You can have a LinkedIn profile but not use the feed-- I don't see how that's necessarily frustrating. Make a profile, provide the link on job applications. Occasionally edit your profile so it's up to date. Then, don't use it. Simple enough.
Coincidentally, this drives everything that is so bad about the platform. All the normal people you know in real life wouldn’t be caught dead posting to LinkedIn, just using it as a resume and jobs platform. The only people willing to post anything are attention seekers and influencers.
It’s a similar complaint to how your Facebook and Instagram feeds barely contain the people you follow anymore, which encourages regular people to post less and attention seekers to post more.
The business model of ad-supported social media apparently doesn’t work under the paradigm of checking in on your friends for a reasonable amount of time (like 5 minutes a day) and calling it a day. Instead, it’s just optimized to be as much of an addiction as possible, and there’s no way your real respected work colleagues can provide that amount of content.
I wish there was a way to never accidentally click on or navigate to the feed at all on LinkedIn. Could be a good opportunity for a browser extension to just nuke that part of the DOM.
Yeah, I basically use it for online resume storage.
For years LinkedIn languished as the site everyone was on, but nobody actually used for anything. But I have actually gotten a couple of leads from it now.
The feed is trash though, for sure. And you have to laugh at the endless parade of bimbo pictures attached to accounts that are supposedly "recruiters." Unprofessional and insulting.
Speaking of "bimbo" recruiters, some of them are low key phone-sex operators.
I had an experience where one of them reached out to me about a job over the phone. She had a hot-sounding voice and the job seemed intriguing, so I figured I would give it a shot. Her LinkedIn photo was stunning. Yes, I sheepishly admit that I was taken in by her and this influenced my decision to even consider a random job from a recruiter.
She was friendly but kinda ditzy, seemed to barely know what she was talking about, and once the easy stuff was over, I was abruptly handed over to some dude. It's like... I thought you were my recruiter, so who's this other guy? He pretty much handled my recruitment process from that point on, but she was allowed to be the first one to talk to me on each call and get the credit for "recruiting" me, although she turned out to be more like live-bait than anything else.
IMO, the tactic of many of these recruitment firms is to hire attractive women to fool male programmers into considering otherwise unappealing jobs and direct most of the profit to the male recruiters.
Part of me is glad the industry is in such a state that no recruiters are contacting me anymore. 99% of third party recruiters are blood sucking parasites.
I recently pointed out to our corporate security that a data broker has detailed employee records for our entire company including job titles and start dates. Given the nature of our business, that data cache is a roadmap for security compromises. The most likely culprit was scraping from LinkedIn. It isn't always a good idea to put your data out there for others to aggregate.
Some companies supply that information voluntarily. Experian (iirc) even has a product offering that ‘helps employees qualify for loans and demonstrate stable earnings’ if the companies will just only send them payroll history. So it may not have been scraped necessarily, just “shared” in the ordinary course of business.
