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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

I mean really, what do they do for me exactly? I have never heard of a friend that got a job through them or found any real value. Besides having a digital rolodex function, one that my email client does anyway, how do they help me? It just seems like a liability, one more thing that can mess up in my life or that I can inadvertently mess up.

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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.

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