Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 156 posts

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#131

Post by snoman »

callalex wrote: post #123
brandall10 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on LI similarly as long... I get some of the ire, but when I see comments like this I wonder if I'm in some extreme minority. I don't get pelted with a ton of messages - maybe a dozen a month at most, and maybe 1/2 of them are actual ops I could be interested in/are applicable to my skillset. I've had several interviews which originated from a LI message - easily over a dozen, and I may have landed a job in…

How much do you value your professional time at? How long does it take you to read, comprehend, and respond to 12 recruiter spams a month? Take that dollar figure and imagine what you could buy with it after 6 months!

It's like 1h/y. You can handle that sitting on the toilet. You can literally filter out to solid leads while pooping. Why the derision?

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#132

Post by anilgulecha »

jiaweihli wrote: post #119
deftnerd wrote: post #109

Up until the LinkedIn redesign a few weeks ago, I used to run a bit of javascript every day that would pick a 100 people randomly on my LinkedIn "friends list" and endorse them for one of their listed skills that I hadn't already endorsed them for. Every time I did that, it caused about 20% of the people to view my profile, which gamed my LinkedIn statistics so my profile was ranked higher in various searches. I have…

Wow, that's an ingenious hack that makes a lot of sense in hindsight. What was your thought process and how did it lead to that? Was it solving a similar problem in another domain?

> Wow, that's an ingenious hack that makes a lot of sense in hindsight. What was your thought process and how did it lead to that? Was it solving a similar problem in another domain?

I've read your comment thrice and have not been able to understand it! It's starts out mildly reasonable, then drifts out into bot-territory

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#133

Post by brandall10 »

callalex wrote: post #123
brandall10 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on LI similarly as long... I get some of the ire, but when I see comments like this I wonder if I'm in some extreme minority. I don't get pelted with a ton of messages - maybe a dozen a month at most, and maybe 1/2 of them are actual ops I could be interested in/are applicable to my skillset. I've had several interviews which originated from a LI message - easily over a dozen, and I may have landed a job in…

How much do you value your professional time at? How long does it take you to read, comprehend, and respond to 12 recruiter spams a month? Take that dollar figure and imagine what you could buy with it after 6 months!

No one is forcing you to read them, and certainly not to respond. If I'm not looking for work I don't respond. It's seriously maybe 5 minutes per month of my life to skim the job postings which come through my inbox.

As I alluded to above - my life prior to LI had far time sunk due to being badgered by recruiters.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#134

Post by deftnerd »

tedmiston wrote: post #124
deftnerd wrote: post #109

Up until the LinkedIn redesign a few weeks ago, I used to run a bit of javascript every day that would pick a 100 people randomly on my LinkedIn "friends list" and endorse them for one of their listed skills that I hadn't already endorsed them for. Every time I did that, it caused about 20% of the people to view my profile, which gamed my LinkedIn statistics so my profile was ranked higher in various searches. I have…

Great idea. Essentially the same approach as like bots on Instagram. Have you considered doing more targeted endorsing — for example, endorsing people in a skill you want to be endorsed in? I've had people do this manually before.

I have thought of that, but my skills weren't good enough at the time.

This is my old (now unworking) code: https://gist.github.com/DeftNerd/4abf63c7d0e680d62a2cd26d534...

It was able to pull from an API of "Suggested endorsements" so I could run it from one page. That "Suggested Endorsements" API endpoint doesn't seem to be around anymore.

I'm going to rebuild using Selenium. It's heavier, but it'll be easier for me to script actions across page clicks and I can run it headless as a cron job.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#135

Post by postsantum »

anilgulecha wrote: post #132
jiaweihli wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's an ingenious hack that makes a lot of sense in hindsight. What was your thought process and how did it lead to that? Was it solving a similar problem in another domain?

> Wow, that's an ingenious hack that makes a lot of sense in hindsight. What was your thought process and how did it lead to that? Was it solving a similar problem in another domain? I've read your comment thrice and have not been able to understand it! It's starts out mildly reasonable, then drifts out into bot-territory

I guess this is a HN version of generic instagram comments used by bots (like "nice pic! where it was made?")

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#136

Post by lazyasciiart »

colinbartlett wrote: post #64
ben1040 wrote: post #8

I've been considering just deleting my LI account. It essentially has just been a sink for terrible recruiter mail; in 12 years of having an account I don't think I've once received any sort of actionable message through it. I've also turned off the endorsements because I was just getting driveby endorsements for things like J2EE. Is there a job-search downside to deleting your account, provided you have a decent Goo…

I am personally astonished that LinkedIn is still a thing. For me, it was the most obviously useless of all the social networks and it was the first one I deleted, upwards of 7 years ago now. The other social networks eventually followed but LinkedIn just gave me zero value from day one. It was nothing but recruiter spam. Do people actually get work and jobs out of LinkedIn? Or is is just a way to keep up with what o…

> Do people actually get work and jobs out of LinkedIn? Or is is just a way to keep up with what old coworkers are doing?

Yes because yes. When I last looked for a job, I poked around LinkedIn to see who was working at companies that I found interesting, got a former co-worker to refer me for his new place, and got a job there.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#137

Post by Ntrails »

Here's my anecdata on LinkedIn Endorsements. I've got endorsements for Malbolge a language I put on as a joke that I only know about vaguely from a wikipedia article.

Turns out when they released them and every time people logged in they got prompted to "endorse", they just pressed all of the buttons (and expected reciprocation) whether or not they knew the first thing about the skill they were endorsing that I had...

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#138

Post by ianai »

rising-sky wrote: post #23
ianai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but I bet you still endorsed Cindy/Bob from accounting for Excel. It's a noisy metric but it survives through social and professional motivations.

You actually have to accept the endorsement before it shows up on your profile, if you accept noise, I don't think you can complain that your profile is noisy.

I meant noisy in terms of accuracy in all universes.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#139

Post by dozzie »

yellowbeard wrote: post #10

Not sure linkedin really cares if the endorsements are accurate or not. I heard endorsements were / are massively successful at re engaging users, which is the real aim of the product.

> Not sure linkedin really cares if the endorsements are accurate or not.

Of course LinkedIn doesn't care. The very idea of endorsements is broken beyond repair, because it allows people to say that some guy knows something they've never had an opportunity to see him working with.

Re: Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

#140

Post by jiaweihli »

anilgulecha wrote: post #132
jiaweihli wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's an ingenious hack that makes a lot of sense in hindsight. What was your thought process and how did it lead to that? Was it solving a similar problem in another domain?

> Wow, that's an ingenious hack that makes a lot of sense in hindsight. What was your thought process and how did it lead to that? Was it solving a similar problem in another domain? I've read your comment thrice and have not been able to understand it! It's starts out mildly reasonable, then drifts out into bot-territory

I'm mildly offended that you trivialized my comment. I'm even more confused because I believe my questions are completely valid, and you're not taking them at face value.

To rephrase:

Have you ever encountered a flash of insight that seemed to approach a challenge from a completely different angle? It could be something like someone solving a deeply technical problem in a non-technical way, or the first time you were introduced to affordance [1].

This is similar. Instead of the obvious solution of injecting buzzwords into his LinkedIn profile, deftnerd did a social hack that nudged his own connections towards viewing his profile, equivalently boosting his visibility.

What I meant by my questions is that I'm interested in learning both the flash of insight and the thought process that led to that. Sometimes the reason is as bland as accumulated knowledge (but even then, what knowledge?). But if not, maybe I can learn a completely new perspective from which to approach a whole class of problems.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-affordances/answe...

Post reply on HN