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Comment by incepted | Hacker News Reader

> I have not suffered in any way

You don't really know that, maybe you missed out on interesting jobs and you'll never know.

At the very least, receiving recruiter emails from LinkedIn allows me to do networking and meet a lot of influential people at various companies, even if I don't end up landing a job there. It also builds my recruiter network, which is never a bad thing: if I ever need a job one day, I am planning to spam my entire network of recruiter, let them know exactly what I'm looking for and let them do the work for me. It goes both ways.

I respect deciding to opt out of LinkedIn but there is an opportunity cost to such a decision that you seem to have overlooked.

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If his current situation is good who cares what other jobs he missed out on? More options isn't always worth the sacrifice of being distracted

Not always, but how distracting is it really?

Obviously, everyone will be different but I get 2-3 emails from recruiters on LinkedIn per week. Managing them takes me about one minute per week.

Compared to the number of times where I ended up on a phone call or having lunch/coffee with a CTO, VP of Eng, architect or senior engineer, it's totally worth it to me.

My suggestion: don't cut out that option until it really becomes unmanageable. Chances are you'll find it's worth the occasional disturbance.

Well, unless you're actually really happy with your current employment and income. In that case, why even bother looking for something "better"? At that point that's just greedy.

The best time to interview is precisely when you're happy with your job.

You have zero pressure, you can practice interviewing, network and you can make extravagant requirements. If it doesn't work out, no big deal, you like where you are. But if it does, your career can make quantum leaps.

A quantum leap is the smallest possible state change

Free time is limited. I'd like to spend it doing something more rewarding than job hunting.

Job hunting can be a life changing moment. Something that will, literally, affect the rest of your life. If only because salary increases compound over an entire lifetime of working.

In other words, a $10k increase in salary might not seem much but it will add up, and not only will raises compound as well but future jobs will start at a higher negotiation level as well.

Of course, spend your time wisely but I think it's really short sighted to think "I'm happy at my job, I am going to completely block out all the recruiters out there".

You know what could give you more free time? A better offer from a different job. Or more money. That can typically be exchanged for free time too.

I'm very happily employed anyway, and at no point in the 4 years since I quit LinkedIn have I struggled to find meaningful, well paid employment. If I had stayed on LinkedIn just maybe some amazing job offer would have appeared that otherwise hasn't - but I doubt it. For 8 years as a member of LinkedIn I never had one interesting conversation. And I could say "what if I moved to New York?" or "what if I learned to speak Spanish?" There's an opportunity cost to not doing those things as well.

I understand that some people can find value from LinkedIn, but I just don't feel that I'm one of them. I attend lots of meetups in London, and participate in online discussions, and that's good enough for me.

Don't underestimate the network effort. Maybe that recruiter you just connected with won't find you something interesting but they will share your resume with their colleagues. Present and future. And these colleagues will look for things on your behalf. And so on.

LinkedIn didn't invent the network effect, nor do they exclusively own it. In my opinion, for my situation, they don't even have the best implementation of it.

I recognise that I could belong to LinkedIn as well as those other networks, but I get enough value out of my existing tools that LinkedIn isn't worth it.

The scummy data collection practises and the constant recruiter spam are what drove me away from LinkedIn. There is nothing pulling me back.

Perhaps purely anecdotal, but in the years I've been working, I can't say I or anyone I've talked to has perceived an opportunity cost in not having / ignoring LinkedIn (especially the folks who had one and then got rid of it)

I've really only ever received an inordinate amount of entry level recruiters "connect" with me using the same canned email they send everyone. I thought the references feature was nice, but the past few places I've been at have officiously discouraged using the feature because of PR issues (I might personally give someone a recommendation which could then not actually represent the company's perspective of the person)

In my opinion, LinkedIn is just a very creepy and annoying service.

I don't buy your line of reasoning. There's also an opportunity cost to wasting time on LinkedIn instead of focusing on other avenues of finding employment. The end-result is the same, these are unknowables that you can never account for. The only real question is, does LinkedIn provide you value? Y/N and proceed from there.

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