Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn
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Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous", i.e. I try to never interact with social media or news platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates, as I find this to be the primary mechanism by which these platforms try to suck people into their content machine (there are other mechanisms like notification spam). Most of these systems seem to target dopamine-releasing pleasure mechanisms in the brain, but some are built around darker psychosocial patterns (e.g. success relative to others, the feeling of adequacy and social confirmation).
HN is like a diet to my brain in comparison as it just presents a single page of news without inciting me to scroll to the next page and doesn't show any notifications to me either. Please keep it that way!
It gave me nothing much.
Recent 'x mentioned u r reporting to Y' was the turning point for me. Too much fuss for nothing.
When I see C on a resume with 0 industry experience I'm 99% sure it's that knowledge level of C which is nearly useless in real world.
One thing I found both awkward and fascinating was a job rejection from somewhere I never applied to or had any prior contact with! That was a strange feeling.
Someone internally recommended me for a robotics position. I didn't ask them to, but it was a glowing recommendation I was told. HR looked at my LinkedIn profile and concluded that since it mentions web (I do different things at different times), I received a surprise mail telling me I was unsuitable for the role and I should watch their company site in case webdev positions come up. But I'm not often a webdev, it's just up there for those times when I am!
From that strange incident as well as the types of approaches I get from recruiters (we think you are a perfect match for... our client asked me to write to you... oh, having now looked at your profile I see you are not... etc),
I'm inclined to think LinkedIn profiles for those with a variety of experience just confuse people looking to hire.
I haven't figured out a way to solve this dilemma and from talking with others at a conference, it's a common problem. The way it's done outside LinkedIn is tailored CVs, which focus on relevant items to each role and leave out the less relevant. But you can't do this on a big shared profile.
I feel like some internal miscommunication had to have happened but maybe not.
If you want to use LinkedIn and keep your sanity, I suggest disabling all notifications except the email notifications for new messages and then don't log back in unless you get an e-mail and you need to respond to that person.
Maybe ban it in hosts and unban when needed?
Recently I tried to get Twitter for the first time and my gosh what a mess that platform is. I only wanted it to follow some researcher to get up-to-date research topic but the damn app just have to fill the feed with "retweet" and other tweet I didn't even ask for (and I can't turn this off!)
If you submit a resume to a recruiter they can submit on your behalf to a company. If you submit to many in the same firm some will use the date received in order to assign any money earned.
Without this rule you would have people sending in resumes without the person's knowledge.
But LinkedIn is basically fine as a way of keeping track of people and potentially contacting those you're not directly connected to elsewhere. I go through my connect requests once a month or so and ignore about half of them. I ignore any messages trying to sell me something or recruiters that are pitching something that's not remotely my thing. (In all fairness, my profile isn't really filled out so it would be hard to know what I actually do or have done.)
I do similarly with respect to notifications which is a good rule of thumb in general.
My feed went back to being social rather than emotional manipulation or clickbait news. It was amazing.
Eventually the site lost its value for me because 75% of my real friends deleted their profiles, so it was an awkward/depressing ghosttown. I eventually deleted mine because of ethical qualms.
It has happened multiple times. I explicitly unfollow someone, never interact with them in any way, and then they again pop up in my feed after two weeks. Somehow if you follow too few people, Facebook just picks some more people for you to follow without ever asking you or telling you.
The behavior you are describing reminds me of the behavior that happens after deactivating your account, not deleting it.
I deleted my facebook last year so maybe things have changed.
My main goal was to harm Facebook's ad business, so I still accomplished that. As far as privacy, I've mostly given up on escaping from Facebook's databases.
Not trolling but I'm willing to bet that the majority here in HN, including me, do not know who you are talking about.
It seems like I would have to unfollow everyone, which is not a big deal for me (I don't look at the newsfeed to begin with) but could be problematic if you find some content useful.
LinkedIn desperately tries to get me to “follow” the people you mentioned which I always ignore however not following them still doesn’t isolate you from the noise.
It seems like everyone on LinkedIn is trying to be an “influencer” or wannabe thought leader posting bullshit motivational content or presenting obvious facts as something groundbreaking.
All the content in my feed is from my connections or interactions by my connections. Of course there is plenty of vapid "thought-leader" content from them too.
Actually I've gotten some amusement from watching a few former colleagues overtly try the "LinkedIn thought leader" thing. Kind of funny to observe the (sometimes very large) gap between what they post and what I know they used to do in their day jobs.
And hence the saying "Nobody is a prophet in their own land".
Maybe one or two of them. But I don't even know who Guy Kawasaki is.
Any post by a company with no logo is virtually guaranteed to be spam. I'm seeing them side-by-side with the real post. It's highly polluted by these bad actors.
The scraped ones are the bad ones. Bad formatting and categorisation, not kept up to date (the job might be expired on the original site but still displayed on LinkedIn) and you have to register and apply on an external site.
It’s quite ironic that LinkedIn is so against scraping despite doing it themselves.
Last time I was looking I used those sites to fil the quota for job applications per day that receiving JSA (social security) requires in the UK - whilst putting the real effort in to the 2-3 decent possibilities a week I found.
The worst part though, to me, is that it seems too often to completely ignore my search terms in favor of showing me "sponsored" or jobs that match my profile, even if they completely lack anything from my search.
It's a shame, because it has a few features I really like that I dont see in other job boards. The ability to filter by both the company industry and the job function is pretty nice.
Also, I can't stand the interface for looking for a job. I really wish it had a "Jobs since you last looked", because otherwise I just kept seeing the same jobs I wasn't interested in.
I am always wondering who reads that? It turns out that a lot of people do read (or at least see) the feed.
That brings up another issue, that employment background checks are increasingly checking social media posts for "questionable" activity. It's already daunting enough to see that I can't express my true self on places like FB for various reasons but now it's a factor when I'm applying for work?
I think if it was voluntary, and for like a PR position or other very public-facing, it would be different but when I found out this was going on I was relieved that I basically checked out of social media long ago voluntarily where I was already very guarded about how I expressed myself.
But you are right, seeing witch hunts on social media makes me think you shouldn't use them. I don't express a lot of my political opinions online anymore for this reason alone and am cutting on how much personal information I give up.
The advice also warns that, “The employer should – prior to the inspection of a social media profile – take into account whether the social media profile of the applicant is related to business or private purposes, as this can be an important indication for the legal admissibility of the data inspection.”
This means that while business networking sites such as LinkedIn may be considered fair game, platforms used for more personal purposes, such as Facebook and Instagram, are possibly not relevant."
I don't live in the EU, though, so I'm oblivious of the details.
1: https://checkpoint.cvcheck.com/the-gdpr-and-its-effect-on-so...
Honestly, can you blame them in the current climate? If they can find something that is seriously questionable (I leave the definition of that to the reader), anyone else can too. And no company wants either internal dissent or an external PR hit because someone they hired ranted online about something that's outside the scope of "civilized" discourse as determined by the standards of the arbiters of appropriate public discussion.
She's gotten incoming freshman kicked out of the colleges they were accepted to. Fired from their jobs. Businesses closed. Dozens and possibly hundreds of them. She's literally dedicated herself to destroying lives.
This is precisely why that although the 1st Amendment only specifically mentions government limits on laws regarding free speech, that free speech MUST ALSO be a cultural value that is protected and defended FIRST and the content of the speech judged SECOND.
People love to say "you are free to speak but we never said there's no consequences!!" as though that's some sort of ace in the hole. Well, sorry folks, but it isn't free speech if you are able to ensure I can never make a living for the rest of my life. The law generously limits what is illegal speech, and certain kinds of hate speech are included.
"I may disagree with every word you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" MUST be a social value for "free speech" and especially the 1st Amendment to have any meaning at all.
I do have good professional reasons to be on twitter and I honestly don't have much inclination to have political arguments there. If I did, I'd probably get another pseudonymous handle but even that carries some risk that it could be connected to you in some way.
And the degree to which this social-media-background-check crap goes - just see a recent entry from jwz's blog about this[1]. I had little idea things had gone that far already.
Sure, play stupid games/get stupid prizes but we are all human and go through phases of self-discovery. Turning social media into a saccharine, superficial cat pics trading ground where everyone is fearful of losing friendships over, say, well-intentioned analysis and opinions seems like a pathetic outcome for humanity overall. Not to mention how easy it is to miss sarcasm or other thought subtleties that can't be easily conveyed on international multimedia social networks.
I agree with others who say HN is a refreshing exception to the toxic mess that is social media, though.
A high percentage of which seem to be recruiters cutting and pasting words of wisdom, inspirational quotes that dozens of people "Like."
I don't know how people can take this stuff seriously.
The only wannabe thought leaders I see are all people I actually know who are taking other people's thoughts and passing them off as their own. Thankfully, I rarely scroll the feed -- I only use linkedin to receive unsolicited messages from people who just want to be my friend so they can sell me their services. I should really delete my linkedin profile.
Before lockdowns, I kept seeing this post, that boiled down to "employee asked for WFH, due to personal life issues. Now they are even more dedicated and can spend the time freed up working 8-6 instead, and we both win! Thoughts?"
On a slight tangent, seeing all the companies come out of the woodwork to praise WFH policies during COVID was truly astounding. I suspected 100% of these companies would go right back to working in an office as soon as COVID left the news. And that seems to be playing out right now. I've been working remote for many years now, so I know these people are totally full of shit. It's the worst sort of virtue signaling and pandering imaginable. Then they all switched to Black Lives Matter. These people sold their soul to the devil.
I personally found messaging to not be very useful or relevant, and I just couldn't keep up with the backlog of messages. If they really want to contact me, they can just email me.
Here are the UBO rules:
www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed
www.linkedin.com###messaging
www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-bubble-header
www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content--scrollable.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content
www.linkedin.com###msg-overlay
www.linkedin.com###messaging-nav-itemThere’s a similar network effect problem with Facebook, but it’s a lot easier to leave Facebook because you presumably can still message your real life friends in other ways.
With LinkedIn you can’t leave without also seriously hurting your ability to get in touch with recruiters.
That said, you basically don’t have to spend any time on it after you set it up. Maybe update once a year? So doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.
...not that I've ever had anything useful come from talking to a recruiter. The useful bits have always come through my existing personal network more directly, or through meatspace networking. I shut down my LinkedIn because I basically started to view recruiter emails as spam.
So in my world, having a CV with the necessary keywords (SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, COBIT, NIST SP 800/XX/yy/zz, NIST CSF, etc.) is a life saver because I always have headhunters calling me. I don't see them as spam. I just tell them to ring me 30 days before my contract/extension ends, and they gladly do so, and I stay working like this.
I don't spend more than 10minutes per month, and only to accept/ignore/reply to messages. I use it. I don't let it use me (apart from the fact that they sell my data to anyone who is willing to pay them).
Sure - if you know people that work at the specific company you're interested in then you can just get a referral through them, but if you don't then having a history of email contact with recruiters at interesting companies via linked in is quite valuable and makes it easy to jump to the interview process.
The job market is strong so we (devs) get a lot of email from recruiters trying to hire, and the recruiter quality can vary (generally employees of the specific company are better than hired firms), but in general I think this is a good problem to have.
I don't categorize the person you're replying to this way, but I've definitely seen devs go on a bit of an ego trip because of the recruiter emails they get and then treat them dismissively. A career is long, there's no reason to be nasty to them or cut them off - at some point you might need their help.
I dislike LinkedIn, but have seen very few people walk the walk professionally when it comes to influencing their own workplace to stop using it in some way. I have advised every company I have worked at against using external recruiters, and rarely has it been accepted (even though we always got a lot of candidates from the external recruiters who weren't a good fit with regards to either skills or eagerness).
Props to the article author for actually doing so, and I hope they will remember this and not use LinkedIn when the company they are cofounding has to recruit their N > 20th employee.
Email might be a neutral tool, but not using a tool like LinkedIn is worse because you're restricting your hiring pool to immediate connections. For all its warts, LinkedIn allows job seekers to connect with a wider range of jobs and job posters to connect to a wider range of potential candidates.
The answer isn't to double down on a "it's not what you know but who you know" world.
Most outside recruiters are terrible, we can agree on that. It's a two-fold problem, they give you poor candidates and harm the reputation of your firm by leaving a poor impression of you to them. I'm looking for work right now and had first hand experience of this recently; I don't know if I should feel sad that I didn't get a job that sounded perfect or happy that I dodged a bullet because if the candidate experience was so bad, what would working there be like?
That's the one that I used, thanks! I find messaging valuable :)
open "https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=__OBJ_...
Apologies to non-Mac users. OnMyCommand is at http://www.abracode.com/free/cmworkshop/on_my_command.html, though for beginners I will immodestly suggest my fork of the ReadMe: https://github.com/abra-code/OMC/pull/9/files
I'd really love to see others job updates there, or job openings. But mostly its just drivel.
For a professional community it is hopelessly clumsy. Also overpriced.
The discussion is generally informed, balanced and insightful . I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.
It's very simple once you stop chasing growth and engagement metrics. The main reasons the other social media platforms are cesspools is because outrage generates engagement so the platform is designed to encourage it as well as encouraging users to join and stay regardless of the quality of their contributions, where as here the design itself acts as a small barrier to entry, in addition to a karma system and competent, human moderation that discourages (and eventually bans) bad behavior.
It doesn't show you ads because it is not trying to sell you anything. You could make a point that the hiring posts for ycombinator grads are ads.
The fake kind of positive. I don't understand why people do that. They're trying to fool other human beings by pretending that everything is awesome, positive, etc.
LinkedIn is useful as an online resume. But the feed is mostly garbage. Fake positivity is the worst.
Of course this could be reproduced in other similar communities as well.
on hackernews, the first one comes as a side effect of the general topic and the relatively high level of discussion and entries, and maybe also of the fact that it's text-only.
the second one comes via the threat of downvotes, or, more generally speaking, the possibility of negative feedback.
This is the trick to turning platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn into a tool, not a vice. You need to curate who you follow. Facebook in particular has many tools to do this, from preventing their content posting to your news feed to unfriending them altogether.
Too many people just follow everyone they know, then complain when they start seeing content that gives them negative outcomes.
There's also this weird social stigma where people think that if you unfollow them on a social website, you can't be friends in real life. That's not true either! They're just really bad at posting content I'm interested in viewing.
The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers.
You just need to curate your timeline. You have the tools. If you timeline looks bad, you probably haven't curated it properly. If it still looks bad after curation, then perhaps it's time to take a long hard look at your friends and acquaintances!
Something amazing happened in the middle. I started seeing engagement photos and wedding announcements and baby shower invites, from the three months prior. All things that I would have loved to know about at the time, but that were systematically suppressed in my feed because they didn’t drive as much “engagement”. For a brief moment I thought I had saved my Facebook.
But then, I refreshed my page and the tide of low quality humor, cat pictures, and political memes came back in. I remember I kept trying to tell Facebook not to show me anything from LadBible, but no matter how many times I clicked “never show me content from this page”, literally the same videos came back. A week later I came back, and the feed was again overgrown with the stuff, like poison ivy.
These feeds do not exist to inform you, they exist to keep a death grip on your attention and they cannot be redeemed. At least, I couldn’t redeem mine.
Another thing I noticed was that basically the same video would be posted by a dozen (and growing) increasingly obscure pages, and my friends (and fb) would share from all the different pages indiscriminately.
If you block one obscure page, another one arrives to take its place within a few days. It almost feels engineered by design, to get around the "never show stuff from this person/page again" mechanism.
I couldn't be bothered... I shut it down.
Selection bias. You may very well have found the same exact, or even better, jobs outside of LI.
Other than that it only left me with jobsdb and jobsteet, both need for me to actively looking for a job.
I never scroll through the news feed.
It looks as if the site is beneficial when used strictly for professional contact(s), it's working as expected most of the time. The marketing side, which is part of its business model, is annoying. Groups used to provide valuable and interesting information in some professional fields. Now, not so much. When everyone tries to push their agenda all of the time, it is just noise. Despite this, some people are still surprisingly listening and engaging, so it still works from a marketing standpoint.
> I never scroll through the news feed.
That's the way to use it.
I kind of wish there was an HN like job site that was widely used in corporate America but didn’t have all the ‘content’. Just an online resume.
Extract the utility (eg. Facebook’s events and groups) without getting sucked into the cycle of shallow dopamine hits that is the news feed.
i'm curious what others see as value from the platform.
in my narrow view:
- i have a list of connections id most likely be able to contact off platform
- a feed full of virtue signaling and mostly useless content
- messages from random recruiters. usually the full extent of the interaction is: phonecall, redo resume and send over, ghost (40+ interactions like this last year with 2 interviews resulting)
i spoke with someone in career services and their #1 suggestion was to start messaging people i don't know on linkedin looking for "connections" to expand my network.
perhaps i don't get "it" but it seems like for some its incredibly valuable and for the rest its actually a net negative all things considered.
LinkedIn is pretty useless for the former--except as a Rolodex--but anecdotally can be very useful for the latter.
1. connect to all recruiters, politely decline with a standard message if obviously not interested
2. when I get a potentially-interesting offer, I reply with "that's all fine and well, but I make <absurdly_high_total_comp> now; do you want to continue the discussion?". (note: I'm not lying).
I used to ignore recruiters at point 1, until I realized it costs me almost nothing to politely decline and earns goodwill; today's junior recruiter that works for a crappy company might be in 10 years the HR director at a company you want to work for. Why not be in touch?
Over the years, this adds up, a handful of opportunities actually said "yes" at point 2, and for one of them I actually went to interviews & got the job (and the very-good-offer).
But, TBH, I'm far enough along in my career in this point and have a sufficiently specialized role (my current job had the description written for me after I started talking to the company) that random recruiting is unlikely to be a fit.
LinkedIn has been extremely valuable to me. The recruiters who contact me are usually from professional executive search firms and highly relevant, though I only get a few a year.
I think the level of relevance depends on the industry though. I'm in finance/banking and fairly senior.
Or is attracting these sorts of offers the only/main reason you're on LinkedIn?
I use LinkedIn to contact professional colleagues when I don't have their email addresses. I've met 95%+ of the people on my contact list at some point in my career, and it's easy to send them a message to catch up. That's especially useful if they've switched jobs and they lose their work emails.
I also sometimes search people I meet at events or job applicants to find out a bit more about their backgrounds and see if we're connected with anyone.
Sometimes when I'm researching a company or hedge fund for work I'll search LinkedIn to get some information about the firm below the senior-most executives.
It also lets me know when some of my colleagues are mentioned in the media or have TV/print interviews. I like following up with people about those.
I never post or like anything. My employer actually forbids it due to securities regulations. I had to give our Compliance Department access to my account through a special program so they can monitor & log everything.
1. My linkedin contact list is >300 people that I worked closely with over the years and all have seen me kick ass. I have actual email addresses for <10% of them.
2. I can browse my list and see where they are currently working. "oh gee, Mary works at coolCo, I should reach out to her because I' like to work for/with coolCo."
3. When I want to let them know that I started a new business venture, I can send them a message that is less obtrusive than an email.
4. If I give a prospective client my linkedin, they can see a) a brief summary of my resume, b) that I have a lot of contacts in x space, and c) that they may know some of the people I have worked with over the years. These all give me some measure of credibility.
By contrast, StackOverflow and Twitter have given me some really great work opportunities.
Could you please explain like what value you derive out of it. LinkedIn primary purpose is to build your professional network so that you can find your next job easily. It does not work out because programmers does not vouch for someone unless they have worked directly in my experience.
I like that way of looking at it.
I have to agree. I no longer even load the FB timeline. I have to have an FB account in order to interact with the community for one of my open-source projects, but I check it maybe once a day.
I...guess I knew there was a newsfeed, I just didn't know anyone actually looked at it.
I joined Skype/Microsoft, then Skyscanner, then Uber: all after a LinkedIn recruiter reachout. They were opportunities I did not know or think about and I would have never applied to any of them at the time. I was very happy the time working in investment banking, and had zero reason or motivation to change this up. I needed that "nagging" from a recruiter to actually consider what if I was building the next Xbox that millions of gamers will use on day one, instead of a trading system that no more than a dozen of traders use.
In hindsight, all the positions were a step up in professionally, financially, and from a personal growth point of view. I even learned about Hacker News when I was working at Skype, from colleagues. If it wasn't for LinkedIn, I might have permanently been stuck in investment banking and my career would have turned out very differently.
The content is a bit of a influencer shit show these days. Too many bored executives trying to promote themselves. I mostly ignore that.
Recruiter spam is another nuisance and as recruiters are paying customers, technically us normal users end up being the the product. IMHO linkedin/ms could do more to balance that relation. A minor nuisance but sometimes there's some valuable conversations that convert to me finding gigs. So, room for improvement there but for now it's not optional for me to maintain my linkedin profile.
I also check it maybe once every other week so it doesn't mostly doesn't have an impact on my life really.
It’s already delivered a lot of value to me. I know they use lots of creepy/dark patterns and there are a lot of things I don’t like, like the news feed or teasing features behind paywalls. But it’s still worth it IMO. I have got tens (maybe hundreds?) of thousands of dollars of value out of it without paying a cent, just filtering through some spam
While YOU might hate it, there are some business folks who search LinkedIn first. They want to see consultants/contractors who've been used by other people in their network, been recommended, etc. I know it sounds odd to us - I would neeeever search LinkedIn first - but I've heard from prospects who have, and they've contacted me on LinkedIn first.
It's never worked out for me though - the billable rates on those kinds of gigs have been pretty low.
Most of the world's employees aren't software devs who get annoyed by regular cold calls from recruiters. So often non-software people are happy to talk to someone who speaks their language and values their advice. It can even lead to new relationships and your initial product sales.
This is a really important point. Time and time again I see lengthy discussions on Hacker News around various topics (especially relating to advertising and marketing) where the consensus isn't even vaguely a majority viewpoint in the wider world, and it's useful to be able to focus on the big picture.
While I don't like it too much, when I consider hiring someone it is the first place for a background check. It saved me once from a really, really bad hire (due to common colleagues).
At the same time - I am an independent consultant, and yet - I am not sure if there were a single contract that came through LinkedIn directly. Quite ironically, Facebook was much more productive with that respect.
Sure, I get a lot of messages, but rarely about offers, I am interested in.
1. Look at a candidate’s LinkedIn 2. See common colleagues and reach out, unbeknownst to the candidate 3. Hear negative feedback and just trust it’s true (or at minimum develop a strong bias against the candidate based on hearsay) with no due process for the candidate 4. Reject the candidate / omit them from interview processes to begin with.
I’m sorry but that’s just awful. I have great references who would say positive things about working with me, but I absolutely would never want someone like you to be able to find them like this.
ADDED: And I hate to break it to you but companies do this all the time with or without LinkedIn. On numerous occasions, I've been asked if I know do-and-so because we worked in the same space. Sometimes I don't know them. Sometimes I give an enthusiastic recommendation. And sometimes I tell them to run away fast.
My point is I have “nothing to hide” so to speak about my work experience or my resume - but despite this if I felt an employer was trying to use publicly shared personal network info to track this down, then that is a horrific employer to avoid.
That’s why I’m not on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. It’s not just that the companies backing the platforms are corrupt, but that you cannot trust others to exercise basic human decency in how they consume and use the available data.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma sort of problem. If companies & recruiters are going to instantly defect (eg bad faith usage of your data without affording you due process) then it leaves individuals no choice but to also defect (abandon shared data platforms).
Well, THB, hard to fight with this strawman/framing.
Not sure what you consider "respect" other than "believe 100% what they say and write about themselves, however suspicious", don't consult anyone (even companies/people they wrote themselves in Resume / on LinkedIn), etc.
It turned out that I knew their last CEO. It turned out that the candidate made-up the entry (exchanged emails, was given a task, never showed up, or emailed or anything) and claimed a 3-month internship experience. It is much worse than having a bad opinion on an employee (in the later, sure - maybe just the relationship, or the project, didn't work out).
Hand-picked references are always, ekhm, hand-picked.
I am not a judge so - I am interested in finding the best candidate, not to give anyone "a due process". And while many people are reasonably honest (sadly, there is some kind of social approval for soft-lies on interviews) some may totally invent their CV. And you never know with whom you talk.
In terms of the actual social network... people use that sh? I've had my moments of Facebook addiction in the distant past, but there's nothing about LinkedIn that makes me look forward to logging in. My feed is mostly composed of inspirational quotes, people celebrating their anniversary at their current job, corporate brown-nosing, articles on productivity, articles about people quitting their job, etc. All generic, mostly low-effort junk. Let's not even get started on the recruiter spam!
Unfortunately, it we will have to wait for a serious decline of LinkedIn before a serious competitor can make headway.
I can do 10 applications in 10 seconds for various tiers of jobs and various jobs in different locations and get an idea of what kind of interviews I can get going forward.
But yeah, I don’t get more interviews. I just get to lazily spam.
My experience as well. Plus the UI itself is a nightmare to navigate. Even something that should be a no-brainer like the embedded messaging is confusing to use. And they keep adding "features" to it!
The good ones I consider worth my time and are basically the only value I see from interacting with LI. Seeing people's resume is a nice side benefit, but something like VisualCV or similar offer a better format.
As a social network? Nah, I'm old school -- the dark closets/water coolers of the interwebs shouldn't be in the same place as primary branding.
Having been a hiring manager in that space, I'm not convinced the format mattered more than avoiding the obvious overly inscrutable wall of text, grammar check failures, or irrelevant data points.
We work with recruiters and hiring managers to review the designs. The primary things we review are readability/scanability and visual appeal.
We found that a lot of our customers were having more issues with getting offers than getting interviews, so we have chose to focus more on appealing to hiring managers.
What it isn't great for is content. There's never anything remotely useful there, the whole feed is a weird corporate version of the self help section in a bookshop. A lot of stuff is written purely to get attention.
But I also don't see the tradeoff in as poor a light as say FB. What's so personal about where you work? If people can see what I've done they can offer relevant services, mainly they can try to recruit me.
Doesn't this apply to any social network feed? Most of the time people (or companies) just want your attention and LinkedIn is still a social network, therefore it makes total sense.
Also, HN doesn't have many dark patterns (or any?) and I'd not consider it a typical social network like FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc but more like a forum. But even if we consider this place a social network, comparing it to any of the typical social networks is futile IMHO.
"never anything remotely useful" is... quite a blanket statement.
Until you realize "wait, I don't actually use linkedin for much of anything. Maybe I get a recruiter that has an interesting offer (rare)"
In my experience, most people use linkedin at one time: when they are looking for a job, either to update or create their profile. Beyond that, the only people I see with any activity there are desperate recruiters, and "CEO of my own BS company" inspirational garbage content posters.
I would guess the reason it exists at all is that someone at LinkedIn figured out that, by its very nature, their site does not generate regular or frequent user engagement. What need is there to visit the site except to update your information occasionally or at select times when you want to make a change to your job situation?
But if you're LinkedIn, you don't want to run a site that people visit every now and then. You want users coming back all the time. More 30-day active users is better, right? So you try to create an artificial reason for them to do that. And it must be job-related, because that's what your site is about. So random user-generated job tips it is.
> I never used LinkedIn... hadn't even updated my profile in the 9 months since I left my last software engineering job.
So you use LinkedIn only passively, never do anything on the platform and then write a rant on how it provides you no value? Maybe actually _try_ to use the strengths of LinkedIn before you dismiss it?
Sure, let me think of a couple of reasons:
1) The network effect of the timeline is HUGE. If people share/like your post, you can have a reach of ten of thousands of people. I scored new customers this way.
2) I often post something about something I've done (new certification, new project I launched, whatever). This almost always leads to replies from connections from unexpected people in my network. The thing I posted might have struck a chord with them, they may see ways for us to collaborate, it might be a product that they need, they may have valuable feedback on it, etc.
3) I interacted with many people over the course of my career. I may have forgotten about those people, but having them all together in an easily searchable "address book" proves pretty valuable to me when I am looking for people with a particular skillset.
4) In the past I did find jobs through linkedin. Either by applying to the job posts or by simply asking around with recruiters.
5) I use LinkedIn a lot to find out who works where, what role they have and who to address when I need something from another company.
There are also counter points to be made:
- I have received a ridiculous amount of recruiter spam over the years. Taking all skills I don't use anymore (like PHP) off of my LinkedIn has certainly helped.
- Advertising on LinkedIn is garbage. We were looking for Dutch speaking candidates in Amsterdam. We got 0 Dutch applicants. All we got is 100+ Indian coders who barely speak proper English.
I definitely wouldn’t have been contacted by an internal recruiter at $BigTech that led to the remote job that I will be starting in July.
My LinkedIn profile is relatively bare. I definitely use it passively. It has just enough keywords to get noticed by recruiters searching.
I imagine there are a lot of passive users of linkedIn. I found the article interesting as I have been considering deleting my account too and share similar emotions.
This is the moment it became spam. I do still use it for job searches.
Did you lie when you wrote you have the ability to do a DCF analysis?
I realized then that it was more of a social network than a business network.
If I was a recruiter I would consider that a better form of endorsement than a random colleague who endorsed you because they expected some similar favor from you.
I mean, that's really quite charming. She loves you!
The first time Linkedin jumped the shark for me when they suggested I add the random dude I sold a couch too on craigslist to My Professional Network. I'd used a throwaway email and only texted the dude 1x. I only randomly remembered who he was after Linkedin suggested him to me because his first and last name rhymed and when he picked up the couch I thought his name was kind of interesting. It was so weird and sketched me out quite a bit as we were in completely different industries and I had no idea how linkedin associated us.
The second time I decided I was over used linkedin was when I was a pitched a data analysis of industry trends in biopharma by a company that scraped and analyzed a bunch of my current and former coworkers linkedin profiles as well as what conferences they had recently attended. It was so creepy and invasive and accurate that I just decided I'd rather not supply my info to be a data point in some hedge fund analyst's report.
I have a shell profile but don't update because I see no benefit and have always gotten jobs without needing it.
This is exactly what spooked me about use LinkedIn. That was many years ago, too. The feeling of "how in the ffffuu did they know about that person" was nauseating.
I do like to have a platform where I’m not constantly reading troll screeds (but it’s starting to show cracks).
I mainly use it to reinforce my “personal brand,” and give people a place I can send them to, where they can find out about me, in a format with which they are comfortable.
I don’t treat it casually, as a lot of folks take it seriously, and treating it badly is disrespectful (IMO).
> Hiring is broken
Yup. Not LI’s fault, though.
I won’t even begin to address that, but, as an older techie, with an enormous portfolio and experience, and mediocre “schoolboy test” performance, I have encountered this in spades.
I have not come across a single serious recruiter there for years and I closed my account 6 months ago or so. Perhaps it's still useful for freelancers.
yeah that's a real cancer... LinkedIn can be really useful, but it's flooded with so much corporate onanism that it just becomes painful. Hundreds of corporate climbers competing with each other to show how passionate and proactive they are about IT middle management
Even before that all of the local external recruiters I’ve found have been through LinkedIn.
Some of these recruiters apparently work for Amazon, which isn't unsurprising given their track record on other ethical concerns.
Worst thing, these recruiter emails rarely have an unsubscribe link or some sort of opt-out. I don't have a LinkedIn but I once accidentally set my email public on GitHub for a month or so, now every once in a while I get those kind of emails. I'm sure it's been scraped and added to some database/spreadsheet somewhere.
> But one thing I am sure about: no one will notice.
LinkedIn remains one of the largest and best data sets for the recruiting industry. I don't want to speak too broadly since my experience is limited to my current employer and personal experience, but if you remove your LinkedIn you will effectively be invisible to the recruiting agency I work at.
Many companies rely on outbound recruiting tactics since inbound is often too noisy; not having a LinkedIn would dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a recruiter finding you without prior contact (referral, application, former colleague, etc). And this is not just limited to recruiters reaching out via LinkedIn. There are companies that scrape LinkedIn and sell that data to recruiting agencies and VC's (and who knows who else).
As an anecdote, having recently complete a job search myself, I have to say that traditional inbound applications (e.g. apply via company website without any contacts) was shockingly ineffective. The difference in traction between self applications using my professional network, job boards, or recruiting markets (e.g. Triplebyte) was night and day.
Since the author seems privacy oriented, removing his LinkedIn is probably the right thing to do, but I don't think it's accurate to imply that there is no opportunity cost to doing so.
Why net positive? For my second start-up, I found our first customer through LinkedIn. After lots of attempts to source a paying customer that led to no conversions, one day a message arrived saying "You're the only ones in Europe doing this. We want to work with you.". No networking, no clever lead generation, just being there being found in a search did the job.
Never used it for jobs because I got these all conference networking and by personal email exchances or being headhunted. It also gave me lots of speaking engagements.
Recently, LinkedIn has had some issues with too much Facebook-like noise (people posting non-professional content), so I think if there was a more focused, mininmalist alternative, lots of people may switch. There is also the question of potential conflict of interest: LI sells to HR/Hiring functions and to people that already work for companies that use it for these functions. So if I was you, I wouldn't apply via LI to any kind of job in case you'd like to keep that fact from your current employer's HR.
My inbox is full of boring templated messages
"Hi XXX, #I noticed you work as XXX @XXXand it is why I send invitation to your LinkedIn. Looking forward to connect with you for open discussion about logging, monitoring, troubleshooting and cloud SIEM. #stayletsconnect"
"Hello XXX, I am a Success Manager of XXXHiring Platform. I will be glad to become a part of your professional connections and build collaboration with you. best regards XXX"
I found an extension to unfollow all my connections so I have no reason to stay on LinkedIn anymore than I need to.
I'm a hydraulic modelling engineer, and people in my field don't hang out on the internet together like software developers.
So when I write articles or develop some FOSS, I'll go to LinkedIn because I can reach thousands of other engineers doing the same type of work.
I don't believe I could get the same reach or engagement on any other platform.
I don't read much/any of the news feed, and only occasionally check in on it at all, but it's a fantastic passive job search platform.
The vast majority of recruiter contacts I get are not worth following up on, but that rare message that just happens to be the right time/place is invaluable.
I do look forward to closing my account again. There's a lot of "professional posting" that goes on -- professional signaling, and uplifting daily posts. Knowing the people who are posting these things, and how they go about their daily work lives -- it's a lot like fitspo/fitfam posts on Instagram.
And companies I have some back office knowledge of are flat out lying about their responses to the pandemic (No, you didn't respond to the pandemic by laying off any FTEs; yes, you did lay-off all your contractors on day 3; and actually, you did have a round of FTE layoffs subsequently but your posting army got their "I'm so proud of my company and the fact that they didn't do any FTE layoffs" posts out the day before the layoff round).
Glad some people get value out of it. Feels of our social times too much for me.
But it's not like I'm challenged by a corner case of their product offer. It's the whole creamy middle. I'm inclined to want out.
It was a weak signal that is now pure noise.
Of course you could do without Linkedin, but it makes your next job search much easier if you keep your profile updated.
Edit: it doesn't even work correctly using chrome without any ad blockers...
It was always lousy, but it's getting worse.
Lastly, I manage groups with hundreds of thousands of people, and I can't get anyone on the phone for anything.
After the countless hours I've spent on LinkedIn, I'm now focussing my energy on ultimately moving away from the platform.
It's so disappointing that I don't want even to log in to see the mess. No joke, this week, my assistant told me "that thing that's been broken and annoying for months was finally fixed." That thing was merely "approving" content in the group moderation queue. Some posts simply wouldn't be approved...
My strategy used to be "build a community using LinkedIn groups."
Now it's "do everything to capture the value I already created in the groups by directing members off of LinkedIn."
It gets worse.
You can't trust their documentation. And I'm not talking about the API. Even information in their help section is factually inaccurate. And it remains published. When confronted, the issue will get escalated until someone comes up with a roundabout excuse for why the published information is correct, but not practically.
I knew better, but I still fell victim to the building on someone else platform problem.
Never again.
I'm using Firefox (beta) and uBlock Origin too, so that could be a common factor. But it varies from load to load. Sometimes it's completely fine. So I don't think it's likely to be a simple rendering bug.
I've been using Firefox and uBlock Origin for years, and LinkedIn more over the last year. I only noticed rendering problems in the last couple of months.
(Plenty of other bugs. Search is unreliable, and the mobile app is not without bugs either (some buttons don't do what they're supposed to), but rendering seems ok on mobile.)
Sure, there are other great online job boards and even physical job agencies but I find (LinkedIn) by being marketed and promoted as a professional job seeking / networking tool, even the type of conversations you have with your contacts tend to be of a professional nature.
Yes, there are some fluff on LinkedIn especially when it comes to variety of videos or feel-good or motivational messages being posted but I take them in stride -- not everybody is same and if some people are social and have desire to share their social feelings with others, then so be it.
I think value of LinkedIn increases as you progress in your career and/or into harder to fill roles. I've now passed the 20 YOE mark in my careers and have moved into management, and it's at this point where I'm really starting to find value from LinkedIn. Yes, there's tons of spam ("I've got a great entry-level role for you!"), but I was able to use it very effectively in my last job search. Of the 4 opportunities I pursued through the final interview/offer stage, 2 were initiated by someone finding my profile on LinkedIn and 1 was a process that got stuck that I was able to get unstuck by reaching out to a connection at the company. The two "inbound" opportunities were both Director/VP level roles at companies I was interested in working in.
My friend is a medical lab technician, for quite some time she was job-hopping a lot and was able to leverage her contacts to find open positions which are hardly advertised anywhere. In that industry it is quite important to have good recommendations so keeping a network of people you once worked with helps a lot.
No social networking. No fancy stuff (they don't even use icons, it's plain text everywhere). Just a simple, straightforward website.
It's not perfect though. Doesn't perform that well and the searching capabilities are poor even after some improvements they've attempted. But during my whole career (17 years) I've gotten 100% of my jobs there, despite having tried some other websites.
I wish that UX folks payed more attention to cases like that.
Just today, I wrote an introduction on a "federated linkedin" that we've been working on for the last few months: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/early-feedback-and-pre...
Basically, aiming to set up a "rolodex on steroids" or a "place to manange your business network" without all the privacy-issues, recruiterspam and duplicated social-network-features.
We are in early phase, currently working through problem interviews and market positioning.
Secondly I appreciate seeing my childhood, college, and ex-coworker friends' careers progress. I like knowing where they're at and what they're working on, and a LI update from someone I know has sparked lots of conversations.
As far as content, we all know it's worse than any other platform. I roll my eyes at over half of the things on my feed. But sometimes I find good article shares that aren't just marketing, and occasionally there's an actually interesting post. However I think they do a good job of showing you your connections' updates from a few weeks ago even, which is great for not following your feed constantly like Twitter.
I agree it is not at all necessary for finding a job, and I don't use it as a normal social media where I expect interesting content. So I definitely understand anyone who decides not to use it. But I've found value in it myself, and I certainly don't think it's doing me harm. The author never explains what the "harm" is.
I think this sentence in the article sums it up:
"It doesn't really matter, but that's not a world I want to participate in."
OP wrote an article about deleting an app that no one thinks is essential.
- My connections list would make a potential recruiter (and maybe even the Linkedin Algorithm) be slightly more confident that I am who I say I am, i.e. I did work at the companies and studied at the schools I listed) because there would be people in that list who have shared that history with me. I make sure these are the only people in my connections list, apart from a few recruiters I wouldn't mind chatting with again.
- I can be discoverable professionally/personally by a google search. I don't have any other social media accounts.
I take some effort to maximize this value and minimize the other irritations and distractions. Example: I unfollow everyone I connect, so my feed is mostly empty. I don't connect with people I don't know or those who don't bother interacting in any other way except just sending a request.
Some people could go a few steps further and use uBlock origin's element picker to permanently block the UI elements constituting the feed and anything else they don't want to see. This way all you get is maybe a few emails a month maximum, and potentially good job opportunities. Everyone else just sees a quasi-official page about my professional experience.
44KB for a scalable, looping blog graphic. Imagine if more of the web were like this.
I would search a company that was interesting and then message an employee asking for questions about the company, if we had a good conversation, they would hook me up with the recruiter. Sometimes I would directly contact a startup founder with a pitch of how my expertise would be helpful to them (my field is pretty niche, so there aren't any job titles for it). I got my current job by directly approaching the recruiter responsible for the position I wanted. It escalated pretty quickly from the first contact.
I didn't need to manufacture my profile in an artificial way. I just put everything I did and know there. The platform gave me the visibility I didn't have, as I come from a small university. The single ability to find who works at a certain company, and how many insiders you already know has enormous value.
I’m there, but like the author I never really bother with it. Maybe every year or two I’ll check it’s up-to-date with work history but that’s about it.
I get a lot of calls from recruiters. I can only assume they’re cold-calling a list from linked in search results and I can’t think of a single incidence where the call has lead to anything.
The bizarre part is that I know several people on LinkedIn and Facebook (to be fair I haven’t signed in on Facebook either for about two years for lack of interest - if I haven’t bothered to call you in the last three years then I really don’t care what you’re eating for lunch these days).
On Facebook people post cat memes and talk about things they’re genuinely interested in, like how Janet’s friend Steve caught coronavirus from a telecom mast.
On LinkedIn the same people’s feeds are repost after repost of how they’re living their most Agile Scrum Synergy-driven Goal-oriented life.
As best I can tell, it’s a website for sucking up to employers you might some day have or hope to impress. Every post reads like the applicant side of a job interview where no-one even asked a question. Maybe it’s just me, and I don’t get it, but I just have better things to do with my time.
>> When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you.
A lot of what he says resonates really strongly. Fact of the matter though is that we are locked in this state of affairs. Specially if you are in a not-exactly-buzzing job market. I don't know if there is a will and a way to revert ourselves back to something more than a commodity. And I don't see a way to move forward to something beyond that.
If you kill off 90% of notifications, the inane "feed" and some of the duplicitous behaviour in trying to pilfer your contacts list then you end up with a solid platform for recruiters and professionals.
I have recommendations from people on my linkedin page that has much more merit than if I included such a thing on my CV.
I have people who endorsed me for skills, which when presented well can mean that people are vouching that I have at least some area of knowledge there.
This means that overall linkedin is a more standardised, searchable and credible source for my working history than my CV is.
So I think that if you treat linkedin simply as a 'live CV' then it has a lot of value, even if you do get some recruiter spam sometimes.
Isn't this true of your resume as well? What makes LinkedIn any worse than a public resume?
And if you don't have a good resume, that's totally fine, many companies will still call you in for an interview, however the companies that have a long queue of interviews, will use those resume for discriminating between potential candidates and there's no way around that.
If your online profile isn't good, then improve your online profile. Work on some public projects, write a blog, read some marketing books and apply that knowledge.
And on LinkedIn ... actively ask your former colleagues to recommend you on LinkedIn. People writing words about you is the best kind of endorsement you can get. Don't be ashamed of asking for it.
But that's not the value of LinkedIn. The value is being connected and receiving recommendations from your current or former colleagues. That's not something you can easily maintain on your own.
And if you want to be recruited, then you have to actively improve your profile and even to actively seek a job — this means maintaining relationships with capable recruiters that can filter out the junk for you, or even contacting the companies that you like directly. And in both cases having an up to date online profile helps.
In other words a combination of outbound and inbound marketing. LinkedIn can help with both, or it might not help, but passively receiving messages from recruiters is not the provided value.
Due to the supply and demand curve, software developers have gotten lazy, but marketing is a soft skill we should all learn.
Most people have a profile but few people I know spend any time on the site unless their activity fits the description above. Thus it’s never really clear to me what the point of it all is.
I used to leave it on "not interested in new work" because I already got so much spam, but then I flipped the switch in March because I temporarily lost all of my customers at once due to Coronascare and I had to scramble for new work.
Most leads that I get that I wouldn't get before are pretty high quality I have to say. I do see that once a new job lands that matches my profile multiple recruiters reach out on the same day for the same job and I see the same opening repeated several times over.
I don't understand why the job market needs to be so opaque.
> Fear of scarcity. Not having a job when you need a job is a terrible feeling, I get it. It's why I joined LinkedIn in the first place.
> Fear of missing out. Maybe some magical opportunity might trickle down through your network of connections? The truth is, if you're relying on LinkedIn to manage your network, those relationships are thin as tinsel.
> The corporate work culture survives on people's fears. If you don't play by the rules of the people in power, how will you make money, how will you feed your family, how will you contribute to society?
...and social media played on similar fears around social life.
Quoting Vonnegut: "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
This sucks, I am aware. But since people send fake / bullshit / impossible to verify CVs all the time, I'm not really sure what the alternative is.
So by all means delete your linkedin, but maybe instead consider just never logging in until you need to update your job history, once every couple of years. Or do delete it, but just be aware of the reality of how that may play out.
(cf Böll —he did work in statistics, so I think the irony is strong in this one— https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t... )
I have diabled all the distractions and focuse on the network though. I realized there is value in keeping in touch with potential decision makers and employers.
If you are an expat, live in a faraway place, lack community in your town, etc, LinkedIn could be valuable for you. If you are in a tech-hub, have access to lots of communities and potential employers, sure, LinkedIn looks useless to you.
> I'd go so far as to say that unless your profile is exceptional for some reason, it probably does more harm than good.
This can't possibly be true. LinkedIn is the go-to sourcing tool for every HR department in the world. Right now —even in the midst of a global recession —thousands of recruiters are trawling LinkedIn to fill a role. If you don't have a LinkedIn account, you are immediately disqualified from the pool. Moreover, a lot of HR departments will simply expect a LinkedIn profile. They like having a standard mode of comparison that's easily digestible.
> You and I are just another candidate in a tall stack
This is a false dichotomy. Having a LinkedIn profile isn't mutually exclusive with a portfolio, blog, github, kaggle account, stackoverflow profile etc. And if the recruiter is only going to look at your LinkedIn anyway, then how is your awesome blog going to help? I would go in an opposite direction, and describe LinkedIn as a sort of Pascal's wager. At worst it's a net neutral; at best you might get an interesting job offer.
> When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you.
Well put. It's definitely kind of depressing. But at the same time, I feel that it's possible that a centralized platform like LinkedIn can serve as an equalizing force (depending on its search/discovery capabilities). I suspect that a world where we are all using blogs and forums is much more siloed than one with LinkedIn. Information asymmetry in job markets is bad for workers. For all their faults, tools like LinkedIn and GlassDoor are (or at least could be) a force that alleviates this. I don't really have a final word here, I can see benefits to both worlds.
I mostly use it as some other people have mentioned - having notifications for messages, and ignoring the News Feed and most other features. Once a twice a year, I update my resume, and update my LinkedIn as well, which is not much extra work, but is essentially really low-cost marketing of my skills and experience.
Of the messages I get, some aren't worth responding to - the "I have a job to fill using Java, and you used Java once, you should apply" type - but some are from recruiters who are willing to build a relationship and place you when the time is right, even if that isn't right away. It's often worth taking a 30 minute phone call with them, or meeting up for coffee or lunch.
As a hiring manager, I immediately get red flags when someone doesn't have a LinkedIn. Its easy to create and keep updated, so to me it seems like they are hiding something. Not that its an instant deny, but it is a part of the decision.
Ironically I created a LinkedIn again after starting this job, I think mostly to flex on my exciting new job and measuring myself against my peers from college, while some small part of me also thought it could be important for networking. If you really want to keep in touch with peers from college you will find a better and much more genuine way of doing so. If you want to network maybe it can be a useful tool but I'm not sure stroking each other's ego is the best way to do that.
Once again I was coming to the conclusion that it's a useless and pointless platform (like most social networks, but that's another topic). My feed right now is nothing but cringe memes, humblebrags, and weird flexing. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I think I will delete it for real this time.
For me, having a LinkedIn is certainly out of fear however I haven’t had many benefits from it. I paid for premium for 2 months and didn’t get anything out of it in terms of getting a job.
I agree that Premium is useless. If you start spamming people you'll just look desperate. And I've not had a single job application go through with LI, I think employers just use it as "the new Monster" (post because you must show effort, then just ignore the thousands of CVs you get, as most real candidates will come through recommendations anyway). It's only useful to be there in case a recruiter calls with a good job (rare but it happens).
LinkedIn is one of the few apps I still allow notifications from. In retrospect I probably turned them on in fear of missing an opportunity when looking for a job. I can confidently say I haven’t missed out on any opportunity and the content notifications are mostly terrible. It’s so bad I’m considering following the author’s lead and getting off the platform altogether.
What does the future look like? I can only assume someone at LinkedIn is looking at daily active users and trying to juice that number with app notification spam. In theory LinkedIn is perfect: keeps business and personal separate, a dedicated platform for work-related everything after the Microsoft acquisition. In practice it’s awful. Is there any future where a social media company like LinkedIn could coalesce around something useful instead of chasing metrics (DAUs, etc)?
When I buy a used car - I don't publish a "I'm looking for a used car" post and wait for car salespeople to approach me. I go and charactarize what I'm looking for and then go car-shopping.
When I look for a job - I don't publish a "I'm looking for a job". Talking to the recruiters (HR people) is very boring and often counterproductive.
Contributing to open source and meeting and talking to engineers and building things is a lot more fun and rewarding.
That's why I don't have a linkedin (well, only an account for the API). It always seemed like "opting in to a lot of spam" without getting any value as a developer. I don't even think I'm particularly good - but great developers probably have this x100.
Of course if I was not a developer but a sales person my situation would be completely different.
I personally get no enjoyment out of development besides it being a way to support my addiction to food and shelter. I don’t dislike development, but it is just a job.
When I am actively looking, it’s so much easier to send messages to local recruiters with my resume and wait for them to call me (pre-Covid they always did).
I genuinely enjoy building software. For the first ~10 years as a software developer I was genuinely surprised I was getting paid.
During that time I dabbled in real estate, was a part time fitness instructor and personal trainer.
In my 40s, I enjoy just working out (home gym), traveling (pre-Covid), hanging out with my wife and friends (again pre-Covid). I have spent a lot of time over the past four years working my butt off at work and after work learning and gaining experience to prepare for (relatively) high paying consulting roles.
Now that is done and I landed a job at $major_cloud_provider, until Covid dies down, I have no idea what life looks like for us on the other side.
The transition I've seen people who enjoy traveling and hanging out with friends a lot is to developer advocate roles where they travel a lot to conferences.
I actually did that quite a bit last year (14 conferences which is hardly a lot but then again I'm not a devrel). Now I'm stuck with the boring parts (making the talks) and none of the interesting ones (traveling, meeting people and tech).
If you spent a decade doing hobby projects - what happened that made that "just a job"?
I got into exercise and fitness after college and my circle started consisting of non-geek professionals who were active. That became my hobby.
Once I had to look at a computer all day, I wanted to do anything else besides looking at a computer after work. You can’t imagine how much fun it was to transform from “computer geek” during the day to “outgoing drill sergeant fitness instructor” in the evening.
I have turned down two or three decent paying ($120/hr+) side contracting opportunities because I would rather just spend time doing anything else when I get off of work.
As far as travel, post-Covid, my job will require extensive travel. I should be able to get frequent flier miles for my personal use.
I completely agree and I do both of those. I used to do a lot more in open source, but had other life priorities take over. Meeting and talking to engineers, though, I liked that so much that I ran a physical space dedicated to it, and will likely do something like it again.
(Aside: The rapid shift to online meetups has been great lately - I've been to a number of meetings and even conferences with fellow engineers in countries I would not have realistically travelled to.)
However in my experience, and I know it's not the same for everyone, "contributing to open source and meeting and talking to engineers and building things", fun and rewarding as it is, has not tended to be a good route to paid work. If anything it's been a significant net expense!
The point of my comment is that, unfortunately, even for developers the "fun" approach doesn't work out everywhere.
Every super hero needs an origin story. Social media encourages exhibitionism, and gone are the days of quiet accomplishment.
The only reason I am on LinkedIn is just that every other person is on it.
And from [0] shared on HN yesterday, it will not work if just a couple of people move to a new platform, they need to move AND share that fact as loudly as possible.
And I completely get the sentiment that much of the rest is just somebody amplifying an opinion for likes, clicks or connections. But consider this alternative scenario.
If you're dissatisfied with your professional lot in life, LinkedIn is a way to vent. LinkedIn posts don't have to be of the 'please consider hiring me' variety - they may be somebody who doesn't have another outlet for their creativity or feelings on how a topic is being handled by the world at large.
I'm in this category. I use Li to show that I'm out here, alive, and have some value. I strenuously try to avoid the whole "thought leader" vibe.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
One of the things I do that I don't see much is to reach out and stay in contact with people occasionally. Sometimes I'll make a referral too. Networking works many ways and you have to give to get. (#givefirst) Sometimes just replying to the anniversary, new job, or giving a technology kudo means something to some people (maybe more so in a pandemic world).
I also like the points that a few other folks made that customers almost always look at the Linked-In profile.
I got my current job and wake up incredibly happy every day, and this opportunity only came because I glossed-up my linked-in profile and a few recruiters expressed interest.
Linked-In networking might be a terrible and sometimes cringe-y game to play, but trust me, you'll be glad you expended the few braincells it took to fake it when employers and recruiters start knocking.
Clearly, LinkedIn does have its share of warts. And if isn't for you, there is nothing wrong with not participating. But you get out of it what you put into it.
At the same time, though, recruiters find me there. Despite my CV being years out of date, and me ignoring LinkedIn most of the time, recruiters keep finding me there and offering me interesting freelance positions.
A co-worker who is also a freelancer uses LinkedIn more actively, and uses it to connect to hiring managers of companies he might want to work for. That way he finds work without middlemen.
> You and I are just another candidate in a tall stack—ie. our profiles are more useless information they can use to cross our name off.
That seems a very naive interpretation. Or maybe my profile is truly exceptional (who knows)
I've came across several potential good job opportunities in LinkedIn, and of course, while you won't jump hoops too frequently and most of them might be not great opportunities, I can totally see the value.
And those are not only through direct recruiter contacts, but also through friends sharing job posts (or candidates).
(Yes, recruiters still ask for CVs sometimes sigh )
I couldn't imagine not having LinkedIn nowadays, it's invaluable.
I've never used it for job hunting, but for the feeling that i might be able to get back in touch with someone i was close with at one point in my life. Basically, i just want Facebook without the feed. Linkedin admirably fits that niche.
Admittedly, I hardly use it - but it's the ultimate fallback for when all other options run out.
Apparently people post things there. But i don't think anyone holds it against you if you do not interact.
Also, it's been a way to get my next best deal via job hopping and starting conversations with recruiters telling them how much Im making (which is really how much i want for my next job). Either the conversation continues or I went to high and it doesnt. Now out of 100 times doing this I've landed 5 to 10 jobs over many years. A lot of the times I'm not looking, but interested in what the market will bear for my experience.
Personally, couldn't imagine deleting Linkedin.
I've been on LinkedIn for years and it did nothing but good for me. I found nothing but quality jobs on it, I stopped visiting job websites as a result, I'm getting approached by companies as a result instead of me applying. I don't understand what the author was doing to find LinkedIn "bad" and "more harm than good". I think this is nonsense.
I've been a nomad most of the last 5 years and everything I do professionally is over the internet.
Granted I have some social accounts(reddit) that are doxxable but mostly they're not... I don't attack people I'm just weird/can't really be me with my name. YouTube is almost borderline but thankfully as of yet I'm not aware of an easy/public way to scan YouTube comments.
I opened it up a bit because I'm looking for a job. It's still spammy, but the pandemic has really slowed things down.
IMO: LinkedIn is bad at managing spam.
All I have to do on LinkedIn is exist and it's led to some useful job connections and a few offers (which I ended up not taking).
Honestly, the tone in the post tells me this person is at a point in their career where they feel confident they can walk in anywhere and get a job. I don't know if I'll ever feel that way and I like recruiters reaching out to me.
Just don't read the News Feed, and LinkedIn is good.
What would be the downside of keeping a LinkedIn profile?
I'm not a huge fan of LinkedIn, but the most it helps me is with understanding the background of someone I'm about to meet (even if internally since I'm at a huge company at the moment), or at least see what kinds of jobs are out there when I'm casually looking.
From another POV I understand the criticism, it's been a while I haven't visited LinkedIn, nor have I updated the profile, and it's mostly caused by the "noise" I feel on social networks. But, it still can be beneficial for some professionals at a certain phase of their career.
“As everyone knows, LinkedIn is a glorified resume site. Nothing actually happens there (unless you are a recruiter or in enterprise sales?).”
This means op could not get any benefit out of an online tool, this does not mean nothing happens there. LinkedIn has been tremendously helpful to find my last 2 jobs. You have to know how to use it, specially the premium account. The market research aspect of it is amazing. I do not enjoy the social media aspect and the timeline approach. Stay away from that.
The second time? https://collantes.us/2019/07/29/closing-linkedin/
However, I still want to be connected to them, its useful for them to be able to reach out to me if they have something that aligns with my skillset, I just don't need them in my feed I guess.
Let's put it this way, in the beginning LinkedIn was useful - very useful, but as many commenters are noting here, it's now become something wholly different from what it started out as.
I deleted my account a good few years ago now and I don't regret it. And I doubt now that I would ever go back - even if I needed to find another job.
https://theoutline.com/post/5495/how-to-beat-linked-in-the-g...
I closed my account over 8 years ago. Sometimes a business partner of mine is bitching that I don't have a profile but that's about it. I am not very successful but the successful people I know (speak XX-XXX MM USD) don't have a profile there.
Linkedin has helped me find and secure new roles. I do agree that its becoming that sort of FOMO experience when I think about. In fact thats why I deleted Facebook, Twitter and Instagram many years ago, which has positively helped me. But, I do feel like its turning into that Facebook experience. I do often reject those random Linkedin connection requests from time to time. Other than that I just play along with it. Use it when I need to use.
Years ago I started "leaving" facebook by just: not visiting it. I didn't delete my account, I didn't explicitly posted anything announcing what I was going to do. I just stopped visiting it.
Now, it wasn't a trivial as that, because facebook will notify you, will email you, will send you messages reminding of everything I was missing out. So, along with the decision of "leaving" facebook I had to manually go and disable every way facebook could reach my attention. It took a while but it wasn't hard: I disabled email alerts (or just filtered them straight to trash) whenever I received one. For years I didn't have fb or messenger apps on my phone, or I would just disable them if I couldn't remove them. Now, with more granular control over notification I may install them but disable notifications entirely. In fact, I take a similar approach to email. While I do receive visual notifications of email, I don't get sound of vibration. In fact, my phone is in silent mode practically all day (I do have some rules that allow certain calls to breakthrough)
To me, gaining back control was about removing the ability of apps (and people) to digitally reach me whenever they felt like. And this is the core of my attitude with "leaving" social networks: it's about controlling when I want to actively use them (as little as needed). So, deleting account feels (to me) as I gave up having control (and extracting the little benefit of a network).
Also, it's not just about control how apps reach us.
It's also about establishing the social boundaries with friends, family and acquaintances: socials networks are NOT how you can get my attention. you may get my attention, but don't count on it. if you really need to find me you probably know how.
I still extract value from facebook/ig/linkedin on my own terms. But those companies probably get much less value out of me given their business models. I feel it's alright. In fact, I feel (maliciously?) better in this approach.
I still get linkedin job offers, and I do respond to them, probably after a few days when I feel like checking.
In my experience, if you send a connection request to someone, they accept and you message them, you might receive a response in 5% of engagements.
My best guess is that people are accepting connections as a pavlovian response.
[0] https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
I think it’s healthy to question what value if any the network provides. Plus what kind of personal info you give away about yourself. Social network news feeds are designed like slot machines with random awards, so that you login and check it every now and then.
It's been a proven strategy that works time and time again compared to the void that eats up bugs reported to large companies (if you can even figure out how to report one).
They do provide tools, at least, so you can see what other people see.
If you think of it as a professional and self-presentation network which other people understand it to be as well, then it's fair game to play that to your advantage. Signal what you want to signal.
I only "like" things that I actually like, but each time I'm conscious that it's a signal others may browse later, so I'm also careful to only "like" things that overlap with my professional side enough that I'm happy for people to see.
So for example I'll happily "like" things in (e.g.) open source hardware or cool tech that I think adds to a better world. Including stuff that may not be commercial. After all I want to work more in those fields, and I also want certain things to be seen by others for non-selfish reasons (e.g. better prosthetic limbs, say).
Doing that shows my interest in particular fields and may (perhaps!) lead to interactions I'd like. And I'll interact with things posted by people I like or respect, because helping each other is a thing.
So it's all genuine. But it's not everything I think.
If someone posts something more "social media-ish", i.e. like Facebook, or some controversial commentary, I avoid interacting actively with it on LI regardless of my opinions, because that's not what I want people to see about me in the quasi-professional realm. And as it happens it's also not what I want to see more of on LI either.
One of the things I like about LinkedIn is you can actually get your personal data (when that feature isn't broken - it has bugs too), and you can easily browse what other people can see about you, including your trail of likes and comments etc. Being informed about my trail, I feel the platform is less misleading, and in some ways less abusive, than some other social media platforms.
How could I figure out who knew who to give me warm intro w/o Linkedin? For that reason I'm probably going to keep my Linkedin until I find it unnecessary.
I get that randoms invites and messages are annoying, but the inconvenience shouldn't outweigh the benefit from LI replacing resumes for professional branding.[1] The 1 page resume is an obsolete concept. LI is like a living resume, with the added benefit of having employers reach out to you.
The resume needs to die. LI should replace resumes. Maybe it will replace recruiters too (where hiring manager reach out to you directly).[2] But it won't happen if you think like the author.
The flip side is waisting time by applying to job, and you'll get ghosted either way.
Yes, the feed is annoying. Yes, sometimes recruiters suck. But those annoyances should be tolerable considering the benefits.
FWIW, I got a very good job from a recruiter that messaged me on LinkedIn. Great companies reach out to me bc I use LI effectively.[3]
[1] Yeah, I hate the word "brand" too. Pro tip - figure it out and use it to your advantage, bc you certainly wont be able to change it. This blog post is an example - the irony is that the author's blog post will do more harm to his image than his LI profile ever did.
[2] Recruiters are not bad people. They're hustling hard just like everyone else.
[3] How to use LI effectively: buzzwords, appropriate profile pic, readable, accept lots of recruiter connections so it looks like you're popular and special.
When reviewing résumés for a software quality assurance position in a trendy sector, I saw numerous résumés from people with no apparent desire to do software quality assurance, but plenty of desire to move into the trendy sector. One was from a senior manager, who had sometimes supervised departments that included lots of stuff, including QA. His targeted résumé differed from his public profile basically by appending “& QA” in several places. After that, I largely ignored targeted résumés.
Speaking personally, the activity you're describing sounds like a major time sink, and doesn't align with the LinkedIn experience of anyone I know.
It shouldn't fall on the shoulders of a social network's users to learn how to optimize their representation on that one website.
To your credit, maybe you're getting contacted by well-off companies because they admire the effort and techniques you're using to boost your profile. If so, having everyone pour the same kind of effort into it would arguably help no one stand out, and only "add value" to the platform itself.
Speaking personally, I spent much less time creating and updating my LI than creating and updating my resume in order to target specific jobs.
> It shouldn't fall on the shoulders of a social network's users to learn how to optimize their representation on that one website.
Agreed, but LI gives me the option to do so, and that is exactly what I do.
> To your credit, maybe you're getting contacted by well-off companies because they admire the effort and techniques you're using to boost your profile. If so, having everyone pour the same kind of effort into it would arguably help no one stand out, and only "add value" to the platform itself.
It wasn't much effort on my part.
5-6 years ago, I started a website/service (also closed, now) at the intersection of LinkedIn and GitHub. Then Microsoft bought the former. A few years passed, and they also bought the latter. It kind of justified my idea (not that those two services are being merged), but nonetheless I had to close my little initiative.
> "Hey, who is this random person contacting me? What does he really want? I better not entertain the possibilities."
If you're on LinkedIn but you don't wish to meet new people, you probably should do as the author did and close your account.
another thing i have found is that some job searching platforms (like indeed) allow you to import your linked in profile instead of uploading a resume. then you can import your indeed profile into ziprecruiter.
so when i was looking looking for a job, the first thing i did was get my linkedin profile updated and corrected. next i signed up for indeed and imported my linkedin profile to it. after that, i signed up for ziprecruiter and imported my indeed profile into that. now all my information was correct and up to date across all platforms.
not only that, but there are so many linkedin to resume builders out there.
If you're just looking for a payout, going to a bunch of startups for 1 year and then moving on and collecting equity from all of them is an interesting approach. It potentially improves your odds of a > 0 payout compared to going all in on one startup and staying in one place for many years. But I suspect if you're optimizing for a combination of expected value + downside risk, you really can't do better than FAANG or a large unicorn. I suspect a very, very small number of people who have worked at any combination of various startups for the past 5 years will have outperformed someone who worked at Google that whole time. And that's before even taking into account the time value/liquidity of the public stock - even if some of the startups over that time period do go on to be successful, you might have to wait 5+ years after you leave to cash it out.
That said, LinkedIn got me my first job out of college and continues to provide opportunities, so I drop in once in a while to like colleagues' accomplishments when prompted. I see value in it.
Ha! I had probably an order of magnitude fewer when I closed my account in 2013. My motivation was their underhanded spamming of all my contacts with connection requests, but I guess it's nice to know I didn't miss out on anything.
I’ll be deleting my profile soon, as well.
As others have said, LinkedIn should have stopped as a digital rolodex.
I think I only use it as a digital Rolodex and it’s been helpful as that. I can’t think of another site as useful for that purpose.
LinkedIn is also buggy in many areas too. Search is wild - search for the same thing twice and get completely different numbers of results. This is good to know, when a job search notification shows 5 results, it's not real. Just click the search button and get 100 the second time for the same search!
But the fact it's an SPA works really well I think. Clicking around within LinkedIn seems much faster than the initial load, and things like open message windows keep their state. I like that. You can still right-click just about everything that looks like it could be a link to open a new tab or save the link. So I think they've done a great job of SPA.
It's a shame it's so buggy that I have to reload it from time to time anyway. LinkedIn is probably the only company where I use a product with so many obvious low-hanging-fruit bugs I'd actually consider working there just for the satisfaction of fixing them.
(I previously deleted my account and then waited 12 months to see if anyone noticed. No one did. I did have to create a new one in order to create a company page.)
Recently a recruiter who didn't get a response on LinkedIn itself wrote an email, which began:
I'm writing because I found your Hacker News profile from your LinkedIn...
That just felt right somehow.
As always YMMV.
My solution to all social media is treat it as a rolodex and not GAF about it the rest of the time.
Why do people blame these companies for being the problem when there's an element of personal responsibility involved?
It's a privacy nightmare basically.
This is exactly the problem that sparked us starting https://otta.com - we speak to job seekers on a daily basis and the overwhelming feedback we hear is that LinkedIn really doesn't help people. We're doing our best to change that - just in London right now, and just for tech companies, but soon (hopefully) everywhere.
I think Linked in helps more if you are experienced and have a decent network - it probably not going to help a new graduate or some one looking for a second job.
The agencies using it can be a bit variable, pre covid-19 I was pitched a Grade 7/6 Job in the UK civil service and the agency seemed clueless - Grade 7 and 6 are very senior positions Think the sort of Gig Mat Cuts Has
And yet recruiters keep finding me through LinkedIn, and I keep getting freelance positions through those recruiters. I put very little effort in finding new positions, but they're always available.
A coworker on my current project who is also a freelancer is much more active. He tries to contact people in companies he wants to work for and gets interesting jobs that way without having recruiters as middlemen. That takes more effort but saves money. Maybe I should do that too.
Maybe it's different for freelancers. Maybe the Dutch market is different from the author's market. I'm no fan of LinkedIn, but it seems to work for me.
Great job.
This goes for any social networking site btw.
The bad: I didn't really understand what to post there
The ugly: I got a bunch of messages by recruiters who didn't read my profile and offered me crap.
After being on the site for many years, I don't think it helped me find a job or attract recruits.
I'm one of the founders and it's a super simple web resume builder. You can import your LinkedIn profile, pick a resume design that you like and publish it as a responsive website, in minutes.
We make money by charging for our product, not selling your personal information.
And what's wrong with that ?
Is this true? Does anyone care about this? Serious question.
Should I close my read-only Twitter account as well?
I’ve found LinkedIn useful for learning about where previous colleagues are now working. I’ve also found it useful as a quick way to learn about people’s past experiences that might be relevant to the issue at hand.
I have turned off all notifications and only visit it when I need something. That is normally to add a contact to my Rolodex or to look someone up I’m meeting with.
The way I looked at it when I deleted my account is that having LinkedIn means having another inbox that attracts a disproportionate amount of crap. It got to the point where I turned off notifications and treated my inbox like a spam folder. By deleting my profile, people who actually do have something to tell me aren't under the false impression that they can contact me on LinkedIn, and people that just want to spam me generally don't make the effort to track down my email (which I make pretty easy to do).
That is false; one thing that happens on LinkedIn is that you can find people from your distant past.
That said, it got me two jobs, so it's not ALL bad.
I remember to close all my social networks when my daughter was two years old, about 12 years ago.
I will never know what I missed.
The only obvious difference that's made to my life is that I never get emails from my "CEO" asking me to drop what I'm doing and buy him some iTunes gift cards. Which is something my LinkedIn-using colleagues get fairly regularly.
LinkedIn is a huge centralised database of phishing targets. Whatever upside it might provide to the world, that's a pretty big downside.
The funny meta-thing about his post, is that the content he feels adds 0 value, is in fact his own post. He is literally making a post about a tool he doesn't use. It's the equivalent of a person making a blog post about a tv series they don't watch but have seen the trailer for; no actual value to add to the discussion about the topic.
This is valueless content.
This is an unpopular and very interesting situation, could you write a blog post about it ?
LinkedIn may be an online professional network, but that doesn't mean there are no other means of "transportation". I take care of my network by meeting my professional peers a lot. I talk with the same recruiters normally, both in a hiring capacity and a candidate capacity. I know them, they know me. I stay in touch with my old colleagues, some who are now CEOs, others who are programmers, and even more who are still where I met them - some of them I even consider friends - most of the valuable connections.
In the technology community, you can go to many organized events. I participate in both React, .NET, and cloud meetups, and now I co-host some as well.
Your network is so much more than LinkedIn, it's a relationship with actual human beings, which is where LinkedIn often falls short. It does, however, work great as a contact book of "oh shit, I wonder where he is now and how can I get in touch with him" - and then you go meet them. In person. All jobs of significance I have been considered for, and most likely most of what I will be considered for in the future is based on my actual relations with people. "Talk to this guy, I worked with him on X" - it's the same way I hire great people. LinkedIn is a showcase for your resume, what you've done, who you are affiliated with, and a professional point of contact, but it's by no means "your professional network".
In Germany there's XING which I think has a similar purpose (professional relationships, both for contractors as well as employees) and is relatively popular AFAICT. I'm not on XING, but what I heard about it from colleagues is that when IT contracting was at its height not so long ago they got several "cold" contacts per week from desperate people (MBA types, mostly) that have neither customers nor projects nor professional experience. Don't know if this is representative of XING; it might actually be not half-bad. But then the way the consulting business works here is that customers rarely approach freelancers directly and use agencies instead.
The fact someone is choosing not to use LinkedIn means they're not getting value from it. Why is that? How could LinkedIn fix that? Are they using an alternative?
If you're more curious about the reasons behind events you can learn a lot.
I disagree. It poses several questions about the value of LinkedIn. And it spurred a discussion. If anything your comment really adds nothing here.. (Maybe some discussion, but a useful one?)
I think it was a waste of time.
I also started to think in this direction more the last few years: If we as a socity would be better of creating less but better, we would not have facebook or linkedin feets full of waste. We would have perhaps 10 hn articles per day, 10 world news, 1-2 local news and thats it.
I would have the rest of my time 'free' of the burden of trying to make sure i'm not missing something.
Every idiot thinks something created and shared is worth while while i'm often enough think 'oh now one would care for something like this' or 'a few people might wanna read it but wouldn't act on it anyway'.
I also started to comment less. It costs time, i don't have the feeling that a lot of peole read comments and honestly, i had plenty of discussions which just stoped and there was never ever any feedback (besides 'likes' like wtf.) on 'was that helpful'.
Did i add value to our society or was it purely for entertainment?
Broadcasts would be much more honest too:
“Hello everyone. There’s a pandemic sweeping the globe, which is unfortunate, but also cancer outcomes are the best they’ve ever been. Overall things are getting better.
Enjoy your weekend and we’ll be back on Monday. If something genuinely important changes. Otherwise, take a walk and maybe get some fresh air instead.
Clint Brockenheimer, Channel 1 news”
The New York Informer
Sunday teller
As with the barrier to entry to any tech-oriented platform (any dev remember their first time posting on StackOverflow?), there is an underlying fear of rejection, or even worse, providing no value whatsoever. I've lurked on HN for years, but only recently have actually started engaging.
Not sure if anyone else feels those kind of emotions, but the article did mention that many people are living in fear -- regardless of the external stimuli is that causes that fear. It's not any different than engaging with communities like SO, HN, forums, etc.
Also like you, I doubt this adds any value beyond giving a couple minutes to type this response to a comment buried halfway down the discussion page on the post. It definitely entertained, and more so distracted me, for the duration of this experience.
For that, I thank you.
IMO a more accurate analogy would be a person dropping a tv series in between, in which case they can indeed add value to the discussion - why they dropped the series etc.
Let me know if you want to have a phone call some time about considering going car-free.
Later I started https://bikes-as-transportation.com/
(spoiler: I also later got married to a woman with a car, so I end having easy access to a car anyway.)
These days our city is full of carsharing cars so should I ever need a car to carry something heavier, I only need to walk a few blocks to find the nearest car that I can borrow. Costs about a half of what I'd pay for a taxi, so it's not cheap, but still cheaper than owning a car and not using it.
Social media is a waste of time, the news feed is enraging, people put on a fake perfect persona, FOMO, insecurity, inauthentic connection, signaling, controversy, drama, dopamine, addiction. Unplug yourself, use analog tools, read books, have real life fun and deep bonding with your partner, friends and family etc.
It's all true, but we've heard it countless times and read it in the lifestyle columns of magazines all the time.
Indeed I think this is the next generation of self promotion and branding. You are above the plebs and the uniform little boxes that people package themselves into. You cannot be represented as a row in a database table, you are unique and special, you think outside the box, you go your own way, know what you want, think critically and independently and can refuse lowly temptations. You are not under the powers of the corporate machine. You delete your social media.
I'm unsure if this is meant to be sarcasm. Do you actually believe the next generation of self-promotion will be offline, in-person as kind of a reform movement or backlash? The optimistic side of frequently likes to entertain this idea but my cynical side thinks the dopamine addiction is only getting stronger. That cynical view is mostly informed by observations of the number of folks I see on sidewalks staring and scrolling at their phones as they walk.
It was also typical in the 90s, when people always announced that they are now really really done with a forum, ragequit and then kept coming back.
The point is, HN likes this type of posts because it's contrarian and quirky. Tons of people don't use linkedin or just have a crude profile and never log in.
/s
Your comment holds some truth, but I found the article interesting.
Likewise, Linkedin isn't needed the majority of the time, until you need it - i.e. you're faced with having to find a new job in an industry where the right referral can translate directly into a job with higher income.
That's not valueless.
I've never worked for someone that didn't love me for anything longer than a weekend gig. Was amazing in school all the way into the #1 ranked grad school for my major and when I got there... I realized even my assigned "mentor" did not care for me. I spilled my soul to her, after experiencing so much contempt and hate, and she had no fucking reaction whatsoever. No advice, no... nothing! These hateful fucks wanted over $60,000 a year to give me no advice, consolation, compassion, NOTHING!
After recovering from that, as a last ditch effort to obtain a career where I could afford a family I tried get a CS degree at the local uni that I could afford.
It's a complete shitshow of no standards and professors would open their lectures with emails from graduates explaining how employers saw a degree from this school as worse than NOTHING. The "weed out" filter test after 2 years was such a fucking joke they gave us 3 hours and I aced it in 10 minutes and then resigned myself to taking a nap for the next 2 hours and 50 minutes until someone asked to leave and was let out so I learned even the bluff about not letting people out early so that they could message people still taking the exam was bullshit, too.
There were over 80 people taking CS in my cohort... I was one of only 3 that seemed competent, top guy, only one that actually stayed in CS was a sociopath who was constantly hacking and stealing from the university and local businesses and expecting to be lauded despite taking his plunder. Then there was a gal who decided to stick with mathematics and give up on the creepy CS department, prolly most of all for the creepy lecturer trying to get a Ph.D. talking about how the only real way to get money he could manage with the knowledge he was teaching us was with his porn sites, and how his personal hero is Howard Stern. After he was already under investigation for gender bias, she decided to stop trying in CS and just focus on math. So during the final exam, this guy realizes that there are only 3 females in this class of about 85 because any female willing and able to learn all this would be accepted and paid to go to far better schools... he's been told that if the grades of the 82+ guys are much better than the 3 gals he will lose his job and Ph.D. spot... and then as he walks the room during the final he walks right to her and sees she hasn't studied and doesn't give a fuck because she finally decided on Math and not CS.
So he panics and starts just outright literally in earshot of the whole room telling her every answer and begging her to write it down on her test.
That's when I decided to nope out of the major. They offered me a job Ph.D. spot and I went back to my janitor job for people who love me.
When they die I have no idea what I'll do. My best friend is someone ten years older than me that I've never been within 2500 miles of, and sometimes he really creeps me out, but I have no one else to voice chat with or watch movies with IRL or online.
At work... lately I mostly think about how I'm drowning in sweat having to wear a mask all the time but also I often feel glad I'm not working on some tech thing I oppose, or having to hear hate speech against me like at school...
The bad thing is not being able to have an IRL relationship, much less family, but that's due to a ton of factors... in the US, it was guaranteed by NSC 68, which reacted to the Soviet, communist goal of full employment of both men and women with trying to keep women in the workforce permanently (for the ultimate purpose of winning an arms race with the USSR) as they had been forced into it during WWII. According to this plan, the US dollar was devalued so that men AND women would have to work an hour each to obtain roughly the same relative purchasing power as one hour of work by a man before.
If someone wanted to keep goosing up the stock market and employment numbers further by various extrapolations upon this theme... anyone see where I'm going?
It's not the hiring that is broken, but the tech industry itself. There is nothing that compares in how low a measurable value is priced in any other domain. It seems that the less you can put a price on something, the more people speculate that it is worth. There is probably some fancy economical law to follow, idk.
I too don't get the animosity for LinkedIn. For me too all the career defining moves happened because of LinkedIn.
Never ever going to close my account.