LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
divinations.substack.com
divinations.substack.com
Previously I would spend hours trawling job boards, composing cover letters and get excited at the prospect of one successful reply. It was soul destroying.
Now I can construct a post, complete with trendy hashtags, and passively watch _hundreds_ of recruiters reach out to me in 24hrs. Now I can sit with a coffee and easy filter out the crap. It's taken some time to build up the 8,000+ contacts, mostly of senior tech people amd recruiters.
Every job in the last 5yrs has been through LinkedIn and due to the ease by which I could change jobs, salary has sky rocketed too.
Maybe I am in the minority of people who use it as a tool this way?
Edit: I also have an emoji as the first "letter" in the string of my first name. This instantly allows me to visually/programmatically filter out genuine "human" messages from bots. I also reply to these messages, as let's be honest, a human took time to compose the message to me. A quick "thank you" (one button click!) goes a long way.
It helps if you have a "weak ties" connection to them, even if you don't really know them: you may be connected via someone else (in which case, asking for an introduction will almost certainly work), you may both be alumni of an org or institution, you may both have attended the same event (this works in a sort of 'missed connections' fashion), and so on.
One somewhat counterintuitive tip: you don't need to connect to a lot of hyper-connected folks, probably just one or two that are actually in your industry. Intros through indiscriminate folks like that tend to be disregarded unless there is a highly targeted ask simply because most of the folks they are connected to don't actually have an existing relationship or particular affinity with them. Similarly, so called "LinkedIn Open Networkers" that accept all incoming connection requests are also something of a red flag, unless you are actually in an industry like recruiting, marketing, or PR, where a 'reach' numbers game is a viable strategy.
Once your network starts growing, you'll start to get more incoming requests from folks trying to do the same thing you are. Don't accept the ones that don't make any sense (eg. If you are a medical software dev in the Midwest, feel free to decline that random connection request from an accountant in Azerbaijan), or you'll start to get a lot more of those (because folks who connect to lots of random folks tend to be mostly connected to others who do the exact same thing).
Absolutely reject and report requests that are outright spam. If you aren't sure, you can reply to ask what led them to try and connect with you before you make the decision to accept ignore or reject the request (saying "Hi, thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry, but I have a terrible memory, and I don't recognize your name or profile image. Did we meet at an event last year?" will work without being insulting).
It all boils down to this: if you want to have a large but high quality/relevance network, you need to be prolific but not indiscriminate in making connection requests.
Have you ever tried declaring yourself a thought leader? What kind of mileage does that get you?
And I still don't love it, but I have to admit it's got a place in the strategy. Posting a job req with some focused hashtags seems to help get more responses. Posting a few industry-appropriate articles does seem to help keep our company in folks' minds.
In an ideal world every company I work for will be so amazing and so well known that I don't have to sell it to folks because the right folks are coming straight to us. Or that all of my friends and all of their friends will magically be capable of switching jobs to come build a new team with me whenever I need to grow.
But reality doesn't work like that, and so things like LinkedIn end up being table stakes. It isn't the whole of my recruitment strategy, but certainly it's a functional part.
It's a negative signal. Go build something instead.
It's one of the biggest blocks I see from developers who are otherwise qualified for positions like that but they don't know how to advocate for themselves.
There is a games element to hiring and you have to put aside the thoughts of it being gross because at the end of the day it's a major component in earning more which for most people is one of the reasons they work.
I say this as a dev myself and not a recruiter.
It becomes very quickly a real-life game of "would you do X for Y money? ".
Saying "I wouldn't use a linked in hashtag for $10k/year (25k a year? 100k a year?) " is a pretty strong principle.
This obviously is a step beyond self promotion. At this point I’m already reviewing someone’s resume. So the question is perhaps how would you get noticed to begin with? How do you market yourself? I don’t know. Work? No better form of self promotion than doing a good job.
What don't you like about it?
> how would you get noticed to begin with?
- - -
Thanks btw for writing about how you think about GitHub PR discussions etc.
Btw i didn't post at all to LinkedIn at least not yet
Not sure. Something just seems off. Perhaps it's because you have a category of not-very-close friends on LinkedIn promoting themselves really hard and the correlation between people self-promoting in that very "LinkedIn fashion" and being a really big asshat seems strong. Anecdotal, but still.
I read it as: "Assuming hashtagging and self-promotion on LinkedIn was effective, I still would not do it no matter the money", and that's the interpretation I replied to - perhaps erroneously.
In a broader discussion - it's all about the fit. I don't think there's a single advice, action, characteristic, attribute, or effort, that won't increase your chances with X% of employers/recruiters/HR and decrease your chances with Y% of employers/recruiters/HR.
[FWIW, I personally have Linked In, it's my online resume, but I don't interact with platform in any other manner; Self-promoting posts are indeed a turn-off for me personally - but I'm neither actively seeking a new job nor promoting my business, so it'd be a bit of dishonest to claim that situational personal preference for a larger truth :]
Right lesson: "If X can help even stupid and incompetent people get prestigious roles and big salaries, I wonder what it would do for a smart and competent person. Probably the same, only more of it."
Both iot and machine learning are the tail wagging the dog. You use a tech because it's appropriate, not because it's trending. The number of businesses trying to shoehorn ML into their sales deck is hilarious, I don't know how much my previous employer spent on continued failed attempts at that trend.
If you get 100 likes on someone on LinkedIn you will have a massive amount of recruiters see it.
I'll ask LI to restart their computer.
Maybe only people who are connected to people already connected to you can find you, or the profile is private.
I always enjoy seeing how much the market will bear when answering them with I'm making $400k(just a number) now what is this web developer position offering? Meaning I bump my salary to see what the market will bear .. if i didnt go too high they will go higher and I boosted my salary by double or more. This trick is best though when your a junior to mid level developer ... salaries do cap out Ive noticed. But, it's always fun to see what you might be able to get.
I use to see a lot of HN readers complain about recruiters. Some are overzealous and shady like I told one recruiter i just met this girl two weeks ago at web dev Meetup who just started at same company. He hunted her down and kept leaving voicemails on her work phone & then calling the receptionist when she didnt answer him(omg lol). Another forced me to lie to owner of company they placed me at, which I very begrudgingly did(hide recruiters shady business practice). Though I sold her and her company out once she threaten to make up false stories so he wouldnt hire me full-time(he did hire me). Though out of ten years and dealing with 100 to possibly 100s of recruiters those two are outliers in my experience.
How many jobs have you HAD in the past 5 years?
As with all hiring though, this is far from perfect.
Leaving early means the investment wasn’t worth it (compared to hiring someone who doesn’t job hop)
I haven't seen a job like this in a decade or more. The last two jobs I had expected you to be fully productive in a month, and if you not had made major contributions in by 12 months (and more specifically didn't fit in with management) you were going to be let go. Letting go of employees used to be relatively rare, but I find it's becoming standard practice these days.
I can't think of a single job I've had where ICs weren't deploying code to production within two weeks and at full productivity in about a month.
Decades ago it used to be the case that you could take time to fit in, find your strengths and start growing. But the idea that you would "just be getting started" at 12 months is laughable.
Job "hopping" used to make sense a few years ago because it was the fastest way to get promoted. Now I would say it's an essential survival skills as any place you aren't happy at is likely seeing that an planning when they can start to pip you.
"Is this someone with high potential who could grow / be trained into a high performer?" to
"Is this someone who can hit the ground running and be productive within a month?"
It's very possible the answer is still yes, but I'm not going to spend time investing in a more uncertain candidate, if it's pretty clear they'll jump as soon as my time investment starts to pay off.
It is also worth noting a 12 month fixed term contract for any new full-time employee is standard. Due to Dutch employment law, the employer only has to offer a perm contract after a number of years (after the 3rd I think). This hardly encourages career growth and it if it takes 12 months to be "up to speed" you would have been fired already!
At the end of those 12 months they don't have to offer you anything more. Struggling and need extra training? Nope, you're gone. Particular project changing course (new CTO, new management)? Nope, you're gone. Pay rise? Lucky for 1% without threatening to leave... but other companies will add 15% for a new contract in a similar role. It's a no-brainer.
There was no sense of loyalty on either side.
The large professional network I made in the city helped enormously and heard about open positions on a weekly basis.
Now I am in a new role (outside of the Netherlands) where I genuinely hope I can stay with the company for many years and have a long career with them (with opportunities to progress internally). Their niche is something which I believe in and have a sense of pride about what they do.
My first job was a 40k per year IT job. I changed jobs every 1.5 years or so, and was able to find a niche in Big Data followed by Real time bidding in ad-tech, and now ML work in one of the FANG’s as a senior engineer.
Not many people care about tenure at this point, and working in multiple environments has served me well. It’s worth calling out that I usually took a pay cut when I switched in order to better align with my career objectives (although the raises always made up for the opportunity cost )
I found every opportunity through LinkedIn, along with many that I passed on. I was always immediately connected with a person (recruiter) rather than a blind resume/email response.
In another industry with stock that appreciates slowly or depreciates over time, the model wouldn't yield the same packages. The company buys your equity grant when you start, and has limited incentive to renegotiate/fight over the outsized reward.
> How many jobs have you HAD in the past 5 years?
I'm old enough to remember when having two or three two-year jobs in a row classified you as a job-hopper to employers.
These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending.
I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky. I wouldn't think of being at several places for two years each as complacent or lucky...
I do not think being at places for less than two years as the ideal scenario or a great candidate. Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps) - I look at it like how I've had it... They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
What's your lower bound on 'several years', in this context? Taken literally it's 'three or more', but not everyone uses the word that way.
> Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps)
I wasn't thinking of pay bumps per-se, but of promotions for increased responsibility.
> They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
Sure, but employers are often insecure. The thought that follows that is "what if they think this job is shitty and then leave?"
Employers hate turnover and tend to like having evidence that you will stick around. No matter what the reason is that you didn't stick around somewhere else, however justified or understandable, that reason can't provide the evidence they want.
In my opinion, several years in this context between two companies would be at least 7 years total - however, I think 4-5+ years at one company is a sign of complacency or you got lucky. So, I'd think spending 10 years at two companies very much a sign of complacency or luckiness. I can't imagine doing it unless I got really lucky. Great managers, great organization, great team, decent work, and, of course, great pay... but that is incredibly rare as far as the social circle I'm involved in goes. So, chase the pay at least.
It was four years.
+1 to the hundreds of views that posts get. LinkedIn is insane that way.
I’m not OP, but as I read it OP just makes a post saying e.g. “my experience with #cryptocurrency and #blockchain combined with #ai on #iot devices has taught me...” etc.
In other words, not a text that says “I’m looking for a job”, but just something that reveals areas of expertise.
The fact that linkedin can't provide direct-to-company recruiting and opportunity research shows the platform is largely a failure.
Act 1: When I'm not paying attention, my friend says, "hey, do you mind if I go through your address book and contact all your friends and family and ask them to be my friend too? If you consent, say, 'what' or 'huh'"
Act 2: When I'm not looking, this friend goes through my address book and spams all my contacts with whatever they're selling under my name.
What would you advise me to do after that? You'd probably say, this person is not your friend by most definitions of the word, you should cut them out of your life and ask them to not contact you anymore.
To which I may say, but this friend is well connected, they might be able to get me a job in the future. (Although I've never gotten a job or even a lead through LinkedIn personally.)
What would you say to that? Probably something like, they're abusive and deceitful, whatever they have to offer, they'll probably damage your life more than they'd help you.
And that's why I closed my account and added a "delete on sight" filter for their emails.
At the time, Linked In wouldn't even let you opt out of mail without making an account, which is definitely never happening. (Thankfully, they eventually added a way to tell them to not contact me again, but I'm going to carry my grudge)
I don't really understand how you make the jump to this part
With the abusive relationship example, if someone's gone as far as snoop through your phone and text your friends without your knowledge, there is no telling what they'll do next. It's common for someone who does this to also be a verbal and physical abuser, which is rarely worth sticking it out for, regardless of how well-connected they are.
With the specific LinkedIn example, they may e.g. sell your data to third parties, leak your data publicly via irresponsible data storage, and allow employees to access your data without authorization. Not to mention spamming your entire contact list with LinkedIn invitations in your name.
Is that worth it to you in exchange for some networking?
If you use it right, it can be useful. LinkedIn isn't your friend, but you can use their platform for your advantage.
At some point I spent some hours to investigate how they did it and trying to tell google (gmail) to not let Linkedin do it (again?). Not sure how much success I had. I think it is a mistake/problem of Google to allow such things.
1. As a digital resume which recruiters/other people can find on their own, and can contact me if they really need to.
2. As somewhat of a soft sign that I "know"/"have been accepted as a connection by" people who work(ed) in the same company/area in the past. Kind of a signal that "maybe this guy is who he says he is".
Everything else on Linkedin is treated as trash. People I connect to are manually unfollowed almost immediately. Notification settings are modified so that I don't get any emails except inmails and connection requests. I thankfully haven't seen much spam from that till date.
Here are some firefox ublock origin filters I use to make the site a lot more bearable (basically removes the feed, the "news" sections, and other things which don't directly relate to the home page or connectivity). Only bad thing about this is that your list of connections won't show up; I haven't had the time to fix that yet.
www.linkedin.com##.feed-follows-module
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.feed-shared-navigation-module.overflow-hidden.Elevation-2dp.left-rail-container
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.pv3.feed-shared-news-module
www.linkedin.com###launchpad-wormhole
www.linkedin.com##.right-rail
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.sticky
www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.share-box-feed-entry__wrapper
www.linkedin.com##div[class^="feed-shared-update"]
Linkedin was already like that before Microsoft bought it.
Made myself a Senior Director of Engineering at a major company with an impressive background.
I've had lots of recruiters reach out to me from most major companies and I've even had some conversations just for kicks.
The unexpected outcome... I swear doing this made me more confident.
I see so many FAANG recruiters wanting "me" to run a team that I don't even open the message because I'm decensitized. It gave me a glimpse into someone 10 years ahead of me. I've been meaning to make a compilation of my conversations.
Getting a callback based on fiction is called Salesmanship. Translating that callback into a profitable deal/gig is what separates the wheat from the chaff. So nothing to see here. Don't kid yourself that you got a glimpse into anything.
HR is just doing their job finding people with impressive backgrounds.
But I am at a profitable company, in a senior role. I’ve been at a handful of unicorns. I just turned down a faang 2 weeks ago after getting an offer.
Is that even legal?
As long as there are no serious effects/money changing hand/contracts signed solely based on those, shouldn’t it be fine ?
:/
Created an obviously fake profile 6 months ago as part of testing something for $JOB and, if the emails are to be believed, it consistently gets more search hits than my real profile.
LinkedIn is the only social network where it's not acceptable to question these weird posts. Only politically correct, somewhat career-related content is allowed, and only positive responses are appropriate. Everyone is inspired and blessed and productive. It's a big circlejerk.
That's not a surprise though. You're here to work on your business-oriented personal brand. If you don't need that, you have no reason to be there.
That's not my experience at all. The examples cited in the article ("president Obama wasn't really black") are, in my experience, the very tip of the iceberg. I don't have to look too far in LinkedIn comments to find people posting ... pretty politically-incorrect shit. It's more the asshole-uncle variety of shit (e.g. "I don't have gay friends because gay people always hit on me", or "I couldn't work for a woman CEO, they're not cut out for it") than the facebook variety (qanon/incohate rage at $phenomenon/etc.), but there sure is a lot of it.
I mean, it's an N of 1 so take it with a grain, but LinkedIn definitely doesn't seem like a bastion of civility or professionalism to me.
The lurkers are there, they're just not mainstream enough on LinkedIn vs their respective Facebook groups.
I wonder when we get to the point where you must declare you are gasping for breath from the electrifying orgasm that another day in the office of MegaCorp Inc gives you.
Just imagine for a moment Linus Torvalds using those words and applying same text structure to the kernel release announcements instead of good straightforward this: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wi-u86++np80GQvgDuARdt9xp...
What gets me is there are at least 2 dead people in my contacts and every year the platform asks me to congratulate them for sticking around so long at one employer. The avalanche of Congrats! they receive is nauseating and speaks to the shallow nature of LI relationship.
LinkedIn is a great platform that gives the opportunity to look on how the market is evolving and what roles are more and more requested. It allows to find jobs and to be found.
Not everyone is in NYC, SanFra, or any other technological hub of the world, the opposite.
The majority of the people live in average cities if not villages where the opportunity to networking are rare if not absent.
Not to mention that if you want to relocate in other countries leveraging your skills, you cannot spend time joining events on the other side of the world unless you are rich.
It's a business card. That's all. There are people that take it seriously. These are people I may want to work with, so I honor their commitment. I will occasionally post stuff there, and keep it up to date, but I spend most of my "social" time, right here (where I am careful in my interactions). I also tend to stay away from Facebook, and almost never tweet.
I agree. It is a really strange place. There's a term, "broetry," that was created to define the way people write those pithy posts with the single-sentence "hook." Ironically, one of the true masters of "broetry" is a woman. I see her posts all the time (whether or not I want).
People who use linkedin regularly either have an inflated self ego or are desperate to find work.
The times I use linkedin - to connect with someone who said "add me on linkedin" or when I'm searching for a job. That's it.
Or people who use bots to automate their networking efforts...
That said, I talk about LI's timeline as an example of a terrible product thinking. It definitively devalues the platform. Specifically - it seems that whenever any of my several thousand contacts Like some post, it shows up in my feed - ie Like is equivalent to Share/Retweet. This is a huge problem because people don't filter themselves as much when Liking vs explicitly sharing. Thus the timeline fills up with "X liked some feel good fluff from an influencer" - stuff that X definitely did not intend to broadcast when they engaged with it.
I think this has the inverse effect on engagement. I am keen on maintaining my network and I find it valuable when LinkedIn tells me who has a new job or promotion or even just an anniversary. I would log in periodically just for that. However, that stuff is now drowned out by total nonsense.
If I had to guess, their metrics are something like "X things liked" and "Y things seen by an average user" and I guess they are doing well on those, but if the metric was more related "are we giving quality engagement to our best users - ones that recruiters are paying LinkedIn in order to be able to reach" - I think the answer would be no.
I am not an expect in consumer web/social media so there might be an angle to the game I am not getting (hard to accept that it actually is just that dumb) but I can't figure it out.
The last few times I’ve looked for a job, I’ve started on LinkedIn but always ended up speaking to recruiters about some mediocre roles and then finding something better through my actual network. LinkedIn seems to prefer to generate so much noise that I’m not sure how useful it really is.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, I am emphasizing how BAD this is but also how forced we are to play by a specific platform’s rules.
A note: making fun of people using Skype in 2020 makes YOU out of touch with reality and not the opposite...the non Bay Area business world has just embraced teams, zoom and unfortunately also webex, and they are still complaining how NEW all this shit is for them.
The hostage dynamic allows it to get away with really annoying and awful features that you put up with anyway because you have little choice.
That is still a situation where you’re using something even though you realize there’s a lot of nonsense because there’s value to you. LinkedIn still takes advantage of this dynamic whether you choose to ignore it or not.
I liken it to the fact that porn sites can get away with extremely intrusive ads because people demand their service and have little alternative. Whether you try to block or ignore the ads as much as possible isn’t really the point.
There are certain news sites like Forbes that are so annoying that I don't deal with it.
The point is LinkedIn is in a category where you "need" it but don't necessarily want it, and that dynamic allows them to do very annoying things.
Sure a lot of websites can try to hold you hostage but, again, the question is whether they even offer something you need enough to deal with it.
I was just adding that most of the internet is this way, not just porn sites.
We can say that most websites are on a spectrum of ad-driven BS and Linkedin (and porn sites) are further to one end.
So for me, the problem is less about Linkedin and more about the difficulty of building alternative business models that are sustainable.
What offering will eventually replace Linkedin and will we have to endure more or less BS?
I think that it is. If you're blocking them, you're getting whatever you want from the website without the downside of the ads. If you're putting up with the ads, that's a bit closer to a hostage situation. Same with LinkedIn - as long as you're using it in a way that's okay with you, I don't see a problem.
Create an account to list yourself in a CV catalog. Add connection with people you worked with to build credibility. Otherwise only ever open it when you're looking for a job. Otherwise you're risking getting cancer from looking at all that shameless self-promotion and posturing.
The news feed is utterly useless. Everyone else seems to be happy and excited and successful. There is no real value in most feed posts. Rather, they’re usually a variation of this:
”#supergrateful and #blessed for meeting super inspiring %SomeoneImportant today #growth #entrepreneurship %hipsterstartup #nopause”
It's worth having a Linkedin profile, but it's car crash of a social network.
The network effect makes it almost impossible to compete with it. If anyone did manage to compete, they are likely to be sucked into recreating the same abhorrent garbage layers over time.
This is social media in a nutshell. I doubt blockchain is going to solve it, so wtf will?
- Premium Career: $29.99/month.
- Premium Business: $59.99/month.
- Sales Navigator Professional: $79.99/month.
- Recruiter Lite: $119.99/month.
The only feature is to be 'a Rolodex on steroids', or 'an adressbook in which some entries are maintained by the contacts themselves'
No social network features beyond that. We're doing our best to align the businessmodel with this. And truly believe it can carve out a niche (and slowly grow from there) without adding all the perverse attentionseeking, 'garbage layers'.
Is that naive?
Not sure if this is an appropriate thread to drop this, but since you asked:
The idea is simple, though: you have a profile on which you put contact details, a list of aspirations and competences. Each such data can be kept private, shared public, or within your network. You add people to your contact list, tag them, keep notes on them or add rich oneway relations (Foo has worked for Bar, from datex to datey at Acmeinc.). Basic crm features. Again, each such data has several privacy levels.
You can search through your contacts and search through the contacts of your contacts. E.g. if you need to find a translater, but don't know any yourself, one of your contacts might know one, and might have shared some data, notes, tags and relations with that translator.
A 'network' is basically a server, instance, in fediverse-speak. An instance would be hosted by your startup-hub, coworking-space, university, etc. You register with one (or more) such instance, and become part of that community, but can add anyone from any other instance, as long as they have a public profile.
At least I wouldn’t consider it a serious professional network just based on that.
That may be incredibly shallow, but those are the only datapoints I have right now.
I guess it’s a matter of adoption though. I’d never have considered google either :)
Any pointers as to what puts you off? From your feedback, I get that you find the name and domain too much hinting at a social network?
1. You couldn’t afford/find a good/similar .com 2. It’s meant to be, well, a social network.
The name flockingbird just sounds casual to me, maybe I get an association with twitter? It doesn’t scream business network to me anyway :)
That said, I like the name flockingbird too. I would want to try it based on the name. I just wouldn’t expect what you just described.
This is one of my last servers with nginx. Nginx and letsencrypt is ... cumbersome, unstable; once every few months I have to manually reboot and/or renew the certs. ugh. Time to move this one to Caddy too.
1. certbot does not need to stop nginx to renew a cert (some modes do).
2. the certbot run succeeded (all certs have been renewed, no network issues, etc) 3. all certs are written correctly so that nginx config is valid (can reach and parse the certs)
In this particular case, for some reason, one of the 7 sites hosted here had a misconfigured DNS, letsencrypt servers could not reach it, certbot failed, no nginx restart was attempted. This case falls in #1, fixable by force-reloading nginx every day after certbot run regardless of whether a cert has been renewed.
All solutions with nginx are cludges like that. Don't get me wrong: certbot/letsencrypt is miles ahead of automation before they came along (I've built en ran several hosting companies, certs automation is a disgrace), but it remains hacky, cludgy and therefore unstable and somewhat unreliable.
People either spammed their terrible YouTube tutorials, Medium links, or job postings.
I’ve found the job searching feature useful, but nearly every day I am spammed by recruiters from companies like TCS with horrible jobs that don’t fit my skills, aren’t matched to my skill level, are 300 miles away, and none of them pay close to what I currently make.
And then my newsfeed is filled with reposted feel good stories like the old woman who wanted to withdraw money from her account and the bank forced her to use the ATM so she took her million dollars to another bank down the road.
I stopped using the groups too.
Now, I just use my profile and share my blogposts there
My new LinkedIn job title is ‘space Marshall’, partly because my new role as a conservation volunteer sometimes involves enforcing social distancing. Also channeling Mark Watney.
(I'm not KineticLensman on LinkedIn but searching for the Space Marshal skill should find me - at the Hawk Conservancy Trust)
I hate any feature that makes LinkedIn more social. It is a great resume hosting service, but a terrible social network. Since I have to use it for work, I'm hoping the culture on the site continues to be business-focused.
For shared interests, Twitter, reddit, and Facebook groups seem to work well. Have you had any luck with those?
I think Linkedin could carve out that niche but it would require a proper effort to do so.
So yeah, like for many folks, it feels like a very weird but essential place.
I do like their job board solely because it allows you to filter by both job function and company industry, but OTOH it tries to be too “smart”. Outside that the content is eyeroll inducing at best, at the article notes.
LinkedIn is for the "desperate." Companies having trouble hiring, and people having trouble getting jobs. The rest is just business card maintenance and having a presence so real recruiters know you actually exist and have that job you said at X networking event.
Every so often I do get some decently sounding positions, but I've almost never seen how legitimate they are since I live in a low COL but work remotely for firms not located here, so most local areas can't match the pay.
I can almost set my calendar based on the yearly recruiters from Amazon I get reaching out, and in the past I have had some conversations (on the phone too) with Facebook recruiters (though all ultimately end up not going anywhere due to relocation requirements).
I used to get much worse messages from recruiters when I was junior, but since I've gotten experience and updated my profile well, the quality of messages has vastly improved.
LinkedIn has incredible lock in though, far beyond mere network effects; they have convinced many people that you might miss out big time if you leave. In a society where the only endpoint that matters is your career and productivity as measured within it, missing an opportunity is effectively suicide. In other words, they exploit people’s tendency towards regret minimisation. Leaving is now equivalent to quitting the lottery after having bought the same numbers for the past thirty years. The kicker is that practically all the value LinkedIn provides comes from its users. LinkedIn didn’t win you a job, you did!
Probably best to give it up by not taking it up.
GitHub, drizzle, academic publishing and oddly twitter? These are the new resume sites ?
For a few professions, what about the rest ?
Plus LinkedIn is a great reflection of workplace reality.
And it's become the worst user experience on the web.
The primary, and I'd say only, value it has is maintaining current contact information of professional colleagues that I've accumulated over a lifetime. I'm connected with people I first met 50 years ago (no kidding). Facebook can provide that, but after 11 years of linking, the equity in that feature alone is too great for me to abandon. Like myself, my LinkedIn contacts have grown in their professional life and now have more responsibility and more resources (VPs, CEOs, technical domain experts) that could be useful for future hiring needs and business endeavors.
On a more whimsical note, I've thought about making a bucket list item to buy coffee for everyone in my LinkedIn network after I retire. Given that they are strewn about the globe, and how many there are, it could be challenging and engaging way to spend retirement.
Still... it's the worst user experience on the web.
Aspiring young monk is given the honor of joining a prestigious monastery. While traveling there, he is stopped on the road by a ragged-looking person who needs help. Monk says get out of my way, I'm important, and in a hurry to meet the head of the fancy monastery! When the monk gets to the monastery, well, you can guess that the head of the monastery was that ragged person, and that there's some remedial lesson in monk-ing.
I deleted mine a few years ago, my most recent job did not seem to mind. My CV is hosted on my website and I'm happy to talk to people via email.
My feed usually consists of job opportunities, business news, academic articles, tech blogs and recommendations for new data science/data engineering/ml tooling.
Hackernews is currently my social network. I use youtube to make low effort videos logging what I've been working on and HN to actually invite people to interact with things I build and get feedback. I still have an Instagram account, but I'm planning on deleting it also.
former coworker rolodex
spamming internal recruiters to bypass portal applications
flexing on people who previously rejected you by adding them after you get a job at a way better employer
I think it's good thing to keep up with all of them, but it also obscures professional network for all of us.
Every single one I've ever seen just shits out any old piece of text here and something else there.
I aggressively block LinkedIn users that post garbage, as well as connections who engage with these posts.
I find the only point of the LinkedIn feed is to serve as white-noise for your brain when you need to recharge.
Download this extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linkedin-unfollowe...
It allows you to unfollow all your connections/companies in one click. Don't spend unnecessary time on LinkedIn reading rubbish.
When I login now there's just two adverts on my newsfeed and nothing else.
1) never use the social features like the timeline. Don’t post things, don’t comment on things. It’s just a bad Facebook for people with ties trying to become workfluencers. People who think that by promoting their employers blog post they’ll rise in the ranks (and they probably will but I don’t want any part of that charade).
2) Only only ever connect with people you work or worked with. Never recruiters. Recruiters want to build a huge network of random people, and it ruins the fundamental idea where I can see if I actually have someone with a work relationship at a company.
3) Don’t reply to messages from people not in your network. Either connect with them (if not recruiters) or ignore. Do not say “no thanks” or “not interested”.
4) Disable all mail notification. You likely get enough email.
Using it like this, I find it’s a pretty simple way to keep track of where my past colleagues are, without being spammed by recruiters or having to wade through message spam in LinkedIn. I check in a few times per year to see what old friends are up to.
Using LinkedIn Jobs for finding a new opportunity? It's slightly better than Indeed et. al., at least in my experience.
Using LinkedIn to network with interesting people and potentially engage in new opportunities with them? It's amazing.
Using LinkedIn Recruiter? Nothing else compares.
That's basically how I see LinkedIn.
On the other hand, having a linkedin doesn't seem to be helping me get a job, but that may just be confirmation bias.
It’s a story about how a useful service that is difficult to quit for professional reasons takes full advantage of that dynamic to get away with doing really annoying or awful things.
The fact that certain individuals are more deft at ignoring or blocking or turning off the annoying parts of the service does not change the dynamic at all.
While I think LinkedIn’s issues are best understood as symptoms of larger issues in corporate / middle-class culture, the article is on-point.
I now receive continuous emails "Hi Steve (Remote Only) Jones, I have this open position in Omaha .."
OTOH, I do the kind of work you don't do fizzbuzz tests for in an interview, and soft skills are a larger part of my job.
None of this requires the timeline feed. But as long as you ignore the inspirational posts and pictures of wolfs walking in a line, it provides easy networking for people with little natural propensity to do so (like myself)
Like the article says, it's a cesspool of bad recruiters and bussiness bullshit combined with a social network that doesn't know how social networks should work.
But now it's okay.
I don't get recruiter messages anymore, my last two projects I got via CEOs that contacted me via LinkedIn.
I cleaned up notifications, now I only get then when someone wrote me.
Added an emoji to the beginning of my name, so now I see who sends me automated bullshit.
They made famous the "A new day begins" LinkedIn post...
https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn/status/10982208809147719...
Thank you for this ... Incredible 'suit joke'
I use LinkedIn for 2 things mainly: 1) to build reputation, sharing articles I find interesting about my broad area of expertise and fostering some discussions. These articles are not set to create maximum engagement, because I care about my direct network creating a certain view of my experience based on diacussions with me.
2) to recruit. I use it actively to search for key profiles (lots of devs) for my team. As my big corporate HR department is very ineffective, I take my time to search for interesting candidates and send them to be contacted by HR for some straightforward filtering (interested in the position, salary, etc). For more senior positions, I contact the potential candidates myself (to avoid HR screwups). It is a very efficient tool for recruiting IMHO.
So, if you don't like LinkedIn just build your profile and keep track of the inmail for contacts, as people will use it more and more to reach out to you.
Though I will say that finally getting an HN account was a gateway drug to LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the professional network, the alternative to swapping business cards (remember those?). It's where you can add that one person you met at a conference so you remember their name and company if needed, or your colleagues. Would you rather add them to your real social network? Personally, I add everyone on LinkedIn and nobody except close friends and family to my real social network. Working as intended.
LinkedIn is also approximately the only place in the world that I know of that you can go to and actually contact someone, when you only know their name. You can't find people's numbers (and nobody wants to call or be called anyway), there's no way to find their email, so unless you're already in their social circle there's nothing else except LinkedIn to reach out with.
I disagee.
LinkedIn is a Mickey Mouse network of professionals.
A few years ago, I had the very bad idea of replying to one of the typical "lol millennials amirite" posts. I called it unprofessional and told them to be more careful about the way they carried themselves because "this is not Facebook".
This prompted a lengthy, downright insane reply from another person, who criticised me because "Facebook is a very big job searching platform" (huh? How does that change my point?) and called themselves "a world thought leader, according to my friends".
At that point I just blocked that whole thread because it was actually giving me anxiety and I just didn't know how to reply to that without making things worse.
I have a rule to unfollow anyone on LinkedIn who posts something non-work, non-job related.
While I do work on open source on GitHub for my job, I feel like most software engineers do not. Does that mean that you have to spend your free time writing FOSS on GitHub if you want to be employable?
I'd like to read that line as a cheeky nod towards uploading all the code you write for your employer to GitHub when you start looking for a job. I'm actually not sure it hasn't happened somewhere yet
It's amazing that the fake Skype story has almost 800k likes!
At this point the LinkedIn feed is for entertainment only, with all the "and then everyone clapped" stories and the deep business lessons gained by all these generic business persons' 6yo ingenuous sentences.
But as she says, there's not much harm in keeping a profile for job search, just disable as much notifications as possible.
On more serious note, I got contacted by every FAANG(M) company in last 6 years and got hired two of them through it. Nice tool, but not for every sector.
Edit: words
For “reasons” I made one again a couple of years ago. No title, just the current place where I work. When I switched jobs, I deleted the old job entry and updated with the new. It lets me say “yes” to connection requests from people I encounter in my day job, while keeping the rest of L.I. at arms’ reach.
Nice that they brought up Gary. I already unfollowed people because they shared to much of his "influencer" and "entrepreneur" contant/spam.
Now at least this problem with website is fixed. I don't know whether app already works.
I do still recommend it to others who are job searching though.
Yeah, we’ll have to disagree there. The resume is still the first and most important piece of information I see.
but with that said, i've got an account that i hold for maintaining professional connections... but i long for the day when i can use it for posting dank memes and shitposts! :D
>The depravity of a platform where HR Managers are the rockstars speaks for itself.
That about sums it up!
I cry when I read linkedin (for work opportunities).
I feel like vomiting when closing linkedin (for work opportunities).
(PS, looking, fullstack UX/UI/Vue/Node/Go/Python/Swift etc. Aus.)