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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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."