LinkedIn at least managed to retain its only useful function, a self-updating Rolodex. It would be nice to be able to disable the virtue signalling feed though.
I prefer to share my experience here:
I really wish there was a way to flag false information in someone's profile.
I had a guy last year that we fired for substantial cause. He was hired as a mid-level engineer, but honestly was borderline-junior level when we got him. That's fine, he clearly "overstated" his resume. I had actually rang alarm bells about him during the interview process but was overruled by HR because his resume was so amazing.
So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing. I figured we could train him on stuff we needed. No big deal, he has at least foundational experience so its fine.
Fast forward 8 months. It has been nothing but a disaster. His personal attitude has been toxic enough that it drove me to consider leaving and we lost two other employees to his toxic attitude. Furthermore, he had already overstayed his welcome from a performance perspective. He directly caused multiple outages in our system in his short tenure and had failed to complete any significant projects by himself without it needing to be rescued by other teammates. In fact we had a junior engineer during his time that was outperforming this mid-level and used the fact that he outperformed this engineer in order to (reasonably) get a promotion.
After the sixth performance review warning in 8 months, I finally fire him for performance and creating a toxic work environment. Remember, he was a mid-level engineer that was being outperformed by our junior engineers.
Anyway, he was fired and I move on. The department significantly turned around for the better after he left. I really regretted not firing him sooner and spending so much effort trying to save him. The entire team was relieved when he left and happy.
Then one day, about a month later, I am having a 1x1 with an employee in my team who asked why that fired employee was a senior engineer and thought that it should justify a promotion for himself. I explained that he wasn't a senior, not even close and I was then pointed to his linkedin page.
On that page I read what the fired employee wrote about himself. First of all, he gave himself a promotion to "Senior / Lead Engineer". Keep in mind, this was someone who couldn't be trusted for basic junior level tasks by himself. Now he is presenting as a lead engineer.
In his accomplishments he said he lowered our AWS bill by 38.5%. Sounds great. Except that he wasn't even priviledged to our AWS expenses during that time, and furthermore our AWS bill had actually increased by over 20% during the same time period. He didn't just "inflate" his contribution (which is normal on resumes/CVs), but he was in no-way involved in managing the AWS expenses whatsoever.
Another bulletpoint said he had helped "integrate ChatGPT and AI tools into our platform to improve developer effeciency by 26%". Except that our company has (and still does) have a compliance regulation against using ChatGPT at all (we deal with sensitive government data that is restricted) and we were explicitly banned from using AI developer tools during his time here. So this is another entirely false claim.
He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released. No such product was ever released, let along him running it. The companies revenues were mostly flat during his time there.
That wasn't even it, but i've made my point. I went down the 8-10 bullet points on his LinkedIn and only 1 was even based in reality (although exaggerated). The rest were entirely false. On top of that he promoted himself as a lead engineer, of which he was closer to a Junior.
Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.
It's fine. I was happy to not have him in my life or organization anymore. I wasn't going to sue him over it or anything. But it does bother me that someone else would potentially hire him based on information that is essentially entirely fabricated. Yes they could try to get references. I assume he would cheat or lie his way through that as well, using friends that pose as past managers or something. If they called for an employment verification, the most any company would do is verify the employment dates and _maybe_ job title. But most companies in tech don't even bother with that.
Of course I don't know how much of this is a LinkedIn problem, as just hiring in general. Even if LinkedIn enforced community moderated accuracy, there's nothing to stop him from typing up stuff on his Resume that he sends around.
Then again, for anyone listening that works at LinkedIn, having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers. It would probably be more real and trusted than a reference check and make LinkedIn an indispensable tool for employers.
Yikes. I have a great cost-cutting proposal for your company, then: don't bother with interviews. Just let HR hire directly based on resumes without ever talking to the candidate. Why would you bother with the interview if this is happening anyway?
> He also said he was charged with launching an entirely new product for the company, which raised our revenues by 19.6% the first quarter that it was released
If you're a public company, this should be easily falsified by the next employer doing due diligence. If not, yeah, hard to know.
> Furthermore he said he worked at our company for 1 year and 3 months. When in reality he only worked there for 7 months and 3 weeks.
This is the one he really should always get caught on. If companies say nothing else when asked about a former employees, they at least say what their tenure was.
> Having a community moderated/validated accuracy platform might actually add significant value to LinkedIn for employers.
Which dating site was it that admitted that they really didn't want their users to find their soulmates, because then they stopped using the dating site? LinkedIn doesn't want you to find your perfect job and work there happily until retirement. Then why would you bother using LinkedIn anymore?
My takeaway from this is that I'm undercutting my opportunities by telling the plain, unvarnished truth of my skill set on Linkedin.
> So I shrugged it off and took him under my wing.
You probably already know it now, but you shouldn't have done that. It never ends up well. If it feels like a no hire, it's a no hire.
Don't underestimate yourself. My version of wandaWant would never admit that anything went over her head. She'd just pretend that she knew what we were talking about. So you're way ahead already :-)
I'm curious; how come?
This project is new. My plan was to write a "comic generator", where I would just input parameters and it would generate the comics.
It worked even better than I expected. In the last 6 months, it has generated 2700 comics from my inputs.
Then I realized that if I launched 7/1/23, it would take 10 years just to post what I already had, even at one per day.
So I just reset my start date from 1/1/23 to 1/1/14. I wanted to launch with a lot of content so people could explore.
I also wanted the site to be evergreen which is why I try not to dig too deep into specific technologies. But COVID was obviously too big to ignore.
I sorted my backlog a few weeks ago based on many factors, but I guess 344 slipped through the cracks. I think I'll leave it there to see if anyone else notices.
I assume you just create a script with the dialogue and your program does the rest? That's neat!
Ignore it for a week or two and repeat, no excessive engagement required.
But the feed could just not be there and it would make no difference. Not sure what you'd put in that real estate on the home page instead though.
My experience is an empty shell of people that only use it when they are looking for a job. The active ones post things that they think will make them look smart, cheap blog posts about “5 management tips”, “is your manager micromanaging you?”, “9 must have resume tools”, stuff like that.
The people that I’m actually interested in have a profile, but never actually use it. Or already got a job and don’t need to open it often, if at all.
The recruiters that reach out are always scammy or offer ridiculous things hoping that if I’m there, I’m desperate. 12/h do it all position, contract, for maybe 2 weeks, maybe 6 months, (doesn’t matter, I’m on the verge of homelessness anyway right?) for a “very important and growing company” that’s not even in the area I’m in.
It always gives me that fake useless vibe. I don’t really know how to turn it into something I actually want to be part of.
The people you'd hope were active are out there busy doing useful things not writing "5 lifehacks to do useful things".
Fixed that for you! :)
Seriously, discoverable linkable profiles with tracking of connections and links to businesses and schools is incredibly useful, and we're fortunate it exists.
Sometimes the recruiters leads are worth it to me, but this must be very variable between users depending on profile, location,…
- Find someone you're interested in connecting with. (Maybe you want to work where they work or where they used to work, maybe they live in your town and work on similar stuff, maybe they just seem to know a lot about something you're curious about.)
- Maybe get an intro from a person you both know. (This definitely increases the odds they'll respond to you.)
- Much lower friction than getting an intro and a nice feature of LinkedIn: You can both see people you both know. Reaching out to those "2nd" order connections increases the odds that they'll respond.
- Then I think the playbook for what to write is just "be yourself and sound like an actual person rather than a spam bot".
- Then don't be upset if you don't get a response, especially from people who probably get tons of messages.
There is also a step 0 that is an ongoing effort, which is to have a background and expertise yourself that is interesting to the person you're reaching out to. I love it when I get messages from people I might have messaged myself if I had come across them first.
I maybe go there once a month because someone I use to work with came in conversation or I had some random thought about someone. I'll also go there to learn about business partners and people I'm about to have to deal with professionally... background kinda stuff. Sometimes that doesn't pay off, but usually it's just enough to not go into a meeting or project blind.
I am not going there to read articles, posts, and other "business self-help" stuff and I'm not going there often.
Does it have their work and education history on it? If so, that is "using" LinkedIn. You click on the companies in their profile. You follow the link to that company's website, see what they do. Or you find their connections from their profile page and see if any of those people are interesting or have interesting histories. Then you can (often) send people messages.
These are (in my view) by far the most useful capabilities for grown up working professionals that have been invented in the social media era. Everything else (including everything else on LinkedIn, posts and the feed, etc.) is almost entirely just noise with limited utility beyond entertainment.
I remember you and I'm interested in what you've been up with for the last decade, so I go look for you on linkedin, but I can't find you. I shrug and forget about it.
Or maybe I also wrote down your phone number or email address along with your name. I remember you and get curious what you're up to. Can't find you on linkedin so I have no idea. But I have nothing to talk to you about, I just wondered what you were up to. So I don't email you. I shrug and move on.
Oh well. This is fine. But it's better if I can just go see what you've been up to like I can with everyone else I've worked with.
I suppose it's kind of old-skool in a way while also just being there to fill the space with... something. Meanwhile you couldn't pay me to sign up to FB, Twitter, Insta or TikTok.
Overall though - LinkedIn definitely grows in value as your career moves from 'what you know' to 'who you know'.
I work with our Bizdev team a lot, discussing proposals for new business and it's great to be able to look up the management/development team of a company that we're going to have a meeting with to get a better picture of where they're coming from and what their company does.
The objections in this thread strike me as typical developer negativity: it's not directly tech-related so it must be useless.
Oh my god, don't say that out loud! That'll send them into a full redesign!
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Twitter forced "recommended content" onto me recently. Now I just visit /notifications directly. I cut the feed out entirely.
I haven’t logged into that clunker in a long time so I haven’t seen it. Our sales team is forced to use it. Poor souls.
Senate, you get 4 max terms. Reps, you get 6. SCOTUS, 4 and term limits of 6 years per term. Something to fix this professional career politicians we see like McConnell, Biden, Kennedy, Cruz, etc. The world moves too fast for one lifetime spent legislatively eliminating rights of people or bringing back “the good ol days”.
like how everything evolves into crabs
The rest of us that are already good at X, don't have the time or energy to write articles about how to be better at it because we are too busy doing it. And when we finally get done for the day, we want to do something else with our lives except go back and write about how to be better at it.
Genuinely curious: Can you delete now? How?
Around 15-16 years ago I _tried_ doing the same and found out that deletion was _not_ possible. I had a personal profile as well as a company profile there. The company was a one-man startup that went down around 2007-9 sometime with the crisis. So it was closed.
As there was no option to actually delete or remove profiles I had to resort to manually tracking every bit of content in groups/threads etc and editing each one-by-one to be blank. Also profile pages were blanked and company facts removed where possible. I even wrote a note on both profile pages that "I no longer use this site: this profile is no longer active". This work took days I recall.
As many years have passed I do not recall if there was an option to hide the personal profile or not, but no such option existed for the company, and no delete option existed either way.
Last time I logged in was around five-six years ago only to find out that my profiles were still there and my former company had now gained 100+ current and former employees from multiple countries!
I had no way to inform anyone that these people were not really employees, as said company no longer existed. And, they never had been.
I would still like to be able to permanently delete these profiles, but last time I checked it was still the digital equivalent of Hotel Califonia:
"you can check out any time you want,
but you can never leave"I refuse to install the LinkedIn apps on my devices. Microsoft didn’t help matters when they integrated it into Outlook.