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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most of what you said, but LinkedIn, at least at a superficial level, is the absolute worst to me. It's full of a bunch of inspiration-porn bullshit that I find unbelievably mind-numbing, but also people treat it like Facebook and post a bunch of political and divisive shit on there as well.

I wouldn't care if people posted political and divisive shit, and I would really prefer to delete it, but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL. I've debated putting something like "https://linkedin.dont.have.one" or something but I suspect that would immediately put me in the reject pile.

So I'm forced to have an account on a shitty product that is strictly terrible with not a single redeeming feature and it just sort of happened. I guess Microsoft's typical practice, to be fair.

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Agreed. There are lots of people posting shitty things on Facebook, Twitter, etc., but on LinkedIn, everyone is so fake. They're putting their best professional face on, heavily self-censoring themselves, and their content plays to the whole "employment culture". It's not even a little bit genuine.

I don't even know why they do it. Everyone knows it's fake and performative, this couldn't possibly actually help their careers could it?

AI has made it worse, but they were always horrible.

now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.

What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.

I got an email from Indeed for this today: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/doordashusa/jobs/7727512

About 2/3 of the way down you can see LinkedIn Profile, and it's a mandatory field.

There are tons though.

> and it's a mandatory field.

It's also an EEO violation. Report them. I've never had a Li account and never will because of their slimy tactics early on and their eventual conversion into a narcissist circle jerk.

Software jobs for sure, but I've been applying for jobs with employers that have other types of jobs too (nursing, accounting, industrial engineering, etc.) and the requirement is not solely for their software jobs. Some have fields that pattern match (for these I put something like "https://linkedin.com/I_DO_NOT_USE_LINKEDIN") while others use an integration that actually require you to sign in to Linkedin (some of these I've created accounts for and then deleted them, some I've managed to bypass by hacking on the POST a bit, and others I've decided not to apply for).

Do any of the workarounds ever result in interviews?

Yes! But I only know because someone mentioned it during an interview. It's not something I keep track of on a per-employer basis.

>but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.

I haven't seen this at all, but I normally do provide my LinkedIn URL to companies that I apply to through that platform. I don't really see the problem, though: I don't post anything (I'm not a LinkedIn Lunatic, though I've seen this with some coworkers), so what's the problem? To me, LinkedIn is mostly just a way to find jobs, and also maintain an online resume of sorts, and also to stay in some sort of contact with previous coworkers. I've had a bunch of recruiters try to recruit me for jobs through it. So it is helpful IMO, but only for career purposes. But I sure as hell don't post opinion crap on there, esp. political drivel. I don't mind the posts from people pointing out, for instance, interesting stuff about Python, so sometimes I read those. I also find entertainment in reading the posts about how companies with ridiculous recruiting practices fail to find decent candidates.

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