ydt

No kidding. That office layout is a nightmare. My last 2 gigs have been pretty weighted towards slack as the preferred communication medium amongst the team. My experience has been that it allows me safely ignore my email inbox with the assurance that anything truly vital will be directly messaged to me on slack. It's lived up to the hype for me.

I agree with you in principle and in the past only accepted connection requests from people I know as well. However, I think LinkedIn's promise as professional social network has really diminished over the years and mostly functions as nothing more than a job board at this point. I probably have about 100 recruiters I have never met in person in my network. As a contract dev updating my profile serves as a way to push notify these people that I'm in the market. It's really the only value I see left in the platform.

One of the main reasons is the existence of a developed Bureaucracy. While Bureaucratic institutions are inefficient and inflexible, the trade off is that they are generally fair. Bill Gates waits in line at the DMV just like the rest of us. There's no way around it.