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I find LinkedIn reasonably useful as a professional Rolodex. I've never fleshed out a resume on it and I mostly just ignore emails that come through it. But, then, I haven't gotten a job other than directly through personal contacts in decades.

ADDED: To your broader points, a resume (especially for experienced people) has long been one of those things that you need to have and that people may use to roughly gauge potential fit. But very few people are making decisions based on only a resume, especially for senior positions. And portfolios, in whatever form, have always tended to trump resumes in certain fields. (Which can admittedly be problematic in software because some have portfolios they can share and other, potentially equally skilled developers, do not.)

I use it in the same Rolodex fashion. I feel it also adds weight to a resume. If someone can find connections of actual people at other companies that I used to work with, it validates my resume, at least at a high-level.

I've received countless job opportunities through LinkedIn. My current position, I reached out to a former colleague to join that company via LinkedIn. It worked well.

> Second, the analysis doesn’t explain why it’s bad that LinkedIn appeals to businesses and recruiters. Why is that a problem?

I will admit that I am probably an outlier here, but I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago once I realized that the only thing I was getting out of it was recruiter spam. No real upside, only downside.

It’s another anecdote - my current employer reached out to me on LinkedIn. Not a commissioned third party recruiter, an internal recruiter.

Someone reaching out to you from a company is a huge leg up over applying directly somewhere: you already know they’re interested.

I’m not sure how they would have found me otherwise. My personal website? Through word of mouth and connections?

It’s only spam when you’re not considering a job change.

My use case for having a Linkedin account is generally keeping track of where people I've worked with in the past are now, and checking out companies/people before I speak to them about something.

TBH I get the recruiter spam that I'm sure most get, but it's easily ignored, and not really that invasive.

I haven’t finished the signup and they started sending spam already. To me linkedin is a curse.

I’m that gai, no fb but LinkedIn is required if you’re not well connected in the valley and have to slum it with external recruiters.

> Personally, I know at least a few people who do not have a Facebook account at all, but they do have a LinkedIn, because that’s where the jobs are.

I’m one of those. I’m on linked in because that’s where I can connect with others in my industry. I don’t care what they do for vacation or their political views but I am interested in their take on issues we’re mutually encountering.

I’m also not looking for work for me but I’m on the lookout for talented folks and former members of my team. If they need a role or if something sounds like them, I can link them up

> The extra pieces of data you get on each listing can be really useful (although potentially not $40 a month useful), and there isn’t really another job website that can give them to you.

Could you provide example(s) of what the extra data are, and how these data are useful for a job search?

> give the Premium free trial a chance.

I did a year ago and was pretty disappointed. It might be my location or my niche, but it didn't really help me in any way.

It actually matches a certain pattern of uselessness from LinkedIn for my purposes (generating leads for freelance jobs). I get notifications saying "23 people saw your profile this week" - and none contacted me, so are you just rubbing it in? It would be useful if it tried to tell me something about why they don't ping me, but as far as I remember there was nothing of the sort. And of course the sales product is extra (and extra-pricy) and the ads are extra (and does anyone actually look at them?)...

Doesn't it tell you how many applied? That is the one piece of data that could help.

Just to add to this, I am not convinced that resume's are going to die any day soon, but in the meantime, linkedin has some excellent ways to show skills outside of the resume with their feature of people underlinig skills of other users. Why did the author of this post not adress that?

For that matter, depending on your field, you don't even need to search actively... just clicking the "allow recruiters to contact me" option opens a virtual floodgate... though I do wish I could filter by salary and location in terms of those contacting me.

Ditto. It's mostly Indian head-hunter types offering contract jobs in cities that I don't live in. It's gotten to the point where I used a modified Slashdot checklist to reply to any direct emails I get.

what is the slashdot checklist?

Took longer to find one than I expected: https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3060655&cid=41058673 from a discussion of using a sandbox for spambots in 2012. The beginning of it reads as follows: "Your post advocates a (X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam."

> It doesn’t matter that the LinkedIn feed is a stupid waste of time

Over time I found it to be very useful. It's my chance to see what's going on in my network and connect with 1st or even 2nd level contacts on specific topics like: events, product releases, partnerships, awards etc. It's very easy to use any of these topics as opportunities to approach somebody via the post itself. In 99% of the cases you get a response. So more than a job seeking platform, it is a business platform for the employed.