Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

I am not sure how I feel about LinkedIn but I did want to expand on this:

> But one thing I am sure about: no one will notice.

LinkedIn remains one of the largest and best data sets for the recruiting industry. I don't want to speak too broadly since my experience is limited to my current employer and personal experience, but if you remove your LinkedIn you will effectively be invisible to the recruiting agency I work at.

Many companies rely on outbound recruiting tactics since inbound is often too noisy; not having a LinkedIn would dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a recruiter finding you without prior contact (referral, application, former colleague, etc). And this is not just limited to recruiters reaching out via LinkedIn. There are companies that scrape LinkedIn and sell that data to recruiting agencies and VC's (and who knows who else).

As an anecdote, having recently complete a job search myself, I have to say that traditional inbound applications (e.g. apply via company website without any contacts) was shockingly ineffective. The difference in traction between self applications using my professional network, job boards, or recruiting markets (e.g. Triplebyte) was night and day.

Since the author seems privacy oriented, removing his LinkedIn is probably the right thing to do, but I don't think it's accurate to imply that there is no opportunity cost to doing so.

What led me to killing my LinkedIn account back then was the near constant email notification spamming of nothing. It just kept asking me whether I worked with some stranger over and over again. Notifications of no importance and no relevance to me is the same reason why I stopped using Facebook. Same company, but Instagram was way better for that reason alone.

> Speaking personally, the activity you're describing sounds like a major time sink, and doesn't align with the LinkedIn experience of anyone I know.

Speaking personally, I spent much less time creating and updating my LI than creating and updating my resume in order to target specific jobs.

> It shouldn't fall on the shoulders of a social network's users to learn how to optimize their representation on that one website.

Agreed, but LI gives me the option to do so, and that is exactly what I do.

> To your credit, maybe you're getting contacted by well-off companies because they admire the effort and techniques you're using to boost your profile. If so, having everyone pour the same kind of effort into it would arguably help no one stand out, and only "add value" to the platform itself.

It wasn't much effort on my part.

That's not the point. Resumes work today, but LI could work much better tomorrow.

LinkedIn has its advantages and disadvantages. I would characterise it as a net positive for me, but it depends who you are, how you use it and what for.

Why net positive? For my second start-up, I found our first customer through LinkedIn. After lots of attempts to source a paying customer that led to no conversions, one day a message arrived saying "You're the only ones in Europe doing this. We want to work with you.". No networking, no clever lead generation, just being there being found in a search did the job.

Never used it for jobs because I got these all conference networking and by personal email exchances or being headhunted. It also gave me lots of speaking engagements.

Recently, LinkedIn has had some issues with too much Facebook-like noise (people posting non-professional content), so I think if there was a more focused, mininmalist alternative, lots of people may switch. There is also the question of potential conflict of interest: LI sells to HR/Hiring functions and to people that already work for companies that use it for these functions. So if I was you, I wouldn't apply via LI to any kind of job in case you'd like to keep that fact from your current employer's HR.