
Right lesson: "If X can help even stupid and incompetent people get prestigious roles and big salaries, I wonder what it would do for a smart and competent person. Probably the same, only more of it."
Also, all three of those hashtags don't exactly inspire job security. I would sooner make a living by playing blackjack than be employed in blockchain.
Both iot and machine learning are the tail wagging the dog. You use a tech because it's appropriate, not because it's trending. The number of businesses trying to shoehorn ML into their sales deck is hilarious, I don't know how much my previous employer spent on continued failed attempts at that trend.
That is a personal decision. It may or may not be a rational decision, but depends on short and long term goals, and one's self-awareness and self-honesty.
It becomes very quickly a real-life game of "would you do X for Y money? ".
Saying "I wouldn't use a linked in hashtag for $10k/year (25k a year? 100k a year?) " is a pretty strong principle.
Fair, but I did not read the parent post I replied to as whether hashtagging/self-promotion is effective/positive or ineffective/negative.
I read it as: "Assuming hashtagging and self-promotion on LinkedIn was effective, I still would not do it no matter the money", and that's the interpretation I replied to - perhaps erroneously.
In a broader discussion - it's all about the fit. I don't think there's a single advice, action, characteristic, attribute, or effort, that won't increase your chances with X% of employers/recruiters/HR and decrease your chances with Y% of employers/recruiters/HR.
[FWIW, I personally have Linked In, it's my online resume, but I don't interact with platform in any other manner; Self-promoting posts are indeed a turn-off for me personally - but I'm neither actively seeking a new job nor promoting my business, so it'd be a bit of dishonest to claim that situational personal preference for a larger truth :]
A solid reputation among people I already know. Short of that, a good portfolio of prior work. good internet presence which shows how a person handles disagreement, conflict. This is why a small GitHub presence is extremely valuable. Not because I want to see people grind away at weekend work or have a full commit graph. Simply because you can hope to see people interact with others in e.g a bug report or PR. How did they behave when their PR was rejected or their bug report was dismissed?
This obviously is a step beyond self promotion. At this point I’m already reviewing someone’s resume. So the question is perhaps how would you get noticed to begin with? How do you market yourself? I don’t know. Work? No better form of self promotion than doing a good job.
Not sure. Something just seems off. Perhaps it's because you have a category of not-very-close friends on LinkedIn promoting themselves really hard and the correlation between people self-promoting in that very "LinkedIn fashion" and being a really big asshat seems strong. Anecdotal, but still.
When I entered the industry in 2010, it was the middle of a recession and I was coming from a non comp sci STEM degree.
My first job was a 40k per year IT job. I changed jobs every 1.5 years or so, and was able to find a niche in Big Data followed by Real time bidding in ad-tech, and now ML work in one of the FANG’s as a senior engineer.
Not many people care about tenure at this point, and working in multiple environments has served me well. It’s worth calling out that I usually took a pay cut when I switched in order to better align with my career objectives (although the raises always made up for the opportunity cost )
I found every opportunity through LinkedIn, along with many that I passed on. I was always immediately connected with a person (recruiter) rather than a blind resume/email response.
For comparison, I started around the same time, never used LinkedIn and still ended up with a job title similar to yours, making a little more than 400k. This is simply a standard rate for someone with 10 yoe who bothers to change jobs.
These FAANG salaries mystify me. Here I am, in the mid-west, working for a manufacturing company, as a programmer/sysadmin/devop in an engineering department, with 25 years of experience, making almost the top end of what's possible for a non-managerial role, and my salary is NOTHING like that. I just worked with 2 of the world's leading experts in my field -- they literally wrote and created systems to implement the government spec which governs most of our work -- and learned that their salaries -- while staggering in this industry -- weren't even half of this. Sometimes I look at this disparity, and want to take a crack at switching industries, but, frankly, it's intimidating. I guess it's 25 years of conditioning. In old-school manufacturing companies, $400K is VP-level pay. There's probably only a couple dozen people making that at my 30K-employee company. And here you are telling me that it's just a "standard rate" for a devop with 10 years of experience. The difference in worlds is hard to wrap my head around.
Same deal here. 400k, hell even 200k to me would seem like "I've made it", and that's just accepted as normal for others? Also, been doing IT way longer than 10 years.
The main difference in my observation between FAANG and the rest is the growth rate, profit margin, and preference for equity compensation. When starting at a FAANG you'll often receive a high but not outrageous compensation package with equity making up 20-30% of compensation. 4 years later the equity will often have compounded by 20-40% annually yielding the TC packages you see today.
In another industry with stock that appreciates slowly or depreciates over time, the model wouldn't yield the same packages. The company buys your equity grant when you start, and has limited incentive to renegotiate/fight over the outsized reward.
Money is crazy! Here I am, making less than 150k in a VP role of a Silicon Valley startup living in Mexico. Even though 150k living in Mexico is a great salary, $400k just is out of any proportion I can think of in my wildest dreams.
No offence, but in most startups, even the CEO is just a line manager who wouldn't make more than 200k in a second tier company. Unless you own 10% of the preferred shares in that startup, you're giving them a huge discount. If I were you, I'd exchange this VP title for a L7 manager job at bigco, make there a couple millions and start my own shop, now in the founder role.
I'm old enough to remember when having two or three two-year jobs in a row classified you as a job-hopper to employers.
These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending.
> These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending.
I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky. I wouldn't think of being at several places for two years each as complacent or lucky...
I do not think being at places for less than two years as the ideal scenario or a great candidate. Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps) - I look at it like how I've had it... They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
> I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky.
What's your lower bound on 'several years', in this context? Taken literally it's 'three or more', but not everyone uses the word that way.
> Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps)
I wasn't thinking of pay bumps per-se, but of promotions for increased responsibility.
> They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
Sure, but employers are often insecure. The thought that follows that is "what if they think this job is shitty and then leave?"
Employers hate turnover and tend to like having evidence that you will stick around. No matter what the reason is that you didn't stick around somewhere else, however justified or understandable, that reason can't provide the evidence they want.
If someone doesn't use few and uses "several" then I presume "several" means "seve"n or more. Yes, literal language of several allows for 3 or more but we'd use few then. And it's clearly not many - which I put in the 10+ bucket typically.
In my opinion, several years in this context between two companies would be at least 7 years total - however, I think 4-5+ years at one company is a sign of complacency or you got lucky. So, I'd think spending 10 years at two companies very much a sign of complacency or luckiness. I can't imagine doing it unless I got really lucky. Great managers, great organization, great team, decent work, and, of course, great pay... but that is incredibly rare as far as the social circle I'm involved in goes. So, chase the pay at least.
This may just be to discourage you from doing it. I've been on a number of hiring committees, and job hopping was never discussed as a negative. By the time you've been on the job for 1.5 years, chances are the hiring manager and recruiter have both moved on.
Someone mentioned "At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee"...
I haven't seen a job like this in a decade or more. The last two jobs I had expected you to be fully productive in a month, and if you not had made major contributions in by 12 months (and more specifically didn't fit in with management) you were going to be let go. Letting go of employees used to be relatively rare, but I find it's becoming standard practice these days.
I can't think of a single job I've had where ICs weren't deploying code to production within two weeks and at full productivity in about a month.
Decades ago it used to be the case that you could take time to fit in, find your strengths and start growing. But the idea that you would "just be getting started" at 12 months is laughable.
Job "hopping" used to make sense a few years ago because it was the fastest way to get promoted. Now I would say it's an essential survival skills as any place you aren't happy at is likely seeing that an planning when they can start to pip you.
It definitely changes the bar for me. If I see someone has a long string of 1-2 year jobs on their resume, the conversation changes from:
"Is this someone with high potential who could grow / be trained into a high performer?" to
"Is this someone who can hit the ground running and be productive within a month?"
It's very possible the answer is still yes, but I'm not going to spend time investing in a more uncertain candidate, if it's pretty clear they'll jump as soon as my time investment starts to pay off.
I was job hopping in Amsterdam where the market is saturated by VC-backed SaaS startups. The churn rate was insane. Many of the teams I worked on have churned so much not one member is still there I worked with - in a space of 18-24 months (this was pre-COVID).
It is also worth noting a 12 month fixed term contract for any new full-time employee is standard. Due to Dutch employment law, the employer only has to offer a perm contract after a number of years (after the 3rd I think). This hardly encourages career growth and it if it takes 12 months to be "up to speed" you would have been fired already!
At the end of those 12 months they don't have to offer you anything more. Struggling and need extra training? Nope, you're gone. Particular project changing course (new CTO, new management)? Nope, you're gone.
Pay rise? Lucky for 1% without threatening to leave... but other companies will add 15% for a new contract in a similar role. It's a no-brainer.
There was no sense of loyalty on either side.
The large professional network I made in the city helped enormously and heard about open positions on a weekly basis.
Now I am in a new role (outside of the Netherlands) where I genuinely hope I can stay with the company for many years and have a long career with them (with opportunities to progress internally). Their niche is something which I believe in and have a sense of pride about what they do.
Personally I consider it a yellow flag when hiring. It could be a sign that they are likely to hop to the next thing and not worth investing in, or it could just be that they are looking for the right place to settle in. I will generally ask about their experiences and what they are looking for to try to discern which camp they may be in.
As with all hiring though, this is far from perfect.
I’m more talking about less than or equal to 12 months. It takes months of investment of my company to train a new hire. At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee and the investment is starting to see returns.
Leaving early means the investment wasn’t worth it (compared to hiring someone who doesn’t job hop)
Also, I'm hired to do a job. Around 1-2 year long job. I finish it and move on to what excites me next. My best hiring/HR managers and recruiters understand this, it makes our cooperation a bliss.
As a former recruiter of 6 years... Most companies do not care. If you can do the job and pass their interview process they will make you an offer. I very rarely had anyone look down on "job hoppers" and if they did it would be when someone had 4-7 six month stints in a row. Normally those people would just say those were contract gigs and then the company wouldnt care.
In the summer of my junior year at undergrad engineering school I attended a "career accelerator" course, a week long series of lectures from entrepreneurs and practicing engineers. One gentleman working for a multinational industrial corporation said specifically he recommends people get a new job every two years. He said he was on track to become CEO of this multinational company. Sometimes a new job can be found in the organization you work already.
I know someone who had trouble finding a job for a couple of years after taking time off to have children. Right before covid hit she took a class on using LinkedIn to find a job. Initially she was going to wait until covid was over, but circumstances forced her to start looking right in the middle of the first covid wave. She applied what she learned from the LinkedIn class, and had a job within two weeks.
"Filtering through the crap" is a skill that many reading your post may not have. There are a ton of companies who use recruiters because they have shitty jobs. So the recruiters make the job sound much better than it is.
LinkedIn has been a huge win for job seekers and employers alike. The rest of it is quite strange largely because LinkedIn is trying to deal with users who appear for a job search, get something, go dormant for a few years, rinse & repeat.
While that seems great, it's still a recruiter enablement platform where almost all opportunities will be vampired in the bill rate or salary by commissions.
The fact that linkedin can't provide direct-to-company recruiting and opportunity research shows the platform is largely a failure.
It's fairly simple: Find people you would like to connect to, find their email address, send a request.
It helps if you have a "weak ties" connection to them, even if you don't really know them: you may be connected via someone else (in which case, asking for an introduction will almost certainly work), you may both be alumni of an org or institution, you may both have attended the same event (this works in a sort of 'missed connections' fashion), and so on.
One somewhat counterintuitive tip: you don't need to connect to a lot of hyper-connected folks, probably just one or two that are actually in your industry. Intros through indiscriminate folks like that tend to be disregarded unless there is a highly targeted ask simply because most of the folks they are connected to don't actually have an existing relationship or particular affinity with them. Similarly, so called "LinkedIn Open Networkers" that accept all incoming connection requests are also something of a red flag, unless you are actually in an industry like recruiting, marketing, or PR, where a 'reach' numbers game is a viable strategy.
Once your network starts growing, you'll start to get more incoming requests from folks trying to do the same thing you are. Don't accept the ones that don't make any sense (eg. If you are a medical software dev in the Midwest, feel free to decline that random connection request from an accountant in Azerbaijan), or you'll start to get a lot more of those (because folks who connect to lots of random folks tend to be mostly connected to others who do the exact same thing).
Absolutely reject and report requests that are outright spam. If you aren't sure, you can reply to ask what led them to try and connect with you before you make the decision to accept ignore or reject the request (saying "Hi, thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry, but I have a terrible memory, and I don't recognize your name or profile image. Did we meet at an event last year?" will work without being insulting).
It all boils down to this: if you want to have a large but high quality/relevance network, you need to be prolific but not indiscriminate in making connection requests.
Not at all.
From my experience (consulting/marketing/advertising/finance), its the same in most professional fields... Job hopping can be a great way to advance your career and your salary.
I've never made a post, but I do think I've experienced some of these benefits. Then again I've also become a more attractive job candidate. Tough to separate these things
The name has an actual emoji (a stormy cloud, the link is in his profile) in front of it, not an emoji that looks like a letter or something like that.
Past ten years or so ive gotten most of my jobs via recruiters reaching out to me on LinkedIn.
I always enjoy seeing how much the market will bear when answering them with I'm making $400k(just a number) now what is this web developer position offering? Meaning I bump my salary to see what the market will bear .. if i didnt go too high they will go higher and I boosted my salary by double or more. This trick is best though when your a junior to mid level developer ... salaries do cap out Ive noticed. But, it's always fun to see what you might be able to get.
I use to see a lot of HN readers complain about recruiters. Some are overzealous and shady like I told one recruiter i just met this girl two weeks ago at web dev Meetup who just started at same company. He hunted her down and kept leaving voicemails on her work phone & then calling the receptionist when she didnt answer him(omg lol). Another forced me to lie to owner of company they placed me at, which I very begrudgingly did(hide recruiters shady business practice). Though I sold her and her company out once she threaten to make up false stories so he wouldnt hire me full-time(he did hire me). Though out of ten years and dealing with 100 to possibly 100s of recruiters those two are outliers in my experience.
I think we're still learning how to deal with abusive relationships in the tech world. Consider this scenario:
Act 1: When I'm not paying attention, my friend says, "hey, do you mind if I go through your address book and contact all your friends and family and ask them to be my friend too? If you consent, say, 'what' or 'huh'"
Act 2: When I'm not looking, this friend goes through my address book and spams all my contacts with whatever they're selling under my name.
What would you advise me to do after that? You'd probably say, this person is not your friend by most definitions of the word, you should cut them out of your life and ask them to not contact you anymore.
To which I may say, but this friend is well connected, they might be able to get me a job in the future. (Although I've never gotten a job or even a lead through LinkedIn personally.)
What would you say to that? Probably something like, they're abusive and deceitful, whatever they have to offer, they'll probably damage your life more than they'd help you.
And that's why I closed my account and added a "delete on sight" filter for their emails.
My first experience with LinkedIn was being spammed by them, after a friend signed up with them. Asking, he had no idea why they were sending emails to me. A few years later, it came out that LinkedIn was using lots of dark patterns to trick users. With that as a first impression, I have no intention of using LinkedIn.
My first experiences were getting these because I was in the corporate address book at a big corp, and I guess people were looking for work.
At the time, Linked In wouldn't even let you opt out of mail without making an account, which is definitely never happening. (Thankfully, they eventually added a way to tell them to not contact me again, but I'm going to carry my grudge)
As mentioned by another poster, not in every area or situation (covid...) it's feasible to find jobs without LinkedIn. I kind of agree with you, however I just keep my contact list small. Probably I miss some opportunities with that but at the same time it mostly consists of people who have little interest to traverse my contacts. As soon as there's an equally well working alternative for job hunts, I'm off but I don't see that yet. I'm curious about honeypot.io etc. but I don't like the idea to put people with price tags online
I have used WeAreDevelopers for my job hunts since I prefer curation over quality. On LinkedIn anybody can post a job ad. On WeAreDevelopers you atleast know that there is a selection process behind it.
>"hey, do you mind if I go through your address book and contact all your friends and family and ask them to be my friend too? If you consent, say, 'what' or 'huh'"
At some point I spent some hours to investigate how they did it and trying to tell google (gmail) to not let Linkedin do it (again?). Not sure how much success I had. I think it is a mistake/problem of Google to allow such things.
> What would you say to that? Probably something like, they're abusive and deceitful, whatever they have to offer, they'll probably damage your life more than they'd help you.
I don't really understand how you make the jump to this part
The benefits are calculable, but the consequences of abuse are unpredictable, and if someone has crossed your boundary once, you don't know how far they will go.
With the abusive relationship example, if someone's gone as far as snoop through your phone and text your friends without your knowledge, there is no telling what they'll do next. It's common for someone who does this to also be a verbal and physical abuser, which is rarely worth sticking it out for, regardless of how well-connected they are.
With the specific LinkedIn example, they may e.g. sell your data to third parties, leak your data publicly via irresponsible data storage, and allow employees to access your data without authorization. Not to mention spamming your entire contact list with LinkedIn invitations in your name.
Is that worth it to you in exchange for some networking?
But right there is where the power of your metaphor breaks down. It is quite unusual for a website to also be a verbal and physical abuser (recent eBay cyberstalking being the incredibly rare exception).
I grew up with the Internet and learned to navigate fake "download" buttons, ads etc. Not to brag too much, but I don't find it hard to use LinkedIn without accidentally consenting to spam my friends. I've never accidentally spammed my contacts via LinkedIn nor ResearchGate nor Academia.edu.
If you use it right, it can be useful. LinkedIn isn't your friend, but you can use their platform for your advantage.
1. As a digital resume which recruiters/other people can find on their own, and can contact me if they really need to.
2. As somewhat of a soft sign that I "know"/"have been accepted as a connection by" people who work(ed) in the same company/area in the past. Kind of a signal that "maybe this guy is who he says he is".
Everything else on Linkedin is treated as trash. People I connect to are manually unfollowed almost immediately. Notification settings are modified so that I don't get any emails except inmails and connection requests. I thankfully haven't seen much spam from that till date.
Here are some firefox ublock origin filters I use to make the site a lot more bearable (basically removes the feed, the "news" sections, and other things which don't directly relate to the home page or connectivity). Only bad thing about this is that your list of connections won't show up; I haven't had the time to fix that yet.
It’s bad at #1, because LinkedIn causes unauthed viewers to hit a signup/loginwall. You’re better off putting it on your own website, because then even people who don’t subscribe to Microsoft’s user-hostile bullshit can read and view it.
The good ones do. I've got friends with blogs who post twice weekly with programming examples and tutorials. You wouldn't believe the jobs they get offered unsolicited. It sorts out the chaff because most recruiters don't know about blogs or can't be bothered.
I created a fake linkedin account a couple years ago using one of those AI face generators.
Made myself a Senior Director of Engineering at a major company with an impressive background.
I've had lots of recruiters reach out to me from most major companies and I've even had some conversations just for kicks.
The unexpected outcome... I swear doing this made me more confident.
I see so many FAANG recruiters wanting "me" to run a team that I don't even open the message because I'm decensitized. It gave me a glimpse into someone 10 years ahead of me. I've been meaning to make a compilation of my conversations.
It would only be interesting if you survived an interview round. Which obviously didn't happen.
Getting a callback based on fiction is called Salesmanship. Translating that callback into a profitable deal/gig is what separates the wheat from the chaff. So nothing to see here. Don't kid yourself that you got a glimpse into anything.
HR is just doing their job finding people with impressive backgrounds.
In my case the big tech interview was simultaneously harder and easier than I expected. As long as you are somewhat smart, I think it should be doable with enough preparation and a lot of it has to do with nerves. I made it to the committee but wasn't extended an offer. I know which two problems tanked me and it was a mixture of nerves, bad attitude by one interviewer and lack of preparation on my side. Fun experience tho.
interestingly someone suggested similar thing in reddit/ILPT where one could create a fake but highly esteemed profile to lure recruiters and later decline for that job and refer his real friend (one behind this fake profile)... it seems to work because in corporate world referrals goes a long way!
We did this for P&G in undergrad. Friend from Cincinnati really wanted to work there - so we packed the interviews. Of 8 invites back to corporate, 7 of us were part of that group. 3 got jobs including him! He was there over 10 years.
> I created a fake linkedin account a couple years ago using one of those AI face generators.
Created an obviously fake profile 6 months ago as part of testing something for $JOB and, if the emails are to be believed, it consistently gets more search hits than my real profile.
I’d guess it’s as legal as including random big company names in the company’s front page, while promising interesting problems to solve with a culture valuing good life/work balance.
As long as there are no serious effects/money changing hand/contracts signed solely based on those, shouldn’t it be fine ?
Just posting false information isn't. If you actually went through with conning someone into giving you a job or some other material benefit based on false information, it would be.
I don't think it's illegal because I know a lot of people are doing the same thing. Mostly from marketing sectors. I have couple of clients who makes a lot of fake profiles.
As long as you don't lie on the CV and the application you send in, it should be at least not illegal. Also, if you don't take a job. Would still get you fired so, I would assume. Not that OP has any of these risks, so.
I'm so glad we're finally addressing this nonsense. The LinkedIn bubble is so weird. It reminds me of those weird bird mating dances you see in nature documentaries.
LinkedIn is the only social network where it's not acceptable to question these weird posts. Only politically correct, somewhat career-related content is allowed, and only positive responses are appropriate. Everyone is inspired and blessed and productive. It's a big circlejerk.
That's not a surprise though. You're here to work on your business-oriented personal brand. If you don't need that, you have no reason to be there.
That's American culture expanding to every region. Even in Europe, now everybody is constantly excited to take on their next challenge and thrilled to announce something.
I wonder when we get to the point where you must declare you are gasping for breath from the electrifying orgasm that another day in the office of MegaCorp Inc gives you.
This might be related to people not having English as their native language and just absorbing whatever formulations they read most. I thought about it, and in English I would say "I am really exited to share some great news", whereas the sentence I would use in French would be better translated as "please allow me to share a good news with you". So american exageration is more an addition than a replacement for my "native personality".
> Only politically correct, somewhat career-related content is allowed
That's not my experience at all. The examples cited in the article ("president Obama wasn't really black") are, in my experience, the very tip of the iceberg. I don't have to look too far in LinkedIn comments to find people posting ... pretty politically-incorrect shit. It's more the asshole-uncle variety of shit (e.g. "I don't have gay friends because gay people always hit on me", or "I couldn't work for a woman CEO, they're not cut out for it") than the facebook variety (qanon/incohate rage at $phenomenon/etc.), but there sure is a lot of it.
I mean, it's an N of 1 so take it with a grain, but LinkedIn definitely doesn't seem like a bastion of civility or professionalism to me.
I’ve used LinkedIn for 15 years. Used as in looked at twice a month.
What gets me is there are at least 2 dead people in my contacts and every year the platform asks me to congratulate them for sticking around so long at one employer. The avalanche of Congrats! they receive is nauseating and speaks to the shallow nature of LI relationship.
The last 3 jobs I found, in two different countries in Europe, in the time span of 10y are due to LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a great platform that gives the opportunity to look on how the market is evolving and what roles are more and more requested. It allows to find jobs and to be found.
Not everyone is in NYC, SanFra, or any other technological hub of the world, the opposite.
The majority of the people live in average cities if not villages where the opportunity to networking are rare if not absent.
Not to mention that if you want to relocate in other countries leveraging your skills, you cannot spend time joining events on the other side of the world unless you are rich.
I take LinkedIn seriously, but not as a social platform. There be dragonnes, there...
It's a business card. That's all. There are people that take it seriously. These are people I may want to work with, so I honor their commitment. I will occasionally post stuff there, and keep it up to date, but I spend most of my "social" time, right here (where I am careful in my interactions). I also tend to stay away from Facebook, and almost never tweet.
I agree. It is a really strange place. There's a term, "broetry," that was created to define the way people write those pithy posts with the single-sentence "hook." Ironically, one of the true masters of "broetry" is a woman. I see her posts all the time (whether or not I want).
To echo others here, LinkedIn is responsible for my last job and a bunch of interesting opportunities. I can definitively say that it is the only social network that has made me wealthier and better off than otherwise. That's worth putting up with a lot.
That said, I talk about LI's timeline as an example of a terrible product thinking. It definitively devalues the platform. Specifically - it seems that whenever any of my several thousand contacts Like some post, it shows up in my feed - ie Like is equivalent to Share/Retweet. This is a huge problem because people don't filter themselves as much when Liking vs explicitly sharing. Thus the timeline fills up with "X liked some feel good fluff from an influencer" - stuff that X definitely did not intend to broadcast when they engaged with it.
I think this has the inverse effect on engagement. I am keen on maintaining my network and I find it valuable when LinkedIn tells me who has a new job or promotion or even just an anniversary. I would log in periodically just for that. However, that stuff is now drowned out by total nonsense.
If I had to guess, their metrics are something like "X things liked" and "Y things seen by an average user" and I guess they are doing well on those, but if the metric was more related "are we giving quality engagement to our best users - ones that recruiters are paying LinkedIn in order to be able to reach" - I think the answer would be no.
I am not an expect in consumer web/social media so there might be an angle to the game I am not getting (hard to accept that it actually is just that dumb) but I can't figure it out.
They seem to be going for pure volume of engagement. Left to its own devices, it would send you notifications for anything.
The last few times I’ve looked for a job, I’ve started on LinkedIn but always ended up speaking to recruiters about some mediocre roles and then finding something better through my actual network. LinkedIn seems to prefer to generate so much noise that I’m not sure how useful it really is.
I agree with all the criticism in the article, but people always forget the world is not the USA.
You should try going to Italy and the social influence LinkedIn has it’s unparalleled whereas Twitter is just for politicians and journalists.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, I am emphasizing how BAD this is but also how forced we are to play by a specific platform’s rules.
A note: making fun of people using Skype in 2020 makes YOU out of touch with reality and not the opposite...the non Bay Area business world has just embraced teams, zoom and unfortunately also webex, and they are still complaining how NEW all this shit is for them.
I'm a mid-level software engineer/SRE. I get tons of recruiters messaging me on LinkedIn, and it's how I landed my last 2 jobs ultimately. So while I'm not a huge plan of using the platform, I can't say it's not worth having a profile on.
The main point of the post is not that LinkedIn isn’t useful, it’s that it is useful but takes advantage of your professional need to be on the service whether you want to or not that is akin to a hostage-like situation.
The hostage dynamic allows it to get away with really annoying and awful features that you put up with anyway because you have little choice.
How is it a hostage situation if I don't have to read all the nonsense, didn't know that most of their features are a thing, can restrict my notifications and only need to really use the site for a few weeks every couple of years?
You’re still creating a profile on a site where you admit is full of nonsense. You’re just saying you ignore it as best you can.
That is still a situation where you’re using something even though you realize there’s a lot of nonsense because there’s value to you. LinkedIn still takes advantage of this dynamic whether you choose to ignore it or not.
I liken it to the fact that porn sites can get away with extremely intrusive ads because people demand their service and have little alternative. Whether you try to block or ignore the ads as much as possible isn’t really the point.
> Whether you try to block or ignore the ads as much as possible isn’t really the point.
I think that it is. If you're blocking them, you're getting whatever you want from the website without the downside of the ads. If you're putting up with the ads, that's a bit closer to a hostage situation. Same with LinkedIn - as long as you're using it in a way that's okay with you, I don't see a problem.
I keep calling LinkedId "the saddest social network".
Create an account to list yourself in a CV catalog. Add connection with people you worked with to build credibility. Otherwise only ever open it when you're looking for a job. Otherwise you're risking getting cancer from looking at all that shameless self-promotion and posturing.
I said this here before: LinkedIn has become a very sad place for me. I use it only two communicate with recruiters or other leads.
The news feed is utterly useless. Everyone else seems to be happy and excited and successful. There is no real value in most feed posts. Rather, they’re usually a variation of this:
”#supergrateful and #blessed for meeting super inspiring %SomeoneImportant today #growth #entrepreneurship %hipsterstartup #nopause”
I don't think I've ever even remotely thought about posting anything to the feed in LinkedIn in. I visit LinkedIn only when I have to, and I do see this kind of thing you're talking about. I always wonder... are they actually using it non-ironically as social media???
I post links to my blog entries to my LinkedIn timeline. I figured why not? I'm already doing that on Facebook, and hey, it's probably different enough from the regular content to be refreshing.
I've done it a couple of times. Once was to advertise a project where I was the lead designer, and another time to advertise a job opening that my company had.
I found myself without a job a few years ago and I really needed a lifeboat.
A job just sort of came to me on Linkedin with very little effort and while it wasn't the best, it was what I needed at the time.
It's worth having a Linkedin profile, but it's car crash of a social network.
Having an online network of professional contacts makes sense. LinkedIn has that. But on top of that it also has unbelievable amounts of toxic profit seeking garbage which makes us abhor the thought of even logging in.
The network effect makes it almost impossible to compete with it. If anyone did manage to compete, they are likely to be sucked into recreating the same abhorrent garbage layers over time.
This is social media in a nutshell. I doubt blockchain is going to solve it, so wtf will?
I'm working on flockingbird (dot social), which is a federated professional network. No blockchain, just activitypub (mastodon, peertube, pixelfed et.al.)
The only feature is to be 'a Rolodex on steroids', or 'an adressbook in which some entries are maintained by the contacts themselves'
No social network features beyond that. We're doing our best to align the businessmodel with this. And truly believe it can carve out a niche (and slowly grow from there) without adding all the perverse attentionseeking, 'garbage layers'.
I wanted to view your website, but the SSL certificate expired yesterday (fingerprint 01:03:F8:89:77:72:11:C2:BC:45:12:E9:EF:04:8E:21:D8:BC:77:83:81:26:B4:38:6E:9C:81:A6:4B:07:C2:70).
This is one of my last servers with nginx. Nginx and letsencrypt is ... cumbersome, unstable; once every few months I have to manually reboot and/or renew the certs. ugh. Time to move this one to Caddy too.
Going offtopic here; but this is exactly the problem. There is a cronjob that restarts nginx after a certbot rerun. This makes at least three assumptions, all of which will fail at some point:
1. certbot does not need to stop nginx to renew a cert (some modes do).
2. the certbot run succeeded (all certs have been renewed, no network issues, etc)
3. all certs are written correctly so that nginx config is valid (can reach and parse the certs)
In this particular case, for some reason, one of the 7 sites hosted here had a misconfigured DNS, letsencrypt servers could not reach it, certbot failed, no nginx restart was attempted. This case falls in #1, fixable by force-reloading nginx every day after certbot run regardless of whether a cert has been renewed.
All solutions with nginx are cludges like that. Don't get me wrong: certbot/letsencrypt is miles ahead of automation before they came along (I've built en ran several hosting companies, certs automation is a disgrace), but it remains hacky, cludgy and therefore unstable and somewhat unreliable.
huh i hear ya, but really the only thing ive ran into is updating certs not taking till nginx restart, in fact im suspect certbot might restart it for you at this point. i dont doubt it drops on the floor in any intermittent outages which isn't unheard of when it runs every 3 months
Anyone interested can drop me a mail at ber at berk dot es for a longer version. I try to post some updates and insights on @flockingbird@fosstodon.org as well.
Not sure if this is an appropriate thread to drop this, but since you asked:
The idea is simple, though: you have a profile on which you put contact details, a list of aspirations and competences. Each such data can be kept private, shared public, or within your network. You add people to your contact list, tag them, keep notes on them or add rich oneway relations (Foo has worked for Bar, from datex to datey at Acmeinc.). Basic crm features. Again, each such data has several privacy levels.
You can search through your contacts and search through the contacts of your contacts. E.g. if you need to find a translater, but don't know any yourself, one of your contacts might know one, and might have shared some data, notes, tags and relations with that translator.
A 'network' is basically a server, instance, in fediverse-speak. An instance would be hosted by your startup-hub, coworking-space, university, etc. You register with one (or more) such instance, and become part of that community, but can add anyone from any other instance, as long as they have a public profile.
I left all the groups I was in for programming languages, server technologies, other “devops type stuff”, because they just turned useless.
People either spammed their terrible YouTube tutorials, Medium links, or job postings.
I’ve found the job searching feature useful, but nearly every day I am spammed by recruiters from companies like TCS with horrible jobs that don’t fit my skills, aren’t matched to my skill level, are 300 miles away, and none of them pay close to what I currently make.
And then my newsfeed is filled with reposted feel good stories like the old woman who wanted to withdraw money from her account and the bank forced her to use the ATM so she took her million dollars to another bank down the road.
Yeah I mostly have a LinkedIn account just to have one. I feel like a professional social network is a bit of an oxymoron. Social networks tend to amplify unprofessional voices. "Hey guys, today I went to work and did my job" is not intriguing content.
You want to know how to make LinkedIn even worse? Retire. You might as well be dead because you are now useless to LinkedIn. How about some cool projects other retirees with your interests are working on? Nope. You're suddenly in a graveyard.
I actually retired and changed my status and it has worked perfectly - very few contacts. Superb!
My new LinkedIn job title is ‘space Marshall’, partly because my new role as a conservation volunteer sometimes involves enforcing social distancing. Also channeling Mark Watney.
I put retired in my profile as well, but didn't come up with a snappy title like space Marshall (I'll work on that.) My actual complaint is hat I expected to get sent stuff about other interesting things retirees were doing. I mean, a lot of people in the tech field retire relatively young with a lot of money and they just don't sit home watching wheel of fortune. LinkedIn is really missing the boat IMHO. I'm happy looking elsewhere, but it would be cool if LinkedIn did a smooth transitions for retirees. I wrote to the CEO about but got no response, which only heightened my feeling of being a ghost on LinkedIn LOL
Perhaps because post-retirement activities (such as volunteering for charity) are usually unpaid, so there is little if any incentive for recruiters to engage. Not sure how LinkedIn supports charity work. I'd check that out, except that it would mean logging in.
I can see how this would be jarring and upsetting, but I think it's ultimately the right thing for LinkedIn and its users.
I hate any feature that makes LinkedIn more social. It is a great resume hosting service, but a terrible social network. Since I have to use it for work, I'm hoping the culture on the site continues to be business-focused.
For shared interests, Twitter, reddit, and Facebook groups seem to work well. Have you had any luck with those?
I'm not retired, but I run a website. I don't need to convince people to work with me. LinkedIn just highlight the most toxic aspects of growing your career.
I agree with so much of this article, and yet, when I desperately needed a job at the start of this pandemic, LinkedIn was there for me. I got more interviews than I would have thought possible at a time when most companies were going into hardcore “wait and see” mode. I ended up getting a great job.
So yeah, like for many folks, it feels like a very weird but essential place.
A lot of people talk about how LinkedIn is still ok because recruiters just flock to them and it’s easy to get a job off it, but am I the only one who gets low quality recruiter trying to fill low quality jobs? I don’t think I’ve ever been contacted remotely by anything near the FAANG level.
I do like their job board solely because it allows you to filter by both job function and company industry, but OTOH it tries to be too “smart”. Outside that the content is eyeroll inducing at best, at the article notes.
FAANGs definitely use it. They need lots and lots of candidates to fill the roles they have since their hiring process is long and selective. They all have an army of recruiters to do so and those recruiters use every possible avenue to find people.
99% of it is low level consulting crap, underpaid positions desperate because they can't keep people because underpaid, etc.
LinkedIn is for the "desperate." Companies having trouble hiring, and people having trouble getting jobs. The rest is just business card maintenance and having a presence so real recruiters know you actually exist and have that job you said at X networking event.
I've gotten a FAANG job, multiple FAANG recruiters and an investment banking job through recruiters asking me via LinkedIn. I get maybe 2 low quality recruiters, for every decent recruiter.
I used to get much worse messages from recruiters when I was junior, but since I've gotten experience and updated my profile well, the quality of messages has vastly improved.
Most of the recruiters that reach out are for crappy jobs (I know you are a senior engineering, here's an entry level QA job, do you know anyone interested).
Every so often I do get some decently sounding positions, but I've almost never seen how legitimate they are since I live in a low COL but work remotely for firms not located here, so most local areas can't match the pay.
I can almost set my calendar based on the yearly recruiters from Amazon I get reaching out, and in the past I have had some conversations (on the phone too) with Facebook recruiters (though all ultimately end up not going anywhere due to relocation requirements).
People were hired before LinkedIn and they will be hired long after LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has incredible lock in though, far beyond mere network effects; they have convinced many people that you might miss out big time if you leave. In a society where the only endpoint that matters is your career and productivity as measured within it, missing an opportunity is effectively suicide. In other words, they exploit people’s tendency towards regret minimisation. Leaving is now equivalent to quitting the lottery after having bought the same numbers for the past thirty years. The kicker is that practically all the value LinkedIn provides comes from its users. LinkedIn didn’t win you a job, you did!
LinkedIn is a critical part of my professional life. Early on, it saved my company by leading me to connect with a business opportunity that I otherwise would not have known about.
And it's become the worst user experience on the web.
The primary, and I'd say only, value it has is maintaining current contact information of professional colleagues that I've accumulated over a lifetime. I'm connected with people I first met 50 years ago (no kidding). Facebook can provide that, but after 11 years of linking, the equity in that feature alone is too great for me to abandon. Like myself, my LinkedIn contacts have grown in their professional life and now have more responsibility and more resources (VPs, CEOs, technical domain experts) that could be useful for future hiring needs and business endeavors.
On a more whimsical note, I've thought about making a bucket list item to buy coffee for everyone in my LinkedIn network after I retire. Given that they are strewn about the globe, and how many there are, it could be challenging and engaging way to spend retirement.
Still... it's the worst user experience on the web.
I don't know whether it's well-known(?), but the parody story of the dog quoted in the article seems based on a better parable:
Aspiring young monk is given the honor of joining a prestigious monastery. While traveling there, he is stopped on the road by a ragged-looking person who needs help. Monk says get out of my way, I'm important, and in a hurry to meet the head of the fancy monastery! When the monk gets to the monastery, well, you can guess that the head of the monastery was that ragged person, and that there's some remedial lesson in monk-ing.
For me LinkedIn is a bottomless pit of despair sprinkled with UX mistakes. As a professional in my field I don't have time to participate, optimise content, post my views and loose my soul in virtual networking. If I want to invest my time in writing and sharing I will make a blog post. Better ROI. Better audience filter. Better everything.
My experience on LinkedIn seems to be radically different from what most people experience. It might be because I quite aggressively unfollow connections if they post content I don’t want to see on LinkedIn - I.e. memes and political content.
My feed usually consists of job opportunities, business news, academic articles, tech blogs and recommendations for new data science/data engineering/ml tooling.
I have recently deleted my lindekin account for many of the reasons mentioned in the article. But what really had me saying: that's enough, was the HUGE amount of unsolicited communication I was getting. From young professionals entering hackathons and looking for guidance to the "talent acquisition" people, who just dump on you all the openings they have to see if you respond to any of it.
Hackernews is currently my social network. I use youtube to make low effort videos logging what I've been working on and HN to actually invite people to interact with things I build and get feedback. I still have an Instagram account, but I'm planning on deleting it also.
i also deleted my linkedin last month or so. the amount of recruiter spam was so much, it would take more effort to filter through that vs using a job board. 10+ years of senior contacts gone i guess but if there are trust issues about prior jobs that means i made em doubt my capabilities
Of all the categories of social media apps I genuinely believe an entirely new professional networking app reimagined from the ground up could very easily “disrupt” a legacy app like LinkedIn. I’m honestly surprised I haven’t seen anything yet (or maybe just not paying attention).
I’m curious how many users (%) are annoyed by this. My gut feeling tells me only HN/Reddit/tech is annoyed by this, most people aren’t. Which is why we haven’t seen a competitor arise
LinkedIN should redefine it's connections definition. In my network I have people who 1) I know personally, close friends 2) professionally, where a friendship lasts as long as we work together 3) also people who I've seen on meetups etc., we both know we work in the same area of expertise, but never had a chance to talk 4) and people who look like we could do business together.
I think it's good thing to keep up with all of them, but it also obscures professional network for all of us.
I deleted my linkedin account. Still employed, no problem in finding new jobs. LinkedIn had negative value for me, took my time and attention and gave nothing back.
LinkedIn is fine provided you follow some very simple rules.
1) never use the social features like the timeline. Don’t post things, don’t comment on things. It’s just a bad Facebook for people with ties trying to become workfluencers. People who think that by promoting their employers blog post they’ll rise in the ranks (and they probably will but I don’t want any part of that charade).
2) Only only ever connect with people you work or worked with. Never recruiters. Recruiters want to build a huge network of random people, and it ruins the fundamental idea where I can see if I actually have someone with a work relationship at a company.
3) Don’t reply to messages from people not in your network. Either connect with them (if not recruiters) or ignore. Do not say “no thanks” or “not interested”.
4) Disable all mail notification. You likely get enough email.
Using it like this, I find it’s a pretty simple way to keep track of where my past colleagues are, without being spammed by recruiters or having to wade through message spam in LinkedIn. I check in a few times per year to see what old friends are up to.
I changed my employer's name to something like Random Large Company as people were scraping the company name and generating emails to my internal company email in order to spam me. But I still get emails anyway as some people scraped it before I changed it and clearly sold the info to other people.
Unfortunately, I find that many companies, especially in engineering it seems, require a linkedin account to apply for internships. Honestly, I don't really mind having it, probably because I don't get much spam.
On the other hand, having a linkedin doesn't seem to be helping me get a job, but that may just be confirmation bias.
There's a lot of hate on LinkedIn here, sorry to say I find it a highly useful tool and it appears to be the defacto way most companies hire so embrace the monster or some other pithy phrase but you get the idea
But the point of this post isn’t that LinkedIn isn’t useful, it’s that it does have value but at the same time takes advantage of your need for their service in a hostage-like way by using lots of dark patterns and psychological tricks to get you to do things like pay for it and put up with being stalked by unsavory people (particularly if you’re female).
It’s a story about how a useful service that is difficult to quit for professional reasons takes full advantage of that dynamic to get away with doing really annoying or awful things.
I'm not talking about whether you individually choose to ignore the bad parts. I'm saying that LinkedIn takes advantage of your need to be on their site whether you actually want to or not to introduce some very annoying features that they know will not churn you because, again, you "need" to be on it.
The fact that certain individuals are more deft at ignoring or blocking or turning off the annoying parts of the service does not change the dynamic at all.
There are many features that make LinkedIn a good tool for professional networking, but as a social media platform LinkedIn has a hugely problematic culture - far worse than Twitter.
While I think LinkedIn’s issues are best understood as symptoms of larger issues in corporate / middle-class culture, the article is on-point.
IMO LinkedIn provides decent value as an address book for business contacts and as a way for people (recruiters, investors, potential partners) to find you and get in touch with you as a "semi warm" introduction via mutual contacts.
None of this requires the timeline feed. But as long as you ignore the inspirational posts and pictures of wolfs walking in a line, it provides easy networking for people with little natural propensity to do so (like myself)
Like the article says, it's a cesspool of bad recruiters and bussiness bullshit combined with a social network that doesn't know how social networks should work.
But now it's okay.
I don't get recruiter messages anymore, my last two projects I got via CEOs that contacted me via LinkedIn.
I cleaned up notifications, now I only get then when someone wrote me.
Added an emoji to the beginning of my name, so now I see who sends me automated bullshit.
Linkedin is as good as the network you have. Obviously nowadays is hard to be that selective with the people you add, but you can be with the people you follow.
I use LinkedIn for 2 things mainly:
1) to build reputation, sharing articles I find interesting about my broad area of expertise and fostering some discussions. These articles are not set to create maximum engagement, because I care about my direct network creating a certain view of my experience based on diacussions with me.
2) to recruit. I use it actively to search for key profiles (lots of devs) for my team. As my big corporate HR department is very ineffective, I take my time to search for interesting candidates and send them to be contacted by HR for some straightforward filtering (interested in the position, salary, etc). For more senior positions, I contact the potential candidates myself (to avoid HR screwups). It is a very efficient tool for recruiting IMHO.
So, if you don't like LinkedIn just build your profile and keep track of the inmail for contacts, as people will use it more and more to reach out to you.
One nice thing about recently joining LinkedIn is to reconnect with colleagues from many years ago, but without getting sucked into one of the more-infamous social media sites, where people seem to need to have a presence, if they are to exist in other people's minds.
Though I will say that finally getting an HN account was a gateway drug to LinkedIn.
LinkedIn seems to be populated mostly with people looking to impress other people on LinkedIn. Problem is the only people truly active are those trying to impress others and the people all these folks are trying to impress aren’t there (apart from logging in once a year to update their current position or profile.)
Not every social network has to be the same. That's OK.
LinkedIn is the professional network, the alternative to swapping business cards (remember those?). It's where you can add that one person you met at a conference so you remember their name and company if needed, or your colleagues. Would you rather add them to your real social network? Personally, I add everyone on LinkedIn and nobody except close friends and family to my real social network. Working as intended.
LinkedIn is also approximately the only place in the world that I know of that you can go to and actually contact someone, when you only know their name. You can't find people's numbers (and nobody wants to call or be called anyway), there's no way to find their email, so unless you're already in their social circle there's nothing else except LinkedIn to reach out with.
I get spam to my username+linkedin@myaccountdomain.com email address constantly. I think LI used to let your connections download the email lists of people they’re connected to on the platform, and I got added to innumerable “hustler” brand-building nonsense lists.
A few years ago, I had the very bad idea of replying to one of the typical "lol millennials amirite" posts. I called it unprofessional and told them to be more careful about the way they carried themselves because "this is not Facebook".
This prompted a lengthy, downright insane reply from another person, who criticised me because "Facebook is a very big job searching platform" (huh? How does that change my point?) and called themselves "a world thought leader, according to my friends".
At that point I just blocked that whole thread because it was actually giving me anxiety and I just didn't know how to reply to that without making things worse.
LinkedIn like Hackernews too has been infiltrated with the Facebook populace. The amount of random discussions that have nothing to do with the focus of the site is staggering.
I have a rule to unfollow anyone on LinkedIn who posts something non-work, non-job related.
> it’s competing against all the places you can do this better. Developers have GitHub...
While I do work on open source on GitHub for my job, I feel like most software engineers do not. Does that mean that you have to spend your free time writing FOSS on GitHub if you want to be employable?
I'd like to read that line as a cheeky nod towards uploading all the code you write for your employer to GitHub when you start looking for a job. I'm actually not sure it hasn't happened somewhere yet
The unfortunate part of this is gaining traction on an alternative platform is extremely difficult. The people who really love these features are recruiters - who end up spending a lot of money on the platform - to make use of the psychological-fuckery the platform has to offer. A no-nonsense LinkedIn alternative that was a public resume, a search engine, and a direct messaging system would be perfect but I bet it'd be hard to gain traction.
I was hopeful that after Microsoft got its hands on the stinky pile, it would revamp it. But, no, it's still the ridiculous place for irrelevant recruiter spam!
Microsoft made it worse, at least UI-wise, after buying it. The other website I hate by I’m registered on because of coworkers is ResearchGate. Spam, gamified portal, with only value being allowing non computer savvy people to build a publication list online.
Yeah, researchgate is a shame. There ought to be a niche for an academic website, but it hasn’t worked out. I get more value from connecting on Twitter. Turns out that plus biorxiv/arxiv/[insert your discipline’s version] works better.
Yes, but again you’ll see there is pattern here: *rxiv are still kinda geek oriented, in addition to being for preprints. Twitter is indeed more accessible to people in other fields like humanities, but that’s another silo that has even bigger problem and more disgusting behavior.
Good summary (I didn't even know about stories or audio posts).
It's amazing that the fake Skype story has almost 800k likes!
At this point the LinkedIn feed is for entertainment only, with all the "and then everyone clapped" stories and the deep business lessons gained by all these generic business persons' 6yo ingenuous sentences.
But as she says, there's not much harm in keeping a profile for job search, just disable as much notifications as possible.
Anecdotal.
I am male but my name in various countries around Europe (and probably world) is female, and people by default think I'm gal when they communicate with me over messenger, emails, etc.
On one occasion I was asked to be talker on some event that is empowering woman in IT. The woman who asked me to do it didn't even look at my profile where my profile pic clearly show that I am a male (beard, moustache and stuff..).
They've only seen the role I am on, experience and probably had some female name database where they filtered me out.
On more serious note, I got contacted by every FAANG(M) company in last 6 years and got hired two of them through it. Nice tool, but not for every sector.
I deleted my LinkedIn a few years ago. I had hundreds of contacts going back 20+ years.
For “reasons” I made one again a couple of years ago. No title, just the current place where I work. When I switched jobs, I deleted the old job entry and updated with the new. It lets me say “yes” to connection requests from people I encounter in my day job, while keeping the rest of L.I. at arms’ reach.
That is a nice summary of linkedin, thay just forgot the utter uselessness as a ad platform because the data to noise ratio just got so screwed up since COVID-19 hit.
Nice that they brought up Gary. I already unfollowed people because they shared to much of his "influencer" and "entrepreneur" contant/spam.
I keep running into a weird issue where i scroll through my Linkedin timeline, don’t interact with any posts, then when I check my ”Activity log” I’ve liked a bunch of those posts. It’s been happening for months now. Anyone else seen this? It would really explain why my network likes so many weird posts.
Until not so long ago I was astonished how such big site can be made so poorly. You had to reload five times to get all elements to load (navbar especially). I tried to use mobile app, which... hadn't allowed me to log in.
Now at least this problem with website is fixed. I don't know whether app already works.
I visit LinkedIn whenever I suspect that I might be experiencing slow Wi-Fi service - their site is so bulky it seems ideal for manually detecting connectivity issues.
It's only weird if you expect sincerity on a social network, which in 2020 seems naive, especially a network entirely based on fostering professional connections. People are there to build their personal brand and try to get a better job, not talk to their friends.
Thought it was nice 12 years ago to land my first job abroad and get my foot into the door but now it's just spam from recruitment agencies that I've just muted all notifications entirely.
I do still recommend it to others who are job searching though.
i could not agree more with this article. everyone producing content on linkedin is passive aggressive and full of shit. it's perpetual apathetic back-patting.
but with that said, i've got an account that i hold for maintaining professional connections... but i long for the day when i can use it for posting dank memes and shitposts! :D
Previously I would spend hours trawling job boards, composing cover letters and get excited at the prospect of one successful reply. It was soul destroying.
Now I can construct a post, complete with trendy hashtags, and passively watch _hundreds_ of recruiters reach out to me in 24hrs. Now I can sit with a coffee and easy filter out the crap. It's taken some time to build up the 8,000+ contacts, mostly of senior tech people amd recruiters.
Every job in the last 5yrs has been through LinkedIn and due to the ease by which I could change jobs, salary has sky rocketed too.
Maybe I am in the minority of people who use it as a tool this way?
Edit: I also have an emoji as the first "letter" in the string of my first name. This instantly allows me to visually/programmatically filter out genuine "human" messages from bots. I also reply to these messages, as let's be honest, a human took time to compose the message to me. A quick "thank you" (one button click!) goes a long way.