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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 sor

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.
- ungreased0675 2y ago
  I get one or two recruiter messages a year, and I’m in the market for a job. Posts mentioning how many contacts they make me wonder what’s wrong with my profile.
- Quothling 2y ago
  I don't know but I'm guessing recruiters have access to some sort of algorithm on who's a likely target based on what skills / projects you have listed on your LI. The recruiter spam I get is much more on target after I "cleaned up" at least. The reason I get so many Java offers is because my area is very Java/C# rich, and since I may one day want to work with Java/C# again I've kept them on my LI profile, at least it's relatively easy to filter out. The actual "job" site of LinkedIn is terrible for me though. It's probably because I worked in the public sector and was involved with medical software, but LI seems to think I'm a doctor, a nurse and a firefighter (for whatever reason) at the same time.
hluska 2y ago
Hate is maybe a little strong. I don’t hate LinkedIn, though I barely have an account. LinkedIn is like being back in business school - everyone is the next CEO of $household_name and they all have this incredibly profound wisdom to share on how you too could be the next CEO of $household_name. I went through business school once and every second was a little worse than the last one. I’m good without LI.
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
They spammed your contacts list in the early years. All my coworkers have detailed job history peddled by various data brokers who scraped or bought the data from LI. That is a significant security threat if you are a worthwhile spear phishing target to a state level actor.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Back when I used LinkedIn you could download a spreadsheet of your contacts with their email addresses and spam all of them.
  - djbusby 2y ago
    LI had that, ages ago but also, and this is the dark pattern, got your contacts (like from phone app, or email extension) and then LI messaged them saying "@PaulHoule is on LI! Update your profile or become insignificant! Do it NOW!!"
- jjbinx007 2y ago
  It's worse than that: https://schlosser.io/writing/linkedin-dark-patterns/ https://schlosser.io/writing/linkedin-dark-patterns/
- captn3m0 2y ago
  I deleted my LI account after they spammed everyone on my contact list, including mailing lists I was subscribed to.
swozey 2y ago
I absolutely abhor LinkedIn but I play the game when I need to change paths. I do everything I can to never, ever log into it. I get immediate stress and second hand embarassment/cringe feelings when I do log in to update something. I have 15-17ish years in tech at various levels up to FAANG and over 1000+ connections but nothing crazy, I don't go out to make connections or anything so its purely organic job search/leave stuff. I don't add anyone I don't know and never have. When I log into it some of those 1000 connections are people from jobs I worked at that were so miserable that as soon as I see their names pop up I'm like, fuck, I'm glad you got away but now I'm reminded of my experience at XYZ. Then you have the Tony Robbins hustle culture people. They're impossible to avoid. "I sleep under my desk m-f! HUSTLE!" These aren't even my connections usually, it's just LInkedIn doing its for you page thinking I want to read that stuff while writing grpc services. It feels so much like performative bullshit. Everyone trying to impress one another with nothing impressive. Nobody talks serious tech. I've worked on some incredibly complex distsys stuff and we used to all network with one another on twitter. Never, ever linkedin. We'd add each other for the connection clout but we only discussed projects and real tech stuff on twitter or discord. I DO contribute my knowledge to some LinkedIn posts when I am around to do so, that usually consists explaining to someone how OCI containers or kubernetes or something works or to help them have a better process but those questions rarely start out with any technical depth beyond "this is how I shrink my docker images! Copy vs ADD!!" I'll log in and "Super Smart CTO Evangelist Hyper 10x Guru" who was a level 2 sysadmin who did piss poor work is still spouting that bullshit 10 years later. And I don't have only one of those, I have tons of those. I have a new manager as of about 6 months ago. He's horrendous. I made the mistake of not interviewing him (I'm staff level so it would've been me and 2 others yes/nos) and he got hired. I finally looked at his LinkedIn (not logged in, because I don't want that creepy site to tell him I'm looking at him) and he had the "SWE Manager Guru" bullshit and I just.. sighed. LinkedIn is a vastly different culture from the actual tech social media/communities I'm in. It's straight up performative sell-yourself bullshit. I just think it's gross. That site is made for recruiters and sales people. Also, https://old.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/
epolanski 2y ago
As every social it is mostly used by attention seekers and provides very little utility. I swear I never found a job (or client now that I'm freelancing) nor I have found decent candidates on it. I'm consistently spammed by Indians and middle eastern devs every time I open a position, it's just endless which my current client does not want to hire due to timezone and language issues and definitely some bias for the quality of their coding and task understanding abilities.
- jowdones 2y ago
  Well why then don't you put a sign on your "position ad" (assuming it's real and not dreamed up) saying "no negroes allowed"? Coze surely that's the vibe of your message.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    It's not my fault that the experience with developers coming from those areas has not been good and my current company does not want to repeat the mistake. There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do.
    - jkaplowitz 2y ago
      > It's not my fault I don’t think anyone was blaming you personally, nor am I. > that the experience with developers coming from those areas has not been good and my current company does not want to repeat the mistake. > There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do. Whether or not racism is involved in this case, it is absolutely possible to be racist against Middle Easterners and Indians without being racist against Africans. Racism is not a single binary yes/no question. Also, is the time zone (whether of residence or of work) really the determining factor, or is it where the person personally or ancestrally comes from? For example, would the client consider someone personally and ancestrally from India or the Middle East who currently lives in Germany or Africa and works in the local time zone there, or who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country but nevertheless can work at the same times that the Europeans work instead of asynchronously? (Tangent: Egypt is usually considered to be both in Africa and in the Middle East, and it’s in a Europe-compatible time zone like the rest of Africa. The rest of my comment will ignore this, but it highlights how weird it is to exclude the Middle East but not Africa for time zone reasons.) What about a Swedish or British person who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country and works in the local time zone there? And does the client’s policy treat Israel like the Middle Eastern country that it in fact is, or is “Middle Eastern” a short hand for “majority Arab or certain other ethnicities such as Persian but not African”? I’ve worked with plenty of good and bad people from all regions - including not only good and bad people from India and the Middle East, but also including good and bad people from Europe and the Americas. The same is true when I’ve interviewed people as a hiring manager. Your client’s biases are not supported by most data or anecdotes, unless there is something very unusual about the particular candidate pool they attract, in which they should fix their outreach methods. Rather than true racism, my suspicion is that your client is simply unaware of how to get past the cultural differences that developers from India and many Middle Eastern countries have to overcome in order to work well in European (or American) companies, none of which are inherent to their level of talent or skill. For example, they need to learn that it’s okay for an individual contributor to take initiative, to admit problems, and to (politely and with data) question potentially bad decisions made or proposed by people above them in the hierarchy. There are ways to either retrain people from that region or to filter at an early stage of the hiring process for candidates who have already made that adjustment.
freetinker 2y ago
Do you perceive a difference in quality when you compare the content and comments on HN, vs. LinkedIn? Or if I understand your comment correctly, the quality of content on LinkedIn doesn’t really matter because you use it infrequently – as an online resume?
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  There's comments on LinkedIn? To me, LinkedIn is a place to post my resume and communicate with recruiters, and that's it. Why would you ever use it for anything else?
  - swozey 2y ago
    That's literally the conversation we're having. Half of us only log in and post our job updates and the other half+ seem to sit on LinkedIn all day long posting performative bullshit and use it like your grandmother uses facebook. I mean, go log in and literally scroll down on the main page and you'll get it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Quothling 2y ago
  I don't really think about the quality when I post on LI, what I do think about is whether or not my comment is likely to get reactions. Often I'll "attach" myself to one of the "open source in the Danish public sector" threads that are relatively common in my feed. Obviously I don't post something silly, but it's a very low effort area for me. Partly because I've spent a decade in the Danish public sector partly because it's a very ideology driven community where it's easy to "farm" a few reactions without much risk of pissing someone off. On the flip-side I don't really use HN for anything job related but here I only engage in things I think are interesting and that I think I can contribute to. So in a way HN is actually much more "unhealthy" for me than LI, as it's my SoMe drug of choice and I should probably spend less time here.
rldjbpin 2y ago
having come out of job search, i had to use the site regularly and i see why people have grievances. to me, it seems like the facebook for the working class. a vast portion of the "500+" club might be those with that many followers and not connections. a lot of them post stuff that your grandma who also works in your industry might do. if you filter the noise out, there is a lot of benefit to having some networking opportunities. but personally outside of job hunting, i would prefer not to partake.

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.

ungreased0675 2y ago
I get one or two recruiter messages a year, and I’m in the market for a job. Posts mentioning how many contacts they make me wonder what’s wrong with my profile.
Quothling 2y ago
I don't know but I'm guessing recruiters have access to some sort of algorithm on who's a likely target based on what skills / projects you have listed on your LI. The recruiter spam I get is much more on target after I "cleaned up" at least. The reason I get so many Java offers is because my area is very Java/C# rich, and since I may one day want to work with Java/C# again I've kept them on my LI profile, at least it's relatively easy to filter out. The actual "job" site of LinkedIn is terrible for me though. It's probably because I worked in the public sector and was involved with medical software, but LI seems to think I'm a doctor, a nurse and a firefighter (for whatever reason) at the same time.

hluska 2y ago

Hate is maybe a little strong. I don’t hate LinkedIn, though I barely have an account. LinkedIn is like being back in business school - everyone is the next CEO of $household_name and they all have this incredibly profound wisdom to share on how you too could be the next CEO of $household_name. I went through business school once and every second was a little worse than the last one. I’m good without LI.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

They spammed your contacts list in the early years. All my coworkers have detailed job history peddled by various data brokers who scraped or bought the data from LI. That is a significant security threat if you are a worthwhile spear phishing target to a state level actor.

PaulHoule 2y ago
Back when I used LinkedIn you could download a spreadsheet of your contacts with their email addresses and spam all of them.
- djbusby 2y ago
  LI had that, ages ago but also, and this is the dark pattern, got your contacts (like from phone app, or email extension) and then LI messaged them saying "@PaulHoule is on LI! Update your profile or become insignificant! Do it NOW!!"
jjbinx007 2y ago
It's worse than that: https://schlosser.io/writing/linkedin-dark-patterns/ https://schlosser.io/writing/linkedin-dark-patterns/
captn3m0 2y ago
I deleted my LI account after they spammed everyone on my contact list, including mailing lists I was subscribed to.

swozey 2y ago

I absolutely abhor LinkedIn but I play the game when I need to change paths. I do everything I can to never, ever log into it. I get immediate stress and second hand embarassment/cringe feelings when I do log in to update something. I have 15-17ish years in tech at various levels up to FAANG and over 1000+ connections but nothing crazy, I don't go out to make connections or anything so its purely organic job search/leave stuff. I don't add anyone I don't know and never have. When I log into it some of those 1000 connections are people from jobs I worked at that were so miserable that as soon as I see their names pop up I'm like, fuck, I'm glad you got away but now I'm reminded of my experience at XYZ. Then you have the Tony Robbins hustle culture people. They're impossible to avoid. "I sleep under my desk m-f! HUSTLE!" These aren't even my connections usually, it's just LInkedIn doing its for you page thinking I want to read that stuff while writing grpc services. It feels so much like performative bullshit. Everyone trying to impress one another with nothing impressive. Nobody talks serious tech. I've worked on some incredibly complex distsys stuff and we used to all network with one another on twitter. Never, ever linkedin. We'd add each other for the connection clout but we only discussed projects and real tech stuff on twitter or discord. I DO contribute my knowledge to some LinkedIn posts when I am around to do so, that usually consists explaining to someone how OCI containers or kubernetes or something works or to help them have a better process but those questions rarely start out with any technical depth beyond "this is how I shrink my docker images! Copy vs ADD!!" I'll log in and "Super Smart CTO Evangelist Hyper 10x Guru" who was a level 2 sysadmin who did piss poor work is still spouting that bullshit 10 years later. And I don't have only one of those, I have tons of those. I have a new manager as of about 6 months ago. He's horrendous. I made the mistake of not interviewing him (I'm staff level so it would've been me and 2 others yes/nos) and he got hired. I finally looked at his LinkedIn (not logged in, because I don't want that creepy site to tell him I'm looking at him) and he had the "SWE Manager Guru" bullshit and I just.. sighed. LinkedIn is a vastly different culture from the actual tech social media/communities I'm in. It's straight up performative sell-yourself bullshit. I just think it's gross. That site is made for recruiters and sales people. Also, https://old.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/

epolanski 2y ago

As every social it is mostly used by attention seekers and provides very little utility. I swear I never found a job (or client now that I'm freelancing) nor I have found decent candidates on it. I'm consistently spammed by Indians and middle eastern devs every time I open a position, it's just endless which my current client does not want to hire due to timezone and language issues and definitely some bias for the quality of their coding and task understanding abilities.

jowdones 2y ago
Well why then don't you put a sign on your "position ad" (assuming it's real and not dreamed up) saying "no negroes allowed"? Coze surely that's the vibe of your message.
- epolanski 2y ago
  It's not my fault that the experience with developers coming from those areas has not been good and my current company does not want to repeat the mistake. There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do.
  - jkaplowitz 2y ago
    > It's not my fault I don’t think anyone was blaming you personally, nor am I. > that the experience with developers coming from those areas has not been good and my current company does not want to repeat the mistake. > There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do. Whether or not racism is involved in this case, it is absolutely possible to be racist against Middle Easterners and Indians without being racist against Africans. Racism is not a single binary yes/no question. Also, is the time zone (whether of residence or of work) really the determining factor, or is it where the person personally or ancestrally comes from? For example, would the client consider someone personally and ancestrally from India or the Middle East who currently lives in Germany or Africa and works in the local time zone there, or who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country but nevertheless can work at the same times that the Europeans work instead of asynchronously? (Tangent: Egypt is usually considered to be both in Africa and in the Middle East, and it’s in a Europe-compatible time zone like the rest of Africa. The rest of my comment will ignore this, but it highlights how weird it is to exclude the Middle East but not Africa for time zone reasons.) What about a Swedish or British person who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country and works in the local time zone there? And does the client’s policy treat Israel like the Middle Eastern country that it in fact is, or is “Middle Eastern” a short hand for “majority Arab or certain other ethnicities such as Persian but not African”? I’ve worked with plenty of good and bad people from all regions - including not only good and bad people from India and the Middle East, but also including good and bad people from Europe and the Americas. The same is true when I’ve interviewed people as a hiring manager. Your client’s biases are not supported by most data or anecdotes, unless there is something very unusual about the particular candidate pool they attract, in which they should fix their outreach methods. Rather than true racism, my suspicion is that your client is simply unaware of how to get past the cultural differences that developers from India and many Middle Eastern countries have to overcome in order to work well in European (or American) companies, none of which are inherent to their level of talent or skill. For example, they need to learn that it’s okay for an individual contributor to take initiative, to admit problems, and to (politely and with data) question potentially bad decisions made or proposed by people above them in the hierarchy. There are ways to either retrain people from that region or to filter at an early stage of the hiring process for candidates who have already made that adjustment.

freetinker 2y ago

Do you perceive a difference in quality when you compare the content and comments on HN, vs. LinkedIn? Or if I understand your comment correctly, the quality of content on LinkedIn doesn’t really matter because you use it infrequently – as an online resume?

shiroiushi 2y ago
There's comments on LinkedIn? To me, LinkedIn is a place to post my resume and communicate with recruiters, and that's it. Why would you ever use it for anything else?
- swozey 2y ago
  That's literally the conversation we're having. Half of us only log in and post our job updates and the other half+ seem to sit on LinkedIn all day long posting performative bullshit and use it like your grandmother uses facebook. I mean, go log in and literally scroll down on the main page and you'll get it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Quothling 2y ago
I don't really think about the quality when I post on LI, what I do think about is whether or not my comment is likely to get reactions. Often I'll "attach" myself to one of the "open source in the Danish public sector" threads that are relatively common in my feed. Obviously I don't post something silly, but it's a very low effort area for me. Partly because I've spent a decade in the Danish public sector partly because it's a very ideology driven community where it's easy to "farm" a few reactions without much risk of pissing someone off. On the flip-side I don't really use HN for anything job related but here I only engage in things I think are interesting and that I think I can contribute to. So in a way HN is actually much more "unhealthy" for me than LI, as it's my SoMe drug of choice and I should probably spend less time here.

rldjbpin 2y ago

having come out of job search, i had to use the site regularly and i see why people have grievances. to me, it seems like the facebook for the working class. a vast portion of the "500+" club might be those with that many followers and not connections. a lot of them post stuff that your grandma who also works in your industry might do. if you filter the noise out, there is a lot of benefit to having some networking opportunities. but personally outside of job hunting, i would prefer not to partake.