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Agree - if you consult in enterprise world, LinkedIn profile is a must-have. This is the first place where prospective customers go to check you out - your history and your connections.

It does not have to be the only tool in your toolbox (own site, blog, Twitter all come into play), but it is expected that you have one.

It is also very useful to keep in touch with former colleagues/customers after projects are over. These are the people who you would not add to your Facebook account but would like to exchange a message with every couple of years or so...

Linked-in is entrenched in my industry (legal). I was job-searching recently, and I noticed that almost every place where a resume submittal lead to a callback, a recruiter checked my Linked-In. It's also been really helpful for finding people I have some connection to, whether it be people who went to the same school, worked for the same firm/judge, etc.

Yeah, as a software developer you're probably in high-enough demand that you can get away with not having one. I hope that state of affairs lasts forever. But for everyone else who still has to hustle for work, the benefits of Linked-In outweighs the scumminess (which is significant, I grant you).

I agree. I'm a project manager, have been in multiple industries. Aviation, intelligence, product dev & mechanical engineering, and oil & gas all use Linkedin, and I benefited from using its service. Linkedin has provided both clients and meaningful job interviews for me; I even give them dollars for upgraded service from time to time.

If you are in sales, it's invaluable in finding individuals in organizations. Maybe some think this is a bad thing and that's fine; I do not. If you are job hunting, it is unbelievable to be able to put something directly in front of the actual person hiring before getting in the door.

Despite being filled with strangeness, many of their industry groups are good for finding specific knowledge. It's scummy (and much less knowledgable than HN or forums around the net), but that's just how some of the internets be, I guess.

It does seem a bit like MySpace; something almost exactly like what they are actually trying to accomplish.

I understand the disdain some have for Linkedin, but I myself have benefited from using it.

I have the same results as you do with an active Github profile. Except I don't get cold-called by recruiters but more directly by the people who need me. It's a lot more personal, friendly, and a better experience overall.

I've had people ask me for my LinkedIn and I sent them my personal site instead - they were just as happy with it. When people ask you for your linkedin, what they really want is a business profile; portfolio, cv, etc. They don't want to "friend" you and "share funny pictures" or something.

LinkedIn helps many get discovered. Recruiters or companies looking for new developers are far more likely to search LinkedIn than to Google "Scala developers in [local City]." Github is great for open-source library and application development, but it's hardly the answer to ditching LinkedIn. Using myself as the example, most of the work I do is proprietary client work or enterprise-level work that is maintained in an internal code repository. My Github profile does not represent my true caliber of work.

Why not have both? Github isn't a social network. I frequently get contacted by people through LinkedIn because of the network aspect of LinkedIn. We both know the same person so they trust me rather than me just being a random name on the internet. They probably found me by searching through their LinkedIn network.

  > Github isn't a social network

Isn't it? I can join, commit no code, fill out a profile, create and join groups, add (well, follow) friends.

It's not Facebook, but it appears to tick most of the social network boxes.

Yeah, good point. I guess I just don't think about it that way because you I go there to browse code rather than people.

Can you message people?

If people want to be messaged through GitHub, they'll put their email address on their profile.

I kinda wish it had this feature.

Off topic and a little nosey, but what skills do you have that command 650/day?

I don't believe, in the last 15 years, I've ever hired a contractor, for any IT work, from Jira consulting to installing telephone lines, (and certainly not any type of skilled development coding) that charged less than $800/day.

Usually a contractor charges from $150 - $200/hour, with a discount if you need them for more than a couple weeks.

It was £650 a day, not $ - so about US$1000

You know that every year the USD gets inflated more? A person making $100k salary gets paid about 400/day (I just divided by 260) with holidays and no breaks. 650/day for freelance where the pay is not consistent sounds pretty modest to me. Really the way inflation and money printing and the market for money has been going these days we should all be getting paid a LOT more. But we will just continue to be happy with our 50-200k salaries as the rich 1% keeps gathering more and more of it.

Just being pedantic here - grand parent post mentions £650 a day, which is around $1000 per day depending on the prevailing exchange rate.

It's in GBP, so £650/day is actually $285,356.50. I wouldn't call that modest in the least.

It's also $137/hr or $121/hr, depending on whether you assume 8- or 9-hour workdays. In IT consulting, these are not high rates.

Also keep in mind: A day rate implies consultant (i.e. non-employee) work, which further implies <100% utilization. Assuming he only works weekdays and takes 4 weeks of vacation (comparable to working at a BigCo), 80% utilization gets you to ~192 days, or $210k.

That's probably optimistic, though. This math further assumes he is able to sell 80% of his time in the 20% of his nonbillable time, and that he doesn't lose any billable time due to scheduling issues (i.e. each client is ready to go as soon as he is). Depending on his business, he'll have to spend some cash on overhead (accountants, lawyers, etc.).

My brother works as an IT project manager consultant for big old companies that will remain nameless. Daily rate something like £450-500, so call it $750.

Under utilisation is true enough, but you also have to take into account the tax efficiencies you can put in place as a freelancer (in the UK at least), which means he's still well enough off to have a Porsche 911 and a flat in the Swiss Alps.

Nice work if you can get it.

Yep. If you charge ~$x/h as a freelancer you're probably taking home a similar amount to someone making $xK/year once you hit your stride and have a lot of contacts coming to you with work (which can take years to build up).

its not even the 1 percent. Its more like the .1 percent. according to forbes: An entry ticket to the 1% starts with an annual income of about $394,000 (says Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez) or about $1.5 million in liquid assets (my zestimate). Post-tax and retirement savings, that’s about $220,000 a year while they are working. These are national norms. If they happen to live on the coasts or near a major urban center, as is more than likely, they might need twice as much money to crash into the 1% by local standards.

Good point. It is definitely a smaller portion of the population that is really pulling the strings with money. I guess I could just say Wall Street? The banks? Regardless, I wouldn't say the lower 1% that makes this sort of middle class money that you are talking about are completely innocent. I'm sure many of them are government or government-funded private business employees, and I'm sure many of them aren't doing important work that is worth the fat wallets they are building thanks to the people who do control the money.

However, I'm also not denying that there are many highly influential, priceless, people getting paid these high salaries that are greatly beneficial to our society and have legitimately earned their fortunes. It's just unfortunate that everything is being done to support the continuation of rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. However, thanks to some people, the entire world can become richer.

Java Enterprise, Spring, JMS, Messaging and a couple of large Java based ecommerce platforms although I spend more time actually leading projects than I do writing code now.

Most good Java guys that I know take around £500 - 700 per day in the enterprise, telco, banking and ecommerce space.

I agree with this. I honestly think this is the only reason why Linkedin/Facebook/et al. are still around, because there's such a social stigma about not having one. Just like you said:

> Everybody I've ever spoken to (outside of small JS type devs) has got a linkedin profile and expected me to have one.

With Facebook the stigma is lessened, but still there.

This is very strange to me. I had a LinkedIn for a couple years, but it served me absolutely no purpose except one or two pings from recruiters who were looking for vastly different skillsets anyway. I got sick of the security issues, endless deluge of useless email, and generally having to care about it at all, so I deleted my account a few years ago.

Now I get more recruiter email, except they actually sort of know what I'm good at, because they found me through GitHub (or my blog) instead. Not to say that GitHub is inherently a better indicator of capabilities, but it's more likely to be looked at by someone with some technical understanding, whereas LinkedIn is basically keyword soup.

I don't believe I've ever once been asked for my LinkedIn. But I work for an SF company, so maybe your experience is a reflection of enterprise and its love of résumés.

You aren't enough of a special hipster snowflake to ironically not use popular job networking services.

I think parent and grandparent just operate in different sub-industries/geographic regions etc. I find it easy to believe that some communities find linkedin indispensable while some consider it an anti-signal.

I also find it strange that while you clearly know that over-generalizing your own experiences shows that one "only knows about the bubble that one operates in", your first sentence is that you can't believe people don't use linkedin...

This pretty much mirrors my experience as a Contract PM in London.

Read your last two sentences.

Maybe you need to read what I've written. I know that I'm not part of his world but I at least understand there is a world outside of what I do. He just thinks that everyone here is the same as him and what he does must be the only thing in software development.

I apologize if it came off caustic - my point was purely understanding, to not be critical of his 'bubble' while admittedly working in one of your own.

That insight should help you understand the relevance of LinkedIn because it operates across 'bubbles'.

I'm all in favor of replacing LinkedIn with something decentralized (or just less exploitative), but isolating yourself on GitHub (which is not even the software dev industry but a minority subset of it) is not a solution, it's immature clique-ish behavior.