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Comment by arcticfox | Hacker News Reader

Not this serious, but when I updated my position from entry level at Microsoft to CTO of a startup, LinkedIn notified all of my connections that I was now CTO of MICROSOFT.

Customer service said it was a "known issue". My friends thought it was funny, but I'm stia little annoyed because it made me look sloppy.

Come on, LinkedIn, you have one job!

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Turn off the option to notify your network in your Linkedin profile, that'll sort out most of these issues.

"Congrats on your new role !" - No, dude, I got the promotion a year ago, it's just that I am now looking to jump ship so I updated my Linkedin

off-topic, but how long do you guys wait before updating linkedin with new job/start adding new coworkers?

3 months or so. If the job has a trial period I definitely don't want to add all my colleagues before the trial period is over. I also don't like adding people who start at my company until I know that they're good at their jobs.

I often get suggestions to connect to my dead mother. I just figured linkedin liked me as much as I like them.

I get connect requests from women who are the manager of Ford Motor Company in Nigeria, or the Vice President of some bank in London, or other ludicrous and unlikely occupations. Always women. Every other day or so.

LinkedIn is just looking out for you. They know kids will continue your legacy, bigger userbase. Cough cough. >.<

A few weeks ago LinkedIn posted a 4 year work anniversary for a colleague of mine who passed away 3 years ago. I complained on Twitter. They responded immediately and a few hours later they said they were taking his profile offline.

I'm not saying I have the solution to this particular problem, but it's still kind of jarring to see these kinds of updates.

Was it necessary, prior to LinkedIn acting on your advice, to provide proof the person had died?

As soon as they got back to me, I sent them a link to the obituary and since this conversation was on Twitter, I also had to verify who _I_ was. My assumption was that they were going to ask for it anyway, so I just got them the info as soon as the conversation got started, but no, they hadn't asked for it at that point.

An obituary is a news article that reports the recent death of a person.

Does an obituary qualify as authentication that a person has died? I would have expected them to require a death certificate from the relevant government department. In Australia these are handled by state level, eg.[1]

1. http://www.justice.tas.gov.au/bdm/deaths/applyforcertificate

Are you asking whether there's a social-engineering attack vector here? Probably, but this sort of change is reversible (assuming your infrastructure is even slightly reasonable). If someone wanted to report me as dead, and went to the lengths of fabricating an obituary about me, I wouldn't be upset at LinkedIn for disabling my profile, provided there was an easy-ish way for me to convince them that reports of my death had been greatly exaggerated.

As security policies go, a setup that with a small chance of temporarily marking someone as dead when they're not seems better than one with no chance of marking someone as dead when they are.

For friends of someone that has died, that is a bit of an onerous task that is not available online in many countries.

As in many, many similar cases, Twitter should charge companies (Linkedin, numerious telco etc) a fee for providing a forum to conduct customer service.

(And typing on mobile I typo "still" and can't edit - maybe I am sloppy)

I really didn't even notice the typo until this comment.

Well it's time I un-endorse you for "attention to detail" on LinkedIn then...

My favourite endorsement on LinkedIn - and one of the few ones that are actually genuinely deserved - is an ex-colleague of mine that has a bunch of endorsements for "general awesomeness".

If you add "general awesomeness" as a skill on LinkedIn then by that very act you don't really need anyone to endorse your general awesomeness because you just are. Any endorsement is jumping on the bandwagon and superfluous at this point.

I totally subconsciously stared at 'stia' but ignored it as I had all the info I wanted

I almost completely ignore typos anymore, assuming that all the cool kids now connect with their space phones.

The good news is no one reads LinkedIn notifications.

Well, that's what I thought too, but enough people liked it and commented on it that I was getting notifications for days. (I'm assuming they show it to more people when it gets reactions, which I agree, is almost never)

It's the clickbait emails that get me. "Congratulate Jim on his new role!" without mentioning what it is

sounds like a case of a change set that was carried out in a non-atomic way when it should have been done atomic

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