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?
Was that before or after you found out LinkedIn sends spam on your behalf?
I am a recuiter, linkedin provides about 25% of the people i place. I approach ~200 people per week via the platform.
If you are not getting approaches you should look at what your profile portrays you as. Also you can mark yourself as actively looking which highlights you to recruiters.
...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.
One was the worst job I ever had. One was the best. On average, it is okay.
I pretty much just use the core LinkedIn features. I don't post blogs there, don't really post anything at all on their stream, neither do I take their trainings, or participate at all in any of the many groups I joined years ago.
However:
1) In my career I have had many offers, and actually taken 3 jobs (including my current one and the one right before that) because recruiters found me on LinkedIn. Whether it was my profile, connections through my network, I don't know, but they found me.
I've found many headhunters rely very heavily on LinkedIn.
2) It's a good way to stay in touch with people, if you have the discipline to do so. Professional contacts will stay in touch via LinkedIn, whereas they would be reluctant to connect on Facebook, or to share personal phone #s or email addresses. They'll share business phone numbers and email addresses, but if they leave that job, you can't get in touch with them anymore. LinkedIn connections provide a way to do that.
About once a year I set aside one day on a weekend, and just drop notes to all my contacts who I'd like to stay in touch with. I write up a core letter which gets customized a bit, but it summarizes what I've been up to, and inquires after the recipient. It's a good way to keep the network alive by sending out a ping and just staying in touch with folks.
I've also in recent years developed a general rule that for the most part, I don't accept invites unless I know the person somewhat substantially ie we worked together, or spent a few days together in some training etc and had meaningful interactions there. I rarely accept "cold call" invites, and am quite selfish about accepting invites from bare acquaintances, that guy I spent 5 minutes talking to at that conference, unless I think there may be something in it for me (he's at a high/senior position at a company I may want to be at someday).
Finally, when applying to jobs, I do like being able to just click on a job on LinkedIn and apply with my profile. Upload resume and done. When they take me to the company's website and I have to register and create a profile or remember the login info from the last time I did that, it's painful. I do like that near one-click experience for the few companies which allow doing so on their LinkedIn postings.
So long story short, I think LinkedIn has some value to me, but not to the extent that they'd like to think they do. All the expansion in features they're doing, I don't use them.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
LinkedIn is a terrible idea because:
- Recruiters throw useless jobs your way or completely throw your application out if you aren't on it.
- other people use it to stalk you
- Everyone on there just "vouches" for each other like some sort of bizarre prisoners dilemma.
- They've been hacked god knows how many times.
- owned by Microsoft who will data mine the shit out of you and then follow you across the rest of their platforms.
almost as much as /.
The problem with all of these sites is that they're for-profit corporations that don't have honest business models. Why allow Facebook to control your social life? Why allow LinkedIn to control your job search and steal your address book to spam your friends? Why allow Google to control your email? The problem is not using a service. The problem is with using a service that makes its money by exploiting you.
I wouldn't use any of those sites. But I also have my own business. So it's probably easier for me to avoid LinkedIn and ignore their spam than it is for someone who works in the corporate, white-collar world.
I get multiple recruiters a month contacting me with decent job offers that align with my skill set. If I were looking to change companies and do the same thing, it would be a great resource.
I am only passively looking at this point though. And I am only interested in moving up, not laterally.
In the middle to late stages of my career with 20 years of experience. It might be different for people who are just getting started.
Unlike the author of the article, I do not just accept anyone who wants to connect. I only accept connection requests from people I have done business with, or want to do business with. I'd say a good 85%+ of the time, I am the one initiating the connection request. I deny most connection requests because they tend to come from people overseas who I do not know and will likely never meet.
until I got an invite from an old friend. Then I set up an account.
After seeing the clickbait-tedium it takes to enter your information, I deleted it again and went back to ignoring invites.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yep, yuck. And it is owned by Microsoft so that would do it for me even if it didn't suck.
I have no need for LinkedIn. Despite my boss's recommendation that I create an account, I closed my account years ago. Have never had any feedback from anyone at all about LinkedIn. A mail filter deletes any emails I get that even contain the word LinkedIn. So why should I care?
LinkedIn is like just about any other social connection group - it will include unwanted and "cold call" contacts. Ignore them. There's quite a bit of good from a site like LinkedIn, especially for consultants - I get a lot of job offers (many more than I can fill) from it, and get to pick and choose. It's a great way to locate consultants or be located.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The closer I get to retirement, the more link requests I get from "wealth management" or "financial analyst" folks.
I should run an experiment and change my status to retired, just to see if they pounce.
Yes
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.
The paid version can rank you and you can rank yourself with the job to see if the recuiter will even waste his or her time? If you are high you can also send a message directly.
The problem is HR today uses filtering or ATS systems that turn your hard worked resume into a black hole. You compete with 1 to 500 other people and you NEVER hear back! It is ridiculous.
LinkedIN helps you go around this problem by contacting the manager directly.
http://saveie6.com/
Since I do t use Facebook, LinkedIn is the only tool for people to find me. But, it is pretty much worthless for anything useful. I am forced by my marketing person to like and comment on shit, and to reject recruiters.
It did import my contact list years ago... and I never delete anyone. Fun to see what people I met 20-30+ years ago are doing now...
Useless? Yes.
There's no way I can answer this headline with no!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
This is my profile. https://www.linkedin.com/in/si... I get job offers from trusted recruiters. They find my Masters in Poverty Management from University of North Korea highly valuable.
Before Microsoft bought it, It was more of a meeting and news site. Sucked only a little. But also the source of several gigs, so I'm not complaining.
It started going downhill about six months after Microsoft bought it. Now TFA gives an accurate description. I used to have browser tab open there all the time. Now I go there once or twice a year. And respond to (almost) all connection requests with, "Have we met?" Usually the last I hear from them.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
I have a profile, mostly because I just want to have one if old friends/colleagues want to reach out to me to say hi (I don't make myself really available on other social networks). I've set it up mostly specifically for that, and to avoid getting recruiter emails (no picture, no access to my email, no real "advertising myself to get a job" thing).
So why does it suck? Because despite trying to avoid recruiters and other spam, once in a while I'll get a spam to my work email about seminars, job fairs, services, etc. that I never signed up for (I never, ever put my work email out anywhere for getting contacted).
So how did these spammers get my email? The only way I can think of is them having 'guessed' my email address based on my name and employer, which is only available together on..... (drumroll....) LinkedIn! I've never checked the email server logs, but I'm convinced they try several variations of my contact email when generating their spam.
So it's obvious that LinkedIn is just basically another place for the usual spammers to get a fresh list of people to pester about their services/products, which makes it pretty much useless as a social network.
AC comments get piped to
John Biggs is an egotistical writer who is so needy of attention that he has accepted all "friend" requests on the LinkedIn social network and currently has 16,000+ "friends". Yet he writes an article on TechCruch, LinkedIn, and Medium whoring for agreement that LinkedIn sucks so that he might drive up his readership.
I'm posting as A/C because I have a life, don't need the karma, and Slashdot - you are better than this - don't give that attention whore a front page article!
PS. I'm happily receiving leads for jobs via LinkedIn. I only accept connections from people I can pick out of a lineup.
And with that, I'm going back to Ars!
I have used Linkedin. I utterly refuse to use facebook. The crap Google pushes I never bothered with.
Corporatism != Free Market
If you write papers then Research Gate is a much more logical social network to belong to since it gives people access to copies of your papers and track how many people grazed and how many people actually downloaded your paper.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Linked in does suck
LinkedIn is a professional tool that can be used correctly to your benefit. I have a hyper-focused field I'm in, and I've personally make a few hundred thousand off of it, so here are my tips:
Don't accept high school contacts. If you are now in a hyper-focused field like "Freelancer with 10 years experience in medical coding software", then don't accept contacts that aren't in your field (like contacts from your first general programming jobs). If you freelance and have clients listed as jobs in your job history, don't accept just any rando who has worked at the same company unless you know them or would benefit from knowing them.
If you want to be aggressive, find the companies you want to contract with or work for, send a linkedIn invite with a personal message to the person in your field. Some will respond immediately, some will take a month, and some will ignore it. I've had good luck with only getting about 15% ignores.
Occasionally 'like' articles that are interesting and pertain to some new development in your field. Not necessary, but it will show in people's feed who glance at LinkedIn.
Include a good level of detail at each relevant company you've worked for. I like to know who is browsing past my profile, so I pay $30 a year to see who is coming by. I occasionally find a reason to reach out to some of these people if they're relevant. Compared to my revenue, the $30 is a no-brainer.
I've gotten plenty of requests from recruiters on LinkedIn, so it certainly has been useful for me for that. Can't say I've found a job that way, but it is one of many tools. It is also useful to keep track of people I used to work with, to see where they are now and if I need to contact them again in the future. Otherwise, I rarely go on the site, other than to update my profile.
The OP makes the mistake of adding anyone who requests. I personally only add people I know, or recruiters I want to do business with.
This isn't hard. If you accept everyone into "your" network, it's no surprise that all the messages you get are marketing.
It's worth spending a few minutes to think about how the platform works. People connected to people you allow in your network can send you messages for free. People outside that network effectively have to pay to be able to send you messages.
If your network is limited to people you actually know, you'll get many fewer nonsense messages.
For once, perhaps Betteridge was wrong?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This story is most timely for me! I know this will not relate well to many of you, but perhaps there are others like me. I retired from an industrial electrician's job in January 2018. My body was too tired to maintain the pace of a maintenance department setting. I did not want to finish my working days by being fired. So, I announced my retirement, and, on to a Social Security check I went. I truly thought I was done. I was at peace with this. Three weeks ago, completely unsolicited, I was contacted by a curriculum manager of a regional technical college. They had found my LinkedIn page. They want me to teach! There are still things that could go wrong with this, however, I am to report for my first day of work in about 32 hours from now. Whether or not this works out, it's been an exciting three weeks. If I don't cut it, I can just go back to being that quiet retiree. I owe this opportunity, at least in part, to that LinkedIn page I never took down. Yes, I know this does not address other well known issues with LinkedIn. I'm not going to be complaining for a while just yet! Best regards to you all.
I get lots of recruiters, even now that I am no longer looking, who approach me.
Before I got my current job, I had plenty of good leads on positions through recruiters, but as I was gainfully employed (not desperate), I passed on a number of positions I interviewed for, or was considered too high-priced for employment at some companies. My current job came as an HR recruiter contacted me - that was two years ago, and I got the salary I was looking for, at a company I enjoy working for.
A lot of it depends on location and your credentials... but my experience with LinkedIn was pretty good. I suspect if it isn't working well for you, it's because you aren't using it right. Social Media isn't my favorite thing at all... that said, it might be my reluctance to depend on social media, or let it take over most of my life, is probably part of the reason for my experience.
Thinking it was a mistake, I looked a little closer, and on the line after the password request, the said, I quote "Don't worry, we'll only hold onto it for a minute."
I am absolutely serious.
"Please give us your password, but don't worry, we'll only hold onto it for a minute"
Please give use your password, but DON'T WORRY WE'LL ONLY HOLD INTO IT FOR A MINUTE!
And they were serious. They were completely serious.
Here guys take my email password which will also give you access to a unix shell account, but shit I won't worry, after all, you're only going to hold into it for a minute. I mean, it's not like you got sued for accessing people's contacts and spamming everyone on it.
What's scary is that some people probably actually gave it to them.
They started spamming one of my accounts many years ago. After the fuckwits ignored multiple nasty grams, I promptly firewalled their entire netblock, and solved the problem permanently.
They're still hammering away, even though I've probably had them blocked for 10+ years now.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Even the guys who designed LinkedIn says we're all using it wrong. Invite people you actually KNOW. Don't invite everybody in your address book. Don't accept links from people you don't know and work with. Don't recommend people for a skill unless you KNOW that he has that skill. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to refuse skill recommendations for skills that you either know you don't have, or don't want to be known FOR.
It all sucks, because we've been using it in a sucky way. At this point, there probably isn't a way to fix things; the database is already too corrupt to fix.
Rarely accept anyone you dont know or have not had contact with outside of LinkedIn... ever.
Doing so is just a ticket to win a stupid prize. Ding you've won and got on Slashdot for it.
LinkedIn just a front door advertisement to your personal workspace. Why let everyone in the door?
Seriously just stop because you are using it wrong.
This timeline gets stanger and stranger.
Stop accepting every single request, thats the first thing. My connections are all basically colleagues, others I know in the industry, or actual friends. I do get the usual amazon recruitment spam, to which I got part way through the interview process from until they decided to waste my time scheduling a phone interview and never calling.
However my current job where Im very happy at came from a recruiter from linked in. It was a place where former coworkers worked, and I had heard good things and had been interested, so it was easy for their HR department to find me through there. All initial communication was done via linked until the interviews started. So its all in how you use it.
Also sitting in on some interviews at the new job, everyone there uses linked in for reference during interviews, none of us expect a physical resume anymore, everyone just has a laptop open to your linked in so they can reference it and google terms from it as needed for questions
I keep getting spamvites from LinkedIn all the frickin' time. I'm not a LinkedIn-user, I stand to gain a grand total of absolutely fucking nothing out of joining, so I obviously clicked on the "Unsubscribe"-link in the first few mails -- didn't do jack shit! LinkedIn keeps sending those spamvites from the same spammers, ignoring the fact that I "unsubscribed" from those mails, and they provide no way of contacting their support or anything so I could tell them to stop spamming me, unless I register an account...
Remember when there were job postings that were exclusive to LinkedIn? They're gone. Have been for some time now.
Want to have your news feed set to only the recent news? Forget it. It defaults to "Top" (i.e., the "Popular") posts by default. In fact, you can't change that default. You have to view the Top posts before you can change it to Recent. This tells me that LI has decided that it wants to cater to Facebook users more interested in what's popular today. That's not why I joined years ago.
What's up with the news feed only showing you 10-20 posts before prompting you to show more, and then when you click on "Show more" you can see more but you're sent back to the top of your feed so you have to scroll through the original set of posts before you get to the new ones. Similarly, what's the point of indicating that there are a small number, say, four replies to an article, only showing three, and making the user click on show more to see the fourth?
Want to see who visited your profile? Sorry. 99% of the people who visit it are people who don't want to be known to you. So please stop the damned come-ons to "upgrade" to a Premium membership so I can see who those visitors were. Because I did that once and, guess what... I still couldn't see who those visitors were. The histogram telling me that 21 of the 25 visitors were recruiters, and that the other 4 were members with the job title "[fill-in-the-blank]" and that I'm not allowed to know who they were is oh so helpful to people who might be trying to tend to their career by using LI. Oh wait... no it's not.
Please, please drop the damned posts about what's "trending in my geographic area". The vast majority of the time, it's not something that would likely be of interest in my geographic area.
Fix whatever "algorithm" decides that the content of my profile detailing several decades of UNIX experience is going to make me the least bit interested in seeing an ad for an elementary course in shell scripting.
Seriously... who designs this crap? LI was once known as "Facebook with a tie". Now it's just a Facebook wannabe.
Finally...
I doubt that any of these types are reading this article and its responses but I don't "live" in LI. I come in, I look around, and I exit. (I'm betting that I'm far from being the only one who uses LI this way.) If you want to send me private messages about job postings via LI's InMail feature, you'll more than likely miss me. My profile has my email address. Use it if you want to get in touch with me. Sending me an InMail tells me you didn't look at all of my profile. I'm not going to have a browser window/tab devoted exclusively to LI all day and visible on all my virtual desktops on the off chance that someone might send me a message. Yes, LI usually sends a regular email to let you know you have an InMail but this mainly ticks off the person who now has to go back onto LI to reply. Frankly, InMail is one of the dumbest features of LI. (Same goes for the private messaging feature on FB.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
i have 43% interest in linkedin.com. you gotta problem...call or text me...480.251.4729 any ?'s.
I personally have only added people that Iâ(TM)ve met in reality and Iâ(TM)ve yet to receive a single spam message. I have managed to use it to keep in touch with people who have got me substantial amounts of work and I use it to improve my reputation through publishing articles with a lot of success.
Did MS file for chapter 9?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
LinkedIn is great. I've applied to jobs with nothing but a link to my LinkedIn profile, gotten a phone interview, then had the job without even doing an in-person. I'd much rather "maintain" my LinkedIn profile by changing my job status and adding skills/keywords every couple years than bother with hand-crafted resumes for each potential employer. Hell, I get offers via LinkedIn about 5-6 times monthly for things ranging from jobs through collaboration AND it encourages employers to give you references or check off "does this person have experience with x" so you don't have to deal with that aspect either. It's easily the best extant site for asocial nerds.
Yeah, no shit! It''s for staying in touch with colleagues who are not friends, after your employer gets acquired.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Never send recruiters messages when you're high...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Iâ(TM)m sure there are some kind of studies out there that have been done on the utility of LinkedIn. Maybe something that looks at who gets the most value out of it, whether certain roles are more sought-after via the platform, that sort of thing. Instead, we have a fluff piece, an attention-whoring bit of tripe that does not serve the geek intellect of Slashdot readers. I want 1997 back, please.
That said, I get use out of the platform. I have the job title of CISO, and recently have been contacted through the platform by a headhunter in a process that wound up with me being offered a much more significant CISO role (an order of magnitude more reports, for one, and a much broader remit). And it all started just because I indicated my willingness (not even eagerness) to discuss new opportunities via an automated switch on LinkedIn.
Of course, I have a lot of the kinds of trash invites too. I ignore (and indicate that I donâ(TM)t know) anyone who cold-contacts me, except in the case of a recruiter who has specific information about a specific role and clearly explains why Iâ(TM)m being contacted as part of the initial invite. That seems to work well for me, so I guess a lot of the utility of the platform derives from how you use it.
Next?
I'm serious, I also had my doubts when joining it, and yes the spam is annoying as hell.
But I managed to land 2 jobs now thanks to it (and in the 2nd one I did not apply, I was contacted by a recruiter) so I wouldn't call it useless, at least in my personal experience.
Linked-in has done NOTHING to help me get a better job. All linked-in is good for is imposter self-promotion. I've found most of the people I was linked to never responded to messages or anything. I dropped them 2 years ago like a bad habit.
If the Author has never had a request from a recruiter, then SURPRISE; their profile sucks.
Instead of blaming the tool, get someone to read your profile and help you fix it. And as others have said, don't accept every request. If I don't the person, or they have no connection of interest, i say no. Just because they know someone I know, doesn't mean I want to be connected to them. I have turned down a dozen in the last month because they were a connection of an old college friend - they have nothing to offer me other then that.
The other possibility besides a poor profile, is that this user has a good profile in a field that has no job openings - spinning wheel operator or typewriter repair maybe?
The thing I notice over and over again on Slashdot is that the people who are willing to live in a congested city with an hour commute time get jobs and usually the others don't. This is a big problem. I think people go on LinkedIn expecting for it to somehow solve these problems because social networking; but it can't force or even encourage employers to think out of the box when it comes to location.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Not sure of the quality of the submission but I agree with the premise! It's a social network but lacking the social side as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm just not using it right but I have no idea how people would... It seems to be useful only for recruitment agencies who get access to profiles that are not just stuffed with keywords but might even have endorsements from peers as well. So yeah, I'm using it wrong because I'm not constantly marketing myself and networking!
I have recruiters reach out to me fairly often on LinkedIn, and I see relevant job postings there fairly often (especially if I'm willing to relocate or work remotely). If it's not useful then maybe you should go elsewhere?
By comparison, I've found ladders.com to be pretty damned worthless. I applied to a job there once and then they started sending me info on all kinds of irrelevant postings (I recall they once notified me of an opening at a local railroad switch yard conducting trains). After a while I realized that they did a terrible job of parsing my CV; once I corrected that the FP rate has gone down but so has total volume.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
LinkedIn is far from perfect and I it has definitely gotten worse in recent years, but...
I can attribute the past 10 years of my employment, across four different jobs, directly to LinkedIn. If LinkedIn did not exist then I likely would have found any of these jobs through other means.
That being said... if you get no value from LinkedIn, perhaps you should stop using it. I reached that point with Facebook several years ago and I've never missed it.
Why are you accepting all invitations on there? Are your parents, siblings, old buddies from high school, etc all in the same field you work in? If not then why are they in your linkedin network? Your'e supposed to be building a network on there that helps you get your next job. There is a reason to be selective on who you accept on there; your profile becomes less useful (in terms of how it reflects you) as you add more people who don't have anything to do with your current or next profession.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Cultivate only relationships with people you actually know and recruiters. Sort of like I assume reasonable people do on FB.
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."
...Because it's LinkedIn it's super easy to slip past any and all defenses against this spam.....
No email from LinkedIn domain(s) is allowed. The excessive amounts of spam I received is the reason why.
You know what a Chinese Oak Table is, right?
It looks like Oak. It has texture. It has grain. It even feels like Oak to someone who doesn't really know what Oak is. It's fucking heavy too and resonates when you knock on it. And for a few weeks after you sit it in a kitchen it's happy and people love your new oak table until, one day, a few weeks in, you spill your tea on it.
And wiping the tea off, some of the painted on wood-grain comes off on the cloth too.
As time gooes by, the texture plastic surface that pretended to be oak grain starts to bubble and delaminate, revealing the mixture of wood-shavings and PVA glue beneath. And the lead blocks buried inside that gave it the sense of weight.
That's Chinese Oak. And the moment you realise you've bought Chinese Oak, you realise you've bought utter crap.
Linkedin is full of people like that. They look great on the surface. They make themselves look great on the surface. And Linkedin is the condensation of these people. It's where they all congregate to get noticed. That's their sole skill, because that's the only real skill that's required in the modern day environment. That's what actually gets you hired by HR.
Maybe I'm being bitter. But the only time I've ever had any sort of success with job interviews is where I spoke to the people who actually did the work, rather than the HR department.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
I use LinkedIn. My current job I would not have were it not for LI. The recruiter for the company found me through key word searches (I asked him after the fact out of curiosity). I find that it's a good way of keeping in touch with former coworkers. It's sort of the "professional" version of Facebook.
I know this is going to sound terrible but I never accept invitations from Indian recruiters unless I know them personally. I have nothing against people from India it's just that in my experience every recruiter I have had contact with from there has been a low ball bottom feeder. At the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater it's just a decision I made.
Having said all that, I do notice that it has become more spammy recently. it seems to have coincided with Microsoft taking over.
Now that I'm settled in to my current job and not really looking for something new, LinkedIn is more like a tool to keep in touch. More just to see what other people I know are doing.
A quote from a Slashdot comment: It started going downhill about six months after Microsoft bought it.
A comment on that comment: "uSoft is the kiss of death."
I had the opportunity to be the 2nd employee of a company that later had an evaluation over over a billion dollars at some point. It allowed this start-up to find people quickly without spending too much money. It's a tool like any other that allows you to be in the driver seat .
I tend not to accept recruiter invitations, but I do like keeping tabs on former coworkers. 70% of all jobs are found through personal contacts.
Since Microsoft took it over, yes, it sucks bigtime. Although.. the worst thing about it is all the people who just send connection requests to everyone. There is no value in your list of connections if none of them KNOWS you and your abilties. There is no value to having a connection who knows nothing about your professionally, and you provide no value to them if you don't know them and their abilities professionally... but like on social media, a lot of people treat it as a "contest" to see who has the most connections. I have a feeling a lot of people think that MORE connections means more likelihood of getting hired etc.., rather than having good quality connections who can vouch for your ability and knowledge due to experience working with you.
From my perspective, social networks are working quite well. They distract everyone else while I get work done. It's pretty easy to appear productive when you're being compared to all these people getting interrupted by LinkedIn emails, Facebook messages and tweets all the time. It's a lack of impulse control. The worst, though, is they all think they have a right to interrupt me while I'm working to ask me something they could have looked up online, or could've thought through themselves. Now I've taken to saying, "I think you could've worked that our for yourself." They're starting to get the hint.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
"and accept everyone who adds me because I don't know why I wouldn't"
Stopped reading there
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Eventually all of these Social Media platforms adopt each other's features, blend, get overused/abused and then "suck".
It used to be Facebook was the 'white-pages', and LinkedIn was the 'yellow-pages', by analogy to those huge wastes of trees called "phone books"?
Then everyone tried to share their own ideas, socialize, share pictures of their lunch. Twitter, Instagram and all provided the same features: news-feed, personal linkages, sharing pictures/videos, chat, and so on and all the use-cases all blended together.
Now web 3.0 is here, someone is probably building the next "thing" to capture society's need to socialize by playing with new toys, and maybe FB and LI will go back to being the online global phone book.
Using LinkedIn and Facebook may be perceived these says as a practical necessity for many people, of course. There is such a thing as social networking effects. But using them is still overall a bad thing for society -- even ignoring the personal mental health effects: https://www.medicaldaily.com/s...
Essentially, profiling (or ratting on) your colleagues and friends/family and defining all your relationships to them to a central authority on an ongoing basis is in some sense immoral in a democracy when other decentralized alternatives exist (e.g. email, IRC, personal websites,and more). It is immoral because it pushes too much power (as information) into a few centers instead of keeping that power decentralized across society. It does not matter if those centers are industrial or governmental.
Giving up such information voluntarily to big central authorities is the kind of thing that anyone who went to public school in the 1960s or 1970s would have been taught reflected the values of Soviet Russia and its pervasive intelligence apparatus (e.g. listening in on all phone calls) -- not the values of a democratic USA.
As Mark Zuckerberg himself said, it is just dumb:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
Of course, given such a high level of informational immorality over the past decade (trading privacy for convenience), the world indeed may have changed. It is possible there is no going back -- even as various people, myself included, have worked towards more decentralized communication alternatives.
Instead, we may have to consider, say, David Brin's "Transparent Society" as a different option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course, there is likely a healthy balance of meshwork and hierarchy needed, so not all one or the other:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
No easy answers... But a big potential problem...
See also for the past:
https://ibmandtheholocaust.com...
"IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing throughout World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s."
And for the present and near future, China's Social Credit system:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
"Chinaâ(TM)s social credit system, a big-data system for monitoring and shaping business and citizensâ(TM) behaviour, is reaching beyond Chinaâ(TM)s borders to impact foreign companies, according to new research. The system, which has been compared to an Orwellian tool of mass surveillance, is an ambitious work in progress: a series of big data and AI-enabled processes that effectively grant subjects a social credit score based on their socia
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
LinkedIn worked for me, but, I guess we can't expect much from journalists. I mean, they can't even play video games well.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
LinkedIn used to be *the* network used by professionals. After Microsoft bought it, they turned it basically into a white-collar Facebook.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
When I found a potential job (outside LinkedIn) I look at that company on LinkedIn
Sometimes I found that someone I know works or used to work for that company.
Then I approach them directly with questions.
This permits getting inside information, like why someone quit the job you are about to take.
I use LinkedIn primarily as a place to store a connected online CV / portfolio including links to projects and companies I've worked on, papers I've contributed to and talks I've given. Additionally, the endorsements I have from colleagues and ex-colleagues "prove" to recruiters that I really do have the skills I claim to have. It's basically an "extended" CV - everything I can't fit on my actual, normal CV.
I have never gotten a job directly over LinkedIn, but indirectly - in the sense that I include a link to my LinkedIn profile in my PDF CV - I guess it may have been helpful. And I do like the "peace of mind" I get from the regular recruiter requests - even if I don't take them up on their offers, it's nice to know I could.
All that said, the LinkedIn UX is still a cluttered nightmare. It's gotten better, but there's still just too much going on on the screen and it still feels far from modern. Xing (LinkedIn's neck-and-neck competitor in the German-speaking world) while slowly suffering from feature creep as well, is still *much* cleaner and prettier in its presentation of user profiles - LinkedIn UX designers should take note.
LinkedIn's worked for me, and I've seen it work for friends networking through me for jobs they want.
But I only ever, ever add folks I know personally; if I wouldn't recognize you on the street, you're not on my contacts list there.
I find LinkedIn's newsfeed to be medium-bad, but as far as "resume service", it works damn well.
To me, LinkedIn is an example of horrible bad design and practice for the following reasons:
Most of the people I know of who have used LinkedIn for developing their career could have used other mechanisms and gotten better results for the same effort.
LinkedIn was useful in its early days, but now it's just another data source/ad revenue tool for Microstuff. I just deleted my account today because I don't want no mo' spam, ma'm
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's part of your problem. The idea is that you're supposed to accept invites only from people you actually KNOW! Since you seem to accept all spam, OF COURSE it's going to suck for you!
I use LinkedIn as a research tool. If I'm looking for a job I use it to see who I already know at the company and reach out to find out the real dirt. It could also get them a hiring bonus, which is nice.
I also use it to check on company hires, especially in the executive ranks in my division. I've learned some interesting stuff that way and have been able to adjust my expectations accordingly.
As for the slew of recruiters sending me job posts that have nothing to do with my skills and want to connect? They get ignored until I get bored and clean out my inbox by deleting the messages and declining their invites.
your using it wrong
I've had Linkedin blocked for spam since pretty much the day they started spamming back in 2002.
As a test, I went to their website from a throwaway account they were blasting at, to find that the only way to stop them sending "invitations" (99.99% of which were from people I'd never heard of, let alone met) was to create an account - except you can't even do it then, so that account got trashed.
Can you say fraudulent behaviour? But that's what you expect from spammers.
GDPR laws haven't stopped them spamming EU citizens either - which is going to explode in their faces. They can't try and pin this on "Your friend said it was OK to send this" as that's specifically NOT allowed under EU data protection laws. The spam's still coming in despite the prospect of $400 million fines.
It's just TOO MUCH.
I have a long enough career at this point that I never, ever have to look for work actively. I have to actively avoid LinkedIn to avoid getting pestered every day or two with another recruiter trying to poach me.
Thing is, that's not special! If you live in a major city or even if you're willing to relocate, and you have a desireable skill like web development, you'll be inundated with offers. Just fill out the details on your LinkedIn page and do basically nothing else.
No, I don't work for LinkedIn nor do I have any stake in you caring about them. But yeah, from my data-point-of-one experience, it works VERY well. TOO well.
I use it to generate a detailed resume and have up to date contact info for references. It also is how I keep in touch with some former colleagues that I was never friends with but still care about on a human level. They are not people I would ever have invited to be friends on Facebook, not to mention I deleted my Facebook account, but I still like to know where they are working at and catch up with them from time to time to chat about the industry.
There isn't a month that goes by where a recruiter doesn't try to get me to add them to my LinkeIn profile. I don't though, because the last thing I need is more recruiter spam.
Having worked as a Systems Administrator though, you tend to have a positive impact on the lives of many people beyond your own field of employment. At least, if you are doing your job right you do.
When you have been working for a quarter of a century it gets hard to keep track of some of the finer details involved and it would be extremely difficult to keep in touch with some of these people by phone or mail, that's where LinkedIn shines.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
This is the only time I can recall Betteridge's law being wrong.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
Did you even read what linkedin is about? It's NOT about accepting all requests. It's about building your network. My network is frickin' strong. I only ever accept or make connections to people that are successful as I am. So if I need help I can look around to people that are either linked to me or linked to people that are linked to me and get things done. It's awesome when it's used right.
Those that think it's just a business facebook totally miss what it's for. You might as well use your screw driver to drive nails into a board.
I put the link to this post at the bottom of my profile.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT