LinkedIn quietly discontinues GitHub app to ‘better invest’ resources | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn quietly discontinues GitHub app to ‘better invest’ resources

thenextweb.com

21 pointscodelion14 comments

Seems to be an obvious cut-off-the-competitor move. Github is quickly becoming a sort-of Resume for tech people. LinkedIn, so far as I've seen, is for the business-types. LinkedIn wants to capture that tech-side, but it's afraid that letting people use Github on LinkedIn will lead to people simply going to Github to look for developers.

I really hope that's not the case. Even as a tech person, I wouldn't want people looking only at my Github page. Call me old-fashioned, but I like the "resume feeling" that LinkedIn provides.

There's space for both. Coding skills are a single dimension, and should never be the sole attribute for hiring good developers. It's about time management, project management, people management. I want to see your code, but I also want to see what you were able to do on the teams you were on. And if you were on a failing product - I want to know that, and ask you why.

There's something to be said about being able to manage successful open source projects with lots of contributors. That's a huge plus in my book. The majority of programmers, though, are not going to be working on projects like this. A smaller plus is when you contribute to a large, quality project, because it shows you can learn to understand a new codebase and determination to get your patch in.

I don't think this is what's happening. If I had to guess, they are slowly deprecating the OpenSocial based InApps platform piece (launched in 2008 - http://socialtimes.com/linkedin-inapps-year-end-review-2008_...) by piece. This happened with LinkedIn events. I'm a bit surprised they didn't replace events with a non-InApps based version, migrating the data, but it was probably not deemed a priority.

The GitHub application was very intrusive, in my opinion. With default settings, every push I made would be posted to the news feed. I didn't notice for several days, but it was a little embarrassing.

This seems like a very foolish move to me. With GitHub integration LinkedIn becomes more useful. When it comes to developers GitHub is eating LinkedIn's lunch. LinkedIn is a cesspool of recruiters and spam. It's useless unless you're actively looking for a low to mid level job at a massive corporation <shutters>. You're far better off telling people the URL to your GitHub account than LinkedIn.

I'm no fan of recruiters myself, but using ONLY GitHub can be short sighted. Not everyone contributes to open source. GitHub has yet to launch products for recruiters. Honestly ... that is a really tough space, and the top guys at GitHub need to figure out if they want to make that a real business or not, because a half hearted investment is not going to benefit anyone.

I think there is some value in LinkedIn integrating with GitHub, but why not just more robust links? What's the value in showing recent checkins, when I can just click through to GitHub and see EVERYTHING?

It's easy to blame LinkedIn here, but this was likely a mutually beneficial outcome agreed on by both GitHub and LinkedIn. LinkedIn didn't want to maintain the APIs GitHub uses; GitHub doesn't want to have to update its app.

s/recruiters/spammer recruiters

Better invest on other resources -- I'd laugh a lot to that. What is harm of the already working plugin if there is no maintenance cost (i.e., GitHub API had a major change, plugin database is full) ?

There's no such thing as no maintenance cost. Everything has a maintenance cost. Make sure unused code doesn't break takes time and resources. Breaking code makes your product look unprofessional.

honestly sometimes i thought i was the only dev using this. i have many dev friends on github and linked in and never saw the app integrated into anyone else's profile. personally i don't think it's that big of a deal as you can just link to the projects in your profile. also it seemed that you really had no control over the `order` in which projects were displayed though the app. why would I want my personal github displayed on top of the major open source project i'm contributing to?

I just found it last week :\ I like it, I think it's a good thing to add to linkedin...shame it's being removed.

Github is changing the way programmers are getting hired. Its common for prospective employers to ask programmers for their github handle.

LinkedIn has been trying to make forays with their jobs program, but there is only so much value that can be derived by looking at a prospect's LinkedIn profile. Previous experience - sure, but verified and authentic? Recommendations - Umm to flowery?

They probably didn't anticipate GitHub becoming a competitor and people including things in job postings like 'links to GitHub profiles would be appreciated - links to LinkedIn profiles will be ignored' - but that is becoming the norm for programming jobs.

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