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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn is a weird, weird place.

There's always people wanting to add me, but then they mostly don't introduce themselves. Even half of the recruiters who add me don't do an intro. How is that networking?

The articles seem pretty low quality. Sorry to say it, but a lot of them seem to be written as a form of homework, as in "you should write something to be seen". There's rarely any insightful comments on news pieces either.

And then there's Oleg. Doing a parody of him is basically the only form of humour on LinkedIn. Do you agree?

The endorsements system is messed up. My 6th grade teacher endorsed me for "derivatives" and "investment". That's not quite the same as a colleague or a manager, is it? But you won't know unless you check all those links.

The one thing it's good for is as a replacement for a rolodex. No need to have business cards anymore, you have LinkedIn.

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Recruitment is too widespread for introductions. I'd wager most of us on HN get at least 1 message a week, with many getting 2-3 per day. We're interested in the roles, not the recruiter. It's up to us to judge whether the recruiter is any good - and it's usually not until you've actually worked with them do you find that out. "RateMyRecruiter" doesn't exist, you can only really judge it based on how they act.

I'm interested in 5 points.

Asking Rate/Salary.

Location.

Company.

Title (or if contract, length of contract).

Technology.

If those are supplied up-front, I can immediately accept or dismiss 95% of messages. However at the moment I have to ask for 1 or 2 more points usually.

Only then do I usually go onto Glassdoor, start asking about why the role is now available, employee and contractor turnover, average employees time at the company and work environment.

Endorsements I agree are ridiculous, you can go on Fiverr and buy 20 customised endorsements within 24 hours.

LinkedIn is going the MySpace way. Total crap “content”, endless amount of people that indeed just want “connect” without intro, reason or anything else than bumping their numbers. Weird thing, I found it pretty useful up to 2 years ago. I guess that’s when the influencers takeover and bullshit blogging began.

God, you should see the number of 20 line posts, each line in a paragraph by itself, about how someone hired someone that others wouldn't. I agree with you about the 2 years/influencers thing.

Yeah, I think the platform is more popular among recruiters, which leads these types of posts to become popular with likes/comments/arguments. I am genuinely curious how they get tens of thousands of engagements though. I can't imagine getting in public arguments about this stuff. Maybe it's a form of networking for recruiters? To us outsiders, it's just plain bizarre.

I no longer connect with any requests unless they include a personal message in the request, because they're either a "legitimate" connection trawler, or (I suspect) LinkedIn making the request "on behalf of" the "requestor."

The last time (among many) that I accepted a generic, canned message request, I waited a week for the guy to say something to me. Nothing, and I dropped him.

One problem for LinkedIn is that they have not made themselves so obviously above-board that a suspicion like mine would be implausible.

> The articles seem pretty low quality. Sorry to say it, but a lot of them seem to be written as a form of homework, as in "you should write something to be seen". There's rarely any insightful comments on news pieces either.

Most of the content on LinkedIn is self-congratulatory circe-jerking (for lack of a better term). People give Reddit shit for that, but it has nothing on the ego-stroking and pandering that happens on LinkedIn.

> The one thing it's good for is as a replacement for a rolodex

That's the only thing I use it for. It was "ok" a couple of years ago, I even went premium for 2 months while looking for a new job (not worth it, at all!). Now it's just spam.

My last company just used it as a cheap ad platform. Staff where encouraged to "like" the weekly billboard.

A sleazy site abused by sleazy companies, including the owner.

edit: Oh, forgot to add.. I think people only give endorsements so you think twice about disconnecting them (you'll lose their endorsements).

Recruiters want to add you so their job postings show up in your timeline. They don't add messages because it's a driftnet tactic. They're hoping people looking for jobs will just add them in case they get sent a message.

I use LinkedIn by simply adding whoever seems interesting, without adding an intro or note to the request. I reach out only when it seems I need their services, for example if I want to work at the company they work for. LinkedIn also has the advantage of being exponential in the connections you can have due to second and third order connections; when I add one person I also add their entire network.

>. Even half of the recruiters who add me don't do an intro. How is that networking?

They want access to your contacts list. People are more likely to add someone who is connected to a person they already know/are connected to.

This happens to me with ad sales reps. A blind add from them with the default message.

I have to ask any sales people seeing this--does this ever work? Is it simply to get your content marketing materials to show up in my feed for nurturing? Or do you expect me to accept and be open to hearing a sales pitch? What is the success rate of this tactic?

Can you expand more on Oleg? Checked out his page very briefly and seems rather normal.

It's just the faux-inspirational tone of it that annoys people. Especially Brits, they hate that sort of thing.

It's always something like "I hired a guy nobody else wanted, and to everyone's surprise they worked hard and prospered."

Or "A guy made a bad mistake, but I didn't fire them because now I'd paid x millions for his education."

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