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Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

pcmaffey.com

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Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#191

Post by coldpie »

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?

Sorry. What I meant by "resume filter" was us manually scanning through the candidates. We put some criteria for C programmers into LinkedIn and got a bunch of web and .NET devs who had also mentioned C someplace. Perhaps skilled C devs just aren't looking for jobs on LinkedIn (totally possible! I wouldn't if I were looking), but I was kind of surprised that we got literally zero viable candidates. I expected at least a couple to look interesting enough to contact.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#192

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

chrismatheson wrote: post #119
NalNezumi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something you got to give to LinkedIn is at least that this is the default behavior (as far as I know, I haven't changed any notification setting since I got it) It's great for someone that just want to have a "easy CV" so that recruiters at least know where/what you've worked with without back&forth mailing. Recently I tried to get Twitter for the first time and my gosh what a mess that platform is. I only wanted it…

This has not been my experience. Any recruiter I talk to asks for a CV. If I tell them my linked in is up to date they just ask me to convert it into a CV

I had the exact opposite experience lately. Recuiters find me and want Linkedin. The companies want a piece of paper.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#193

Post by randycupertino »

take_a_breath wrote: post #140

LinkedIn jumped the shark when they started heavily promoting their skill endorsement section. I remember receiving a notification that my mom endorsed my ability to perform discounted cash flow analysis. She didn’t know what a discounted cash flow was, but endorsed me all the same. This is the moment it became spam. I do still use it for job searches.

> my mom endorsed my ability to perform discounted cash flow analysis

I mean, that's really quite charming. She loves you!

The first time Linkedin jumped the shark for me when they suggested I add the random dude I sold a couch too on craigslist to My Professional Network. I'd used a throwaway email and only texted the dude 1x. I only randomly remembered who he was after Linkedin suggested him to me because his first and last name rhymed and when he picked up the couch I thought his name was kind of interesting. It was so weird and sketched me out quite a bit as we were in completely different industries and I had no idea how linkedin associated us.

The second time I decided I was over used linkedin was when I was a pitched a data analysis of industry trends in biopharma by a company that scraped and analyzed a bunch of my current and former coworkers linkedin profiles as well as what conferences they had recently attended. It was so creepy and invasive and accurate that I just decided I'd rather not supply my info to be a data point in some hedge fund analyst's report.

I have a shell profile but don't update because I see no benefit and have always gotten jobs without needing it.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#194

Post by shafyy »

prepend wrote: post #95
shafyy wrote: post #77

I've deleted my LinkedIn several years ago, as it was annoying and didn't bring any value to me. I do have a fake account to overcome their auth wall to see other people's profiles (useful once in a full moon). As others have said, LinkedIn should have stopped as a digital rolodex.

How was it annoying? I turned off LinkedIn’s notifications probably 10 years ago and they’ve been surprisingly not bad about coming up with new categories of messages that I need to block. I think I only use it as a digital Rolodex and it’s been helpful as that. I can’t think of another site as useful for that purpose.

Yeah had all notifications turned off also for a while before. Still, I found myself getting back on it and reading all the mindless shit people posted on my timeline :-)

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#195

Post by alain_gilbert »

bulka wrote: post #37
Avalaxy wrote: post #25

The author says it himself in the introductory paragraph: > I never used LinkedIn... hadn't even updated my profile in the 9 months since I left my last software engineering job. So you use LinkedIn only passively, never do anything on the platform and then write a rant on how it provides you no value? Maybe actually _try_ to use the strengths of LinkedIn before you dismiss it?

I think this is what author is saysing exactly. If you use it passively then there is no value (add?) and then the question is why to have a profile at all? Did not look like a rant to me.

Just like my resume has absolutely no value... until I need it.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#196

Post by wodenokoto »

BrentOzar wrote: post #6

If you ever want to become an independent consultant, LinkedIn has a value that won't be immediately apparent to you. While YOU might hate it, there are some business folks who search LinkedIn first. They want to see consultants/contractors who've been used by other people in their network, been recommended, etc. I know it sounds odd to us - I would neeeever search LinkedIn first - but I've heard from prospects who h…

Worked out great for me, and I am quite astonished that you are telling consultants that linkedins value is not "immediately apparent"

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#197

Post by Avalaxy »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #88
Avalaxy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I don't really get what the news value of this post is. Pretty much nothing that you don't actively use provides value. It comes across more as "LinkedIn has no value" to me.

Maybe you can provide your experience on why linkedin is of value to you and then there can be a discusion. I personally agree with the author and i am happy to read on this. From the stand point of a company, if they were actually paying attention to honest feedback they could learn a bunch.

> Maybe you can provide your experience on why linkedin is of value to you and then there can be a discusion

Sure, let me think of a couple of reasons:

1) The network effect of the timeline is HUGE. If people share/like your post, you can have a reach of ten of thousands of people. I scored new customers this way.

2) I often post something about something I've done (new certification, new project I launched, whatever). This almost always leads to replies from connections from unexpected people in my network. The thing I posted might have struck a chord with them, they may see ways for us to collaborate, it might be a product that they need, they may have valuable feedback on it, etc.

3) I interacted with many people over the course of my career. I may have forgotten about those people, but having them all together in an easily searchable "address book" proves pretty valuable to me when I am looking for people with a particular skillset.

4) In the past I did find jobs through linkedin. Either by applying to the job posts or by simply asking around with recruiters.

5) I use LinkedIn a lot to find out who works where, what role they have and who to address when I need something from another company.

There are also counter points to be made:

- I have received a ridiculous amount of recruiter spam over the years. Taking all skills I don't use anymore (like PHP) off of my LinkedIn has certainly helped.

- Advertising on LinkedIn is garbage. We were looking for Dutch speaking candidates in Amsterdam. We got 0 Dutch applicants. All we got is 100+ Indian coders who barely speak proper English.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#198

Post by AlexandrB »

LinkedIn was and is mega-creepy. They still prompt me to "discover my network" by giving them my Gmail username and password. Based on the comments here, it seems that everyone has at this point accepted LinkedIn's creepy business practices and now we're just arguing about its relative utility. Great.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#199

Post by shultays »

karussell wrote: post #164

Maybe a bit unrelated but who else has always serious page rendering issues when visiting LinkedIn? I do not visit it often but there are so many problems lately that I doubt that I'm the only one, especially since all other sites are fine. These problems appear when I open LinkedIn pages in a tab or for the initial rending but also just when I click on new messages or 'Start'. Is it because of Firefox and/or uBlock…

Last week I was getting weird crashes with games, probably something was wrong with my gpu. Weirdly my firefox was also crashing consistently when I open linkedin. Other websites seemed fine, only linkedin.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#200

Post by k__ »

The good: I got good jobs from CEOs/VPs

The bad: I didn't really understand what to post there

The ugly: I got a bunch of messages by recruiters who didn't read my profile and offered me crap.

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