Ask HN: Have You Deleted LinkedIn? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have You Deleted LinkedIn?

It seems to me no longer to be useful. Except for posturing, virtue signaling and self promotion.

The jobs posted on LinkedIn also seem to remain for months or years, applying to them almost never yields a response. Probably for data farming and cherry picking.

The only thing keeping me there is the contacts list/recommendations (but with whom I never communicate).

Note this observation is one I've made probably since 2020 at least.

Is there any point in having LinkedIn in 2023? Has it peaked - it seems to have crossed that line of saturation/utility.

Any good reasons not to delete it?

View on HN

Got my most recent job through LinkedIn. 2nd order contact found me in a search and my 1st order contact set up the interview.

I keep my LI profile as a superset of my resume. I keep it public, don't turn on the "looking for work" stuff, and NEVER look or write to the social feed.

One primary rule I never break: I only connect with people that I've worked with for at least six months. I'm not a job hopper, but spending a week onsite with a client doesn't make you best pals. But if you worked on a long-term project together, connect. HOWEVER, if that other person is one of those collectors that has 500+ connections, skip it.

I never apply to open jobs broadcasted to me. There's a steady stream of recruiters that contact me and I can one-click dismiss them. Not a lot of effort to do that and I'm not offended at reachouts. That lets me keep a pulse on the job market and salaries in my town.

It also lets me see which companies are bad news. When you see the same job come in from multiple recruiters over a few weeks, it's not hard to reverse-search the listing and figure out what's going on.

Deleted mine about 4–5 years ago, I even switched jobs after that. I never landed a job using LinkedIn, I joined the site when I was young and saw everyone else doing it.

For me, LinkedIn is like any other social media, "okay enough" to find people and companies, but near-impossible to land a job. It is far easier to search job elsewhere, go to the company portal, and apply job from there.

Never found a job through LinkedIn. If you don't look at the wall/home/feed, it's just another tool to look up companies, candidates and stay in touch. The feed is extreme cringe to the point that I can't believe some of the posters are real humans.

Edit: on the other hand, I have no clue where else to look for jobs in tech. HN seems to be mostly US-focused.

I’m not going to delete my number one lead generator for job opportunities. I’ve gotten my last two jobs from recruiters who found me on LinkedIn.

Deleting it would likely be very detrimental to my career.

Same here. Except for my 1st job in tech, all subsequent jobs have been mediated via recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn.

Never used it. I’ve poked around it without a login account. I was amazed that the people I supervised, who clearly did not like each other at work were linked together positively on LinkedIn. Too much BS I felt - example: I coordinated a weekend fund raiser, putting in 40 hrs of my time, a volunteer showed up for 2 hrs and his linked post looks like he ran the whole event. I would not have even thought of posting this.

I did not need LinkedIn to land a solid post retirement job in another industry.

I use LinkedIn a lot.

While there is a lot of dumb noise around people trying to thought-leader, there is also a lot of professional content I find useful. I'd rather have the annoying hustle-grind-thought-leader BS than the political content I find on twitter / facebook.

I meet a lot of people on LinkedIn and do indeed find a lot of professional connections. I find its useful to always be chatting with people outside my company, for a number of reasons, and set aside time to do these calls.

I don't actively maintain a resume, I use my LinkedIn profile for this purpose.

I think it's important to be "heads up" with your career networking (interviewing?) a lot, always chatting about potential opportunities, preparing for next steps, learning about problems others are solving, etc.

One step further: I never had an account in the first place. Potentially survivorship bias, but I’d never felt hampered in my career by not being there.

I add everyone, and follow no one. It’s a write only medium for me.

This has worked really well and brought me both traffic and connections at no cost to my sanity.

Never signed up, but I'm wondering if I should, because it seems like a lot of people complain about too many job offers through there, which is a problem I'd like to have right now. I haven't even had my first developer job yet, and I think it's mostly high-experience people who are getting bombarded with the offers, so I don't know if I should even bother.

I deleted it once. It turned out useful. The best companies in my area recruit from LinkedIn.

Don't apply for jobs there, fish for recruiters. Visibility helps. Befriend the recruiters that match your virtues (things like no long interviews or whatever).

I try to avoid the social media aspect. LI feels like a sink for all the social media. If people want to self-promote, they do it less on other sites.

I am posting on LinkedIn almost daily.

I found it to be the easiest platform to build an audience and make money from.

YouTube is highly competitive. LinkedIn is not.

I've gotten two jobs from Linkedin. I don't much care for it outside of when I'm looking for jobs. Whenever I'm employed I put it into the "hibernate" mode and only reactivate it when I'm back on the job market.

I have some contacts, mostly past colleagues, that are most easily reached via LinkedIn messages. And occasionally I have someone get in touch with me that way, although my contact info is easy to find so I doubt I'd miss anything inbound it I didn't have it. And sometimes for business reasons I like to look at the cv of someone I'm going to be talking with.

The actual quality of the "discourse" on there is horrible and it would be better off if it wasn't there.

I have never actually gotten a job from LinkedIn, the social media aspect is the most potent form of cringe.

I really should delete it too but I just never log in.

Yep, was in the top 1% most viewed profiles for years but it never ever gave me anything of value .. might just be me though, introvert deluxe.

I got all of my jobs through LinkedIn. Just ignore the posts and focus on one's own profile, cv and connection with recruiters.

No, I've got my current job through LinkedIn. It wasn't by applying to a specific role in the "Jobs" section, but by replying to a 2nd order contact post.

I'm not a daily user but I think it's still useful to me.

Not yet; I have deleted Facebook and Instagram, and I have never signed up to Snapchat and TikTok…

I tried Linked in for maybe two weeks, figured out it didn't work for me, and never went back. That was something like 17 years ago.

But I still have an account. I literally can't delete it, since I don't remember the account name or the password.

No, it's useful for staying in touch with people and keeping up with their careers.

I don't know what "posturing" and "virtue signaling" mean in this context. And, self-promotion is one of the points of LinkedIn.

Yes. It was useless to me and I would not work or apply anywhere that requires it

I found LinkedIn was bringing grifters, salespeople who couldn’t sell and dreamers who couldn’t execute into my life so I deleted my account long ago.

(Occasionally though my spammer evil twin wants to give it another go…)

Nope, I still use it. It's the only place people from my city are coordinating on, aside from twitter.

Yes I did, because recruiters could not stop bombarding me with emails about new job opportunity.

No, I have not. Just don't log in if you are not looking for work.

i delete mine when i have a job, i create it again when in job hunting. the emails are annoying as hell lol and recruiters call you a lot.

i got nice job from it though, just secured it last week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com