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- avenger123 13y agoLinkedIn is fantastic! This will be next.
- robobenjie 13y agogoogle has a search app: (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-search/id284815942 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-search/id284815942) and facebook has a "just share photos with your friends" app: (https://www.facebook.com/mobile/camera https://www.facebook.com/mobile/camera). While you can bemoan feature creep all you want, the truth is that its hard to remove features one they are in (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html). On the other hand having a specialized tool for a common task is really handy. I like these specialized apps, (though I can't comment on LinkedIn's in particular).
- itsybitsycoder 13y agoWhy would you add your current boss to LinkedIn to begin with?
- corin_ 13y agoThe purpose of LinkedIn is to connect in the business world, I don't know a single user who doesn't connect to their current colleagues, including their boss.
- stuartcw 13y agoI didn't and have had people say to me that they don't connect with current colleagues. I also don't connect with recruiters until I have announced that I am leaving. I'll happily chat with them via private messages or give an alternative email address. There is no benefit in the default behavior of having the system send all your contacts, including your boss and HR colleagues that you have made a new recruiter friend today.
- corin_ 13y agoI guess it depends on what you want to get out of LinkedIn, and your situation. Personally, my relationship with colleagues/boss is such that if I think about leaving they'll know about it from me first, and if I added a recruiter as a contact they wouldn't even think about it. But apart from that, my use-case for LinkedIn is primarily connecting with people I do/have work/ed with, to help us stay connected should we need to work again in the future, and so other people can see who I know and who knows me. If and when I leave my job, I won't be looking at adverts or to be contacted by recruiters, I'll be leaving for a job offered by someone I already know in the industry. But appreciate that for other people, they might want to use it completely differently.
- jinushaun 13y agoLinkedIn is where you're supposed to connect with your boss and other work colleagues. You certainly don't do that on Facebook.
- itsybitsycoder 13y agoAren't you already connected to your boss and other current work colleagues through, you know, work? I've only connected with current colleagues when I know they won't tattle, and never connected with a boss until I've given notice. If your main use case for LinkedIn is to find work through your connections (as it is for many people), it seems a little thoughtless to connect with people who not only won't help you find work, but will be unhappy to know that you're even looking. EDIT: OK, I don't mind downvotes, but could you please explain why? After factoring in actual work hours, company social events/groups, water cooler/lunchroom chat, and internal company communication channels (email/phone/IM/etc), what sort of connection is missing that LinkedIn provides?
- NamTaf 13y agoIt provides a sense of validity to people who may know your boss and see you, as an employee of theirs, as being competent and proficient at your job role. Say I work as a design engineer. My boss is probably older and more experienced. He may have worked at competing firms previously and has connections there. I connect with him, and he's connected with former colleagues. They want to recruit and so start looking around the networks of people in the industry and region. Because I'm connected to my boss, I am more exposed in their ads. They see the mutual connection and consider that partial confirmation that if I'm employable under him, I'm probably a decent employee. Networking with existing colleagues, including your boss, helps create exposure of your profile to others in the industry by utilising the connections that your (usually more experienced and more connected) boss has. I'd almost be willing to bet that connecting 'upwards' to more experienced people is on the whole far better for your profile exposure than connecting 'downwards' to lesser-experienced employees (e.g.: you as a mid-level employee connecting to new graduates entering your workforce).
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- drorweiss 13y agoI get a little too much spam from LinkedIn. The default mail digest option is daily, and unless one changes it each time after joining a new group, one can expect an inbox flood
- J_Darnley 13y agoWhat a stupid webpage! It looks like it wants to do some fancy javascript just to show an image that should be: <img src="URL">
- rachelbythebay 13y agoView source on this thing. The entire post is there at least two times in different formats. I like the whole "&nbsp" thing in one of them. I didn't go looking for others.
- vampirechicken 13y agoMaybe those are the premium features...
- corin_ 13y agoComplaints such as "Sadly, I didn't take a screenshot of the suggestion I apply to work as a SAP consultant in Germany, though I don't speak German or have the word 'SAP' on my profile. " The thing to keep in mind is that LinkedIn's job, in this area, is to offer great options to advertisers. On Facebook I can put an advert out targeting a specific age, a specific city, and specific interests. Or I can just target... a huge number of people. If I do the latter, do you blame Facebook for not using their data properly? I've never advertised on LinkedIn. Maybe it's awful, it could well be. But seeing badly targeted adverts means absolutely nothing.
- Thrymr 13y ago> But seeing badly targeted adverts means absolutely nothing. You don't think that advertisers are willing to pay more for well-targeted ads? This is a strong sign that LinkedIn is not leveraging their data as well as they could.
- tyre 13y agoI think his/her point was that LinkedIn might have those features, but customers don't _have_ to use them. So you can pay more for better targeting, which is probably an intelligent way to get the users you want, but there could be companies that just ignore logic and want the cheapest way to blast out a message.
- nemothekid 13y agoIn the authors case I think it means IBM isn't leveraging LinkedIn's data. It could the case that some HR person checked off "programming" and left it at that. I can't imagine someone at LinkedIn going back and fixing all the vague job descriptions that go through their system.
- corin_ 13y agoI have often experienced: - Advertisers who don't understand what they are doing with automated systems [1] - Advertisers whose specific target is too small, so they widen the net [2] - Advertisers who would rather waste a bit more money to keep the net wide [3] Point 1: remember that plenty of advertisers are old-school, they're used to signing off campaigns over lunch or drinks, not to fiddling with settings on a website. Hell, I'm 23, so far from oldschool, and a.) I have often chosen less targeted advertising options (based on performance of KPIs) and b.) I don't like getting involved in specific stuff like Facebook advertising - I hired someone to do that for me, but maybe if I knew even less about it I wouldn't have even thought to do that. Points 2/3: Some people are going to be your target audience without the data showing it. Just because someone doesn't list SAP as a skill, doesn't mean they don't have it. Just because they aren't in Germany, doesn't mean they wouldn't consider moving for the right opportunity. Just because someone isn't a fan of McDonalds on Facebook it doesn't mean they won't be interested in a KFC advert. edit: Of course, LinkedIn offering poor features is also a possible explanation. As I said I've never used it (for advertising) and have no interest in exploring it as I only deal with B2C marketing.
- ben1040 13y agoI am honestly questioning the utility of LinkedIn in general. It seems to be a sink for recruiter messages when people don't know how to otherwise contact me. I know when someone is hiring bioinformatics developers locally, because within an hour I get LinkedIn messages from six different recruiters who are all trying to pitch the exact same job. I am not sure how it could be useful in a job search scenario. I don't perceive it as any less annoying to send someone a cold-email just because they are a FOAF on LinkedIn. Am I wrong on this? I've been on there for 8 years and have accumulated a ton of connections, but I've been tempted to just delete the account. I have avoided doing it though because I have this idea that if someone Googled me and found no LinkedIn profile, they'd think I don't care about my career.
- k3n 13y agoI boycott them with the idea that I don't want any single company to become any sort of de facto resume & hiring service, which they already try to bill themselves as. Ostensibly, if you use their service, you don't need a resume or a list of references -- it's all right there! I also have grave reservations about giving so much of my personal info (job, job history, colleagues, etc.) to a for-profit entity that has every motivation to capitalize on that data while having few reasons not to. I'll network the old-fashioned way, thank you.
- harlanlewis 13y agoI am unclear on why you see low-effort resume and reference services as a bad thing.
- k3n 13y agoI don't trust them with my data. This stems back from a few years ago when they automatically created an account for me based on information that a 3rd party had provided. I don't know if they still do that, but it told me all I needed to know about them.
- ryguytilidie 13y agoI just think its useful to quickly be able to see an overview of someones career, but yeah, I agree, I wish it wasn't so spammy.
- stuartcw 13y agoMy biggest gripe with LinkedIn is that recently, I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts. Getting suggestions for contacts who are already using LinkedIn was the intention but they invited anyone who had ever mailed me! Up until that point, my contact list was limited to people that I personally knew and could recommend. Now, months later, I am still getting successful "contact accepted" replies from people that I barely know. I.e everyone who ever contributed to any mailing list that I was ever subscribed to. I even got replies from people asking why I contacted them. I have no idea how many people remain to accept my invitation or even who they are. What a disaster. It has changed for me, an early user of the site, what was a useful database of the people I know, to now some random connection of strangers. The worst part is the link to connect to Gmail still appears and I'm sure that it doesn't clearly indicate what it's intention is. So, if you have connected with an email provider in the past be wary of allowing it to connect again. And yes, if you let any site connect to your personal data, expect the worst outcome...
- david_shaw 13y agoThis same issue happened to me, including the unsolicited LinkedIn contact invitations. Suffice to say that it is extremely embarrassing to not only send "connect requests" to people I barely (or don't at all) know, but also to people whom I am actively avoiding due to issues in real life. I had to go through, check all my pending invitations, and rescind them. Not sure if that really helps, though, since then if they were to click "accept," it would simply say "no invitation to connect." What a mess.
- Casseres 13y agoHave you tried seeing if those auto-invites are in your invite outbox [1]? You might be able to cancel them. Then again maybe not, I've never used the contact integration feature. [1] http://www.linkedin.com/inbox/invitations/sent http://www.linkedin.com/inbox/invitations/sent
- city41 13y agoThis happened to me several years ago. I'm appalled they still do this! It's the main reason I deleted my account. For what it is worth, I've never once regretted deleting it.
- igorgue 13y agoI just closed my account, and I bet I'd still get a shiton of emails from them or people who finds me there.
- Sven7 13y agoCompared to the other ongoing social networking experiments that generate constantly exploding datasets of worthless noise, LinkedIn is a very different story. Their data is the most interesting. Today the focus is on individuals. Tomorrow it will be groups.
- kevincrane 13y agoThe thing I hate most about LinkedIn right now (apart from spamming me) is their new system of friends endorsing your skills. I just got an email this morning saying a friend endorsed my skills in Python. This guy played water polo with me in college, why would he be in any position to endorse my programming skills, and why was he asked to endorse me?
- perssontm 13y agoCouldnt agree more, this is the current biggest pain of linkedin... ...or perhaps the recruiters sending email such as "I see you have worked with purely with linux and mysql, how about you applying for this 100% microsoft-stack company as a sharepoint/exchange professional." That might not be linkedins fault the recruiters seems stupid, but it should be in linkedins interest to not annoy me with such crap.
- mnicole 13y agoI'm swimming in endorsements from people who aren't qualified to do so. I've told this story on here before, but my co-worker was endorsed by one of our colleagues for something he never set as a skill to begin with; it was just some random acronym she thought "sounded technical!" They really need to figure that business out. Even a simple, "How do you know this person?" would suffice, allowing people to determine the weight of that endorsement on the relationship we have.
- stmchn 13y agoEndorsements have lost all meaning whatsoever. 3 people have endorsed me for OS X for some reason even though I don't have it listed in my skills. I've never owned an Apple product in my life except for an iPhone so my skills with OS X are average at best. My boyfriend's dad, who is not technical whatsoever, endorsed me for git. I'm pretty sure he just saw the word git and thought, "Hehe, she's a git!" I think the problem too is that LinkedIn offers people the path of least resistance to endorse people. Occasionally I'll see a message at the top of my profile saying, "Endorse X for Y & Z" and a button to approve it. I'm sure more times than not, people just approve endorsements without giving it a second thought.
- S_A_P 13y agoLinkedIn has become the equivalent of spray and pray for job seeking. This article hits the nail on the head. They are more worried about monitizing >5 people who have viewed my profile than truly allowing me to connect with other professionals. I would love to see more dialog options. Groups ala G+ to partition personal info. There is so much more linkedin can be and they fall flat.
- qqg3 13y agoClick on about on his blog. He has a link to his own goddamn LinkedIn profile right there. If he hates it so much why does have such a nicely filled out and active LinkedIn profile.
- lumens 13y agoWe're solving these exact problems by developing Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com). LinkedIn has always been a good professional networking tool. But because it's a professional networking tool, exploring new opportunities is rife with risk (as the OP alludes to). Great opportunity discovery is about what you want to do, not just what you have done, and that isn't necessarily public information. Mighty Spring helps you find interesting jobs discretely -- a private place for you to manage your career. ps. We're in private beta, but will expedite invites to all you hacker news folks that sign up :)
- Cub3 13y agoI love the idea and am interested in signing up... but the design for your page leaves much to be desired. Dark green on lime green is not a good choice, I'd suggest moving toward the colors and style of your blog / logo Just my 2cents
- ultimatedelman 13y agoThe biggest problem that good developers have when it comes to recruiting is that they hate recruiters, and the best way to guarantee that you get spammed by every recruiter in a thousand-mile radius is to tell something like LinkedIn that you're looking. Mighty Spring solves this problem by providing candidates with the ability to check out relevant jobs and indicate interest _completely anonymously_. No alerting recruiters. No alerting your boss. Disclaimer: I'm the front-end guy for Mighty Spring :)
- asafira 13y agoHow do we let you know we are hackernews people?
- lumens 13y agoWe're live monitoring signups :) Also, you should feel free to email me: lumen [at] mightyspring -dot- com
- berberous 13y agoI'm getting a standard http "authentication required" dialog from bugherd.com when visiting your site. I'm guessing this is because I have httpsEverywhere installed (a firefox extension that tries to use https wherever possible). Visiting bugherd.com gives me the same error, so it appears it's a problem on their end. Still, it leaves a bad impression. You might want to disable whatever you are using from them.
- leeny 13y agoI'm a recruiter, but I hate LinkedIn. In some ways, that's a gross exaggeration because LinkedIn does one thing very, very well: it standardizes people's work experience and puts it all in one place. Once you get used to reading LinkedIn profiles you can get the context you need about a person very, very quickly. This is great. The rest of it sucks. In particular, LinkedIn Recruiter (the module that lets you see pretty much anyone, no matter how many degrees of separation exist between you and them and lets you send some number of InMails per month) is a giant spam factory. Its design encourages impersonal spams by making it super easy to send exactly the same InMail to large volumes of people. If I'm a recruiter, I can search for everyone who attended MIT and now works at, say, Oracle very easily, and then do the moral equivalent of throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Ugh.
- fudged71 13y agoDoes it--in any way--feel creepy or unethical to be able to see those kind of connections? As though you're a spectator able to traverse anyone's real life in far more detail than others.
- shurane 13y agoWhat are the clever, resourceful, and truly evil recruiters doing? I guess the amateur ones can filter by universities and organizations, but surely there's a more efficient way to wade through the swamp of linkedin?
- leeny 13y agoI guess I don't see being clever and resourceful synonymous with being evil. I don't know what the other guys are doing, but I try to use LinkedIn only as a reference (e.g. "where is this person working now, and how long have they been there?", "what kind of stuff has this person worked on historically?") I try to look at blogs, GitHub, dribbble, HN posts, tweets, Quora submissions, and whatever else I can to try to get some idea of what the person in question is interested in and good at. At the end of the day, I'm trying to surface smart people. Then I try to figure out whether I can offer said smart people interesting work that's in line with what they seem to be passionate about.
- cityzen 13y agocould have stopped with "LinkedIn annoys me."
- jamieb 13y ago"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product." would seem to explain the complaints made here.
- harlanji 13y agobuilding on this: the feature set for paying customers (recruiters, internal/external) seems pretty solid, from the few articles I've read; so it seems to fit the saying exactly.
- xxbondsxx 13y agoA lot of people pay for LinkedIn... Regardless, why is this such a common response to these types of posts? I understand the angle of "don't be entitled to a free service," but there's also the alternative interpretation of "here are some fundamentals your business is missing, and my humble suggestions."
- saltzman 13y agoAgreed. LinkedIn's been awful for a long time and unfortunately nothing has paralleled its popularity... hoping something that doesn't suck will come up and sink it into irrelevance in the abyss of the interwebs as Facebook did to MySpace.
- smtddr 13y agoWell, LinkedIn has been great for me and allowed me to land an awesome job recently. However, I babysit my linkedin account. I check it daily, update my profile with links people would find of interest, reply to all recruiters, comment on stories in the news section. Yeah, I'm pretty engaged in LinkedIn. I don't have facebook, so maybe I use it as a replacement....
- elchief 13y agoanybody else get Mining Engineer job "recommendations" when they work in Data Mining?
- DigitalSea 13y agoLinkedin is a Facebook for recruiter spam. The article raises some valid points, you can't advertise you're looking for a new job because your boss will see or if not, one of your colleagues will and they'll most likely report you to get brownie points with the boss or even take your job. Half of my connections are recruiters, I get daily emails offering me Wordpress development and SEO services (even though I am a front-end developer and can do that stuff myself), people add me I've never met before who don't even live in the same country as me. Linkedin is a giant mess, it's kind of like the professional equivalent of Myspace circa 2007 when that scantily clad girl wanting to add you was some low-life in a basement trying to spam affiliate links at you, only that scantily clad girl is a guy in a suit trying to get a recruiting commission from spamming your inbox. Don't get me started on the skill endorsements feature. I get tonnes of emails everyday saying "Joe X has endorsed you for Java" even though Joe knows nothing about Java nor do I. People are endorsing me for skills that I don't even posses or have, what a joke. Want to network? Get someone's business card and their phone number, store it into your phone and don't rely on a website comprised of spam to build up a network.
- alex_doom 13y agoI've never used LinkedIn and got along just fine. But if someone were to build a better alternative they could be the Facebook to MySpace's death.
- corin_ 13y agoSmall bit of syntax feedback - should be "the Facebook to LinkedIn's MySpace". Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine, since so many people word it like you in a way that is obvious to understand but doesn't technically make any sense.
- dontAgree 13y agoGreat. Another one of those dismissal comments as the first in the thread. Let's see: "Linkedin is a Facebook for recruiter spam. The article raises some valid points, you can't advertise you're looking for a new job because your boss will see or if not, one of your colleagues will and they'll most likely report you to get brownie points with the boss or even take your job." - You don't need to advertise that you are looking for a new job on LinkedIn. You can always passively look. Are your employers reading your inbox too? If that's the case, maybe you should look elsewhere. "Half of my connections are recruiters, I get daily emails offering me Wordpress development and SEO services (even though I am a front-end developer and can do that stuff myself), people add me I've never met before who don't even live in the same country as me. Linkedin is a giant mess, it's kind of like the professional equivalent of Myspace circa 2007 when that scantily clad girl wanting to add you was some low-life in a basement trying to spam affiliate links at you, only that scantily clad girl is a guy in a suit trying to get a recruiting commission from spamming your inbox." - People don't add you. People request to add you. There is a difference. I don't accept requests from people who I either A) don't know B) don't care to network with. I don't see how this is different than any other social network. "Don't get me started on the skill endorsements feature. I get tonnes of emails everyday saying "Joe X has endorsed you for Java" even though Joe knows nothing about Java nor do I. People are endorsing me for skills that I don't even posses or have, what a joke." - Joke or not I'll know the difference between someone's actual skills if I was a recruiter/hiring manager after asking them about said skill. I interview many candidates who I see write lots of languages on their resume. I'm not going to go through the list and ask about each one, but the skills endorsements are useful in that I know what I should focus on when I interview them to see if they actually know it. Anyone can lie about anything on any social network. "Want to network? Get someone's business card and their phone number, store it into your phone and don't rely on a website comprised of spam to build up a network." - Please. Especially for people in the technical industry. Waste of trees for the person receiving the card and waste of money for the person buying the card. I don't think I've ever called someone after meeting them for the first time at some sort of event, then again I'm not in sales; I prefer more passive introductions.
- holms 13y agoyeah linkedin has tons of useless stuff.. i just keep my cv updated, trying to avoid reading news, or subscribing to groups. i've actually have found few jobs through linkedin posted job offers. Most of recruiters sending automated messages with invitations which I always decline. there's no way to communicate with your connected person.. no chat, no email provided.. it's easier to grab name and surname, and write PM through facebook. in my country linkedin is not so popular and recruiters actually writing nice messages with a good suggestions, that's how i've found a job in barclays. After living 2 years in netherlands.. i still get lot's of spam from there. Sometimes it's seems for me that only my country has a culture of recruiting, all others just spamming to get your attension.
- mbrock 13y agoFuck LinkedIn and everything it symbolizes and reinforces. Die, die, die.
- L0j1k 13y agoI have a feeling in my soul that "social media" is going to move into a more organic space in a way that means the most to the advertisers (or governments) that want deep information about target demographics. What I mean by this is that as the companies grow (and thus move away from niche market into infrastructure), they become too large to retain meaning to end users in an important way. What I'm saying here might be a little too cerebral for 2am, but it's the same reason Google just doesn't have the granularity to capture the mom-and-pop advertising market like they want (and consistently cannot achieve, if you pay attention to their stream of product inventions and reinventions). Facebook has started to lose its appeal on an accelerating timeline, and I believe that companies like Facebook and LinkedIn -- that are desperate for growth curves and thereby "smoothing off" the niche market granularity in an effort to streamline the company to afford maximal growth -- are going to be a "yeah, I knew that chick in high school" kind of utility that contains cursory information, but really lacks the depth of social networking that is the sought-after distilled end product that everyone dreams about, where your close friends are able to keep up with you online in a fashion that closely resembles your real life social graph. This information and depth -- the kind that is highly marketable and extremely valuable to all kinds of enormous, information-hungry organizations -- will be contained in little "what app.net wanted to be" bubbles that all intermix through network APIs to other social media bubble companies. Unless someone is capable of building a Facebook/LinkedIn that won't info grab and bother the shit out of every contact you've ever had, while maintaining that "niche market" feel for every user, and while keeping that "closely resembling real life social activity graph" feel. Or maybe I'm just stupid.
- mooreds 13y agoDoes it make sense to look at the linked in API http://developer.linkedin.com/apis http://developer.linkedin.com/apis and build useful tools on top of the data? Not sure what the monetization strategy would be, or whether it'd be a TOS violation, but some of the features mentioned in the article would be great to have.
- mikescoffield 13y agoThis reminds me of a comment my former VP made. It was something to the effect of... Oh, so and so is looking for a new job. I see he's adding recruiter connections on LinkedIn.