7 ms·

I feel like there are two types of LinkedIn users: The ones who think it's good/great/useful, and then the other 96% who wish it didn't exist, but have a profil

by burnte 2y ago

I feel like there are two types of LinkedIn users: The ones who think it's good/great/useful, and then the other 96% who wish it didn't exist, but have a profile because you have to play the game. I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable part of your LI profile is what you did (a short resume) and your connections number. If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. The quality of those connections does not matter to the people who look at that number. So basically LI is a huge sales/marketing/MLM echo chamber with 19 out of 20 users there against their will.

1oooqooq 2y ago
i bet this one anecdote is from the time when those companies hired a bunch of people who then proceeded to post their lifestyle of do-nothing all day on tiktok.
lockedinspace 2y ago
That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration a person who has more connections than other even tho they have the same resume? Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing. Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network".
- b112 2y ago
  so it's a dumb metric I have to ask, have you interacted with many recruiters?
  - lockedinspace 2y ago
    Fortunately quite many, maybe cause my sector is highly demanded, but having 1k,2k or whatever number of connections is not a metric for a lookable candidate. Years of experience, your github projects, open-source contribs are valuable metrics IMHO. Maybe recruiters after all also look a the connection number, could be, but its like saying a photographer is better than other cause he just simply posts more pictures.
    - arjvik 2y ago
      I think you're reading in too much to the above comment... from what I can tell they're just trying to say "it's a dumb metric because recruiters are dumb"
      - lockedinspace 2y ago
        Maybe I am overlapping my personal experience with others, but since I have a small number of connections, my job requests from recruiters in LI are normally optimal, quite elaborate and high-quality.
  - DowagerDave 2y ago
    All those recruiters have 1000's of connections! </s>
- burnte 2y ago
  > That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration a person who has more connections than other even tho they have the same resume? Would I? No, but I also have never once looked at someone's LinkedIn when in the hiring process. I used to carefully curate who I connected with so that when looking at my connections, you could see it was a list of respected people in their fields, but I had barely over 100. Several recruiters told me point blank that doesn't matter at all. So I stopped bothering to care about my LI profile and connections, and suddenly had a LOT more activity with recruiters when I added more connections. Seemed quantity is truly valued over quality there. > Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing. Yes, that was my point. > Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network". You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in the end.
  - lockedinspace 2y ago
    >You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in the end. Maybe a high number of connections causes a better first-impression, but if the candidate does not know how to write or articulate a word makes things much harder. Overall, seeing how a person expresses their ideas in their natural language gives you a better impression of how a person thinks/operates. Which in the end matters, cause you are dealing with persons, not statistics. For first instance recruiters, having a large number of people in your LI can get you into the first recruitment stage, but you won't pass if you don't know how to communicate, express and confront ideas, that's how it works.
    - burnte 2y ago
      I've never failed to secure an offer from an interview. So I'm not worried about what happens when I get there.
Quothling 2y ago
I never really understood the negativity towards LinkedIn and I'm probably not one of those 4% considering I basically never use it. To me LI is the perfect sort of social network, where it's actually useful when you need it, and the rest of the time you can simply ignore it. In years where I'm not considering changing jobs I'll usually only open LI to add new colleagues, or click an e-mail to accept someone wanting to link up with me, and that's it. Well, I'll admit that I kind of use it as an online resume for myself because I dislike updating my old doc (I really need to get that written in something that isn't doc). If I get some big brain-think which is related to my professional life I'll write it down in a note app and keep it for when I actually want to "activate" the LI algorithm. To do that I'll post a few comments over a week, which seems to make LI think you're an active user, and then I'll post the most relevant / well written brain-think from my collection. If I'm feeling frisky I'll post two. A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15 years), but usually there is something interesting in the ocean of shit. Some of my colleagues use it actively and dislike it, but use it because they think they have to. In my experience that's not the case at all. The 500+ may be true, I crossed that long ago even though I've generally worked in non-tech enterprise so 80% of my connections have nothing to do with SWE. Maybe this means that I do fall under the 4%, but even if you hate LI, you should know that you can play it extremely casual.
- burnte 2y ago
  I don't hate it, I just don't care about it. I'm in a field where I get jobs by what I've done, not how many work-friends I have on a website. I wish I didn't have to play the LI game but for some reason business execs think that connections number means something, so I have to play the game a little. > A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15 years) Ditto, except I'm not even a programmer and never have been but I still get a flood of Java programming offers. I actually get so many I have "java developer" as a filtered phrase in my email. I get 50+ a month, every month, for a decade now. And really that's what most people get on LI, oodles of connection or sales spam, and irrelevant communications from people casting nets rather than actually being good recruiters and finding good people. That's why most people "hate" it, it's junk mail we actually have to interact with sometimes. I spend maybe 2 minutes a month there, and wish I didn't have to at all.
tfsh 2y ago
I had about 1000 connections and found my linkedin homepage completely useless as it wasn't showing me anything about the people I care about (mostly uni friends, colleagues). I went through and whittled the list down to about 150 people I would either consider a friend or.close colleague. My homepage is still useless as linkedin shows me random trending posts, so that effort was a complete waste of time. It hadn't occured to me that recruiters would see less than n connections as a negative trait. I'd expect the opposite, someone with 1k connections (e.g) seems like someone who connects regardless.
- arjvik 2y ago
  I'm at the point where I'd rather recruiters who care about useless metrics like that skip over me. The true signal makes itself known amongst the noise of spam-all recruiters.
  - anytime5704 2y ago
    Yep, this is the same as people who tell you not to mark yourself “open to work” because it “makes you look desperate.” If that’s what some company cares about, then I’m glad they won’t message me.
matrix87 2y ago
> If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. How is this supposed to be correlated with employee quality? I doubt there's a positive correlation
- DowagerDave 2y ago
  the correlation (if any) is negative IME, as the lowest count people are long-term employees who haven't need to build a pseudo-employment network to get their next job; they've been busy heads down doing work. The content served up by LI is either low effort/low value listicles with vague, click-baity headlines, or grand, ego-puffing requests to generate said content (you've been selected to answer this question about database design!)
notzane 2y ago
> I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable part of your LI profile is … your connections number. How long ago was this? I’ve been talking to lots of recruiters and the most common points I hear are - add every skill - keywords in your descriptions so you show up in searches - gaps and job tenure Remote jobs apparently get a ton of fake candidates so some recruiters have started checking for verification and profile age as additional signals.
rty32 2y ago
This is some sort of the third type of users but really non-users -- real people you know that actually exist (like colleagues) but never have had a LinkedIn profile, yet they have a successful career.
anothername12 2y ago
> over 500, that's a plus Here I was accepting connections judiciously after lightly researching their connections..
- burnte 2y ago
  I used to do that too!
bena 2y ago
Ah. I have a profile because it seemed like the professional thing to do to get professional jobs, etc. However, I only have about 100 connections mostly because I feel weird about adding people on any social network. Which I know is weird, but, I am. But I only add people I personally know or have a good reason for trying to connect with me. And now you're saying that's basically worthless. Which, sure, I'll buy that. My LinkedIn hasn't really provided me with much worth. But, what I'm curious about is why the number of connections is important? Is it just a measure of potential engagement/reach etc. like any other social media network?
- burnte 2y ago
  From what I understand, they use that to determine if you've met a lot of people in your work life which somehow means you're better at jobs. I never understood it.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I just use it, so people can find out about me. Unlike many folks on the Internet, I have no issues with people finding me, but I'd like to have some curatorial control over how they do so, so I have a [rather stale] LI profile, and "placeholder" profiles on many other sites. I enjoyed learning a bit about Tedium. Its mission reminds a bit of the book Outside Lies Magic[0]. [0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/outside-lies-magic/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/ou...
herpdyderp 2y ago
> because you have to play the game Maybe my SE niche is different but I've never gotten a job where they cared about my LinkedIn profile. To the point where I deleted it last year because it was totally worthless.
driverdan 2y ago
> If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. It's the opposite. If you have less than 500 connections as I intentionally do it's a filter for fools who think that number means something. If someone is that shallow I don't want to have anything to do with them.
- burnte 2y ago
  No offense, but if you're not a recruiter I don't care about you there. Yes, they're fools, and they're gatekeepers.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  a linked in profile is like a safety plan you thought very little about and you really hope it never gets so bad that you have to resort to it.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  I just auto-accept anyone that comes in. I only ever open LinkedIn when I'm switching jobs to update my profile (basically to mirror my CV), but unfortunately the people screening the hires care about stupid shit like that
iamthemonster 2y ago
I have been very surprised at how good LinkedIn is as a news aggregator. I work in the energy industry and there are a lot of consultants who share genuinely quality articles or links to reports, sometimes with quite insightful analysis. However to achieve that, it takes effort to block people very liberally (I block people who have no interesting technical insight, even if they are perfectly pleasant) and I follow anyone who links a good article. The benefit of LinkedIn (for now) is that it actually respects the user's choices and curates the feed rather than filling it with whatever junk it wants (like Facebook)
eru 2y ago
Why does anyone care about the connection number? My connection number is mostly driven by how many times I accept recruiters' requests to connect. I don't think accepting these more often would make me (or anyone else) a better person? I could easily inflate that number further, by pro-actively reaching out to recruiters. But I feel, if I want to do self-promotion, my time is better spent eg contributing to some random projects on github.

by burnte 2y ago

1oooqooq 2y ago

i bet this one anecdote is from the time when those companies hired a bunch of people who then proceeded to post their lifestyle of do-nothing all day on tiktok.

lockedinspace 2y ago

That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration a person who has more connections than other even tho they have the same resume? Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing. Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network".

b112 2y ago
so it's a dumb metric I have to ask, have you interacted with many recruiters?
- lockedinspace 2y ago
  Fortunately quite many, maybe cause my sector is highly demanded, but having 1k,2k or whatever number of connections is not a metric for a lookable candidate. Years of experience, your github projects, open-source contribs are valuable metrics IMHO. Maybe recruiters after all also look a the connection number, could be, but its like saying a photographer is better than other cause he just simply posts more pictures.
  - arjvik 2y ago
    I think you're reading in too much to the above comment... from what I can tell they're just trying to say "it's a dumb metric because recruiters are dumb"
    - lockedinspace 2y ago
      Maybe I am overlapping my personal experience with others, but since I have a small number of connections, my job requests from recruiters in LI are normally optimal, quite elaborate and high-quality.
- DowagerDave 2y ago
  All those recruiters have 1000's of connections! </s>
burnte 2y ago
> That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration a person who has more connections than other even tho they have the same resume? Would I? No, but I also have never once looked at someone's LinkedIn when in the hiring process. I used to carefully curate who I connected with so that when looking at my connections, you could see it was a list of respected people in their fields, but I had barely over 100. Several recruiters told me point blank that doesn't matter at all. So I stopped bothering to care about my LI profile and connections, and suddenly had a LOT more activity with recruiters when I added more connections. Seemed quantity is truly valued over quality there. > Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing. Yes, that was my point. > Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network". You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in the end.
- lockedinspace 2y ago
  >You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in the end. Maybe a high number of connections causes a better first-impression, but if the candidate does not know how to write or articulate a word makes things much harder. Overall, seeing how a person expresses their ideas in their natural language gives you a better impression of how a person thinks/operates. Which in the end matters, cause you are dealing with persons, not statistics. For first instance recruiters, having a large number of people in your LI can get you into the first recruitment stage, but you won't pass if you don't know how to communicate, express and confront ideas, that's how it works.
  - burnte 2y ago
    I've never failed to secure an offer from an interview. So I'm not worried about what happens when I get there.

Quothling 2y ago

I never really understood the negativity towards LinkedIn and I'm probably not one of those 4% considering I basically never use it. To me LI is the perfect sort of social network, where it's actually useful when you need it, and the rest of the time you can simply ignore it. In years where I'm not considering changing jobs I'll usually only open LI to add new colleagues, or click an e-mail to accept someone wanting to link up with me, and that's it. Well, I'll admit that I kind of use it as an online resume for myself because I dislike updating my old doc (I really need to get that written in something that isn't doc). If I get some big brain-think which is related to my professional life I'll write it down in a note app and keep it for when I actually want to "activate" the LI algorithm. To do that I'll post a few comments over a week, which seems to make LI think you're an active user, and then I'll post the most relevant / well written brain-think from my collection. If I'm feeling frisky I'll post two. A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15 years), but usually there is something interesting in the ocean of shit. Some of my colleagues use it actively and dislike it, but use it because they think they have to. In my experience that's not the case at all. The 500+ may be true, I crossed that long ago even though I've generally worked in non-tech enterprise so 80% of my connections have nothing to do with SWE. Maybe this means that I do fall under the 4%, but even if you hate LI, you should know that you can play it extremely casual.

burnte 2y ago
I don't hate it, I just don't care about it. I'm in a field where I get jobs by what I've done, not how many work-friends I have on a website. I wish I didn't have to play the LI game but for some reason business execs think that connections number means something, so I have to play the game a little. > A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15 years) Ditto, except I'm not even a programmer and never have been but I still get a flood of Java programming offers. I actually get so many I have "java developer" as a filtered phrase in my email. I get 50+ a month, every month, for a decade now. And really that's what most people get on LI, oodles of connection or sales spam, and irrelevant communications from people casting nets rather than actually being good recruiters and finding good people. That's why most people "hate" it, it's junk mail we actually have to interact with sometimes. I spend maybe 2 minutes a month there, and wish I didn't have to at all.

tfsh 2y ago

I had about 1000 connections and found my linkedin homepage completely useless as it wasn't showing me anything about the people I care about (mostly uni friends, colleagues). I went through and whittled the list down to about 150 people I would either consider a friend or.close colleague. My homepage is still useless as linkedin shows me random trending posts, so that effort was a complete waste of time. It hadn't occured to me that recruiters would see less than n connections as a negative trait. I'd expect the opposite, someone with 1k connections (e.g) seems like someone who connects regardless.

arjvik 2y ago
I'm at the point where I'd rather recruiters who care about useless metrics like that skip over me. The true signal makes itself known amongst the noise of spam-all recruiters.
- anytime5704 2y ago
  Yep, this is the same as people who tell you not to mark yourself “open to work” because it “makes you look desperate.” If that’s what some company cares about, then I’m glad they won’t message me.

matrix87 2y ago

> If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. How is this supposed to be correlated with employee quality? I doubt there's a positive correlation

DowagerDave 2y ago
the correlation (if any) is negative IME, as the lowest count people are long-term employees who haven't need to build a pseudo-employment network to get their next job; they've been busy heads down doing work. The content served up by LI is either low effort/low value listicles with vague, click-baity headlines, or grand, ego-puffing requests to generate said content (you've been selected to answer this question about database design!)

notzane 2y ago

> I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable part of your LI profile is … your connections number. How long ago was this? I’ve been talking to lots of recruiters and the most common points I hear are - add every skill - keywords in your descriptions so you show up in searches - gaps and job tenure Remote jobs apparently get a ton of fake candidates so some recruiters have started checking for verification and profile age as additional signals.

rty32 2y ago

This is some sort of the third type of users but really non-users -- real people you know that actually exist (like colleagues) but never have had a LinkedIn profile, yet they have a successful career.

anothername12 2y ago

> over 500, that's a plus Here I was accepting connections judiciously after lightly researching their connections..

burnte 2y ago
I used to do that too!

bena 2y ago

Ah. I have a profile because it seemed like the professional thing to do to get professional jobs, etc. However, I only have about 100 connections mostly because I feel weird about adding people on any social network. Which I know is weird, but, I am. But I only add people I personally know or have a good reason for trying to connect with me. And now you're saying that's basically worthless. Which, sure, I'll buy that. My LinkedIn hasn't really provided me with much worth. But, what I'm curious about is why the number of connections is important? Is it just a measure of potential engagement/reach etc. like any other social media network?

burnte 2y ago
From what I understand, they use that to determine if you've met a lot of people in your work life which somehow means you're better at jobs. I never understood it.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I just use it, so people can find out about me. Unlike many folks on the Internet, I have no issues with people finding me, but I'd like to have some curatorial control over how they do so, so I have a [rather stale] LI profile, and "placeholder" profiles on many other sites. I enjoyed learning a bit about Tedium. Its mission reminds a bit of the book Outside Lies Magic[0]. [0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/outside-lies-magic/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/ou...

herpdyderp 2y ago

> because you have to play the game Maybe my SE niche is different but I've never gotten a job where they cared about my LinkedIn profile. To the point where I deleted it last year because it was totally worthless.

driverdan 2y ago

> If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. It's the opposite. If you have less than 500 connections as I intentionally do it's a filter for fools who think that number means something. If someone is that shallow I don't want to have anything to do with them.

burnte 2y ago
No offense, but if you're not a recruiter I don't care about you there. Yes, they're fools, and they're gatekeepers.
1oooqooq 2y ago
a linked in profile is like a safety plan you thought very little about and you really hope it never gets so bad that you have to resort to it.
sensanaty 2y ago
I just auto-accept anyone that comes in. I only ever open LinkedIn when I'm switching jobs to update my profile (basically to mirror my CV), but unfortunately the people screening the hires care about stupid shit like that

iamthemonster 2y ago

I have been very surprised at how good LinkedIn is as a news aggregator. I work in the energy industry and there are a lot of consultants who share genuinely quality articles or links to reports, sometimes with quite insightful analysis. However to achieve that, it takes effort to block people very liberally (I block people who have no interesting technical insight, even if they are perfectly pleasant) and I follow anyone who links a good article. The benefit of LinkedIn (for now) is that it actually respects the user's choices and curates the feed rather than filling it with whatever junk it wants (like Facebook)

eru 2y ago

Why does anyone care about the connection number? My connection number is mostly driven by how many times I accept recruiters' requests to connect. I don't think accepting these more often would make me (or anyone else) a better person? I could easily inflate that number further, by pro-actively reaching out to recruiters. But I feel, if I want to do self-promotion, my time is better spent eg contributing to some random projects on github.