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Comment by hoorayimhelping | Hacker News Reader

This is completely common in America. Is the London job market scene just messed up?

I took a job abroad after coming from the U.S., and updated my LinkedIn accordingly. Soon after, the spam shot up through the roof. All of the same, non-descript, no-details contacts the author describes. It's been striking.

I torched my linkedin account a while back after recruiters wouldn't stop hounding me. I also despise social networks of all sorts so that contributed to my decision.

Before I torched it though I tried a little experiment. I left my tech skills in place, but also added things like "Blacksmithing" and "Former POTUS" as my skill set. I also said "Do not contact me" and "I hate recruiters" and something along the lines of "if you contact me, you clearly didn't read my profile" - the spam seemed to increase for a while before I finally deleted the profile completely.

Meanwhile, I consider two LinkedIn hits in the same month to be a lot. :/

I never made a dime or had any positive experience with Linkedin. Just recruiter spam and "friends" begging for endorsements... so I don't think you're missing out on anything.

Interesting. A similar thing happened when I moved to New York City, it might just be a new node appearing in a network.

It's common in the US, sure, but it rarely works. It's not that we don't all know a few people we'd be glad to work with again, it's that they're mostly happy and well-compensated where they are. Offering me an extra few grand isn't going to change that, and it isn't nearly enough to make splitting it with the candidate a game-changer either. Occasionally someone you want will be available during a bust (which often means during a hiring freeze, too) or under some unusual personal circumstances, but it doesn't happen often enough to make up for attrition much less grow a team.

This is completely common in America

Except for the use of the term "fortnight". :)

Yes.

We ran some back-of-the-envelope numbers last week at the office. Wolfram provided us with a ballpark figure that there are about 70k "IT industry professionals" in London region. Of this, 10-15% (so maybe 12k) are the good ones, and absolutely everybody is fighting for them.

There are more than 10k tech industry companies in London alone. [0]

Competition for talent is fierce, to say the least - and every single startup I know of is hiring. Us included.

0: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/10/tech-city-uk-... (24% of 47k)

In London no one has any friends to begin with.

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