Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for.

Things I don't find it useful for:

Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot

Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."

Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired

Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.

"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.

Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.

Awww cute videos with a baby or small animal.

View on HN

A really good way of weeding out the recruiter spam is to change your first name to an emoji (I use the waving hand) and then put first name and last name in the last name field. That way when a DM opens with 'hello %waving hand emoji%' you know it's just scripted bulk crap.

Good idea! Thank you

LLMs have solved this at scale. Really you're just filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters at volume.

Yeah, it was never going to be a forever solution, but it's served me well for the last few years.

Given the average LinkedIn recruiter, filtering for more technologically sophisticated recruiters is a decent value add.

Cool idea. I used to have

"[crab emoji] positions only - or get blocked"

in my profile and it did not deter anyone from offering me Java positions.

Okay, but maybe recruiters aren't up on rust iconography. Seems like an ineffective way to communicate a preference (vs it being a shibboleth with the GP).

I mean, unless the recruiter is a rust programmer they're going to have a hard time distinguishing your profile vs just "positions only - or get blocked" (ie don't contact me unless it's about recruitment).

That was very much the intention. I think good tech recruiters should know their field and I know some that do. It's just that LinkedIn is a swamp of bad ones and my little experiment proofed to me that signal noise ratio there is so low that it is useless for me.

Telling someone not to contact you in a way you expect them not to understand seems like a mostly philosophical exercise.

Is it bad to use automation?

Yes. If I want a job without a prior relationship there’s plenty of sites for that like indeed. I’m only interested in job offers from people who have read and valued my work.

Edit: and clearly this is the case because it’s not “Google bot”, it’s a robot pretending to be human like “Amy Bushwack from google” but really it’s a bot

TBH automation for finding/filtering candidates, but preferably personal email to my inbox. I can tell when you’ve used some cruddy software to send automated follow-ups four times after I didn’t respond to the first message.

I agree - I would expect all follow-ups to be personalized. If my job was a recruiter, I would probably use templates for FAQs to save time.

That's a pretty exhaustive list, but I think you forgot, "What X taught me about B2B sales..." type posts. These do seem to have died down but 2 - 3 years ago my feed was absolutely awash with them. They were like a really beige version of those daft TikTok crazes you see. Very much good riddance.

As a general rule, if you’re an engineering candidate that made a profile years ago and is missing updates and haven’t put in much description about your work experience beyond “I worked here from this date to that date”, you’re probably a good engineer.

That’s how I find LinkedIn useful.

That is in danger of being a typical "weird heuristic" that linked in loves to post about (with high p values).

I have seen people say for recruiting advise.

* They recommend you hustle. E.g. deliver your resume pretending to be a food delivery

* Don't follow up if explicitly not told to by your recruiters instructions.

* You must have an up to date linked in.

Usually in hot take format that if you dont do that you got no chance.

So everyone stick to measuring for the role!

That doesn't jive with my experience.

When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.

Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.

The sad part is, a quick algorithm tweak would probably fix this, but I doubt they're interested in making any changes - Why would they, when LinkedIn is already the winner of the winner-take-all "business social media" market. Sure, they might make user experience better, but that doesn't increase their bottom line.

I think I heard about something similar happening in the web search market too...

The reason people are hurt by LinkedIn is we had hoped (somewhere deep down) it would be a modest community of professionals that didn’t descend into ostentatious self aggrandizement.

Unfortunately there was no hope for this because our careers became a ranked status ladder. It’s a really unfortunate macro development.

Need to properly identify what truly disgusts us about LinkedIn.

> Typical motivational/marketing stuff

Disproportionately, and predictably corny and insipid.

that sounds a bit rough on graduates. we all start from the bottom and some people are not born with well connected parents or schools with wide networks. I actually think linkedin is a good way to pay it forward (although NOT for low effort graduates who send the same template spam message to everybody)

trys way to hard to be a social platform

Reply on news.ycombinator.com