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Comment by jarrett | Hacker News Reader

> I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good.

I'm quite certain I'm none of those things. I'm gainfully employed and well-respected. Yet I'm not on LinkedIn. Why? Because I prefer to minimize my social media footprint, because I've heard a lot of things about LinkedIn that rub me the wrong way, and because I don't see a clear value proposition.

So no, my absence from LinkedIn has nothing to do with me being a bad candidate for a job. If you assume it does, you miss out on a good hire.

I think any statement of the form "a person who doesn't use product X is necessarily a bad candidate" is absurd, unless product X is something like disinfectant and the job is something like doctor.

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> So no, my absence from LinkedIn has nothing to do with me being a bad candidate for a job.

- I agree completely.

>If you assume it does, you miss out on a good hire.

- Again, I agree completely.

On the other hand, any company that vets potential employees by LinkedIn, or any single metric or source, isn't a company that I want to work for. So my lack of presence there helps weed out companies that I don't want to work for anyway.

The value I see in my LinkedIn profile is, first of all, the ability to keep in touch with colleagues from my previous jobs.

Also, I find some of the LinkedIn groups pretty good. Gone are the good old days of Usenet, unfortunately, and there are niche topics for which I can't find better forums than some LinkedIn groups.

Oh absolutely, if it delivers value to you in those ways, by all means use it. I don't think it would help me personally in that regard, but if it did, I might reconsider.

I suspect that LinkedIn is more useful to some people than others. And that's fine. Most products are like that. My comment above was really just arguing against the idea that LinkedIn usage somehow correlates with the quality of a candidate.

They're not necessarily a bad candidate, but I have a lot of resumes to scan and this metric works most of the time. I'm okay with getting it wrong sometimes.

I didn't intend this to be taken as a personal affront to people who don't use LinkedIn, so I should have used less inflammatory language. My apologies.

The few very, very excellent developers I know are not on LI, and keep away from it. Why? Because they're so good they will probably never need such a tool, finding work was never an issue.

I think you're actually shooting yourself in the foot, and as someone else mentioned - you're actually missing out on the very best developers out there by taking the shortest, easiest path to recruiting.

> I have a lot of resumes to scan and this metric works most of the time.

Works in what sense? Does it reliably help you make the best hires? Are you sure? (I hypothesize that it does not, and you might not even know it.)

Yes, every hiring manager has lots of resumes to scan. But I wouldn't consider that a logical justification for establishing an arbitrary criterion that's likely to weed out some of the very best candidates. (As others have stated, there anecdotally appears to be a trend wherein the very best don't bother with LinkedIn.)

> I think any statement of the form "a person who doesn't use product X is necessarily a bad candidate" is absurd, unless product X is something like disinfectant and the job is something like doctor.

I've been casting about for a way to illustrate clearly what I mean by "tech snobbery". Many of my conversations go in a direction similar to this (scrollaway > seldo > jarrret). Your sentence will help me. Thank you.

:) To devil's advocate myself, though:

Where does this logic end? On the extreme end of the spectrum, we can agree that a doctor who skips the disinfectant is categorically a bad hire. But what about less extreme cases? Where do we draw the line? What about a developer who doesn't use version control? Or who doesn't use automated tests? What if they do use those things, but within those genres, they've chosen tools you happen to despise?

So I think it's tricky to know which products should be considered mandatory for quality hires.

That being said, I still stand by my comment on LinkedIn. The more debatable examples I gave above are tools that directly affect the quality and efficiency of a developer's work. LinkedIn is not, and that's a pretty big distinction.

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