The most surprising thing is that there's people who think LinkedIn used to be good. It was built by spamming people and grabbing contact books without consent. It's always been trash.
I dunno, it literally got me to a 180k salary (Eastern Europe based so astronomical) just by me having a profile there. I didn’t have to find a job since 2015 thanks to it. You might argue that the feed is shit, but to me it’s normal human behavior trying to stand out and abusing everything that you can (including feed algos), so I just don’t look at it.
I’ll be forever grateful to LinkedIn and I would never be in the situation I am right now if it hadn’t have been for it.
Wow interesting! I've being using LinkedIn since it first started, and honestly this is first time I have heard a positive story that is not written by MS or LinkedIn staff or related people. I guess a broken clock can be right 2 times a days. Still won't touch LinkedIn with a 10 feet pole since the MS take over.
A lot of my friends and coworkers from Eastern Europe share my sentiments. Every job I’ve had was due to being recruited via LinkedIn without me lifting a finger, starting from 1k euros gross per month, up until 15x that.
Couldn't agree more. I lived in the middle of nowhere USA bc of my spouse and an amazing remote job found me on LI, circa 2015. Would never have happened otherwise
Similar to other posts, LI is probably the website that changed my life the most. It's made finding a new job so easy it's almost embarrassing to discuss with non-tech people. I just set my profile to "Open to work" and recruiters just stream in and eventually I get a job that is awesome and pays well. No other website has had a larger impact on my life.
You're right, it's always been awful, but it's actually gotten worse which is something I did not think was possible (Facebook quality 'news' feed, constant awful captchas and popups to name a few).
I only look at it once every couple of months to check up on old colleagues. If I am looking for a job I am forced to use it more often, but mostly just the messaging part. The feed is something I think most people can safely ignore.
I always liked Bill Gurley's take on LinkedIn (paraphrasing):
"I only ever accept connection requests from people I 100% know to be honest, smart and good judges of character. That way, if I meet some new person, I look them up and see they are connected to someone I know: I immediately call the shared connection and ask their opinion."
Yup. I installed LinkedIn not long after it was a thing, and just kinda clicked through the sign up flow. To my horror, it contacted every single person in my contact list telling them I was on LinkedIn.
It was trash, but dealing with recruiters has always been, and keeping professional network into a separate space was the saner thing to do.
In that sense, I think it worked as intended: people would only need to react to recruiting mail, and that only during the spans they cared about moving careers.
The whole "tell your life on linkedin !" promotion pushed by Microsoft clearly degraded that part.
yeah, the most useful resource wasn't even the recruiters (which was occasionally helpful, but none of my career roles were gained through LinkedIn Recuiters). Having a way that wasn't twitter to connect and talk with old co-workers and colleague was invaluable.
My last role was gained by reaching out to a colleague I haven't talked to since college and asking about the role I applied to, and he was nice enough to give me a referral (I honestly wasn't expecting a referral. it was easily 5+ years since we last interacted, didn't talk that much in college, and I wasn't the best student to begin with). I doubt he posted his roles on Facebook so I never would have thought to contact him otherwise.
