I've been gradually pulling away from LinkedIn. Right now, I have for my profile: "I don't reveal history without a reason, so my past jobs summary is blank.

I've been gradually pulling away from LinkedIn. Right now, I have for my profile: "I don't reveal history without a reason, so my past jobs summary is blank. I'm a New York-based software engineer who specializes in functional programming, machine learning, and language design." I really don't think it's a good idea for people in their 20s to reveal their career histories to the public. A lot can go wrong, and there's questionable upside. All kinds of shit can happen, and who's to say that a person won't need creative repair years down the road (e.g. one's worst enemy takes over a prior employer, years later, and gives a bad reference, and the only way to overcome it is to depart from the truth)? I don't think most people are age will get burned by a need to lie overtly (because that's rare) but more by accidental consistency risk and benign forgetting of details. My issue with LinkedIn is that, although it's 21st-century technology, and it has some stellar people working on it. it seems to me to be still a tool for evaluating technical people by 20th-century means: prestige of company, title, dates of employment. Then there is the game aspect of trolling other people for recommendations to build a more impressive profile, which seems like an enormous source of tension and pissed-off-ness ("you recommended him, why can't you recommend me?") I realize that it has to embrace the 20th-century mentality to get employers to take it seriously, but it's sad that it has to accept those kinds of compromises.