Unless you're already a big name superstar, you have to maintain at least some presence in a centralized location where people can find you.
Github. Github Github Github. LinkedIn for recruiters seems to be a case of aggregating people who potentially have some sort of experience related to what you want. It's great for them because it gives them a pool of people to cold-call. It's not so great for the aspiring employees because chances are greater you will be contacted by a company that doesn't care about you and vaguely relates to what you do than anything else.
It seems like people are afraid that if they delete their linkedin profile they'll miss out on "all those job opportunities!"... Damn it guys, everything dev-related outside of js/html/php is a buyer's market. If you're in need of jobs, there's plenty of high quality freelance websites that can act as a linkedin profile and actually have running jobs.
I'd love to know if anyone actually relies completely on LinkedIn to get their all-precious jobs in the tech sector... because if you do, you're doing it wrong and I'd love to help you.
"I don't have time to put my stuff on Github" when talking about your tech career easily equates to "I don't have time to go to the doctor" when talking about your health.
Those kind of contracts are quite common in the finance world, and to a lesser extent in R&D in big enterprise tech firms (Apple, Microsoft, etc.)
Tell me I'm in my own bubble - fine. Talk about the "HN bubble", what? You're on HN. All these people replying and disagreeing with me are on HN. In fact, despite the upvotes, it's pretty clear a lot of people find LinkedIn useful.
So again, what bubble are you referring to? Seriously...
I rather spend my free time after work on this one life, with family and friends than coding.
Not to mention that most corporate work is under NDA that prevent us to publish anything about it.
You can read more about such arguments here -> http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-an...