Slashdot Mirror
Does LinkedIn Suck? (techcrunch.com)
"LinkedIn Sucks" writes TechCrunch's John Biggs:
I hate LinkedIn. I open it out of habit and accept everyone who adds me because I don't know why I wouldn't. There is no clear benefit to the social network. I've never met a recruiter on there. I've never gotten a job. The only messages I get are spam from offshore dev teams and crypto announcements. It's like Facebook without the benefit of maybe seeing a picture of someone's award-winning chili or dog. I understand that I'm using LinkedIn wrong. I understand I should cultivate a salon-like list of contacts that I can use to source stories and meet interesting people. But I have my own story-sourcing tools and my own contacts. It's not even good as a broadcast medium....
LinkedIn is a spam garden full of misspelled, grunty requests from international software houses that are looking, primarily, to sell you services. Because it's LinkedIn it's super easy to slip past any and all defenses against this spam.... I know people have used LinkedIn to find jobs. I never have. I know people use LinkedIn to sell products. It's never worked for me.
The article ends with advice for people trying to contact him on LinkedIn for promotional purposes. "LinkedIn isn't a game. It isn't an alternative to MailChimp. It's a conversational tool. Use it that way." But what do Slashdot's readers think? Is LinkedIn a valuable resource for finding recruiters and job offers, interesting perspectives, and updates on your friends' careers?
Or does LinkedIn suck?
LinkedIn is a spam garden full of misspelled, grunty requests from international software houses that are looking, primarily, to sell you services. Because it's LinkedIn it's super easy to slip past any and all defenses against this spam.... I know people have used LinkedIn to find jobs. I never have. I know people use LinkedIn to sell products. It's never worked for me.
The article ends with advice for people trying to contact him on LinkedIn for promotional purposes. "LinkedIn isn't a game. It isn't an alternative to MailChimp. It's a conversational tool. Use it that way." But what do Slashdot's readers think? Is LinkedIn a valuable resource for finding recruiters and job offers, interesting perspectives, and updates on your friends' careers?
Or does LinkedIn suck?
...will be from people who make money from the platform.
"It's for work!"
OK sure. But why do I need a picture of myself? How I look has no bearing on my ability to do my job, since I'm not a model. But no, every other week, LinkedIn would prompt me to upload a picture, despite repeatedly saying "No". So, I closed me account. I don't want facebook. I sure as hell don't want a cheap facebook clone.
Tons of recruiters are constantly trying to contact me via LinkedIn. Its basically the primary tool they use. (Of course I also only actually accept invites from people I at least vaguely know.)
Of course this only started the moment I moved to Silicon Valley. Before that, they basically ignored me. I'm guessing the author doesn't live in Silicon Valley.
P.S. A co-worker once told me that before he moved out here, his friends would fake an SV address on their profiles just to get noticed. They'd then deal with the reality afterwards, but it worked for them.
The value of LinkedIn is vastly diminished by its weird subscription model. You have two choices:
1) Receive about 80% of the Facebook experience for $0; or
2) Receive a few modest but nice premium features, such as messaging and more detailed "who viewed your profile" info, for $$$$$$$$$$. The cheapest plan starts at $30/month.
That's it. There is no in-between.
The costs are such that the only reason I would ever "subscribe" would be when I had a specific, acute need - and once that need was satisfied, probably after one month, I'd immediately cancel. On the other hand, at a price point of around $10/month (which, incidentally, is what Apple Music charges...), I'd just sign up to have the features available at my whim.
LinkedIn is one of many companies that just doesn't seem to understand how people view its features. It could really boost its user base *and value* by making its subscription plans not suck.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Start by not accepting EVERY FUCKING INVITATION you receive. My entire network is 250 people. I consider them all a part of my professional resume.
DING! DING! DING!
People think it's about your number of connections, but it's about the quality. I'm been using it since 2007 and have a whooping 136 connections. I only accept people that A) I actually know and B) am willing to suggest to others for a job.
I don't use any of the silly social features of it and most of the people I connect to don't either. In fact I only log into the site when I need to update my resume.
Between those two things I don't get anything I would consider spam. I do get invites from random people, but I simply ignore them. There are of course the weekly "we think you'd be perfect for this job that we won't tell you about because we did a keyword search and didn't bother to actually read your profile" BS, but again that is easy to ignore. I also get at least one real (that actually fits my profile) ping from a recruiter a week.
As far as an impact on my career, my current employer (3 years and counting) found me via LinkedIN and my job before that (5 years) came from me being able to use it to see where previous co-workers had ended up and using them as contacts to move there too.
So yeah, as long as you treat it professionally (e.g. skip all the FB-esque garbage) and use it to manage your career, it's a very useful tool. If you treat it as some type of scoring game, then it's going to be garbage.
I don't know why millions of users use it. I believe I already made that clear.
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99% of the recruiters on LinkedIn do not even bother to read my profile where the very first line says I am not looking and please do not contact me about jobs. They probably just do a keyword search and send the same impressed-with-your-career-history-devoid-of-specifics lie. Some of the time, my skill set is not even a match. And I get a few such messages every week. Recruiters are some of the most irritating people.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Curate the information you present, much like a resume. Make sure it lists skills and technologies you'd like to use again, because those are what recruiters are searching on. Put in employment-relevant information about yourself like location and employment history.
The biggest difference between LinkedIn and a resume, from a curation perspective, is the amount of information that LinkedIn can reasonably organize. Where a resume is mostly limited in length, LinkedIn is only limited by your desire for privacy. Online, you can (and probably should) list every skill you hold expertise in, rather than keeping a carefully-pruned list of eye-catching skills. A resume is written to pass a human HR drone's quick review, but LinkedIn searches don't care how irrelevant skills they have to parse to include you as a match.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I don't know about spam on your behalf, but it has a creative way of verifying that people still work where they claim to work.
Yes linkedin send spam on behave of its users. My theory is that if someone hasn't logged in for some time (2 to 6 months), linkedin will start spamming contacts in the hope they will send an invite/connect request, forcing the inactive users to interact with the site. Reason I am really sure about this is that I started getting requests from a dead person about 2 months after his death, to make it even more obvious the spam request is send to 2 emailadresses, firstname@domain.tld and firstletter.lastlast@domain.tld.
How did Microsoft buying LinkedIn affect your experience?
4 Reasons Microsoft Wasted $26.2 Billion To Buy LinkedIn.
3 Quotes:
1) "... there is no reason to believe that Microsoft has the strategic skills needed to revive LinkedIn's growth."
2) "Nadella touted the idea that business people working on projects will love the way the combined company will be able to spam them with more targeted newsfeeds! Is this the kind of magic that $26.2 billion buys? It sounds like a good reason for me to dump my LinkedIn account."
3) "This deal makes no sense to me and in the wake of its efforts to force people like me to upgrade to Windows 10 malware style, I am beginning to question Microsoft's governance."
I don't use LinkedIn, I just have an account. That's because you're discriminated against if you don't. But I've never used it and I've never heard of anyone else who does. It's cyberbling.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)