Dammit LinkedIn, I'm a college dropout (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Dammit LinkedIn, I'm a college dropout (2009)

paulholmes.ca

102 pointsiamjeff63 comments

This rings true for me. I'm a high school dropout with a GED and a couple of community college credits, but nevertheless found success in tech. I know a lot of people my age took this unconventional path, but LinkedIn basically tells us to fuck off.

Conversely I'm in the same boat, but I still can't find value in LinkedIn because it feels so disingenuous, and not at all part of my peer hiring circle. I suppose if I weren't already employed in a job that fulfills all of my needs, I'd be more concerned, but LinkedIn has never been anything but a curiosity for me. I'm sure others may find more value in it, but in responding to your comment I guess I just felt the need to say you're not the only one that took the same unconventional path.

Highschool dropout as well. I see LinkedIn as sort of the antithesis of GitHub.

Whereas LinkedIn is sort of a social proof via credential, GitHub is social proof via work product.

Plenty of people smarter than me have written about the diminishing value of credentials and credentialism as social proof[0]. I believe that is partially why LinkedIn is such a cess-pool/shit-show.

Maybe it's my bias from being a dropout that only my work product has ever mattered. I believe there's room for a social network to replace LinkedIn with a "GitHub for non-tech people". Perhaps this would have a mix of credentials and a way to show ones work.

[0]: The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts Book by Daniel Susskind and Richard Susskind https://www.amazon.com/Future-Professions-Technology-Transfo...

I agree with the first part about credentials, but I see a bit of danger in how you view Github.

I wish I had time to put more stuff in my Github account, but I don't.. All the work I do is for clients, or for my employer, and I can't post or share it.

Sometimes I can extract a small piece and share it, but otherwise, I can't. I also don't have a ton of time in my life to code on personal projects anymore.

So while I consider myself an experienced and accomplished developer (been at it for 20 years now), if Github is my "social proof via work product", then I don't look like much..

I'm not saying this is your fault or that people will only ever look at Github, but I hear this more and more ("show us your Github work") in the context of hiring and evaluating developers, and I hope it doesn't become just another thing that - following OP's point - people or systems hold against you for not having.

I am of similar mind re: github.

Recently, I found viewing a potential hire's StackOverflow to be much more interesting than their github. You learn a lot about what kinds of questions someone asks and how they ask them.

Only few of my colleagues have active github or open source contributions. They code enough in work basically. Some of them a lot actually. Oddly and I think it is just random, those with active github are less productive/reliable at work.

Then again, I never bothered to have linked in account. Nobody I know is using it.

Judging someone by github activity is pointless unless you're hiring for open source and take the effort to see how they interact with community.

I've seen lots of github profiles that look amazing on paper and then when you dig in they just went around to projects changing spelling/pronouns/punctuation in other projects.

It's much faster to phone screen people after a simple resume read rather than deriving signals that can be gamed like github.

I've never seen linked in as anything except a way to find out if I know someone at a given company...

I think thats why https://brydge.com/ was built?

Can relate, I failed at the game of academia as well. In the end, on LinkedIn I gave up and ended up just putting in my college, but without listing a degree. Funnily enough, it looks pretty much like I finished to the uninitiated outsider.

Now that I'm CTO of one of the more successful startups in Berlin, that's actually one of my pet peeves for rejecting job offers when applicable. Microsoft just offered me a very well paid startup CTO position, but I told the recruiter he must be wrong, as I didn't fit their requirements (i.e. a finished degree)...

I take the same approach, listing the (non technical) area of study and years of attendance. People tend to assume this resulted in a BA, which is not the intent. I've struggled with whether this is duplicitous on my part. Generally I feel that listing no education would be a lie of omission and not relay the story of my professional career properly.

FWIW, I'm a GED holder, but later finished college & PhD. My linkedin profile is 100% complete, and I find zero utility in the platform. You really aren't missing much there.

LinkedIn also only wants to consider jobs in the modern sense, not the traditional sense. So I decided to list myself as "Co-CEO of the Ganz Family" with the description "Full-time stay-at-home mom. Job description includes cleaning up other people's poop, so it actually isn't too different from corporate life..."

EDIT: And if you think that this approach would cut down on the dumb recruiter spam, you'd be sadly mistaken. :-/

It might not stop the poor recruiters but it might stop the good ones who had good leads.

Yes, there are some good recruiters even read profiles before they contact people.

I have never paid attention to any of the "you aren't complete!" messages or indicators. I don't care.

I ignored LinkedIn's "get complete!" messages for a long time. One night I sat down with the curiosity of hitting 100% on LinkedIn. I now have an "all-star profile", whatever that means, and in a top some percentage of profiles.

At the end of the day, it just means more people look at my profile.

It may be jumping to conclusions to say I get no value out of it — it's a mixed bag. More contacts from people I know about legitimately good opportunities, and them seeing my face pop up more on LinkedIn might play a role in that. But it also means more contact from recruiters, and usually that means spammy third party recruiters. I mostly just don't respond to them anymore.

I finally gave up complaining about this issue late last year, and filled in the education section of my profile with the following:

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Master of Wizardry, Arithmancy, Passed all N.E.W.T.s with grades E and O

1985 – 1989

Activities and Societies: Ravenclaw House, Dumbledore's Army

Thesis: "Extending Turing's Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-dimensional Summoning to Account for Quantum Many-Worlds Hypothesis using Dho-Nha Geometry Curves".

Facebook did something similar and I entered 'Bovine University', which it turns out has tens of thousands of students.

The University of Northern New Jersey would be a fun choice. A fictional school created by US Homeland Security for a sting operation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Northern_New_J...

Edit: 72 Alumni and 2 employees on LinkedIn. Heh. https://www.linkedin.com/edu/university-of-northern-new-jers...

You could also go for the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schickele https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Q._Bach

> The fake university was recognized by the State of New Jersey and was accredited by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC).[3] The director of the ACCSC confirmed that it had accredited the "university" to cooperate with the federal investigation.[6]

Thus bringing into doubt any ACCSC accreditation. I pity the innocent student who, at best, wasted time researching UNNJ, and possibly moved forward without realizing where the trail was leading.

They appear to give out accreditation to massage schools, schools of "hair design", and so forth. I don't know that they reached a new low or anything. Homeland Security didn't appear to arrest any students, just the brokers. However, they did appear to let the students get screwed out of their time and money, and then deport them.

I never went to high school, and this option doesn't really exist in many sites and forms on the web. It is what it is.

Side note: how did you not go to high school and end up in tech(assuming here), just curious, you don't have to answer of course :-)

You can skip high school by taking a GED and applying to a community college.

Or as the article points out you can just not go to college at all.

Colleges and universities generally don't require that you have a GED at all. If you can score well on their entrance exam (SAT or ACT), they you qualify for enrollment.

"High School" as an educational trifurcation is very USA, most of the world seems to bifurcate into pre-teen and teen. No concept outside the USA of going to a separate building for ages 14-18.

For a good time there's also no enforced standard in the USA for middle school (older elementary) vs Junior High (youth high school). I went to a middle school that operated internally like a junior high, which was interesting. Construction/logistical reasons resulted in my high school experience being only 3 years sophomore to senior, freshmen year was the last year of middle school. Everyone who graduated with me had a middle school as their first year of high school on their transcript. When I was young enough for anyone to care about my education this sometimes led to bizarre conversations with HR people about why I transferred schools or why did I skip a grade, etc.

When I was growing up what we had was (direct translation of terms)

- basic school (grade 1-8) --> elementary

- middle school (9-12) --> high school

- high school --> 3yr college

- university -> 4+ years

so I got really confused most of the time :-)

> "High School" as an educational trifurcation is very USA, most of the world seems to bifurcate into pre-teen and teen. No concept outside the USA of going to a separate building for ages 14-18.

Division of secondary education into separate upper and lower stages is actually pretty damn common, and definitely not unique just for USA. For example in Finland (and I think in Norway too) we have 6 years in primary, 3 in lower secondary and 3 in upper secondary school. Both EU and UN classification have three levels for this range.

The division certainly exists, but most of the rest of the world uses the concepts of primary, secondary, and tertiary education.

The US tends to distinguish between before high school, high school, and college. Which puts the demarcation lines in different places.

International comparisons are further complicated by the different focii that exist in different countries. For example, my final two years of secondary education in the U.K. were entirely focused on a very academic approach to Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. While the school payed lip service to the idea of well-rounded students, that was really left to the kids. At university, my first mathematics lecture was on surface integrals — if you weren't ready for that there had been a catch-up summer class, but the implication was that you'd be ready.

I did the same thing; never finished Grade 10. Had been playing with coding since I was 5 [1]. Always knew one day I'd "do something with computers". My dad wrote one of the first books on the Internet in '92 so I got some good exposure somewhat early. Moved to a third world country at 15 cause they didn't card for booze. Ended up with some web site contracts, and kept diving deeper until I was a "real" programmer (not just web/CRUD stuff - but high perf, high-scale, life-critical, reversing, etc.).

It was only hard for the first little bit. No one takes a 17-yr-old seriously. But I had a 24-yr-old business partner and that helped. I managed to get a speaking slot at a 300+ person business conference and picked up some solid clients that built portfolio. Plus it was 2000, so a whiz-kid-Internet-thing had some sort of cachet perhaps.

I already had a real career and some recognition by the time I would have graduated, so, eh, it worked out and was fun. Though I do regret not knowing maths and not having taken really solid algorithms classes (OTOH, no guarantee I'd have gone to a real school - might have gotten fake CS classes like so many end up with). And I wonder what kind of connections I might have made if I had stayed with it, especially staying in the US.

1: Most elaborate thing was designing a fake grade tracking program (demo) to convince other kids I had hacked the school's systems (hint: they used paper) and could change their grades.

which book?

"Fundamentals of Database Systems". Hashing schemes and so on. I thought I had come up with some neat stuff, it seemed to work real fast, showed my diagrams to a friend and he showed me identical ones from his classes.

Edit: Sorry I had made an edit and was referring to another book. The book my dad wrote was called NetPower. Was a collection of links, gopher servers, etc.

Is it the one by Navathe and Elmasri or a different one?

Yep that one.

Edit sorry. I thought the question was talking about an edit I made before where I mentioned another book.

No worries. I took a look at your github, etc and you didn't look like either Navathe or Elmasri's kid :) Congrats on setting an example for others!

Interesting, I'm actually similar, I completed high school but didn't goto college, I became a chef instead and aelf taught coding(I work freelance when I have time).

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I didn't finish high school either. I dropped out, enrolled in a top ranked university, and graduated at the top of my class. Since then I've since then done extensive work as an engineer, hold numerous patents, and am a respected writer. I've also taught both college and high school classes on the side. Often the best thing someone can do is drop out of high school. I don't recommend it for anyone other than the developmentally disabled who need extra time to learn basic skills.

Home schooling in my jurisdiction carries absolutely no reporting obligation, so after registering for that I didn't need to do anything in particular.

I got my first job through a combination of meeting my boss at a meetup, and knowing somebody who worked for him. I started working at 17. My first week there, I learned AngularJS (by porting a vanilla javascript application). By my second week, I was already leading a project which was delivered ahead of schedule.

Without Wikipedia and the Free Software Foundation I would probably not have had it as easy.

Job success is mainly about a combination of basic mental health and general intelligence. If you have these two things, you can make it in software.

I think it also helped that I had a fairly mature outlook and lifestyle by then. It also probably helped that I looked like a goofy adult and not just a mature adolescent.

From time to time I wonder what life might have been if I stayed through high school and actually tried (I was a very bad student in primary school). I probably can't go to law school, though in some jurisdictions I could study independently to practice law; I almost certainly couldn't go into medicine. In a way, even though I am young enough to change course in life, a number of doors are closed because I did not go to high school.

As for me, I like my life a lot.

Interesting, thanks for taking the time to write that up.

Dammnit Linkedin, all you do is let recruiters spam me.

They do a lot more than that - e.g. they scan all your contacts so they can spam them as well.

Only if you grant them access. It's not required to use LinkedIn.

Erm, nope. Unfortunately, I downloaded the iOS app before Apple finally stopped their annoying "growth hack" by introducing a permission for accessing the contact list.

To this day, I still have ex-girlfriends, one-time ridesharing buddies and even some fictuous people "waiting to connect with me" on LinkedIn.

Not sure when you downloaded it but the contacts permission was added under iOS 6 in 2012.

http://www.imore.com/how-restrict-apps-access-your-contacts-...

and now that Microsoft bought it, it's even more offputting.

Is a 100% filled in linked in profile something to strive for? It seems like the poster has chosen an arbitrary goal, then seeks to manipulate the goal so he can finish it. Why not just choose a different goal?

He was complaining about the LinkedIn UI, and probably things like email, that would constantly complain about it being unfinished.

They've moved away from percentages, but it still nags you: http://imgur.com/a/vVOdv

Note there's a "NOT NOW" button, but no "NOT EVER" button.

If liked-in does not make your "percent complete" available to others then who cares? If it does, that could be bad because people will think "this guy didn't bother..."

So what is the answer to this?

Add a custom stylesheet that removes the warning? ;)

It's not about LinkedIn. Apparently companies today don't care about your work or skills. All they want is a dog that is trained to obey. School education is part of that. Questions like "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" are a sign towards that direction.

Holy shit, posted in 2009 and still no change. I see this every time I'm on LinkedIn--I hate it. Still nowhere for me to add my book (sure, publications, but it will drown under more recent talks and papers), but it can harass me about my non-existent schooling.

What would be the harm in making the widgets modular and more customizable? I'm not asking for CSS, but let me completely remove sections that don't apply, and add new generic ones as I see fit.

I just put "School of Hard Knocks" on my LinkedIn and leave it at that. If that's unacceptable to a prospective employer, I've successfully weeded out a bad fit.

So far it hasn't been.

For eduction I put down "Various" - that seemed to work.

I put down the school that I attended, but no mention of a degree. Do they still let you do that?

They let you, but then nag at you to fill in more details. It doesn't get you to 100%.

Meh. I don't need LinkedIn to judge or validate my life achievements.

I recommmend avoiding it entirely. That has worked well for me so far.

How do you deal with the email invites? I'm thinking of making a filter to auto-delete them.

This has worked fine for me.

Settings > Communications > Emails in the iOS app

You can turn them all off.

I don't get too many of them, they are annoying though.

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