Honestly, I put a good amount of effort into LinkedIn before quitting. I even subscribe to the job seeker's tier for a month before realizing what a piece of junk it was (pure vanity metrics, little substantial information of use).

My problem was actually getting too many recruiters contacting me offering me jobs out of my interest and it ultimately felt like that email inbox you check once a month to wipe only out the spam.

While I understand some developers find use in LinkedIn, I still think that this might be biased if alternative ways of job seeking weren't also simultaneously pursued. I believe that having a good GitHub, releasing products, blogging, tweeting, and attending meetups can all be affective means of network building.

I'm interested in how you use it to handle communication. I would never try and contact anyone through LinkedIn unless there were no other alternatives. In my experience there is so many junk notification on LinkedIn that any attempt at real communication would drown out.

Counter anecdote: I got my current job through LinkedIn. Recruiter reached out the first time, and I said I wasn't interested. A few weeks later I decided to test the waters and I put my resume on Dice.com. The same recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few hours later, saying he saw my resume on Dice and asked if anything had changed. It had, I interviewed, and I've been working here for a little over a year and a half.

For me it's a convenient way of having recruiters reach out without having my normal inbox completely spammed.

LinkedIn is a great way for recruiters to reach you and offer you job opportunities from companies you've never heard of but might be super interesting to you. Easily 80%+ of the interview offers I've received in the last 5 years have been through LinkedIn (from small startups to tech giants such as Amazon, Netflix or other big companies such as Morgan Stanley).

It's also a pretty good platform to look for jobs out of your local network, say, if you're a foreigner looking to tap in that sweet sweet US tech job market.

Not much additionally to add from the previous comment except that I thought a lot of the recruitment stuff I got from LinkedIn was fake until a friend got a pretty amazing job through a LinkedIn found recruiter.

I have replied to a few recruiters and while I haven't changed companies, it is the equivelent of head hunters for our generation and some of them have been very, very tempting offers.

I use LinkedIn to locate former coworkers but then I keep in touch with them through regular email.

I dont see LinkedIn as being able to do much that personal websites would not do better. I use LinkedIn because many people, even coders do not have websites.