How to beat LinkedIn: The Game
theoutline.com
theoutline.com
Dying. Nice work.
Degree: Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A)
Majors:
* International Business
* A+
Degree: Bachelor of Arts
Majors:
* Farm Sciences
* Straight A's
Perhaps the surprise and indignation of a person who discovered that "Straight A's" is not a real major in Yale does have some comic value.
lol, priceless!
Lol, this guy is too much.
I’d pay good money for a “premium” alternative without the above issues.
Gary Vaynerchuk!
It took me a few weeks of unfollowing, unsubscribing, or clicking whatever buttons were available for “omfg stop showing me this stuff” to delouse my feed of all things Gary Vee.
He had a challenge this year on flipping items from free section of Craigslist, yard sales, thrift stores for profit.
What is this all pretty much useless? He gives away 99% of information for free (I've been watching his videos for 3 years). He comes out with a book once every two or three years that's a synthesis of mostly what he has already given away. Think of Tim Ferris' book Tools of Titans.
Do you think advise like work to make money so you can fund your own businesses if no one else wants to fund you is useless? How about figuring what you want and reverse engineering the path? Or to successful entrepreneur who doesn't find money rewarding anymore, that it's good thing, because most people never get past the phase of chasing money, that he can focus on what he wants and finds meaningful.
Sources? I suspect origin will be himself. What does it mean to invest early in Facebook? FB completed its last traditional round in 2006. Personally, I’m a fan of GV, but it’s weird when someone says they invested early to mean outside of an angel investment / funding round. I’d be surprised if he was part of a FB round. Instead like other social media entrepreneurs he likely picked up some on secondary market or directly from a shareholder 2007+ as much for the narrative as the financial investment.
Crunchbase does list him as Angel/Seed Round investor in Uber in 2010[1].
[0] https://outline.com/8HHZFF
[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/uber-angel--c76f942...
Anything pre ipo, they’re going to be the first 1% of shareholders if the company does well. And many times you can’t even buy into those rounds without the right connections. Early is subjective vs if he said he was an angel round investor.
He runs a really successful marketing company (https://vaynermedia.com/) a sports agency (http://vaynersports.com/), gives most of his content away for free on YouTube, wrote 4 books and is a NYT + Wall Street Journal Bestseller, and is pretty respected in the early stage Silicon Valley investment community (https://www.crunchbase.com/person/gary-vaynerchuk/investment...).
Like most things on hacker news, don't speak on something unless you know what you're talking about.
I don't really understand why most people use apps for things that are essentially websites that don't have unusual latency requirements. I mean, sure, maps and some of the other daily use things, those extra microseconds matter. I want to do more of it locally. But things like linkedin and facebook? the ios browser works fine for that (well, I haven't figured out how to make facebook messages work through the mobile website... but there's no way I'm installing that app)
then go to facebook.com/messages.
An engineer I once worked with used to joke that the best way to fix flash was to uninstall flash.
I wonder if this precedent holds for avoiding LinkedIn spam by just avoiding LinkedIn.
(Spoiler alert: it works marvels, YMMV)
firstname.lastname@company_firstname_works_for.com
For example, you go to a LinkedIn group about marketing with million of subscribers, post an average interesting non spammy article and nobody comments or click on the links. Nobody! And it has million users. Compare this to posting in an interesting subreddit like /r/sysadmin or /r/networking or /r/python where almost anonymous people give you an answer to a complex issue.
Then you decide to go premium, or pay for ads where you will find that the conversion is practically zero. Finally you apply to their API. Yes, you apply because they manually review your use case and will not approve your request even if you just want to retrieve all your connections with a simple HTTP GET.
I get that it's a reflection of current corporate/professional culture, but I'd like to minimize the amount of time I spend using that set of social norms.
edit: And before I became a consultant, I got a life changing job offer from someone who discovered me on LinkedIn.
An alternate LinkedIn game that I've done many times with colleagues (and which works better on the web/desktop UI) is:
* Ensure you have at least 50 connections
* Go to the 'My Network' then 'People You May Know'
* Scroll down and enjoy some of the ridiculous profile photos eg people at the horse races, photos with partners cropped out, weird off-camera poses, 1980s hair, etc
* Try not to laugh
Admittedly with the recent rise of 'personal brands', this game is more difficult than it used to be - yet still juvenile!
Also, what the heck is a 'thought leader' anyway? Isn't it better to be an 'action leader', a decision-maker, a publisher of some description; someone who does something or produces something meaningful?
Not all thoughts were created equal, of course, and there are not many 'thought leaders' on LinkedIn who were not self-appointed!
edit: fixed 2 spelling errors, formatting changes, added Quantcast reference for clarity
As far as I can tell:
Someone who very successfully spreads ideas they only partially understand with the inevitable oversimplification here and there.
Maybe we need a separate HN thread: who is the lamest ‘thought leader’ you’ve come across recently? ;)
I have no qualms connecting with a vendor or recruiter I just worked with, even if briefly on a single project, but after 6 years of no contact and 2-3 employers later, that connection isn't going to be useful for something like an introduction, if we even remember each other.
Imagine the LinkedIn’s-dream-case of someone starting to use LI as soon as they are old enough to type (or hell, to say ‘hey cortana’) and sticking with it nearly from cradle to grave. How many years until even connecting with only legit other people gets them over 500?
I have over 500, am pretty selective about connecting and I’m also over 40. Really what is needed is some kind of better metric than the number of connections anyway. Though one might ask better for who; it seems likely that it’s to LinkedIn’s advantage to hold the true graph connectivity closely so only they can profit thereby.
I’ve also been thinking for awhile lately that I’m just part of the problem here and that it’d be not a bad idea to rather be part of the solution by getting off LinkedIn, to try and recapture some of the value that they’ve been deriving from the data I and my connections have been feeding them. Again, another example of the old “if you’re not paying for the service you’re probably the product being sold” corollary to the more familiar proverb concerning the price of lunches.
Returning to the prospect of things like the ideal scenario for LI, I feel like the minimum age for joining any of these “free” services should be something like 30, so one has enough life experience to figure out that it may not actually be a bargain they are willing to make.
Hmm, I just realized that the shorthand I’ve been using for LinkedIn could be pronounced like “lie”. I think I’ll start using that when talking about LI verbally.
https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/13/linkedin-lawsuit-email-c...
Indeed, I know it's a very old cliche but I'm still not convinced there's such a thing as a recruiter who knows the difference between Java and JavaScript...
Bad part is when person attacked by recruiter/business hunter gets mad at you because you were supposed to be connected with this guy.
I don't get the hate though and again those that hate it I guess don't need to play the game? They already have maxed out their salary and or aren't in tech to make as much money as possible?
Or maybe they are the programmers who hate facebook and social networks in general; have no clue how to use Linkedin to their advantage?
What can L.I. do for me?
For job hunting, I prefer to do it on my own terms: linkedin has job postings I can view from a dummy account, then there's glassdoor, indeed etc. I don't do consulting/contract work so I tend to stick around companies for at least a year, the weekly job offers are just annoying to me. As is having to deal with connection requests from people I don't know or don't care about.
Salary wise I'm comfortable enough and not in tech to make as much money as possible, I just enjoy it: there's better fields for salary in the UK. I've doubled my salary in two years without linkedin anyway, it's not essential to have.
Then there's the whole security side of things. I want linkedin to die solely because it's such an easy source of OSINT information. I also do hate social networks in general, at least the implementation of them, for quite a few reasons.
What exactly does Linkedin offer me other than ego stroking which I can't do myself?
Also this whole attitude strikes me as a little odd... If you managed to somehow blag your way into a job earning 100k more you're either a fool for accepting such an underpaid job in the first place or you're not going to last very long in your new position.
LinkedIn is useless even for me, and I'm not making crazy bank yet. I have given up on it completely. I just wanted to use it as a tool to keep in contact with some old mates of mine. However, I keep getting spammed by recruiters, despite me having explicitly stated I'm not currently looking for another job.
Furthermore: when I'm going to go and look for a new job, I'll avoid all recruiters like the plague. They're a bunch of parasites who'll be the first to go down when the bubble bursts. I've worked with quite a few of them, and nearly all of them were completely useless. Worse than useless, actually, with all the lies they told both me and potential employers.
> Or maybe they are the programmers who hate facebook and social networks in general; have no clue how to use Linkedin to their advantage?
Jesus christ. If you start projecting anymore, you should point yourself at a wall and start a Drive-In theatre.
I tend work for a company until I can either learn no more there, the projects become too tedious or I get the feeling the company no longer cares for me properly. I feel I'm a bit too young and unexperienced (I was really lucky to land programming gigs given that I'm a biologist by education) to really start job hopping, given that you need to be fairly good at what you do in order to pull that off in the long term.
> Cool and pardon for projecting/thinking that it should all about trying to make the most money one can in their field. It's not always about that especially if those you work with are great friends.
Fair enough. I can understand why you would do so. I reacted a bit too aggressively, since I've too often seen good IT people being labelled clueless geeks for not playing the economic game.
But they aren't offering you a job. They're not even offering you an interview. All they are offering is to add your CV to a pile they already have.
For his Github, we just forked popular projects like jQuery and then ctrl+f replaced the name with his first name, like "bradQuery".
Surprisingly, we had many recruiters contact us about the popular "bradQuery" library. And we uh, had to play the part of a douchey brogrammer. It's amazing how far those conversations went.
It was really fun at the time, but also maybe a little mean to recruiters. They do have a tough gig and they're usually under the gun. Ah well...
I'm almost tempted to delete my LinkedIn. I turned off all email notifications months ago so largely forgot about it, but a friend of mine recently said he saw my profile pop up in his feed about a work anniversary or some other 'engagement' thing they spam people with.
The photo on my profile is from 9 years ago, and my job title has since changed, in fact most of it is probably out of date.
I suspect my inbox is full of recruiters shouting into the void.
Anyone have any idea how to stop this? (Besides an email filter?) is this practice even legal?
(Imho. Not a lawyer.)
Nothing before I had an account, and when I signed up I turned off all the spam in the notification settings and don’t get any either.
After numerous emails back and forth they eventually added to their "Do Not Contact" list. No emails since!
Probably I’m overthinking this..
I don't usually accept requests from recruiters, either. In fact I had this for a while as my first sentence in my profile page and that didn't stop them from sending requests. That signals me they don't bother checking your profile first, either.
Apart of maintaining my vanity URL, I don't even know why do I still have a LinkedIn account; I just don't find it very useful.
It was just a one off script. The next step would have been to run it daily or fill it with commits from the future.
I remember there was an HN article where someone made the Github contribution diagram on the profile page into some picture.
Can't stop laughing at this!
I’ve started a couple of lucrative contracts via LinkedIn and receive many offers there.
I make lots of money because of LinkedIn.
Thanks for playing, sorry to hear you suck at the game. Maybe try some cheat codes?
Some recruiters are slimey, but most I’ve dealt with in my ten year career are not.
As a contractor who has to jump ship every 6 months or so, I find it quite convenient to let the recruiters do the heavy lifting.
I literally have to do nothing - I just get offers in my inbox and just have to say “interested” to secure an interview and usually get the gig the next week.
Maybe past a certain level of experience you can easily secure gigs without it, but I’ve never really been interested at “networking” and if I can let LinkedIn do the job for me then all the better.
Granted, the platform itself is shit (and the iOS app is an absolute crime) but the idea isn’t that bad.
Edit - I ask because instead of the usual advertising model they have 12 partners a year that get custom ads, and there is no other advertising.
Edit: actually I did return to the article just now. Curiosity. No longer a cookie alert, though I accepted nothing yet. Either silently placed or not working properly.
I noticed a few ads for Hewlett-Packard within the article, but the cartoon-y graphics used and their placement within the article body just made me think they were faux ads that fit the comedy nature of the article.
It was only when I scrolled through to another (serious) article and saw the same ads that I realised they were actual legitimate ads.
I remember one recruiter who was really pissed off when I accepted her request after half a year or so, but most of them couldn't care less. I usually apologize first and then tell them politely how I'm "not good with linkedin".
Same for facebook. Unless I want to reach someone who prefers the platform (fortunately only a handful of people for me), otherwise no login at all. Unfollow everyone (no exceptions), like their pages if they send a like request (and unfollow in the same second) and just get out.
The internet is like a bottle. You can put the cork back in and noone will care. Of course this is a strategy that works for me, ymmv.
Not sure why Linkedin allows people to send 3000 contact-requests without throttling them. Any ideas?
I just ended a hiring campaign on LinkedIn. The stats were that it lasted 35 days, cost $704, our job ad was shown to 1001 people, and 233 applied through the platform.
I didn't keep exact stats of qualified / non-qualified people, but there were at least 5 people I thought were wow good, and another dozen or two that I wasn't sure immediately about but who were possibly really good. We hired two people.
These numbers outperformed their algorithm — they estimated that we'd get 40-60 applications for $600 across 30 days, and we got considerably more. I think our ad was pretty good and unusual, it was a condensed version of our team hiring page —
As for whether "fake social networker" cred helps... I don't think so. I make a quick checklist of things I'd skim rapidly for when looking at profiles to do first pass analysis. Basically, I'd look for any sense of ownership, service, or self-direction.
Things like genuine volunteer activities, excellent academics, leadership roles in student clubs are all obvious examples.
But actually, there were a bunch of things that are doable for everyone that I looked for, and which surprisingly few people do.
For instance, the vast majority of candidates wrote their profile in first person tense. "I'm a skilled marketer with X years of..." or "I'm looking for a job doing..."
Very few people wrote in any second person tense at all. EG: "If you're looking to hire a marketer and you have a great company, I'd love to help you develop your..."
I also saw only 2-3 profiles out of 300 that mentioned being happy, smiling, or service oriented. One guy didn't have any fancy brand name education or work experience, but he wrote something like, "I did this job with a smile every day and looked to make everyone I worked with happy." Okay cool, yes, I'd be delighted to talk to you.
Your culture will vary of course, but I was also impressed with people that had a mix of any kind of art/aesthetics alongside any math/engineering/analytical pursuits, and noted anyone who mentioned a disciplined history of sports, martial arts, or athletics.
What didn't factor much at all for me were the self-descriptions of jobs (I skimmed briefly to make sure they weren't a total non-fit, but otherwise don't really trust it) and in the Hiring Portal, you can't even see how many connections someone has easily. Or maybe you can, but I must have just parsed over it if so — I didn't notice it once.
I was skeptical of Linkedin for a long time. The "LinkedIn: The Game" thing. But it's a legitimately great way to put good opportunities in front of people looking for a new job, and a good way to seek companies doing what you're interested in if you're jobseeking. I'm legitimately very impressed with Linkedin excited to work with the two people that joined the team. In my book, a very good use of $700 and 15 hours.
My team is a pile of nice people with no illusion of only showing up on Monday for the money. The work environment is great because we treat the whole game as a bad joke. Corporate makes some nonsensical decision? Let's all play along, might as well make the game fun.
I like coding but there's countless other things I would work on besides boring CRUD apps if I wasn't getting paid. I don't understand the people that insist you should like work. My opinion, these people should get out more because if work is fun then you probably haven't done much else
We've developed an algorithm for ranking users similar to how Google ranks pages. This does away with spam & depends on reciprocal endorsements rather than friend requests.
> Why is the company setup in the USA?
And
> Peertal is developed by a global team... https://peertal.com/#/about
So good! I won’t spoil it for others. They’ll have to visit the sight for the full experience. I’m a beleiver!
1- I will personally update site FAQs & about section shortly. I wrote those points when we first launched the app back in 2015 but we're now up to version 47 of the app & a lot has changed.
2- The app is developed by Global team, we all work remotely from Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam & Canada. You can find us all on the map view https://peertal.com/#/map-view
3- As for your point about our code being vulnerable to spam, you might find it more entertaining to read our business principles that we're working on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jPV7sXWfMRle03U0E6RPdCDY...
If you haven't read this book already I suggest you read it https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13530973-antifragile
Feedback & criticism will only make us better & I can only thank you for that :)
1. You should take a look at your typos.
2. Collecting data like that about users without their consent and claiming that you can only "suggest" its deletion is going to get you in trouble once your project gets traction. Be prepared.
If an English speaking market is what you are first targeting that is cool too. I would recommend adopting Lean Startup and refocus on what is your MVP and product/customer fit, conversations and experiments.
I actually don't know if this is satire or not
Is it weird I was thinking of making a mastering linkedIn course yesterday? I think people would be interested.
LOL
The metrics likely suggest it's good for the site, but I'm also not a fan. It's very confusing for the reader.
- WOPR/Joshua