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Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

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Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#271

Post by the_af »

ravenstine wrote: post #204

I've never found a job through LinkedIn. I do like Easy Apply a lot, but it never resulted in anything. Every job I've ever had was found either through someone I know or by applying directly on a company website. I've had a few interviews resulting from LinkedIn, but it's not like LinkedIn gave me much of an advantage beyond Easy Apply. I didn't exactly get more interviews. In fact, I may have been getting fewer int…

> My feed is mostly composed of inspirational quotes, people celebrating their anniversary at their current job, corporate brown-nosing, articles on productivity, articles about people quitting their job, etc. All generic, mostly low-effort junk. Let's not even get started on the recruiter spam!

My experience as well. Plus the UI itself is a nightmare to navigate. Even something that should be a no-brainer like the embedded messaging is confusing to use. And they keep adding "features" to it!

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#272

Post by jlokier »

lildata wrote: post #247

Just from a performance point of view, opening LinkedIn webpage is a traumatic experience. I've rarely seen something so slow & heavy. It's quite sad because LinkedIn gave birth to a lot of fantastic techs, such as Apache Kafka...

The loading is heavy, though since lockdown I'm finding HN takes almost as long to load for me, which suggests they have been reasonably smart about parallel loading.

LinkedIn is also buggy in many areas too. Search is wild - search for the same thing twice and get completely different numbers of results. This is good to know, when a job search notification shows 5 results, it's not real. Just click the search button and get 100 the second time for the same search!

But the fact it's an SPA works really well I think. Clicking around within LinkedIn seems much faster than the initial load, and things like open message windows keep their state. I like that. You can still right-click just about everything that looks like it could be a link to open a new tab or save the link. So I think they've done a great job of SPA.

It's a shame it's so buggy that I have to reload it from time to time anyway. LinkedIn is probably the only company where I use a product with so many obvious low-hanging-fruit bugs I'd actually consider working there just for the satisfaction of fixing them.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#273

Post by virgilp »

ghaff wrote: post #223
covidien wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free i'm curious what others see as value from the platform. in my narrow view: - i have a list of connections id most likely be able to contact off platform - a feed full of virtue signaling and mostly useless content - messages from random recruiters. usually the full extent of the interaction is: phonecall, redo resume and send over, ghost (40+ i…

I think people's job patterns varying is part of it. For me, I've mostly stayed at my relatively few jobs for a long time (10 years or more) and every job after the one immediately after grad school have been through people I knew. Others are hopping around a lot more and are more often through recruiters looking for some particular keyword skill. LinkedIn is pretty useless for the former--except as a Rolodex--but an…

I also tend to stay a lot at a given job (e.g. slightly more than 10y at the last one) but still found the current job through LinkedIn. I do 2 things:

1. connect to all recruiters, politely decline with a standard message if obviously not interested

2. when I get a potentially-interesting offer, I reply with "that's all fine and well, but I make now; do you want to continue the discussion?". (note: I'm not lying).

I used to ignore recruiters at point 1, until I realized it costs me almost nothing to politely decline and earns goodwill; today's junior recruiter that works for a crappy company might be in 10 years the HR director at a company you want to work for. Why not be in touch?

Over the years, this adds up, a handful of opportunities actually said "yes" at point 2, and for one of them I actually went to interviews & got the job (and the very-good-offer).

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#274

Post by hliyan »

gen220 wrote: post #235
snarfy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is ultimately why I stopped using Facebook. One day, I sat down for two hours to systematically unfriend, unfollow, and click “I don’t want to see stuff like this” on all of the memes, politics, and other crap. I’d unfollow friends who exclusively shared this stuff, and tried to train the algorithm to avoid cat videos and memes. Something amazing happened in the middle. I started seeing engagement photos and wed…

Very strange. Facebook seems to more or less honor my "never show stuff from this person/page again" clicks. Also, if you unfollow someone permanently (not for 30 days), I really doubt their posts will appear in your timeline again. Unless they arrive through pages or communities you're members of.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#276

Post by mancerayder »

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.

> wannabe thought leaders

A high percentage of which seem to be recruiters cutting and pasting words of wisdom, inspirational quotes that dozens of people "Like."

I don't know how people can take this stuff seriously.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#277

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

kozhevnikov wrote: post #47
lordnacho wrote: post #15

I find that a lot of serendipitous connections are made on LinkedIn. People will see my profile and strike up a conversation. Seems to work OK for what it is. What it isn't great for is content. There's never anything remotely useful there, the whole feed is a weird corporate version of the self help section in a bookshop. A lot of stuff is written purely to get attention. But I also don't see the tradeoff in as poor…

Aggressively unfollowing people that amplify meaningless posts is the key, just like with any other social network. You can block power users so no comments or likes of their posts from your network will show up in your feed. Unfortunately you cannot block companies, so any like or comment on a fake-company-posting-memes's post will result in unfollowing the person responsible directly, unless you know them personall…

> Aggressively unfollowing people that amplify meaningless posts is the key,

Until you realize "wait, I don't actually use linkedin for much of anything. Maybe I get a recruiter that has an interesting offer (rare)"

In my experience, most people use linkedin at one time: when they are looking for a job, either to update or create their profile. Beyond that, the only people I see with any activity there are desperate recruiters, and "CEO of my own BS company" inspirational garbage content posters.

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#278

Post by covidien »

ghaff wrote: post #223
covidien wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a professional standpoint LinkedIn gave me a lot of value for free i'm curious what others see as value from the platform. in my narrow view: - i have a list of connections id most likely be able to contact off platform - a feed full of virtue signaling and mostly useless content - messages from random recruiters. usually the full extent of the interaction is: phonecall, redo resume and send over, ghost (40+ i…

I think people's job patterns varying is part of it. For me, I've mostly stayed at my relatively few jobs for a long time (10 years or more) and every job after the one immediately after grad school have been through people I knew. Others are hopping around a lot more and are more often through recruiters looking for some particular keyword skill. LinkedIn is pretty useless for the former--except as a Rolodex--but an…

agree - and in the case of the latter it feels like its being permeated by influencer culture, by that i mean (im going to paint with a broad brush here) recruiters and the recruiting industry seems to have exploded and with seemingly non-technical agents. so they naturally gravitate towards shiny things - FAANG positions, hot tech (ex: React), well known schools. outside of power users, its becoming a requirement to play the game if you want to have any success. /oldmanyellsatcloud

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#279

Post by jlokier »

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…

Me too. It has been noticably worse the last two months, and I often see things that look like CSS loading errors.

I'm using Firefox (beta) and uBlock Origin too, so that could be a common factor. But it varies from load to load. Sometimes it's completely fine. So I don't think it's likely to be a simple rendering bug.

I've been using Firefox and uBlock Origin for years, and LinkedIn more over the last year. I only noticed rendering problems in the last couple of months.

(Plenty of other bugs. Search is unreliable, and the mobile app is not without bugs either (some buttons don't do what they're supposed to), but rendering seems ok on mobile.)

Re: Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

#280

Post by [deleted] »

banifo wrote: post #215
matsemann wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is valueless content. I disagree. It poses several questions about the value of LinkedIn. And it spurred a discussion. If anything your comment really adds nothing here.. (Maybe some discussion, but a useful one?)

I read that because hn showed it on spot 1. I think it was a waste of time. I also started to think in this direction more the last few years: If we as a socity would be better of creating less but better, we would not have facebook or linkedin feets full of waste. We would have perhaps 10 hn articles per day, 10 world news, 1-2 local news and thats it. I would have the rest of my time 'free' of the burden of trying…

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