10 ms·

Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

• nonines 6y ago
  >> The corporate work culture survives on people's fears. If you don't play by the rules of the people in power, how will you make money, how will you feed your family, how will you contribute to society? >> When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you. A lot of what he says resonates really strongly. Fact of the matter though is that we are locked in this state of affairs. Specially if you are in a not-exactly-buzzing job market. I don't know if there is a will and a way to revert ourselves back to something more than a commodity. And I don't see a way to move forward to something beyond that.
• swiley 6y ago
  I quit using LinkedIn after realizing that just viewing pages spams people you know with emails... Talk about unprofessional.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    It was quite handy to stay in touch with people you worked with but eventually it turned in another spammy cesspit just like every other form of social media.
• benbristow 6y ago
  I found my last 2 jobs through LinkedIn. One through direct application through LinkedIn (the Easy-Apply feature) and then once through a recruiter's message. I couldn't imagine not having LinkedIn nowadays, it's invaluable.
• xavk 6y ago
  > I'm fairly certain LinkedIn has never helped me in my job search. This is likely not true for everyone, but I'd go so far as to say that unless your profile is exceptional for some reason, it probably does more harm than good. You and I are just another candidate in a tall stack—ie. our profiles are more useless information they can use to cross our name off. This is exactly the problem that sparked us starting https://otta.com https://otta.com - we speak to job seekers on a daily basis and the overwhelming feedback we hear is that LinkedIn really doesn't help people. We're doing our best to change that - just in London right now, and just for tech companies, but soon (hopefully) everywhere.
  • C1sc0cat 6y ago
    That's interesting, I get a lot of job offers via LinkedIn. For my last job search I did very little direct searching for jobs I had enough just from linked in. I think Linked in helps more if you are experienced and have a decent network - it probably not going to help a new graduate or some one looking for a second job. The agencies using it can be a bit variable, pre covid-19 I was pitched a Grade 7/6 Job in the UK civil service and the agency seemed clueless - Grade 7 and 6 are very senior positions Think the sort of Gig Mat Cuts Has
  • mcv 6y ago
    I do almost nothing on LinkedIn. I used to keep it up to date; I still have hundreds of outdated, barely relevant contacts. My CV hasn't been updated in years. And yet recruiters keep finding me through LinkedIn, and I keep getting freelance positions through those recruiters. I put very little effort in finding new positions, but they're always available. A coworker on my current project who is also a freelancer is much more active. He tries to contact people in companies he wants to work for and gets interesting jobs that way without having recruiters as middlemen. That takes more effort but saves money. Maybe I should do that too. Maybe it's different for freelancers. Maybe the Dutch market is different from the author's market. I'm no fan of LinkedIn, but it seems to work for me.
  • philjackson 6y ago
    I just ran thorough the process of looking at jobs as a potential candidate. What a breath of fresh air compared to the obscured roles that recruiters post. Great job.
• BrentOzar 6y ago
  If you ever want to become an independent consultant, LinkedIn has a value that won't be immediately apparent to you. While YOU might hate it, there are some business folks who search LinkedIn first. They want to see consultants/contractors who've been used by other people in their network, been recommended, etc. I know it sounds odd to us - I would neeeever search LinkedIn first - but I've heard from prospects who have, and they've contacted me on LinkedIn first. It's never worked out for me though - the billable rates on those kinds of gigs have been pretty low.
  • ageitgey 6y ago
    As a consultant, LinkedIn is also helpful if you are trying to turn a niche consulting area into a resellable software product (the dream of every hourly consultant). You can find and reach the end users of whatever weird niche you want to sell into and have them try out a prototype, etc. Most of the world's employees aren't software devs who get annoyed by regular cold calls from recruiters. So often non-software people are happy to talk to someone who speaks their language and values their advice. It can even lead to new relationships and your initial product sales.
    • petercooper 6y ago
      Most of the world's employees aren't software devs who get annoyed by.. (insert one of many things here) This is a really important point. Time and time again I see lengthy discussions on Hacker News around various topics (especially relating to advertising and marketing) where the consensus isn't even vaguely a majority viewpoint in the wider world, and it's useful to be able to focus on the big picture.
  • stared 6y ago
    For me it's similarish. While I don't like it too much, when I consider hiring someone it is the first place for a background check. It saved me once from a really, really bad hire (due to common colleagues). At the same time - I am an independent consultant, and yet - I am not sure if there were a single contract that came through LinkedIn directly. Quite ironically, Facebook was much more productive with that respect. Sure, I get a lot of messages, but rarely about offers, I am interested in.
• hyko 6y ago
  The idea that you need LinkedIn to further your career is a myth straight out of the LinkedIn marketing budget. It was a weak signal that is now pure noise.
  • s1t5 6y ago
    There's a large number of people who find their jobs through LinkedIn. I wouldn't call that noise even if some people can do without it.
  • 2rsf 6y ago
    My experience, and of a few people around me in different professions and experience levels shows differently. Of course you could do without Linkedin, but it makes your next job search much easier if you keep your profile updated.
• NietTim 6y ago
  Did the same years ago, LinkedIn had next to 0 value for me. The only linkedin invites I still get are from a guy that I had a financial disagreement with years ago when I freelanced for him and who has blocked me on twitter. Heh.
• rapnie 6y ago
  I hope someone picks up a project similar to CloutStream [0] meant to be the LinkedIn for the fediverse (but now dead). [0] https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-activitypub-apps#its-dead-jim https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
• sdan 6y ago
  I was thinking of closing my Linkedin, but it came down to this: Suppose I wanted to join a company / get to know someone and didn't realize that someone I already knew, knew them? How could I figure out who knew who to give me warm intro w/o Linkedin? For that reason I'm probably going to keep my Linkedin until I find it unnecessary.
• asplake 6y ago
  I totally get that it’s not for everyone. For me though, way more traction there than in (say) Twitter or Facebook. But for me it is not “glorified resume site” (to quote the article) but a place actively to connect with people. You get out of it what you put in I guess.
• bad_user 6y ago
  > "unless your profile is exceptional for some reason, it probably does more harm than good" Isn't this true of your resume as well? What makes LinkedIn any worse than a public resume? And if you don't have a good resume, that's totally fine, many companies will still call you in for an interview, however the companies that have a long queue of interviews, will use those resume for discriminating between potential candidates and there's no way around that. If your online profile isn't good, then improve your online profile. Work on some public projects, write a blog, read some marketing books and apply that knowledge. And on LinkedIn ... actively ask your former colleagues to recommend you on LinkedIn. People writing words about you is the best kind of endorsement you can get. Don't be ashamed of asking for it.
  • viraptor 6y ago
    I'm not sure what the author means by this, but my view is that unless you're good enough to get the recruitment people you'd like to see, you'll only get low quality messages that waste your time.
    • bad_user 6y ago
      I have some experience on being recruited. Most of the messages you receive are indeed junk. But that's not the value of LinkedIn. The value is being connected and receiving recommendations from your current or former colleagues. That's not something you can easily maintain on your own. And if you want to be recruited, then you have to actively improve your profile and even to actively seek a job — this means maintaining relationships with capable recruiters that can filter out the junk for you, or even contacting the companies that you like directly. And in both cases having an up to date online profile helps. In other words a combination of outbound and inbound marketing. LinkedIn can help with both, or it might not help, but passively receiving messages from recruiters is not the provided value. Due to the supply and demand curve, software developers have gotten lazy, but marketing is a soft skill we should all learn.
• ementi 6y ago
  If I didn’t worry about money, I would certainly delete my LinkedIn. The author’s opinion is that having a LinkedIn will hurt in getting a job. I was thinking that it would help since a lot of companies ask for it. For me, having a LinkedIn is certainly out of fear however I haven’t had many benefits from it. I paid for premium for 2 months and didn’t get anything out of it in terms of getting a job.
  • toyg 6y ago
    It's definitely a defensive posture - in my corner of the world, unless you're a hotshot name, not having a LinkedIn profile at all will raise eyebrows when jobhunting. So you must have a presence, even if fundamentally idle. I agree that Premium is useless. If you start spamming people you'll just look desperate. And I've not had a single job application go through with LI, I think employers just use it as "the new Monster" (post because you must show effort, then just ignore the thousands of CVs you get, as most real candidates will come through recommendations anyway). It's only useful to be there in case a recruiter calls with a good job (rare but it happens).
• 082349872349872 6y ago
  I keep my LinkedIn mostly to be aware of how much they know about several decades of my true social graph. (cf Böll —he did work in statistics, so I think the irony is strong in this one— https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/ucha20/2002/ucha20.v015.i03/09332480.2002.10554810/production/09332480.2002.10554810.fp.png_v03 https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t... )
• lordnacho 6y ago
  I find that a lot of serendipitous connections are made on LinkedIn. People will see my profile and strike up a conversation. Seems to work OK for what it is. What it isn't great for is content. There's never anything remotely useful there, the whole feed is a weird corporate version of the self help section in a bookshop. A lot of stuff is written purely to get attention. But I also don't see the tradeoff in as poor a light as say FB. What's so personal about where you work? If people can see what I've done they can offer relevant services, mainly they can try to recruit me.
  • outime 6y ago
    >A lot of stuff is written purely to get attention. Doesn't this apply to any social network feed? Most of the time people (or companies) just want your attention and LinkedIn is still a social network, therefore it makes total sense.
    • kuu 6y ago
      Well, I would say HN seems interesting in most cases, not only some attention grabbing platform. Don't you agree?
      • outime 6y ago
        I get what you mean but I didn't say that attention-grabbing platforms are incompatible with (at least some) interesting content. Also, HN doesn't have many dark patterns (or any?) and I'd not consider it a typical social network like FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc but more like a forum. But even if we consider this place a social network, comparing it to any of the typical social networks is futile IMHO.
        • fakedang 6y ago
          The difference between HN and any other social platform can be summarized in one word - dang.
  • varjag 6y ago
• ayhoung 6y ago
  I got my job at AWS from LinkedIn.
• aroberge 6y ago
  I did the same and the amount of spam emails (trying to sell me services or products related to my job) dropped down by at least 80%. If I were at the beginning of my career, I imagine that the network effect might compensate for the annoyance, but that is not the case for me.
• keeganpoppen 6y ago
  did this ~7 years ago; haven't regretted it once. have been met with bemusement on many occasions when people ask for my linkedin, which amuses me. it's always struck me as the most flagrant "give my personal data to someone else to profit on for virtually no reason" of all of the social networks. at least on Facebook i can talk to my friends...
• pulkitsh1234 6y ago
  Off topic: I find that LinkedIn is bloated with features (most of the "social" aspects of it seem to be just ripped off of FB), which often facilitate spam (Look at my new certificates, Sharing of TikTok videos, Motivational quotes) and just a weird way to share information ("Link in the first comment"). I believe LinkedIn thinks they are improving customer "retention" and all other metrics might be ringing hard, but it suffers from massive feature bloat. The only reason I am on LinkedIn is just that every other person is on it. And from [0] shared on HN yesterday, it will not work if just a couple of people move to a new platform, they need to move AND share that fact as loudly as possible. [0]: https://fs.blog/2020/06/coordination-problems/ https://fs.blog/2020/06/coordination-problems/
  • rakkhi 6y ago
    It is like management that expect to see what Gartner or Forrester said even though it is just who did the biggest sponsorship
  • bluedino 6y ago
    It's really just a work Facebook. The job ads are decent though.
• Avalaxy 6y ago
  The author says it himself in the introductory paragraph: > I never used LinkedIn... hadn't even updated my profile in the 9 months since I left my last software engineering job. So you use LinkedIn only passively, never do anything on the platform and then write a rant on how it provides you no value? Maybe actually _try_ to use the strengths of LinkedIn before you dismiss it?
  • bulka 6y ago
    I think this is what author is saysing exactly. If you use it passively then there is no value (add?) and then the question is why to have a profile at all? Did not look like a rant to me.
    • Avalaxy 6y ago
      Then I don't really get what the news value of this post is. Pretty much nothing that you don't actively use provides value. It comes across more as "LinkedIn has no value" to me.
      • bulka 6y ago
        It is a personal account and an unusual move I guess. Try to reverse what you consider to be the cause and the effect here. The argument does not seem to be LinkedIn is usedless in all possible cases, but it has no value for the author that they cannot get otherwise.
      • darkwater 6y ago
        The only value I get from the post it's that it may provoke a thought in other LinkedIn members about "What am I doing here too?" "Do I really need a LinkedIn profile?". But you cannot judge LinkedIn platform usefulness as a whole based on this post.
      • quijoteuniv 6y ago
        Maybe you can provide your experience on why linkedin is of value to you and then there can be a discusion. I personally agree with the author and i am happy to read on this. From the stand point of a company, if they were actually paying attention to honest feedback they could learn a bunch.
• ThePhysicist 6y ago
  From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free so I'm mostly feeling positive about it, but I agree that like any social network it has downsides and can lead to psychological stress. Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous", i.e. I try to never interact with social media or news platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates, as I find this to be the primary mechanism by which these platforms try to suck people into their content machine (there are other mechanisms like notification spam). Most of these systems seem to target dopamine-releasing pleasure mechanisms in the brain, but some are built around darker psychosocial patterns (e.g. success relative to others, the feeling of adequacy and social confirmation). HN is like a diet to my brain in comparison as it just presents a single page of news without inciting me to scroll to the next page and doesn't show any notifications to me either. Please keep it that way!
  • aivosha 6y ago
    All these mechanisms are not 100%. They are averaged around "an average" person as all these things are. I would argue that anybody that realizes the true intention poses enough intuition to stay away from it. Its a tool. Use parts of it you need and dont pay attention to the rest. Its not hard. If it is hard - be thankful it revealed something about you that you want to work on overcoming.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    > Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous" I like that way of looking at it. I have to agree. I no longer even load the FB timeline. I have to have an FB account in order to interact with the community for one of my open-source projects, but I check it maybe once a day.
  • diminish 6y ago
    I am one of the first LinkedIn members. Closed my account this year. It gave me nothing much. Recent 'x mentioned u r reporting to Y' was the turning point for me. Too much fuss for nothing.
    • deleted 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ultim8k 6y ago
  I got my last few good-paying contracts from LinkedIn, so I can't complain. I've even started paying the premium plan. I know ...privacy and a lot of noise, can't disagree. But that's the price to pay if you want a career. Can't become rich by living an easy and private life.
  • hyko 6y ago
    I’d say you can’t really be rich without living an easy and private life :)
• saos 6y ago
  Fair enough. Linkedin has helped me find and secure new roles. I do agree that its becoming that sort of FOMO experience when I think about. In fact thats why I deleted Facebook, Twitter and Instagram many years ago, which has positively helped me. But, I do feel like its turning into that Facebook experience. I do often reject those random Linkedin connection requests from time to time. Other than that I just play along with it. Use it when I need to use.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  LinkedIn is fairly useless, but it’s a game I play. Some folks just expect me to have a LI profile, so I keep it up, and treat it respectfully. I do like to have a platform where I’m not constantly reading troll screeds (but it’s starting to show cracks). I mainly use it to reinforce my “personal brand,” and give people a place I can send them to, where they can find out about me, in a format with which they are comfortable. I don’t treat it casually, as a lot of folks take it seriously, and treating it badly is disrespectful (IMO). > Hiring is broken Yup. Not LI’s fault, though. I won’t even begin to address that, but, as an older techie, with an enormous portfolio and experience, and mediocre “schoolboy test” performance, I have encountered this in spades.
• inglor 6y ago
  I don't understand why as a developer I'd want to use LinkedIn. I have StackOverflow and GitHub which a lot of relevant leads come from. When I buy a used car - I don't publish a "I'm looking for a used car" post and wait for car salespeople to approach me. I go and charactarize what I'm looking for and then go car-shopping. When I look for a job - I don't publish a "I'm looking for a job". Talking to the recruiters (HR people) is very boring and often counterproductive. Contributing to open source and meeting and talking to engineers and building things is a lot more fun and rewarding. That's why I don't have a linkedin (well, only an account for the API). It always seemed like "opting in to a lot of spam" without getting any value as a developer. I don't even think I'm particularly good - but great developers probably have this x100. Of course if I was not a developer but a sales person my situation would be completely different.
  • namdnay 6y ago
    Even within a developer role, there is also the business knowledge aspect. Imagine my company is looking to expand into the widget market, and I'm going to lead the IT for the new widget division. I need a team of 10 engineers. Obviously I can look for strong open source developers, mix it up with some promising graduates too, but I'm going to want at least one or two developers who have already worked in the widget space. So what do it do? I go to LinkedIn and look at profiles from the main widget companies, and reach out to some of them
  • scarface74 6y ago
    Contributing to open source and meeting and talking to engineers and building things is a lot more fun and rewarding. I personally get no enjoyment out of development besides it being a way to support my addiction to food and shelter. I don’t dislike development, but it is just a job. When I am actively looking, it’s so much easier to send messages to local recruiters with my resume and wait for them to call me (pre-Covid they always did).
    • inglor 6y ago
      Maybe a dumb question - but what are you passionate about? What do you find fun and rewarding? I genuinely enjoy building software. For the first ~10 years as a software developer I was genuinely surprised I was getting paid.
• 2rsf 6y ago
  > LinkedIn is a glorified resume site. And what's wrong with that ?
• gerland 6y ago
  Most of my best jobs came from LI leads, so I don't really get the point. I find LI to be a more open and just system than hiring a guy that knows a guy, or forcing people into slavery in open source. It's not the hiring that is broken, but the tech industry itself. There is nothing that compares in how low a measurable value is priced in any other domain. It seems that the less you can put a price on something, the more people speculate that it is worth. There is probably some fancy economical law to follow, idk.
  • achow 6y ago
    Hear! Hear! I too don't get the animosity for LinkedIn. For me too all the career defining moves happened because of LinkedIn. Never ever going to close my account.
    • tcbasche 6y ago
      I guess YMMV though. I closed mine and it hasn't really affected anything. Career has been able to move forward full steam without it.
  • UweSchmidt 6y ago
    I don't understand what you mean. Do you think it's easy or hard to measure the value of a contributor in tech, and what does the "speculation" about their worth do exactly?
    • gerland 6y ago
      I think it's much easier to measure value of tech skills than most other skills. In the management and business areas you have to bet on how well people will perform and it's harder to put a finger on what will define success. Even people moving between similar environments might have difficulty adjusting. I personally believe that a lot of hiring is happening only on appearances alone. Since the people in middle management are often recruited like that, they also tend to overvalue skills of similar individuals. I'm seeing right now some "reassessments" happening due to the whole COVID thing. A lot of invaluable people are losing their jobs and yet no one is feeling any difference. It's just the market finally catching up to an overvalued good.
• hidiegomariani 6y ago
  linkedin has been an invaluable tool for me professionally. The day I'll be able to delete it is when I'll be retiring or not having to seek employment..
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• olcor 6y ago
  Linkedin provides value to me in two ways: - My connections list would make a potential recruiter (and maybe even the Linkedin Algorithm) be slightly more confident that I am who I say I am, i.e. I did work at the companies and studied at the schools I listed) because there would be people in that list who have shared that history with me. I make sure these are the only people in my connections list, apart from a few recruiters I wouldn't mind chatting with again. - I can be discoverable professionally/personally by a google search. I don't have any other social media accounts. I take some effort to maximize this value and minimize the other irritations and distractions. Example: I unfollow everyone I connect, so my feed is mostly empty. I don't connect with people I don't know or those who don't bother interacting in any other way except just sending a request. Some people could go a few steps further and use uBlock origin's element picker to permanently block the UI elements constituting the feed and anything else they don't want to see. This way all you get is maybe a few emails a month maximum, and potentially good job opportunities. Everyone else just sees a quasi-official page about my professional experience.
• eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  Excellent points: > Fear of scarcity. Not having a job when you need a job is a terrible feeling, I get it. It's why I joined LinkedIn in the first place. > Fear of missing out. Maybe some magical opportunity might trickle down through your network of connections? The truth is, if you're relying on LinkedIn to manage your network, those relationships are thin as tinsel. > The corporate work culture survives on people's fears. If you don't play by the rules of the people in power, how will you make money, how will you feed your family, how will you contribute to society? ...and social media played on similar fears around social life.
  • kubanczyk 6y ago
    Yes, the last point hit especially hard when he continued about "outsourcing" the choice of my values. Quoting Vonnegut: "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
• unixhero 6y ago
  LinkedIn generated offers for me. It's all I can say.
• ThomPete 6y ago
  Linkedin works for me not the other way around. Its a giant rolodex, stays mostly out of the way and make it easy for me to investigate various things like who knows a person or what does company x do I even pay for the premium account and have for years. Its not useful for everyone and definitely not all the ti e but when its is, its all the money worth.
• bulka 6y ago
  "Finally, after I cofounded a company, I closed my LinkedIn account". It does seem that author never tried to use LinekdIn other than as an online copy of the CV. In my expirience it can be an ok job board replacement for example.
• redelbee 6y ago
  Anyone else notice significantly more notification spam from LinkedIn lately? It seems like I’m guaranteed to get a badge notification daily now compared to once a week or so in the past. LinkedIn is one of the few apps I still allow notifications from. In retrospect I probably turned them on in fear of missing an opportunity when looking for a job. I can confidently say I haven’t missed out on any opportunity and the content notifications are mostly terrible. It’s so bad I’m considering following the author’s lead and getting off the platform altogether. What does the future look like? I can only assume someone at LinkedIn is looking at daily active users and trying to juice that number with app notification spam. In theory LinkedIn is perfect: keeps business and personal separate, a dedicated platform for work-related everything after the Microsoft acquisition. In practice it’s awful. Is there any future where a social media company like LinkedIn could coalesce around something useful instead of chasing metrics (DAUs, etc)?
• arexxbifs 6y ago
  LinkedIn began as something that actually seemed useful, but it long since turned into Facebook for middle management types for feeding their echo chamber with self help stories and 10 Things All Successful People Do. I have not come across a single serious recruiter there for years and I closed my account 6 months ago or so. Perhaps it's still useful for freelancers.
  • namdnay 6y ago
    > turned into Facebook for middle management types yeah that's a real cancer... LinkedIn can be really useful, but it's flooded with so much corporate onanism that it just becomes painful. Hundreds of corporate climbers competing with each other to show how passionate and proactive they are about IT middle management
  • scarface74 6y ago
    Three of the Big 5 tech companies (no Netflix doesn’t count) had internal recruiters randomly reached out to me in the last three months while the local job market has cratered. Without LinkedIn, I wouldn’t have even pursued the (remote) job I am starting in July with $BigTech. Even before that all of the local external recruiters I’ve found have been through LinkedIn.
    • arexxbifs 6y ago
      Glad to hear it can still be worthwhile!
• sk0v 6y ago
  I really consider getting rid of my car. I bought it a year ago, but it's only ever sat in the driveway, I never use it. The funny meta-thing about his post, is that the content he feels adds 0 value, is in fact his own post. He is literally making a post about a tool he doesn't use. It's the equivalent of a person making a blog post about a tv series they don't watch but have seen the trailer for; no actual value to add to the discussion about the topic. This is valueless content.
  • maelito 6y ago
    > I really consider getting rid of my car. I bought it a year ago, but it's only ever sat in the driveway, I never use it. This is an unpopular and very interesting situation, could you write a blog post about it ?
    • majewsky 6y ago
      Depends on the circumstances. I'm 30 years old and I don't have a driver's license. Public transit, biking and walking work just fine.
  • osobo 6y ago
    Well, in your metaphor he decided to get rid of all cars, forever. There are probably a ton of people who blog about that. Since there is no alternative for Linkedin and it is defacto the only professional social network out there, it is a categorical decision where quite a few people are wondering how it would affect them, of they did the same.
    • sk0v 6y ago
      I get what you say to some extent - and as often is, there is no direct comparison. But let me elaborate a little bit on my view. LinkedIn may be an online professional network, but that doesn't mean there are no other means of "transportation". I take care of my network by meeting my professional peers a lot. I talk with the same recruiters normally, both in a hiring capacity and a candidate capacity. I know them, they know me. I stay in touch with my old colleagues, some who are now CEOs, others who are programmers, and even more who are still where I met them - some of them I even consider friends - most of the valuable connections. In the technology community, you can go to many organized events. I participate in both React, .NET, and cloud meetups, and now I co-host some as well. Your network is so much more than LinkedIn, it's a relationship with actual human beings, which is where LinkedIn often falls short. It does, however, work great as a contact book of "oh shit, I wonder where he is now and how can I get in touch with him" - and then you go meet them. In person. All jobs of significance I have been considered for, and most likely most of what I will be considered for in the future is based on my actual relations with people. "Talk to this guy, I worked with him on X" - it's the same way I hire great people. LinkedIn is a showcase for your resume, what you've done, who you are affiliated with, and a professional point of contact, but it's by no means "your professional network".
• dreen 6y ago
  You might have closed the account, but good luck stopping them from emailing you!
  • robin_reala 6y ago
    I never had a LinkedIn account but was getting email from them. Hitting the unsubscribe button would stop it for a month but then restart again. After about 6 months I sent them a mail threatening legal action if I ever received a mail from them again, and since then it’s been blissfully quiet. They must have an internal black-list for people that do that.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• teekert 6y ago
  I also got/get a lot of value out of LinkedIn, I see what my old classmates do and that helps a lot at approaching a new company. Also, our own recruiters use it to send me lists of applicants that I can judge with stars or yes/no very fast. I like it.
• rodolphoarruda 6y ago
  As a business developer, I see LinkedIn more like a business network than a job seek Website. LinkedIn favor networking above all, which eventually leads you to get a new job.
• cdmp 6y ago
  I don't have a LinkedIn profile. The only obvious difference that's made to my life is that I never get emails from my "CEO" asking me to drop what I'm doing and buy him some iTunes gift cards. Which is something my LinkedIn-using colleagues get fairly regularly. LinkedIn is a huge centralised database of phishing targets. Whatever upside it might provide to the world, that's a pretty big downside.
• simonkafan 6y ago
  Like any social network, the value you get out of it is the cumulative value your connections bring in (through news postings, recommendations, leads). If you don't have much connections and the few you have are basically just celebrating themselves ("look mum, I got promoted!") the value gain is limited.
• quijoteuniv 6y ago
  I am so glad people/blog like this one that explain very clearly matters experienced by lot of us! Good job! Thanks for sharing.
• shafyy 6y ago
  I've deleted my LinkedIn several years ago, as it was annoying and didn't bring any value to me. I do have a fake account to overcome their auth wall to see other people's profiles (useful once in a full moon). As others have said, LinkedIn should have stopped as a digital rolodex.
  • prepend 6y ago
    How was it annoying? I turned off LinkedIn’s notifications probably 10 years ago and they’ve been surprisingly not bad about coming up with new categories of messages that I need to block. I think I only use it as a digital Rolodex and it’s been helpful as that. I can’t think of another site as useful for that purpose.
    • shafyy 6y ago
      Yeah had all notifications turned off also for a while before. Still, I found myself getting back on it and reading all the mindless shit people posted on my timeline :-)
• therealmarv 6y ago
  If you are searching for a job there is no choice: Expose all your personal data everywhere on every job searching platform and job social network and confirm the usage of your data in every way. It's a privacy nightmare basically.
• Pedrit0 6y ago
  I can underestand the author's point of view about the uniformizing atmosphere on Linkedin, but I could not quit. I am IT system architect in Paris. It means linkedin is my magic tool to get tons of job opportunities without even searching. Closing my account would be a meaningless and self-harming move... But by the way I use it only as smart and dynamic resumé / job offer board and never use it as a social network. And I never read at personal publications as they are mainly about corporate spirit BS clichés and pathetic personal development advice. And I personnaly think that people who spend much time commenting on Linkedin often offer a bad image of themselves : they should work more and self-promote less.
• thedanbob 6y ago
  > Having only 100 connections probably does more harm than good Ha! I had probably an order of magnitude fewer when I closed my account in 2013. My motivation was their underhanded spamming of all my contacts with connection requests, but I guess it's nice to know I didn't miss out on anything.
• code4tee 6y ago
  LinkedIn is mostly full of people trying to reach or impress other people who are broadly not really using LinkedIn. Most people have a profile but few people I know spend any time on the site unless their activity fits the description above. Thus it’s never really clear to me what the point of it all is.
• nottorp 6y ago
  I don’t see what’s wrong with keeping a LinkedIn profile. Just turn off all notifications and ignore the corporate speak self promotion drivel in your feed. This goes for any social networking site btw.
• mehdix 6y ago
  I was in doubt whether to delete my LinkedIn or give it a facelift. After Corona hit, I did indeed improved my LinkedIn presence. I have diabled all the distractions and focuse on the network though. I realized there is value in keeping in touch with potential decision makers and employers. If you are an expat, live in a faraway place, lack community in your town, etc, LinkedIn could be valuable for you. If you are in a tech-hub, have access to lots of communities and potential employers, sure, LinkedIn looks useless to you.
• ssm008 6y ago
  I tried creating a LinkedIn profile some time ago. After having updated everything in the profile, it was restricted. To activate it again I have to verify my ID by sending pictures of my passport or something. I wonder which wire I tripped to get banned like that
• mcv 6y ago
  I'm no fan of LinkedIn. It's a mess of dark patterns, and I think that shortly after I joined, they tried to con me into giving them my Gmail password. They certainly offer me a lot of contacts who I do know, but they have no business knowing that I know them. There's certainly fishy stuff going on. At the same time, though, recruiters find me there. Despite my CV being years out of date, and me ignoring LinkedIn most of the time, recruiters keep finding me there and offering me interesting freelance positions. A co-worker who is also a freelancer uses LinkedIn more actively, and uses it to connect to hiring managers of companies he might want to work for. That way he finds work without middlemen.
• brendancahill 6y ago
  I really enjoyed your article. LinkedIn seems to not know what it would like to be. Its initial model was good - bring resumes into the 21st century. But, in an era when one's Twitter account or personal blog is considered "the new resume" what is LinkedIn's value proposition anymore? Personally, I do like the platform, but I have found its users much less likely to respond/interact with content or DMs than Twitter. Thanks!
• raverbashing 6y ago
  > but I'd go so far as to say that unless your profile is exceptional for some reason, it probably does more harm than good. > You and I are just another candidate in a tall stack—ie. our profiles are more useless information they can use to cross our name off. That seems a very naive interpretation. Or maybe my profile is truly exceptional (who knows) I've came across several potential good job opportunities in LinkedIn, and of course, while you won't jump hoops too frequently and most of them might be not great opportunities, I can totally see the value. And those are not only through direct recruiter contacts, but also through friends sharing job posts (or candidates). (Yes, recruiters still ask for CVs sometimes sigh )
• fabiomaia 6y ago
  I saw the same thing a while ago and deleted it. I got my first job in a different country easily without LinkedIn. I see no value in LinkedIn for job hunting, many of the ads are just links to different job boards or application forms that I have to fill out or upload my CV to anyway. Ironically I created a LinkedIn again after starting this job, I think mostly to flex on my exciting new job and measuring myself against my peers from college, while some small part of me also thought it could be important for networking. If you really want to keep in touch with peers from college you will find a better and much more genuine way of doing so. If you want to network maybe it can be a useful tool but I'm not sure stroking each other's ego is the best way to do that. Once again I was coming to the conclusion that it's a useless and pointless platform (like most social networks, but that's another topic). My feed right now is nothing but cringe memes, humblebrags, and weird flexing. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I think I will delete it for real this time.
• robinduckett 6y ago
  My linked in is a constant source of anxiety and is never a source of employment
  • tcbasche 6y ago
    Then get rid of it ;) it's a worthwhile decision
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• growlist 6y ago
  Me too. The level of corporate virtue signalling is beyond obnoxious to the point of becoming risible, but worse, I started seeing former colleagues that I respect buying into this Stepford Wives crap.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• joyj2nd 6y ago
  Relevant and formerly on HN: https://theoutline.com/post/5495/how-to-beat-linked-in-the-game https://theoutline.com/post/5495/how-to-beat-linked-in-the-g... I closed my account over 8 years ago. Sometimes a business partner of mine is bitching that I don't have a profile but that's about it. I am not very successful but the successful people I know (speak XX-XXX MM USD) don't have a profile there.
• soliduser 6y ago
  Try Fikafy(iOS) instead.
• dijit 6y ago
  I have conflicting feelings about linkedin. It suffers greatly from all the things that SV success's suffer from: feature bloat, the need to be all things and above all; trying to steal and keep your attention. If you kill off 90% of notifications, the inane "feed" and some of the duplicitous behaviour in trying to pilfer your contacts list then you end up with a solid platform for recruiters and professionals. I have recommendations from people on my linkedin page that has much more merit than if I included such a thing on my CV. I have people who endorsed me for skills, which when presented well can mean that people are vouching that I have at least some area of knowledge there. This means that overall linkedin is a more standardised, searchable and credible source for my working history than my CV is. So I think that if you treat linkedin simply as a 'live CV' then it has a lot of value, even if you do get some recruiter spam sometimes.
  • aabbcc1241 6y ago
    I agree, and you can just ignore the spam (or block them with browser extension as others as mentioned)
• gwbas1c 6y ago
  I used to get a lot of recruiter spam so I locked down my profile. I opened it up a bit because I'm looking for a job. It's still spammy, but the pandemic has really slowed things down. IMO: LinkedIn is bad at managing spam.
• Ecstatify 6y ago
  I hate LinkedIn, majority of the articles are rubbish most of the job offers you get are not related to your skills but I still feel it's valuable to have when I want to look for a new job or just to keep in contact with people I have worked with in the past. My inbox is full of boring templated messages "Hi XXX, #I noticed you work as XXX @XXXand it is why I send invitation to your LinkedIn. Looking forward to connect with you for open discussion about logging, monitoring, troubleshooting and cloud SIEM. #stayletsconnect" "Hello XXX, I am a Success Manager of XXXHiring Platform. I will be glad to become a part of your professional connections and build collaboration with you. best regards XXX" I found an extension to unfollow all my connections so I have no reason to stay on LinkedIn anymore than I need to.
• Beldin 6y ago
  I use linkedin for having a reasonable reliable connection to people from the past. I.e., primary school friends, high school friends, colleagues, etc. I've never used it for job hunting, but for the feeling that i might be able to get back in touch with someone i was close with at one point in my life. Basically, i just want Facebook without the feed. Linkedin admirably fits that niche. Admittedly, I hardly use it - but it's the ultimate fallback for when all other options run out. Apparently people post things there. But i don't think anyone holds it against you if you do not interact.
• Nginx487 6y ago
  The title reminds me of a joke "I chased you to say I'm a vegan". Well, you deleted your account, we are happy fir you. If you're a regular employee, your benefits from LinkedIn could be limited to a job search. However, being an independent consultant, author of your content, owner of a product, you should care about building your community and increase your "influence" in this community. I do not agree nothing much happen there, probably nothing that could be interesting a big corporation employee. In terms of building business connections that is the only available worldwide social network.
• philshem 6y ago
  “If a LinkedIn account is deleted, and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?” (I previously deleted my account and then waited 12 months to see if anyone noticed. No one did. I did have to create a new one in order to create a company page.)
  • tcbasche 6y ago
    This was my experience too. Same thing happened with Facebook. No-one really noticed the account was gone. Doesn't mean I instantly lost all of my friends either ...
• daodedickinson 6y ago
  >Hiring is broken. People leave their jobs every 2 years or less. The corporate work culture survives on people's fears. If you don't play by the rules of the people in power, how will you make money, how will you feed your family, how will you contribute to society? It's a viscious cycle perpetuated by our willingness to outsource our values. I've never worked for someone that didn't love me for anything longer than a weekend gig. Was amazing in school all the way into the #1 ranked grad school for my major and when I got there... I realized even my assigned "mentor" did not care for me. I spilled my soul to her, after experiencing so much contempt and hate, and she had no fucking reaction whatsoever. No advice, no... nothing! These hateful fucks wanted over $60,000 a year to give me no advice, consolation, compassion, NOTHING! After recovering from that, as a last ditch effort to obtain a career where I could afford a family I tried get a CS degree at the local uni that I could afford. It's a complete shitshow of no standards and professors would open their lectures with emails from graduates explaining how employers saw a degree from this school as worse than NOTHING. The "weed out" filter test after 2 years was such a fucking joke they gave us 3 hours and I aced it in 10 minutes and then resigned myself to taking a nap for the next 2 hours and 50 minutes until someone asked to leave and was let out so I learned even the bluff about not letting people out early so that they could message people still taking the exam was bullshit, too. There were over 80 people taking CS in my cohort... I was one of only 3 that seemed competent, top guy, only one that actually stayed in CS was a sociopath who was constantly hacking and stealing from the university and local businesses and expecting to be lauded despite taking his plunder. Then there was a gal who decided to stick with mathematics and give up on the creepy CS department, prolly most of all for the creepy lecturer trying to get a Ph.D. talking about how the only real way to get money he could manage with the knowledge he was teaching us was with his porn sites, and how his personal hero is Howard Stern. After he was already under investigation for gender bias, she decided to stop trying in CS and just focus on math. So during the final exam, this guy realizes that there are only 3 females in this class of about 85 because any female willing and able to learn all this would be accepted and paid to go to far better schools... he's been told that if the grades of the 82+ guys are much better than the 3 gals he will lose his job and Ph.D. spot... and then as he walks the room during the final he walks right to her and sees she hasn't studied and doesn't give a fuck because she finally decided on Math and not CS. So he panics and starts just outright literally in earshot of the whole room telling her every answer and begging her to write it down on her test. That's when I decided to nope out of the major. They offered me a job Ph.D. spot and I went back to my janitor job for people who love me. When they die I have no idea what I'll do. My best friend is someone ten years older than me that I've never been within 2500 miles of, and sometimes he really creeps me out, but I have no one else to voice chat with or watch movies with IRL or online. At work... lately I mostly think about how I'm drowning in sweat having to wear a mask all the time but also I often feel glad I'm not working on some tech thing I oppose, or having to hear hate speech against me like at school... The bad thing is not being able to have an IRL relationship, much less family, but that's due to a ton of factors... in the US, it was guaranteed by NSC 68, which reacted to the Soviet, communist goal of full employment of both men and women with trying to keep women in the workforce permanently (for the ultimate purpose of winning an arms race with the USSR) as they had been forced into it during WWII. According to this plan, the US dollar was devalued so that men AND women would have to work an hour each to obtain roughly the same relative purchasing power as one hour of work by a man before. If someone wanted to keep goosing up the stock market and employment numbers further by various extrapolations upon this theme... anyone see where I'm going?
• prepend 6y ago
  This is curious to me as I’m not sure the benefit from deleting. If author stated some negative value, then that would make sense, but he doesn’t call out any real downsides that can’t be trivially mitigated. I’ve found LinkedIn useful for learning about where previous colleagues are now working. I’ve also found it useful as a quick way to learn about people’s past experiences that might be relevant to the issue at hand. I have turned off all notifications and only visit it when I need something. That is normally to add a contact to my Rolodex or to look someone up I’m meeting with.
  • paulgb 6y ago
    > This is curious to me as I’m not sure the benefit from deleting. The way I looked at it when I deleted my account is that having LinkedIn means having another inbox that attracts a disproportionate amount of crap. It got to the point where I turned off notifications and treated my inbox like a spam folder. By deleting my profile, people who actually do have something to tell me aren't under the false impression that they can contact me on LinkedIn, and people that just want to spam me generally don't make the effort to track down my email (which I make pretty easy to do).
• davidcollantes 6y ago
  Never liked it. The first time I open a LinkedIn account, a long time ago, most of my connections were people I didn't know. It seems--like with any other social media--people likes to see big numbers, and I connected with people I had no relation simply because I accepted their request. The second time? https://collantes.us/2019/07/29/closing-linkedin/ https://collantes.us/2019/07/29/closing-linkedin/
• berkes 6y ago
  Interesting and it resonates with me. Just today, I wrote an introduction on a "federated linkedin" that we've been working on for the last few months: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/early-feedback-and-presentation-of-a-federated-professional-business-network/743 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/early-feedback-and-pre... Basically, aiming to set up a "rolodex on steroids" or a "place to manange your business network" without all the privacy-issues, recruiterspam and duplicated social-network-features. We are in early phase, currently working through problem interviews and market positioning.
• Havoc 6y ago
  Much like FB I keep it open as a coms channel. Doesn't mean I need to interact with it beyond that
• geomark 6y ago
  Just to toss in my two cents, Linkedin has been of no use career-wise for me. But it has helped me find some people in a niche whom I failed to find through a lot of Googling and forum trolling. So a net positive for me.
• take_a_breath 6y ago
  LinkedIn jumped the shark when they started heavily promoting their skill endorsement section. I remember receiving a notification that my mom endorsed my ability to perform discounted cash flow analysis. She didn’t know what a discounted cash flow was, but endorsed me all the same. This is the moment it became spam. I do still use it for job searches.
  • pnako 6y ago
    Your mom probably knows you better than any of your colleagues. Did you lie when you wrote you have the ability to do a DCF analysis?
    • take_a_breath 6y ago
      I didn’t lie when I indicated I know DCF, but mom knew almost nothing about my professional work. She was able to endorse me without any knowledge and that pretty much eliminates the value of an endorsement. I realized then that it was more of a social network than a business network.
      • pnako 6y ago
        Your mom knows you don't lie and that's why she endorsed you. If I was a recruiter I would consider that a better form of endorsement than a random colleague who endorsed you because they expected some similar favor from you.
        • take_a_breath 6y ago
          I’ve never had a potential employer call my parents for a reference, but they have called co-workers. That implies that the market values the co-worker’s endorsement more.
  • randycupertino 6y ago
    > my mom endorsed my ability to perform discounted cash flow analysis I mean, that's really quite charming. She loves you! The first time Linkedin jumped the shark for me when they suggested I add the random dude I sold a couch too on craigslist to My Professional Network. I'd used a throwaway email and only texted the dude 1x. I only randomly remembered who he was after Linkedin suggested him to me because his first and last name rhymed and when he picked up the couch I thought his name was kind of interesting. It was so weird and sketched me out quite a bit as we were in completely different industries and I had no idea how linkedin associated us. The second time I decided I was over used linkedin was when I was a pitched a data analysis of industry trends in biopharma by a company that scraped and analyzed a bunch of my current and former coworkers linkedin profiles as well as what conferences they had recently attended. It was so creepy and invasive and accurate that I just decided I'd rather not supply my info to be a data point in some hedge fund analyst's report. I have a shell profile but don't update because I see no benefit and have always gotten jobs without needing it.
• FpUser 6y ago
  I just used LinkedIn to find some people I knew from before. In theory I could've done the same with Facebook but I am not using it.
• markstos 6y ago
  LinkedIn is on the top of my list of social networks I should quit next. After being on the site for many years, I don't think it helped me find a job or attract recruits.
• makison 6y ago
  Created Linkedin account while I had a job, kept it passive for a while - 6 months. Became active when I quit, recruiters started contacting me. Got a new job, during covid and only because of Linkedin, in 2-3 months.
• SCdF 6y ago
  I've said it before, but if your CV is one of hundreds that are being reviewed for a role and you don't have a linkedin, it basically means that everyone else is more legitimate than you. This sucks, I am aware. But since people send fake / bullshit / impossible to verify CVs all the time, I'm not really sure what the alternative is. So by all means delete your linkedin, but maybe instead consider just never logging in until you need to update your job history, once every couple of years. Or do delete it, but just be aware of the reality of how that may play out.
• T3RMINATED 6y ago
  The author says it himself in the introductory paragraph: > I never used LinkedIn... hadn't even updated my profile in the 9 months since I left my last software engineering job. So you use LinkedIn only passively, never do anything on the platform and then write a rant on how it provides you no value? Maybe actually _try_ to use the strengths of LinkedIn before you dismiss it?
• bengale 6y ago
  LinkedIn could really do with a way to segment recruiters. I don't know how that would work but I tend not to go on there an interact as most of my feed is recruiters either listing jobs I don't care about or talking about the recruitment industry which I also don't care about. However, I still want to be connected to them, its useful for them to be able to reach out to me if they have something that aligns with my skillset, I just don't need them in my feed I guess.
  • jlokier 6y ago
    I think you can unfollow the recruiters whose output you don't care about, but remain connected to them.
• dlkf 6y ago
  I liked this essay. I don't agree with all of it. But it has a lot of interesting musings, and it's written without the sort of hyperbole or bombast that typically accompanies pieces about "why I'm not using x." > I'd go so far as to say that unless your profile is exceptional for some reason, it probably does more harm than good. This can't possibly be true. LinkedIn is the go-to sourcing tool for every HR department in the world. Right now —even in the midst of a global recession —thousands of recruiters are trawling LinkedIn to fill a role. If you don't have a LinkedIn account, you are immediately disqualified from the pool. Moreover, a lot of HR departments will simply expect a LinkedIn profile. They like having a standard mode of comparison that's easily digestible. > You and I are just another candidate in a tall stack This is a false dichotomy. Having a LinkedIn profile isn't mutually exclusive with a portfolio, blog, github, kaggle account, stackoverflow profile etc. And if the recruiter is only going to look at your LinkedIn anyway, then how is your awesome blog going to help? I would go in an opposite direction, and describe LinkedIn as a sort of Pascal's wager. At worst it's a net neutral; at best you might get an interesting job offer. > When people long for the days of the early web, the glorious idiosyncracies of personal sites and forums, they are really longing for a time and a space where people were free to communicate their own values. Now that space is owned and rented to the highest bidder. A site like LinkedIn wraps you up into a tiny, uniform package, sets you in an enormous data warehouse next to millions of other tiny people just like you, and sells the lot of you. Well put. It's definitely kind of depressing. But at the same time, I feel that it's possible that a centralized platform like LinkedIn can serve as an equalizing force (depending on its search/discovery capabilities). I suspect that a world where we are all using blogs and forums is much more siloed than one with LinkedIn. Information asymmetry in job markets is bad for workers. For all their faults, tools like LinkedIn and GlassDoor are (or at least could be) a force that alleviates this. I don't really have a final word here, I can see benefits to both worlds.
• karussell 6y ago
  Maybe a bit unrelated but who else has always serious page rendering issues when visiting LinkedIn? I do not visit it often but there are so many problems lately that I doubt that I'm the only one, especially since all other sites are fine. These problems appear when I open LinkedIn pages in a tab or for the initial rending but also just when I click on new messages or 'Start'. Is it because of Firefox and/or uBlock Origin?
  • DailyHN 6y ago
    It gets much worse when you start using the less popular features, like group management. Edit: it doesn't even work correctly using chrome without any ad blockers...
    • karussell 6y ago
      Haha, thanks for confirming. This is ridiculous for such a popular site. Maybe it is since Microsoft took over ;)
      • DailyHN 6y ago
        I've been heavily active, too active, on the site for over eight years. It was always lousy, but it's getting worse. Lastly, I manage groups with hundreds of thousands of people, and I can't get anyone on the phone for anything. After the countless hours I've spent on LinkedIn, I'm now focussing my energy on ultimately moving away from the platform. It's so disappointing that I don't want even to log in to see the mess. No joke, this week, my assistant told me "that thing that's been broken and annoying for months was finally fixed." That thing was merely "approving" content in the group moderation queue. Some posts simply wouldn't be approved... My strategy used to be "build a community using LinkedIn groups." Now it's "do everything to capture the value I already created in the groups by directing members off of LinkedIn." It gets worse. You can't trust their documentation. And I'm not talking about the API. Even information in their help section is factually inaccurate. And it remains published. When confronted, the issue will get escalated until someone comes up with a roundabout excuse for why the published information is correct, but not practically. I knew better, but I still fell victim to the building on someone else platform problem. Never again.
• leriksen 6y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. He wants privacy, I don't, at least as far as job opportunities.
• eplanit 6y ago
  As a consultant, I find linked in useless; they're only about fte. Dice.com has always been far more valuable.
• nwsm 6y ago
  I've been on LinkedIn for a while, and I don't mind it for what it is. I have not taken a job that started with LinkedIn, but it has given me leads, multiple interviews, and an offer at one of the big tech companies. On most of my job applications I've attached my LinkedIn, but I doubt it does anything as all that info is on my resume. Secondly I appreciate seeing my childhood, college, and ex-coworker friends' careers progress. I like knowing where they're at and what they're working on, and a LI update from someone I know has sparked lots of conversations. As far as content, we all know it's worse than any other platform. I roll my eyes at over half of the things on my feed. But sometimes I find good article shares that aren't just marketing, and occasionally there's an actually interesting post. However I think they do a good job of showing you your connections' updates from a few weeks ago even, which is great for not following your feed constantly like Twitter. I agree it is not at all necessary for finding a job, and I don't use it as a normal social media where I expect interesting content. So I definitely understand anyone who decides not to use it. But I've found value in it myself, and I certainly don't think it's doing me harm. The author never explains what the "harm" is. I think this sentence in the article sums it up: "It doesn't really matter, but that's not a world I want to participate in." OP wrote an article about deleting an app that no one thinks is essential.
• kup0 6y ago
  It never helped me. Was very glad to get rid of my account.
• millette 6y ago
  Same here. 5-6 years ago, I started a website/service (also closed, now) at the intersection of LinkedIn and GitHub. Then Microsoft bought the former. A few years passed, and they also bought the latter. It kind of justified my idea (not that those two services are being merged), but nonetheless I had to close my little initiative.
• myth2018 6y ago
  In my country, probably the most well-known IT-related jobs website (www.apinfo.com) is something around 20 years old and uses basically the same technologies and concepts that were mainstream at the time. Coldfusion, plain HTML, ad spaces sold directly to advertisers. No social networking. No fancy stuff (they don't even use icons, it's plain text everywhere). Just a simple, straightforward website. It's not perfect though. Doesn't perform that well and the searching capabilities are poor even after some improvements they've attempted. But during my whole career (17 years) I've gotten 100% of my jobs there, despite having tried some other websites. I wish that UX folks payed more attention to cases like that.
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  I’m noticing a lot of pretentious at best, contrived at worst, mythology posts on LinkedIn. Everyone’s career is being transformed through the narrative machine, and it appears a lot of people suddenly persevered ‘against all odds’. Every super hero needs an origin story. Social media encourages exhibitionism, and gone are the days of quiet accomplishment.
  • higeorge13 6y ago
    Best comment on this thread. Thank you for perfectly expressing my own feelings as well.
• AlexandrB 6y ago
  LinkedIn was and is mega-creepy. They still prompt me to "discover my network" by giving them my Gmail username and password. Based on the comments here, it seems that everyone has at this point accepted LinkedIn's creepy business practices and now we're just arguing about its relative utility. Great.
  • jlokier 6y ago
    I don't think everyone has accepted to the point of giving LI their email password. I certainly haven't. Personally I think LinkedIn has some utility for me that I haven't found elsewhere yet. I was very skeptical when I joined it, and didn't really update or use it for at least 10 years. But more recently I've realised it fills a useful niche that is not well provided for by other services to my knowledge.
• k__ 6y ago
  The good: I got good jobs from CEOs/VPs The bad: I didn't really understand what to post there The ugly: I got a bunch of messages by recruiters who didn't read my profile and offered me crap.
• kerkeslager 6y ago
  I've never had a LinkedIn, but I regularly receive emails from recruiters that start, "Hey, I found your profile on LinkedIn and...". These get a form response from me which says basically, "No you didn't, and given the first words you say to me are a lie, I have no interest in working with you. And if you feel guilty enough about how you actually got my email that you feel the need to lie about it, maybe you should consider whether you want to be the kind of person who gets people's emails via unethical means and then lies about it." Some of these recruiters apparently work for Amazon, which isn't unsurprising given their track record on other ethical concerns.
  • laurentdc 6y ago
    Probably an automated tool. Sometimes I even get the "Hey |REAL_NAME|," ones.. Worst thing, these recruiter emails rarely have an unsubscribe link or some sort of opt-out. I don't have a LinkedIn but I once accidentally set my email public on GitHub for a month or so, now every once in a while I get those kind of emails. I'm sure it's been scraped and added to some database/spreadsheet somewhere.
    • kerkeslager 6y ago
      True. I'm not sure whether that makes it worse or better.
• magwa101 6y ago
  Name, picture, background enforces instant bias in recruiting. This is a known fact. LinkedIn enables our perceptive biases. The feed that is full of thought leaders shouting how to be successful is just pablum for the drones.
• ravenstine 6y ago
  I've never found a job through LinkedIn. I do like Easy Apply a lot, but it never resulted in anything. Every job I've ever had was found either through someone I know or by applying directly on a company website. I've had a few interviews resulting from LinkedIn, but it's not like LinkedIn gave me much of an advantage beyond Easy Apply. I didn't exactly get more interviews. In fact, I may have been getting fewer interviews on average, but it didn't seem like it because it was easy enough to apply to a lot of companies. In terms of the actual social network... people use that sh? I've had my moments of Facebook addiction in the distant past, but there's nothing about LinkedIn that makes me look forward to logging in. My feed is mostly composed of inspirational quotes, people celebrating their anniversary at their current job, corporate brown-nosing, articles on productivity, articles about people quitting their job, etc. All generic, mostly low-effort junk. Let's not even get started on the recruiter spam! Unfortunately, it we will have to wait for a serious decline of LinkedIn before a serious competitor can make headway.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    I mostly do Easy Apply as a market/sanity check every now and then. I can do 10 applications in 10 seconds for various tiers of jobs and various jobs in different locations and get an idea of what kind of interviews I can get going forward. But yeah, I don’t get more interviews. I just get to lazily spam.
    • boopk 6y ago
      Exactly. I'm in a completely different field than the demographic of HN users; however, easy apply does give me the ability to apply to a bunch of random positions at various tiers. Now I've never had an offer from LinkedIn and a handful of interviews out of the 500+ applications but it does give me the the ability to apply quickly. For cool companies I find that have jobs I am not qualified for I just book mark them into my companies bookmark and periodically check or reach out to a recruiter.
  • isakkeyten 6y ago
    That's the opposite of my experience but I'm assuming it's just more used where I'm from. I've gotten 3/3 of my job positions in these past 4 years by recruiters finding me instead of me looking for them. And I was a junior then. I still get contacts and offers in messages and get a connection request or two on the daily by HR people.
• RoutinePlayer 6y ago
  Has this been posted to LinkedIn yet?
• jeff_vader 6y ago
  I sort of liked LinkedIn until they (like Facebook, twitter and others) made "liking" or commenting equivalent to sharing. There's no distinction nowadays. And, as a result, my feed is now mostly recruiter memes. I also stopped reacting to any posts in any way since I don't want all of my connections to see everything I do.
  • jlokier 6y ago
    I think the most important thing to understand about LinkedIn as an individual is that you are publishing what you put out there. It's not a private space and it's not meant to be (except for the messaging). They do provide tools, at least, so you can see what other people see. If you think of it as a professional and self-presentation network which other people understand it to be as well, then it's fair game to play that to your advantage. Signal what you want to signal. I only "like" things that I actually like, but each time I'm conscious that it's a signal others may browse later, so I'm also careful to only "like" things that overlap with my professional side enough that I'm happy for people to see. So for example I'll happily "like" things in (e.g.) open source hardware or cool tech that I think adds to a better world. Including stuff that may not be commercial. After all I want to work more in those fields, and I also want certain things to be seen by others for non-selfish reasons (e.g. better prosthetic limbs, say). Doing that shows my interest in particular fields and may (perhaps!) lead to interactions I'd like. And I'll interact with things posted by people I like or respect, because helping each other is a thing. So it's all genuine. But it's not everything I think. If someone posts something more "social media-ish", i.e. like Facebook, or some controversial commentary, I avoid interacting actively with it on LI regardless of my opinions, because that's not what I want people to see about me in the quasi-professional realm. And as it happens it's also not what I want to see more of on LI either. One of the things I like about LinkedIn is you can actually get your personal data (when that feature isn't broken - it has bugs too), and you can easily browse what other people can see about you, including your trail of likes and comments etc. Being informed about my trail, I feel the platform is less misleading, and in some ways less abusive, than some other social media platforms.
  • glglwty 6y ago
    There is a "save" feature that behaves like bookmarking.
• paysandu 6y ago
  LinkedIn had enormous value for me after I graduated from a PhD and was desperately looking for a job in industry. I got the LinkedIn Premium, which allowed me to message any people directly (without the need to be connected first). My first attempts at cold approaching people were not successful, but I slowly refined my communications and was able to get many replies. I would search a company that was interesting and then message an employee asking for questions about the company, if we had a good conversation, they would hook me up with the recruiter. Sometimes I would directly contact a startup founder with a pitch of how my expertise would be helpful to them (my field is pretty niche, so there aren't any job titles for it). I got my current job by directly approaching the recruiter responsible for the position I wanted. It escalated pretty quickly from the first contact. I didn't need to manufacture my profile in an artificial way. I just put everything I did and know there. The platform gave me the visibility I didn't have, as I come from a small university. The single ability to find who works at a certain company, and how many insiders you already know has enormous value.
• AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  I also closed my account recently because they wouldn't let me update my profile without providing a location. I've been a nomad most of the last 5 years and everything I do professionally is over the internet.
  • undebuggable 6y ago
    I noticed this as well and consider such practice a dark pattern. Unable to update exsisting information without providing new information.
  • majewsky 6y ago
    > they wouldn't let me update my profile without providing a location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
    • aungmyohtet 6y ago
      you suggested to provide Null Island as one's location?
      • majewsky 6y ago
        yes
• morberg 6y ago
  I use LinkedIn as a Rolodex where the contact info is kept up to date by the people in it. Professional contacts only, and only people I’ve worked with or met through work.
• Damogran6 6y ago
  There was never an underperforming employee of failed project on Linked-In. That said, it got me two jobs, so it's not ALL bad.
• johnward 6y ago
  The value of LinkedIn is getting contacted by clueless recruiters and "wealth managers" /s
• say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  I want to make genuine new connections with people but it's hard. > "Hey, who is this random person contacting me? What does he really want? I better not entertain the possibilities." If you're on LinkedIn but you don't wish to meet new people, you probably should do as the author did and close your account.
• lildata 6y ago
  Just from a performance point of view, opening LinkedIn webpage is a traumatic experience. I've rarely seen something so slow & heavy. It's quite sad because LinkedIn gave birth to a lot of fantastic techs, such as Apache Kafka...
  • higeorge13 6y ago
    And besides website performance, their recommender on news feed, jobs, similar profiles even their search is terrible. And while the news feed is probably heavily biased to influencers' posts (same as other social media platforms), I keep getting job recommendations for architect jobs just because i had a past job with "data architect" title.
  • jlokier 6y ago
    The loading is heavy, though since lockdown I'm finding HN takes almost as long to load for me, which suggests they have been reasonably smart about parallel loading. LinkedIn is also buggy in many areas too. Search is wild - search for the same thing twice and get completely different numbers of results. This is good to know, when a job search notification shows 5 results, it's not real. Just click the search button and get 100 the second time for the same search! But the fact it's an SPA works really well I think. Clicking around within LinkedIn seems much faster than the initial load, and things like open message windows keep their state. I like that. You can still right-click just about everything that looks like it could be a link to open a new tab or save the link. So I think they've done a great job of SPA. It's a shame it's so buggy that I have to reload it from time to time anyway. LinkedIn is probably the only company where I use a product with so many obvious low-hanging-fruit bugs I'd actually consider working there just for the satisfaction of fixing them.
• mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I feel the almost same about LinkedIn as Facebook: I have privacy concerns and concerns about wasting my own attention/time on those sites. My compromise is to keep my accounts but to spend less than 15 minutes per month on each site.
• wreath 6y ago
  Thanks, I just needed a teeny tiny push for me to close it too. One less thing to think about it.
• headmelted 6y ago
  LinkedIn is a very strange place to me. I’m there, but like the author I never really bother with it. Maybe every year or two I’ll check it’s up-to-date with work history but that’s about it. I get a lot of calls from recruiters. I can only assume they’re cold-calling a list from linked in search results and I can’t think of a single incidence where the call has lead to anything. The bizarre part is that I know several people on LinkedIn and Facebook (to be fair I haven’t signed in on Facebook either for about two years for lack of interest - if I haven’t bothered to call you in the last three years then I really don’t care what you’re eating for lunch these days). On Facebook people post cat memes and talk about things they’re genuinely interested in, like how Janet’s friend Steve caught coronavirus from a telecom mast. On LinkedIn the same people’s feeds are repost after repost of how they’re living their most Agile Scrum Synergy-driven Goal-oriented life. As best I can tell, it’s a website for sucking up to employers you might some day have or hope to impress. Every post reads like the applicant side of a job interview where no-one even asked a question. Maybe it’s just me, and I don’t get it, but I just have better things to do with my time.
• temptemptemp111 6y ago
  I use LinkedIn to harass engineers as big companies to fix bugs the company doesn't care to know about... Or ask questions about why they don't take better approaches.
• codingdave 6y ago
  I've gotten multiple jobs from LinkedIn. I've caught up with old friends after not having talked for years, because I saw a job update from them, and it was a good reminder to get back in touch. I've reached out to people local to me, and to people from my college who I never knew, but I now see work in my field, in my area, and gotten to know more people. I've seen well-written articles, and found new people and blogs to follow who talk about the non-technical side of this industry - management, product ownership, leadership, and other such things. Clearly, LinkedIn does have its share of warts. And if isn't for you, there is nothing wrong with not participating. But you get out of it what you put into it.
• mcs_ 6y ago
  Congratulation! I remember to close all my social networks when my daughter was two years old, about 12 years ago. I will never know what I missed.
• m23khan 6y ago
  If you are Developer or even a DevOps or Data Engineer, LinkedIn is a very handy tool in order to get connected with recruiters and also to apply for jobs that are posted there. Sure, there are other great online job boards and even physical job agencies but I find (LinkedIn) by being marketed and promoted as a professional job seeking / networking tool, even the type of conversations you have with your contacts tend to be of a professional nature. Yes, there are some fluff on LinkedIn especially when it comes to variety of videos or feel-good or motivational messages being posted but I take them in stride -- not everybody is same and if some people are social and have desire to share their social feelings with others, then so be it.
  • fatnoah 6y ago
    >If you are Developer... I think value of LinkedIn increases as you progress in your career and/or into harder to fill roles. I've now passed the 20 YOE mark in my careers and have moved into management, and it's at this point where I'm really starting to find value from LinkedIn. Yes, there's tons of spam ("I've got a great entry-level role for you!"), but I was able to use it very effectively in my last job search. Of the 4 opportunities I pursued through the final interview/offer stage, 2 were initiated by someone finding my profile on LinkedIn and 1 was a process that got stuck that I was able to get unstuck by reaching out to a connection at the company. The two "inbound" opportunities were both Director/VP level roles at companies I was interested in working in.
  • aeyes 6y ago
    LinkedIn job hunting works outside of the tech bubble as well. My friend is a medical lab technician, for quite some time she was job-hopping a lot and was able to leverage her contacts to find open positions which are hardly advertised anywhere. In that industry it is quite important to have good recommendations so keeping a network of people you once worked with helps a lot.
• lbutler 6y ago
  If you publish content for a professional niche, then LinkedIn may be your best choice to reach your audience. I'm a hydraulic modelling engineer, and people in my field don't hang out on the internet together like software developers. So when I write articles or develop some FOSS, I'll go to LinkedIn because I can reach thousands of other engineers doing the same type of work. I don't believe I could get the same reach or engagement on any other platform.
• habanany 6y ago
  I deleted LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, then I got married I’m still cheating with twitter, google news, HN and Reddit. Cheating = consuming lots of time scrolling and reading
• bjarneh 6y ago
  I still cannot believe they are trying to push that premium version on me. 14 years I've turned it down now. If it was free I still wouldn't be interested.
• acd 6y ago
  I think we are past peak social network. At the plateau of productivity whatever that means for social networks. I think it’s healthy to question what value if any the network provides. Plus what kind of personal info you give away about yourself. Social network news feeds are designed like slot machines with random awards, so that you login and check it every now and then.
• paul7986 6y ago
  Ive found just about all my software/UX Design gigs on Linkedin via recruiters. Also, it's been a way to get my next best deal via job hopping and starting conversations with recruiters telling them how much Im making (which is really how much i want for my next job). Either the conversation continues or I went to high and it doesnt. Now out of 100 times doing this I've landed 5 to 10 jobs over many years. A lot of the times I'm not looking, but interested in what the market will bear for my experience. Personally, couldn't imagine deleting Linkedin.
• gregdoesit 6y ago
  It’s clear from the comments that many people have no positive experiences with LinkedIn. For me, LinkedIn was the tool that not only helped me get into better companies, but also introduced me to Hacker News. I joined Skype/Microsoft, then Skyscanner, then Uber: all after a LinkedIn recruiter reachout. They were opportunities I did not know or think about and I would have never applied to any of them at the time. I was very happy the time working in investment banking, and had zero reason or motivation to change this up. I needed that "nagging" from a recruiter to actually consider what if I was building the next Xbox that millions of gamers will use on day one, instead of a trading system that no more than a dozen of traders use. In hindsight, all the positions were a step up in professionally, financially, and from a personal growth point of view. I even learned about Hacker News when I was working at Skype, from colleagues. If it wasn't for LinkedIn, I might have permanently been stuck in investment banking and my career would have turned out very differently.
  • jillesvangurp 6y ago
    Agreed. I don't engage with it a lot but it's useful for it's original purpose of keeping track of former colleagues as well as profiling yourself to potential employers/customers. The content is a bit of a influencer shit show these days. Too many bored executives trying to promote themselves. I mostly ignore that. Recruiter spam is another nuisance and as recruiters are paying customers, technically us normal users end up being the the product. IMHO linkedin/ms could do more to balance that relation. A minor nuisance but sometimes there's some valuable conversations that convert to me finding gigs. So, room for improvement there but for now it's not optional for me to maintain my linkedin profile.
  • spelunker 6y ago
    Twice LinkedIn connections have resulted in full time jobs for me. It's just another outlet for passive job searching IMO, and I think it fills that position better than Dice or Monster or any other resume site, so I'm content with keeping a LinkedIn account. I also check it maybe once every other week so it doesn't mostly doesn't have an impact on my life really.
  • opportune 6y ago
• game_the0ry 6y ago
  This blog post comes off whiny and weak, with a tone of unearned moral and social superiority, all while making sweeping generalizations and false claims. The author used LI poorly, then complained publicly about being dissatisfied. I get that randoms invites and messages are annoying, but the inconvenience shouldn't outweigh the benefit from LI replacing resumes for professional branding.[1] The 1 page resume is an obsolete concept. LI is like a living resume, with the added benefit of having employers reach out to you. The resume needs to die. LI should replace resumes. Maybe it will replace recruiters too (where hiring manager reach out to you directly).[2] But it won't happen if you think like the author. The flip side is waisting time by applying to job, and you'll get ghosted either way. Yes, the feed is annoying. Yes, sometimes recruiters suck. But those annoyances should be tolerable considering the benefits. FWIW, I got a very good job from a recruiter that messaged me on LinkedIn. Great companies reach out to me bc I use LI effectively.[3] [1] Yeah, I hate the word "brand" too. Pro tip - figure it out and use it to your advantage, bc you certainly wont be able to change it. This blog post is an example - the irony is that the author's blog post will do more harm to his image than his LI profile ever did. [2] Recruiters are not bad people. They're hustling hard just like everyone else. [3] How to use LI effectively: buzzwords, appropriate profile pic, readable, accept lots of recruiter connections so it looks like you're popular and special.
  • jiofih 6y ago
    I just got a job using my one-page resume. It looks almost the same as my LinkedIn profile. What’s the difference?
    • FlaSheridn 6y ago
      Your LinkedIn profile is public, and your contacts might notice if you padded it conspicuously. Even more important, it’s _one_ thing, whereas a targeted résumé is what the target wants to hear. When reviewing résumés for a software quality assurance position in a trendy sector, I saw numerous résumés from people with no apparent desire to do software quality assurance, but plenty of desire to move into the trendy sector. One was from a senior manager, who had sometimes supervised departments that included lots of stuff, including QA. His targeted résumé differed from his public profile basically by appending “& QA” in several places. After that, I largely ignored targeted résumés.
• actionowl 6y ago
  LinkedIn is almost entirely full masturbatory self back-patting, inspirational re-posts, expired job listing, and recruiters offering you jobs that don't match any of the skills on your profile.
• yepthatsreality 6y ago
  I do this all the time and create a new one when I switch jobs. Otherwise I get near 0 benefit from LinkedIn.
• Springtime 6y ago
  Just wanted to give a bit of praise for the blog post's illustration as a rather delightful little example of how lightweight and smooth SVG animation can be (and SMIL no less). 44KB for a scalable, looping blog graphic. Imagine if more of the web were like this.
  • pcmaffey 6y ago
    Thanks! SMIL is so under-appreciated. I always look forward to doing these animations.
• Rafuino 6y ago
  I don't think there's much value if you're a SW developer. You have many ways to show off your work, but if you're not in that field, hiring is much more based on word of mouth, credentials (ugh), or self-promotion. I'm not a huge fan of LinkedIn, but the most it helps me is with understanding the background of someone I'm about to meet (even if internally since I'm at a huge company at the moment), or at least see what kinds of jobs are out there when I'm casually looking.
• hnaccount02 6y ago
  Just adding my $0.02. I was pretty neutral about LinkedIn for a long time. I just made one because a couple friends recommended it, but it was neither bad nor good for me. Later in my career, I actually had recruiters reaching out to me and I had old colleagues that I wanted to hear from/reach. For my last job hunt, I was actually able to find an opportunity to nearly double my salary and shorten my commute. The feed is pretty meh, but I still think it's useful having a footprint. YMMV
• rileyt 6y ago
  If you are sick of recruiter spam, another useless feed, having your personal information sold to strangers and having to send links to your LinkedIn profile that looks like shit and has ads on it, you should check out https://standardresume.co https://standardresume.co. I'm one of the founders and it's a super simple web resume builder. You can import your LinkedIn profile, pick a resume design that you like and publish it as a responsive website, in minutes. We make money by charging for our product, not selling your personal information.
• nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Is social media addiction really that serious? My solution to all social media is treat it as a rolodex and not GAF about it the rest of the time. Why do people blame these companies for being the problem when there's an element of personal responsibility involved?
• petters 6y ago
  "Having only 100 connections probably does more harm than good" Is this true? Does anyone care about this? Serious question. Should I close my read-only Twitter account as well?
• mud_dauber 6y ago
  80% of my LinkedIn feed feels like absolute dreck. "Humbled to announce..", "We had a great time at..", or "Announcing availability of.." .. you know it when you see it. And I completely get the sentiment that much of the rest is just somebody amplifying an opinion for likes, clicks or connections. But consider this alternative scenario. If you're dissatisfied with your professional lot in life, LinkedIn is a way to vent. LinkedIn posts don't have to be of the 'please consider hiring me' variety - they may be somebody who doesn't have another outlet for their creativity or feelings on how a topic is being handled by the world at large. I'm in this category. I use Li to show that I'm out here, alive, and have some value. I strenuously try to avoid the whole "thought leader" vibe. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
• thrownaway954 6y ago
  if you are looking for a job, linked in is invaluable. lots of recruiters i know, now check resumes against linkedin to see if there is anything dishonest going on. with that point, i find it very imperative that i keep me linkedin updated. another thing i have found is that some job searching platforms (like indeed) allow you to import your linked in profile instead of uploading a resume. then you can import your indeed profile into ziprecruiter. so when i was looking looking for a job, the first thing i did was get my linkedin profile updated and corrected. next i signed up for indeed and imported my linkedin profile to it. after that, i signed up for ziprecruiter and imported my indeed profile into that. now all my information was correct and up to date across all platforms. not only that, but there are so many linkedin to resume builders out there.
• 627467 6y ago
  I share a lot of the commenters opinions: most of the toxicity (and intrusion) of social networks are due to... THE FEED. and they only affect us because we keep checking on them. Yes, they are engineered to "make" us go back over and over again to check for "news", but if we are aware of that, there are (arguably convoluted) ways to minimize that effect. The following is my experience on how I dealt with facebook, but I have since applied to linkedin and others. Years ago I started "leaving" facebook by just: not visiting it. I didn't delete my account, I didn't explicitly posted anything announcing what I was going to do. I just stopped visiting it. Now, it wasn't a trivial as that, because facebook will notify you, will email you, will send you messages reminding of everything I was missing out. So, along with the decision of "leaving" facebook I had to manually go and disable every way facebook could reach my attention. It took a while but it wasn't hard: I disabled email alerts (or just filtered them straight to trash) whenever I received one. For years I didn't have fb or messenger apps on my phone, or I would just disable them if I couldn't remove them. Now, with more granular control over notification I may install them but disable notifications entirely. In fact, I take a similar approach to email. While I do receive visual notifications of email, I don't get sound of vibration. In fact, my phone is in silent mode practically all day (I do have some rules that allow certain calls to breakthrough) To me, gaining back control was about removing the ability of apps (and people) to digitally reach me whenever they felt like. And this is the core of my attitude with "leaving" social networks: it's about controlling when I want to actively use them (as little as needed). So, deleting account feels (to me) as I gave up having control (and extracting the little benefit of a network). Also, it's not just about control how apps reach us. It's also about establishing the social boundaries with friends, family and acquaintances: socials networks are NOT how you can get my attention. you may get my attention, but don't count on it. if you really need to find me you probably know how. I still extract value from facebook/ig/linkedin on my own terms. But those companies probably get much less value out of me given their business models. I feel it's alright. In fact, I feel (maliciously?) better in this approach. I still get linkedin job offers, and I do respond to them, probably after a few days when I feel like checking.
• okareaman 6y ago
  Linkedin is absolutely useless after a person retires when it could be used to connect people to volunteer projects and meaningful non-profit groups looking for experienced free help. I'd go so far as to say it's ageist because it sends the message that once you're retired, you're worthless.
• cybert00th 6y ago
  LinkedIn got me the job I'm currently in at this here publishing saltmine back in 2013, so I'm a little ambivalent about it - but only a little. Let's put it this way, in the beginning LinkedIn was useful - very useful, but as many commenters are noting here, it's now become something wholly different from what it started out as. I deleted my account a good few years ago now and I don't regret it. And I doubt now that I would ever go back - even if I needed to find another job.
• cryptozeus 6y ago
  Completely biased article. “As everyone knows, LinkedIn is a glorified resume site. Nothing actually happens there (unless you are a recruiter or in enterprise sales?).” This means op could not get any benefit out of an online tool, this does not mean nothing happens there. LinkedIn has been tremendously helpful to find my last 2 jobs. You have to know how to use it, specially the premium account. The market research aspect of it is amazing. I do not enjoy the social media aspect and the timeline approach. Stay away from that.
• jasonv 6y ago
  I deleted LinkedIn about 5 years ago when I went totally independent. I was super happy not to have it. I recently re-created it because a consulting engagement put me back in the center of "Are you on LinkedIn?" discussions. I do look forward to closing my account again. There's a lot of "professional posting" that goes on -- professional signaling, and uplifting daily posts. Knowing the people who are posting these things, and how they go about their daily work lives -- it's a lot like fitspo/fitfam posts on Instagram. And companies I have some back office knowledge of are flat out lying about their responses to the pandemic (No, you didn't respond to the pandemic by laying off any FTEs; yes, you did lay-off all your contractors on day 3; and actually, you did have a round of FTE layoffs subsequently but your posting army got their "I'm so proud of my company and the fact that they didn't do any FTE layoffs" posts out the day before the layoff round). Glad some people get value out of it. Feels of our social times too much for me.
  • GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    There's nothing forcing you to scroll the feed. I just uBlock the entire feed, and use it as an online Rolodex. I've also built a fairly sizeable contact book of headhunters, should I ever want to leave my current position.
    • jasonv 6y ago
      True. And worth considering. But it's not like I'm challenged by a corner case of their product offer. It's the whole creamy middle. I'm inclined to want out.
      • GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
        It's not really a "product" for individuals looking for work. Just set and forget, check for recruiter messages. I think that's the beauty of it, or how I use it anyways.
  • drivebycomment 6y ago
    What's the point of closing the account ? Your history proves that you'll open it again in the future - in which case, why not just keep it and don't use it till you need it again ?
• sevensor 6y ago
  I never really got into Facebook, but as far as I can tell LinkedIn is mandatory Facebook for work. TFA hit the nail on the head with "I don't want people to think I'm a weirdo" being the reason to use LinkedIn. The only value in having the account is in not having to explain to colleagues why I don't have one.
• bsd44 6y ago
  Am I the only one not seeing the argument in the blog post? All I read was "LinkedIn is bad and being on it does more harm than good" without anything to support the premise. I've been on LinkedIn for years and it did nothing but good for me. I found nothing but quality jobs on it, I stopped visiting job websites as a result, I'm getting approached by companies as a result instead of me applying. I don't understand what the author was doing to find LinkedIn "bad" and "more harm than good". I think this is nonsense.
• abjecton 6y ago
  I never liked linkedin. There's is a strange 'race' of getting 500+ connections, even if you're not connected at all to them
• danday 6y ago
  My current employer's internal recruiter found me randomly on linkedin. I wouldn't have my job without being on there :)
• jcun4128 6y ago
  It works great for me with regard to job hunting get pinged almost everyday by recruiters... my connections mostly are recruiters other than people I know/work with. Other than that I don't participate in social stuff as it has my name on it. Granted I have some social accounts(reddit) that are doxxable but mostly they're not... I don't attack people I'm just weird/can't really be me with my name. YouTube is almost borderline but thankfully as of yet I'm not aware of an easy/public way to scan YouTube comments.
• mothsonasloth 6y ago
  I left LinkedIn over 2 years ago now, never looked back since. A lot of what I wrote is similar in theme - https://tomaytotomato.com/linkedout/ https://tomaytotomato.com/linkedout/
• otar 6y ago
  I can freely attribute my previous and current job, as well as my current partnership (emerged from the current job) to LinkedIn. I've been reached out by recruiters both times and apparently it did work out. From another POV I understand the criticism, it's been a while I haven't visited LinkedIn, nor have I updated the profile, and it's mostly caused by the "noise" I feel on social networks. But, it still can be beneficial for some professionals at a certain phase of their career.
• droobles 6y ago
  I only really get on LinkedIn when I need a job which I hope I don't see any need for in a long, long time. That said, LinkedIn got me my first job out of college and continues to provide opportunities, so I drop in once in a while to like colleagues' accomplishments when prompted. I see value in it.
• era86 6y ago
  I don't know, I like keeping up with what my old co-workers are up to without actually hitting them up. It's also my go-to place for job hunting. It seems like the most popular.
• actualwill 6y ago
  The feed is nothing but useless hustle porn. 99.99% of recruiter messages I get are offering the same position I have now, but at a less mature company. However I got my first software job using it (don’t have a degree), and found my most recent job via the easy apply. LinkedIn has been a net positive for me, and can safely be ignored for a long time while not hunting.
  • GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    The feed is akin to a perpetual conference hall. Maybe you'll bump into someone who got a new job, but the majority of the time it's just people trying to sell their new business or themselves as a "thought leader"
• dep_b 6y ago
  I have a LinkedIn account for quite a few years now after some initial hesitation and the bad feeling never quite went away given the fact they still scrape address books and other dark patterns. I used to leave it on "not interested in new work" because I already got so much spam, but then I flipped the switch in March because I temporarily lost all of my customers at once due to Coronascare and I had to scramble for new work. Most leads that I get that I wouldn't get before are pretty high quality I have to say. I do see that once a new job lands that matches my profile multiple recruiters reach out on the same day for the same job and I see the same opening repeated several times over. I don't understand why the job market needs to be so opaque.
• bitwize 6y ago
  You sure this isn't because LinkedIn was recently revealed to be a festering cesspool of racism?
• jlokier 6y ago
  Heh, I have my Hacker News profile listed as a main contact on LinkedIn. Recently a recruiter who didn't get a response on LinkedIn itself wrote an email, which began: I'm writing because I found your Hacker News profile from your LinkedIn... That just felt right somehow.
• NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  He says people switch jobs around the 2 years time frame, which is surprising and short. Is that true, an avg say in tech? I have been doing that but I didn't realize it was that common. In SF I've heard staying a year is the goal to get stock, then after that look for the next thing.
  • cactus2093 6y ago
    Well there's not one single "the goal" that everyone follows. Some people are genuinely happy to be working for a company they really believe in, some people are looking for experience to level up their career/rise up the corporate ladder/start their own company in the future. If you're just looking for a payout, going to a bunch of startups for 1 year and then moving on and collecting equity from all of them is an interesting approach. It potentially improves your odds of a > 0 payout compared to going all in on one startup and staying in one place for many years. But I suspect if you're optimizing for a combination of expected value + downside risk, you really can't do better than FAANG or a large unicorn. I suspect a very, very small number of people who have worked at any combination of various startups for the past 5 years will have outperformed someone who worked at Google that whole time. And that's before even taking into account the time value/liquidity of the public stock - even if some of the startups over that time period do go on to be successful, you might have to wait 5+ years after you leave to cash it out.
    • NotSammyHagar 6y ago
      I think you are right that fang companies are the place to make money, better than startups. I've spent 2/3 of my career at fang and 1/3 in startups. Startups are fun but I really benefitted by a solid engineering start.
• apple4ever 6y ago
  I never had a problem with LinkedIn. Sometimes I get recruiter emails, but those are easy to deal with. I actually got my last job via LinkedIn, so it has helped me get a job. As a hiring manager, I immediately get red flags when someone doesn't have a LinkedIn. Its easy to create and keep updated, so to me it seems like they are hiding something. Not that its an instant deny, but it is a part of the decision.
• gshulegaard 6y ago
  I am not sure how I feel about LinkedIn but I did want to expand on this: > But one thing I am sure about: no one will notice. LinkedIn remains one of the largest and best data sets for the recruiting industry. I don't want to speak too broadly since my experience is limited to my current employer and personal experience, but if you remove your LinkedIn you will effectively be invisible to the recruiting agency I work at. Many companies rely on outbound recruiting tactics since inbound is often too noisy; not having a LinkedIn would dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a recruiter finding you without prior contact (referral, application, former colleague, etc). And this is not just limited to recruiters reaching out via LinkedIn. There are companies that scrape LinkedIn and sell that data to recruiting agencies and VC's (and who knows who else). As an anecdote, having recently complete a job search myself, I have to say that traditional inbound applications (e.g. apply via company website without any contacts) was shockingly ineffective. The difference in traction between self applications using my professional network, job boards, or recruiting markets (e.g. Triplebyte) was night and day. Since the author seems privacy oriented, removing his LinkedIn is probably the right thing to do, but I don't think it's accurate to imply that there is no opportunity cost to doing so.
• chaostheory 6y ago
  What led me to killing my LinkedIn account back then was the near constant email notification spamming of nothing. It just kept asking me whether I worked with some stranger over and over again. Notifications of no importance and no relevance to me is the same reason why I stopped using Facebook. Same company, but Instagram was way better for that reason alone.
  • darkwizard42 6y ago
    You killed your LinkedIn account over the inability to silence email notifications? Its like a 4-click experience to turn them off so that seems a little bit of an overreaction no?
  • dddw 6y ago
    This! Also all those invites on vaccuumed addressbooks made me furious. I was very disappointed that Lynda.com was bought by linkedin
• Animats 6y ago
  I got off LinkedIn years ago. I'm neither looking for work or hiring, so what's the point? They used to have a questions section, like Stack Overflow, but when they dumped that, there was nothing to do there.
• jll29 6y ago
  LinkedIn has its advantages and disadvantages. I would characterise it as a net positive for me, but it depends who you are, how you use it and what for. Why net positive? For my second start-up, I found our first customer through LinkedIn. After lots of attempts to source a paying customer that led to no conversions, one day a message arrived saying "You're the only ones in Europe doing this. We want to work with you.". No networking, no clever lead generation, just being there being found in a search did the job. Never used it for jobs because I got these all conference networking and by personal email exchances or being headhunted. It also gave me lots of speaking engagements. Recently, LinkedIn has had some issues with too much Facebook-like noise (people posting non-professional content), so I think if there was a more focused, mininmalist alternative, lots of people may switch. There is also the question of potential conflict of interest: LI sells to HR/Hiring functions and to people that already work for companies that use it for these functions. So if I was you, I wouldn't apply via LI to any kind of job in case you'd like to keep that fact from your current employer's HR.
• raydev 6y ago
  I see a lot of complaints here about the News Feed, which I agree with, but I spend approximately zero minutes looking at it. All I have to do on LinkedIn is exist and it's led to some useful job connections and a few offers (which I ended up not taking). Honestly, the tone in the post tells me this person is at a point in their career where they feel confident they can walk in anywhere and get a job. I don't know if I'll ever feel that way and I like recruiters reaching out to me. Just don't read the News Feed, and LinkedIn is good.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ptmcc 6y ago
  LinkedIn has directly led to me getting two great jobs and accelerating my career by leaps and bounds. I don't read much/any of the news feed, and only occasionally check in on it at all, but it's a fantastic passive job search platform. The vast majority of recruiter contacts I get are not worth following up on, but that rare message that just happens to be the right time/place is invaluable.
• lma21 6y ago
  I've had many positive experiences because of LinkedIn, whether noticing new interesting people or companies. Though most importantly, I got connected to good companies through LinkedIn and went through their recruitment process. I don't think that would have been possible without it, unless I was actively applying and searching for a job myself. It's not a bad thing to thrown with some new opportunity without being the one actively applying. What would be the downside of keeping a LinkedIn profile?
• sarah180 6y ago
  I wouldn't drop it altogether, but getting dozens of connection invites daily from people I've never met is very obnoxious. Even somebody from LinkedIn bizdev spammed me after I asked them to stop; I had to block them…. I've since adopted a "have we directly interacted or had a known introduction?" policy and refuse any other connections.
• bigasscoffee 6y ago
  Politely disagree. In my local market, my current job and other offers came through there. Working with recruiters made job searching extremely easy. It may not be for everyone, but in my city it worked/works extremely well for me. As always YMMV.
• bookmarkable 6y ago
  I ran an experiment last year. I messaged over 100 of my 500+ LinkedIn connections with an invitation to reconnect and a link to book a call or in-person meeting. I got two responses - 2% success rate! - and zero followed through with even scheduling a call. I’ll be deleting my profile soon, as well.
  • nafix 6y ago
    I would ignore a message like that as well. I would expect someone to state their purpose in a message before proposing some kind of call or in-person meeting. I don't think general "reconnecting" is a meaningful purpose.
• JoeMayoBot 6y ago
  As an independent consultant, Linked-In has worked well for me. I've been contacted there for more opportunities that I can count - real customers. I have very few recruiter contacts and weed them from my list every once in a while. In fact, I received a referral a couple weeks ago that's a paying customer today. One of the things I do that I don't see much is to reach out and stay in contact with people occasionally. Sometimes I'll make a referral too. Networking works many ways and you have to give to get. (#givefirst) Sometimes just replying to the anniversary, new job, or giving a technology kudo means something to some people (maybe more so in a pandemic world). I also like the points that a few other folks made that customers almost always look at the Linked-In profile.
• thelittleone 6y ago
  I hadn't checked LinkedIn for months. After reading this post I decided to login. First thing I saw was a post from a former colleagues hiring a position that fits my experience at one of the few companies I'd really love to work at. Messaged him on LinkedIn, spoke 15 minutes later and the process has begun.
• ajtjp 6y ago
  I've found LinkedIn to be great for two things - becoming aware of companies/opportunities I wouldn't have heard of otherwise, and building relationships with recruiters so that when I'm ready to move on from a job, I already have ins at the companies they work with. So far, that has led to two jobs, although not my current one. But it's absolutely been worth having a profile. I mostly use it as some other people have mentioned - having notifications for messages, and ignoring the News Feed and most other features. Once a twice a year, I update my resume, and update my LinkedIn as well, which is not much extra work, but is essentially really low-cost marketing of my skills and experience. Of the messages I get, some aren't worth responding to - the "I have a job to fill using Java, and you used Java once, you should apply" type - but some are from recruiters who are willing to build a relationship and place you when the time is right, even if that isn't right away. It's often worth taking a 30 minute phone call with them, or meeting up for coffee or lunch.
• Plutonsvea 6y ago
  I've always used a mantra of "You can't win the game without playing it". A large majority of recruiters and job searchers in the world use LinkedIn. If you're not willing to throw yourself out there in the LinkedIn world, I think you'll find you're not opening yourself to enough opportunities for your career growth. This is strictly from a growth perspective though. I got my current job and wake up incredibly happy every day, and this opportunity only came because I glossed-up my linked-in profile and a few recruiters expressed interest. Linked-In networking might be a terrible and sometimes cringe-y game to play, but trust me, you'll be glad you expended the few braincells it took to fake it when employers and recruiters start knocking.
• robomartin 6y ago
  One of the most perplexing things on LinkedIn is the terrible response rate to messages. No, I don’t mean spamming your connections. That’s not what I’m talking about. In my experience, if you send a connection request to someone, they accept and you message them, you might receive a response in 5% of engagements. My best guess is that people are accepting connections as a pavlovian response.
• archon810 6y ago
  I find LinkedIn immensely useful for finding out who works in certain roles at certain companies, then reaching out to them directly, say on Twitter, to report a bug in their software. It's been a proven strategy that works time and time again compared to the void that eats up bugs reported to large companies (if you can even figure out how to report one).
• kazinator 6y ago
  > Nothing actually happens there That is false; one thing that happens on LinkedIn is that you can find people from your distant past.