I'm not a developer so I don't get a lot of recruiter spam, but the ones that do contact me usually have very relevant openings for my experience.
I hate being on any social networks, and I feel like LinkedIn has declined in quality over the years, but I stay with LinkedIn.
The primary reason is that you never know when you are going to be thrust into the job market, and its the key place to find future opportunities, identify gatekeepers and leverage your professional rolodex when an opportunity to earn an income is on the line.
This is an extremely niche persona among professional careers, overrepresented on HN.
- Why can't I see the path to other users anymore? That used to be a thing you always got. Now sometimes even a level 2 connection page won't tell you who the common friend is.
- Why can't I categorize my contacts anymore? There's still how-tos about how to do this, and they for some odd reason removed the ability to do this. LI is a much more promiscuous network than FB or others, so I need to be able to throw all the recruiters in one bucket, people I've worked with in another, and interesting people who've added me with zero other contact in yet another. I'm happy to spend the time doing the labelling, but I can't.
The content discovery and discussion features really aren't very good relative to other niche sites either.
Indeed and LinkedIn are basically the only job sites these days so you need an account to use it.
I wish I could block certain employers or be able to tell LinkedIn to quit telling me about jobs from certain companies.
No, you find the people who are posting their latest work on LinkedIn. A lot of niche field professionals won't do that.