ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
Up until that point, my contact list was limited to people that I personally knew and could recommend. Now, months later, I am still getting successful "contact accepted" replies from people that I barely know. I.e everyone who ever contributed to any mailing list that I was ever subscribed to.
I even got replies from people asking why I contacted them. I have no idea how many people remain to accept my invitation or even who they are.
What a disaster. It has changed for me, an early user of the site, what was a useful database of the people I know, to now some random connection of strangers.
The worst part is the link to connect to Gmail still appears and I'm sure that it doesn't clearly indicate what it's intention is. So, if you have connected with an email provider in the past be wary of allowing it to connect again.
And yes, if you let any site connect to your personal data, expect the worst outcome...
Suffice to say that it is extremely embarrassing to not only send "connect requests" to people I barely (or don't at all) know, but also to people whom I am actively avoiding due to issues in real life.
I had to go through, check all my pending invitations, and rescind them. Not sure if that really helps, though, since then if they were to click "accept," it would simply say "no invitation to connect."
What a mess.
I sold a guy a couch on Craigslist in 2005 or 2006, and he must've uploaded his Gmail contacts to LinkedIn not too long afterward. I only know this because for the last six years or so, the "People You May Know" feature on LinkedIn has kept trying to get me to add him as an e-friend.
I've had countless cases similar to the Craigslist one that seem uncanny.
Gmail has/had that behavior where anyone you email ends up getting created as a contact, and in the early days it seemed a lot more aggressive as to when it would auto-add someone to the list. So there are a lot of people who have spurious entries in their contact lists.
I know it wasn't worth the time to me to clean the list, up until I bought an Android phone in 2010. So I had six years worth of auto-added contacts, going back to when I first got a gmail invite.
On the flip side though, their "people you may know" feature is the best I have ever seen. Once you hook up Gmail once, it repeatedly checks it for new contacts, and thus always presents very relevant recommendations for who you might want to connect with whenever you are on the site. It's extremely frictionless.
It still surprises me how many otherwise clued up people regularly do this sort of thing (it doesn't surprise me that the inexperienced masses do, but people who have some technical and/or business experience behind them should know enough to be more automatically cynical).
Far too many people are quiet happy to hand access to their accounts to third parties despite all the past occasions when this has turned out to have been a bad idea. Heck, you'll probably find that it is a direct violation of your terms of service with the email provider: many have clauses stipulating that you will not share your authentication credentials or otherwise allow 3rd party access under pain of account cancellation.
The other one I don't get is letting apps like facebook exist on a device that contains all your contacts without any control to stop them accessing said contacts. It isn't just that they can use them for behaviour that I consider spammy, there have been occasions where apps have corrupt a significant number of people's contacts list (like when facebook "accidentally" replaced many contacts email details with new "facebook" addresses, much to the irritation of those affected). I know people who get up in arms about the slightest hint of someone being interested in their personal details, who are happy to let any old developer/distributor of some free game or other such have full access to everything on their phones and don't see the cognitive disconnect they are experiencing.
I've wondered for a while whether that was done as a strategic move specifically to pressure the "clued up" demographic into installing the app. It certainly worked on me.
I am not sure how it could be useful in a job search scenario. I don't perceive it as any less annoying to send someone a cold-email just because they are a FOAF on LinkedIn. Am I wrong on this?
I've been on there for 8 years and have accumulated a ton of connections, but I've been tempted to just delete the account. I have avoided doing it though because I have this idea that if someone Googled me and found no LinkedIn profile, they'd think I don't care about my career.
How could it be useful in a job search scenario? Let's say you want to work at X company and you have a friend, or a friend of a friend who works there. You ask them to refer you into their company, and since companies typically will favor internal referrals, you are more likely to get hired.
A large percentage of jobs are filled without ever even being posted online, so for most people networking is their best bet at landing a new job.
Unless its entirely unwieldy and you get tons and tons of emails from friends of friends who are hounding you all the time, then its pretty much common courtesy to help someone out who asks you for help on LinkedIn or otherwise.
Being contacted by recruiters all the time is another story, but thats kind of the trade off you make when you sign up for a free professional networking tool.
Don't want to deal with recruiters contacting you but still want to keep your LinkedIn account? Let people know you don't respond to messages on your profile and unsubscribe from emails or create an email filter. Or even just filter out emails from the word "recruiter" & LinkedIn and that will probably catch most of it.
I also have grave reservations about giving so much of my personal info (job, job history, colleagues, etc.) to a for-profit entity that has every motivation to capitalize on that data while having few reasons not to.
I'll network the old-fashioned way, thank you.
This stems back from a few years ago when they automatically created an account for me based on information that a 3rd party had provided. I don't know if they still do that, but it told me all I needed to know about them.
I like the technologists at LinkedIn, but I fucking hate the product. It's bullshit. The "Communities" are nothing but recruiter spam, I have people who have never worked with me in particular fields voting me up in these areas (if you have never worked with me on a project involving web dev, why would you upvote me for that skill)....
LinkedIn never rethought the resume. They just took it and put it online with Facebook clone features.
seriously, though, I completely agree.
That option is long gone, but I don't know when it disappeared. Does anyone know when this happened? If anything, that's a sign of when it jumped the proverbial shark.
My boyfriend's dad, who is not technical whatsoever, endorsed me for git. I'm pretty sure he just saw the word git and thought, "Hehe, she's a git!"
I think the problem too is that LinkedIn offers people the path of least resistance to endorse people. Occasionally I'll see a message at the top of my profile saying, "Endorse X for Y & Z" and a button to approve it. I'm sure more times than not, people just approve endorsements without giving it a second thought.
Are you telling me that you only get "meaningful" add requests? My friends don't often bother (the feeling is mutual), but the more desperate acquaintances seem to seek me out nonstop.
I'm probably in the minority when it comes to how I use the network, but I've also found that I get a lot less noise from it than most people. I can't say if these two factors are correlated at all, but it stands to reason that they would be.
Some people (undefined process) are given an endorsed skill (eg. Python). They can now endorse anyone in their network for python. But they cannot endorse anyone who claims a skill in 'goat herding'.
Now they have meaning as you can only endorse someone for a skill you have also been endorsed for.
My former boss had added 'Oracle' as a skill. I didn't know until LinkedIn asked me to endorse it. He's not even a technical guy, so I've no idea why he had added it but he's actually been endorsed for it by other business owners.
They really need to figure that business out. Even a simple, "How do you know this person?" would suffice, allowing people to determine the weight of that endorsement on the relationship we have.
...or perhaps the recruiters sending email such as "I see you have worked with purely with linux and mysql, how about you applying for this 100% microsoft-stack company as a sharepoint/exchange professional." That might not be linkedins fault the recruiters seems stupid, but it should be in linkedins interest to not annoy me with such crap.
And yet I am still getting empty endorsements.
Hiding endorsements is straightforward: http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/34994
The rest of it sucks. In particular, LinkedIn Recruiter (the module that lets you see pretty much anyone, no matter how many degrees of separation exist between you and them and lets you send some number of InMails per month) is a giant spam factory. Its design encourages impersonal spams by making it super easy to send exactly the same InMail to large volumes of people. If I'm a recruiter, I can search for everyone who attended MIT and now works at, say, Oracle very easily, and then do the moral equivalent of throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Ugh.
I try to look at blogs, GitHub, dribbble, HN posts, tweets, Quora submissions, and whatever else I can to try to get some idea of what the person in question is interested in and good at. At the end of the day, I'm trying to surface smart people. Then I try to figure out whether I can offer said smart people interesting work that's in line with what they seem to be passionate about.
However, that doesn't make me like it or want to use it.
The design makes it easy to contact multiple people at once with seemingly personalized messages. In particular, I can specify the type of greeting and a template, and LinkedIn will fill in the person's name etc.
While you can bemoan feature creep all you want, the truth is that its hard to remove features one they are in (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html). On the other hand having a specialized tool for a common task is really handy. I like these specialized apps, (though I can't comment on LinkedIn's in particular).
Half of my connections are recruiters, I get daily emails offering me Wordpress development and SEO services (even though I am a front-end developer and can do that stuff myself), people add me I've never met before who don't even live in the same country as me. Linkedin is a giant mess, it's kind of like the professional equivalent of Myspace circa 2007 when that scantily clad girl wanting to add you was some low-life in a basement trying to spam affiliate links at you, only that scantily clad girl is a guy in a suit trying to get a recruiting commission from spamming your inbox.
Don't get me started on the skill endorsements feature. I get tonnes of emails everyday saying "Joe X has endorsed you for Java" even though Joe knows nothing about Java nor do I. People are endorsing me for skills that I don't even posses or have, what a joke.
Want to network? Get someone's business card and their phone number, store it into your phone and don't rely on a website comprised of spam to build up a network.
"Linkedin is a Facebook for recruiter spam. The article raises some valid points, you can't advertise you're looking for a new job because your boss will see or if not, one of your colleagues will and they'll most likely report you to get brownie points with the boss or even take your job."
- You don't need to advertise that you are looking for a new job on LinkedIn. You can always passively look. Are your employers reading your inbox too? If that's the case, maybe you should look elsewhere.
"Half of my connections are recruiters, I get daily emails offering me Wordpress development and SEO services (even though I am a front-end developer and can do that stuff myself), people add me I've never met before who don't even live in the same country as me. Linkedin is a giant mess, it's kind of like the professional equivalent of Myspace circa 2007 when that scantily clad girl wanting to add you was some low-life in a basement trying to spam affiliate links at you, only that scantily clad girl is a guy in a suit trying to get a recruiting commission from spamming your inbox."
- People don't add you. People request to add you. There is a difference. I don't accept requests from people who I either A) don't know B) don't care to network with. I don't see how this is different than any other social network.
"Don't get me started on the skill endorsements feature. I get tonnes of emails everyday saying "Joe X has endorsed you for Java" even though Joe knows nothing about Java nor do I. People are endorsing me for skills that I don't even posses or have, what a joke."
- Joke or not I'll know the difference between someone's actual skills if I was a recruiter/hiring manager after asking them about said skill. I interview many candidates who I see write lots of languages on their resume. I'm not going to go through the list and ask about each one, but the skills endorsements are useful in that I know what I should focus on when I interview them to see if they actually know it. Anyone can lie about anything on any social network.
"Want to network? Get someone's business card and their phone number, store it into your phone and don't rely on a website comprised of spam to build up a network."
- Please. Especially for people in the technical industry. Waste of trees for the person receiving the card and waste of money for the person buying the card. I don't think I've ever called someone after meeting them for the first time at some sort of event, then again I'm not in sales; I prefer more passive introductions.
The thing to keep in mind is that LinkedIn's job, in this area, is to offer great options to advertisers. On Facebook I can put an advert out targeting a specific age, a specific city, and specific interests. Or I can just target... a huge number of people. If I do the latter, do you blame Facebook for not using their data properly?
I've never advertised on LinkedIn. Maybe it's awful, it could well be. But seeing badly targeted adverts means absolutely nothing.
You don't think that advertisers are willing to pay more for well-targeted ads? This is a strong sign that LinkedIn is not leveraging their data as well as they could.
- Advertisers who don't understand what they are doing with automated systems [1]
- Advertisers whose specific target is too small, so they widen the net [2]
- Advertisers who would rather waste a bit more money to keep the net wide [3]
Points 2/3: Some people are going to be your target audience without the data showing it. Just because someone doesn't list SAP as a skill, doesn't mean they don't have it. Just because they aren't in Germany, doesn't mean they wouldn't consider moving for the right opportunity. Just because someone isn't a fan of McDonalds on Facebook it doesn't mean they won't be interested in a KFC advert.
edit: Of course, LinkedIn offering poor features is also a possible explanation. As I said I've never used it (for advertising) and have no interest in exploring it as I only deal with B2C marketing.
So you can pay more for better targeting, which is probably an intelligent way to get the users you want, but there could be companies that just ignore logic and want the cheapest way to blast out a message.
LinkedIn has always been a good professional networking tool. But because it's a professional networking tool, exploring new opportunities is rife with risk (as the OP alludes to). Great opportunity discovery is about what you want to do, not just what you have done, and that isn't necessarily public information.
Mighty Spring helps you find interesting jobs discretely -- a private place for you to manage your career.
ps. We're in private beta, but will expedite invites to all you hacker news folks that sign up :)
Disclaimer: I'm the front-end guy for Mighty Spring :)
I'm guessing this is because I have httpsEverywhere installed (a firefox extension that tries to use https wherever possible). Visiting bugherd.com gives me the same error, so it appears it's a problem on their end. Still, it leaves a bad impression. You might want to disable whatever you are using from them.
Dark green on lime green is not a good choice, I'd suggest moving toward the colors and style of your blog / logo
Just my 2cents
Also, you should feel free to email me: lumen [at] mightyspring -dot- com
This will be next.
Not sure what the monetization strategy would be, or whether it'd be a TOS violation, but some of the features mentioned in the article would be great to have.
Today the focus is on individuals. Tomorrow it will be groups.
Oh, so and so is looking for a new job. I see he's adding recruiter connections on LinkedIn.
I also don't connect with recruiters until I have announced that I am leaving. I'll happily chat with them via private messages or give an alternative email address.
There is no benefit in the default behavior of having the system send all your contacts, including your boss and HR colleagues that you have made a new recruiter friend today.
But appreciate that for other people, they might want to use it completely differently.
EDIT: OK, I don't mind downvotes, but could you please explain why? After factoring in actual work hours, company social events/groups, water cooler/lunchroom chat, and internal company communication channels (email/phone/IM/etc), what sort of connection is missing that LinkedIn provides?
Say I work as a design engineer. My boss is probably older and more experienced. He may have worked at competing firms previously and has connections there. I connect with him, and he's connected with former colleagues. They want to recruit and so start looking around the networks of people in the industry and region.
Because I'm connected to my boss, I am more exposed in their ads. They see the mutual connection and consider that partial confirmation that if I'm employable under him, I'm probably a decent employee.
Networking with existing colleagues, including your boss, helps create exposure of your profile to others in the industry by utilising the connections that your (usually more experienced and more connected) boss has. I'd almost be willing to bet that connecting 'upwards' to more experienced people is on the whole far better for your profile exposure than connecting 'downwards' to lesser-experienced employees (e.g.: you as a mid-level employee connecting to new graduates entering your workforce).
I agree with you that the inability to customise who your updates go to is pretty bad. That's a pretty basic feature and I'd expect to be more integral to LinkedIn than, say, Facebook.
Regardless, why is this such a common response to these types of posts? I understand the angle of "don't be entitled to a free service," but there's also the alternative interpretation of "here are some fundamentals your business is missing, and my humble suggestions."
Unless someone is capable of building a Facebook/LinkedIn that won't info grab and bother the shit out of every contact you've ever had, while maintaining that "niche market" feel for every user, and while keeping that "closely resembling real life social activity graph" feel.
Or maybe I'm just stupid.