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Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

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Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#181

Post by cpjk »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #28

From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free so I'm mostly feeling positive about it, but I agree that like any social network it has downsides and can lead to psychological stress. Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous", i.e. I try to never interact with social media or news platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates, as…

I completely agree.

Extract the utility (eg. Facebook’s events and groups) without getting sucked into the cycle of shallow dopamine hits that is the news feed.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#182

Post by nwsm »

I've been on LinkedIn for a while, and I don't mind it for what it is. I have not taken a job that started with LinkedIn, but it has given me leads, multiple interviews, and an offer at one of the big tech companies. On most of my job applications I've attached my LinkedIn, but I doubt it does anything as all that info is on my resume.

Secondly I appreciate seeing my childhood, college, and ex-coworker friends' careers progress. I like knowing where they're at and what they're working on, and a LI update from someone I know has sparked lots of conversations.

As far as content, we all know it's worse than any other platform. I roll my eyes at over half of the things on my feed. But sometimes I find good article shares that aren't just marketing, and occasionally there's an actually interesting post. However I think they do a good job of showing you your connections' updates from a few weeks ago even, which is great for not following your feed constantly like Twitter.

I agree it is not at all necessary for finding a job, and I don't use it as a normal social media where I expect interesting content. So I definitely understand anyone who decides not to use it. But I've found value in it myself, and I certainly don't think it's doing me harm. The author never explains what the "harm" is.

I think this sentence in the article sums it up:

"It doesn't really matter, but that's not a world I want to participate in."

OP wrote an article about deleting an app that no one thinks is essential.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#183

Post by [deleted] »

madengr wrote: post #160
coldpie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the hiring side, we tried using LinkedIn during a recent hiring round of about 5 highly skilled C developers. We flipped through hundreds of LinkedIn candidates and exactly zero made it past the resume filter. Completely useless. The only successful hiring method we found was actually the monthly Who's Hiring threads here on Hacker News.

Are you saying the filter was useless, or you couldn’t find a single candidate out of hundreds?

[deleted]

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#185

Post by millette »

Same here.

5-6 years ago, I started a website/service (also closed, now) at the intersection of LinkedIn and GitHub. Then Microsoft bought the former. A few years passed, and they also bought the latter. It kind of justified my idea (not that those two services are being merged), but nonetheless I had to close my little initiative.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#186

Post by snarfy »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #159
hliyan wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-example to the original author: I refused to have a LinkedIn account for the first 12 years of my career (LinkedIn launched the same year I started my career, I believe). But after I opened one, it really helped my career. I found my last two jobs through it. My timeline looks OK because I unfollow a lot of people. I've done the same with Facebook. I rarely come away from either site with my blood pressure an…

> I unfollow a lot of people This is the trick to turning platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn into a tool, not a vice. You need to curate who you follow. Facebook in particular has many tools to do this, from preventing their content posting to your news feed to unfriending them altogether. Too many people just follow everyone they know, then complain when they start seeing content that gives them negative outcomes.…

My problem with Facebook is they actively try to make your feed controversial. You can unfriend 95% of the haters and some how that remaining 5% will fill up 50% of your feed, and it's not because they are posting more frequently.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#187

Post by myth2018 »

In my country, probably the most well-known IT-related jobs website (www.apinfo.com) is something around 20 years old and uses basically the same technologies and concepts that were mainstream at the time. Coldfusion, plain HTML, ad spaces sold directly to advertisers.

No social networking. No fancy stuff (they don't even use icons, it's plain text everywhere). Just a simple, straightforward website.

It's not perfect though. Doesn't perform that well and the searching capabilities are poor even after some improvements they've attempted. But during my whole career (17 years) I've gotten 100% of my jobs there, despite having tried some other websites.

I wish that UX folks payed more attention to cases like that.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#188

Post by runawaybottle »

I’m noticing a lot of pretentious at best, contrived at worst, mythology posts on LinkedIn. Everyone’s career is being transformed through the narrative machine, and it appears a lot of people suddenly persevered ‘against all odds’.

Every super hero needs an origin story. Social media encourages exhibitionism, and gone are the days of quiet accomplishment.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#189

Post by Hoasi »

42_ wrote: post #97
ThePhysicist wrote: post #28

From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free so I'm mostly feeling positive about it, but I agree that like any social network it has downsides and can lead to psychological stress. Personally I live by the mantra that "scrolling is dangerous", i.e. I try to never interact with social media or news platforms that incite me to scroll down a feed of algorithmically curated news or updates, as…

Now that I think about it, most of my complaints about LinkedIn is about the "news feed". Its full of mostly useless content by wannabe thought leaders drowning out a few posts which may have been insightful/relevant. Job search and add/message connections are the only features I have found useful.

> Now that I think about it, most of my complaints about LinkedIn is about the "news feed".

I am always wondering who reads that? It turns out that a lot of people do read (or at least see) the feed.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#190

Post by paulgb »

prepend wrote: post #129

This is curious to me as I’m not sure the benefit from deleting. If author stated some negative value, then that would make sense, but he doesn’t call out any real downsides that can’t be trivially mitigated. I’ve found LinkedIn useful for learning about where previous colleagues are now working. I’ve also found it useful as a quick way to learn about people’s past experiences that might be relevant to the issue at h…

> This is curious to me as I’m not sure the benefit from deleting.

The way I looked at it when I deleted my account is that having LinkedIn means having another inbox that attracts a disproportionate amount of crap. It got to the point where I turned off notifications and treated my inbox like a spam folder. By deleting my profile, people who actually do have something to tell me aren't under the false impression that they can contact me on LinkedIn, and people that just want to spam me generally don't make the effort to track down my email (which I make pretty easy to do).

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