It's extremely frustrating, because in 2023 you're sort of expected to have a linkedin (some job applications even require it!), but people have started treating it like the next FaceBook. From 2020-2022 I saw a lot of COVID conspiracy theories and political memes being posted, and I wanted to respond to them, but since LinkedIn is basically a resume, I withheld responding, for the same reason that I don't put my voting history directly on my resume.
Though honestly the worst part is the "inspiration porn" that people post on there all the time, nearly all of which reduce to "the job market is tough, but don't give up because it gets easy!!!". When you point out that it, in fact, does not ever get "easy" to wake up to 30 rejection emails every morning, they either try and sell you on some meditation routine, tell you that you have a bad attitude, or just block you.
Honestly, it really is the absolute worst platform that I am stuck using. There are worse websites, obviously, but no one is forcing me to go to 4chan or The Daily Stormer every day.
You can have a LinkedIn profile but not use the feed-- I don't see how that's necessarily frustrating. Make a profile, provide the link on job applications. Occasionally edit your profile so it's up to date. Then, don't use it. Simple enough.
Sure, but a lot of companies post job listings on LinkedIn as well. I could (and mostly do) ignore the homepage, but I still see it occasionally.
I wish there was a way to never accidentally click on or navigate to the feed at all on LinkedIn. Could be a good opportunity for a browser extension to just nuke that part of the DOM.
That exists already! I use this one, which works on a bunch of other sites as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
If you use uBlock Origin you can do
The former will block the main content of the page while on the /feed/ path, while the latter will block the "Home" button in the header nav.
wow I didn't know uBlock Origin was also capable of DOM cleanup. I really need to give that tool a second look.
Yeah, I basically use it for online resume storage.
For years LinkedIn languished as the site everyone was on, but nobody actually used for anything. But I have actually gotten a couple of leads from it now.
The feed is trash though, for sure. And you have to laugh at the endless parade of bimbo pictures attached to accounts that are supposedly "recruiters." Unprofessional and insulting.
Speaking of "bimbo" recruiters, some of them are low key phone-sex operators.
I had an experience where one of them reached out to me about a job over the phone. She had a hot-sounding voice and the job seemed intriguing, so I figured I would give it a shot. Her LinkedIn photo was stunning. Yes, I sheepishly admit that I was taken in by her and this influenced my decision to even consider a random job from a recruiter.
She was friendly but kinda ditzy, seemed to barely know what she was talking about, and once the easy stuff was over, I was abruptly handed over to some dude. It's like... I thought you were my recruiter, so who's this other guy? He pretty much handled my recruitment process from that point on, but she was allowed to be the first one to talk to me on each call and get the credit for "recruiting" me, although she turned out to be more like live-bait than anything else.
IMO, the tactic of many of these recruitment firms is to hire attractive women to fool male programmers into considering otherwise unappealing jobs and direct most of the profit to the male recruiters.
Part of me is glad the industry is in such a state that no recruiters are contacting me anymore. 99% of third party recruiters are blood sucking parasites.
Hahah, wow, I haven't engaged with any of them, but that's a fun anecdote. Thanks for confirming.
Coincidentally, this drives everything that is so bad about the platform. All the normal people you know in real life wouldn’t be caught dead posting to LinkedIn, just using it as a resume and jobs platform. The only people willing to post anything are attention seekers and influencers.
It’s a similar complaint to how your Facebook and Instagram feeds barely contain the people you follow anymore, which encourages regular people to post less and attention seekers to post more.
The business model of ad-supported social media apparently doesn’t work under the paradigm of checking in on your friends for a reasonable amount of time (like 5 minutes a day) and calling it a day. Instead, it’s just optimized to be as much of an addiction as possible, and there’s no way your real respected work colleagues can provide that amount of content.
I recently pointed out to our corporate security that a data broker has detailed employee records for our entire company including job titles and start dates. Given the nature of our business, that data cache is a roadmap for security compromises. The most likely culprit was scraping from LinkedIn. It isn't always a good idea to put your data out there for others to aggregate.
Some companies supply that information voluntarily. Experian (iirc) even has a product offering that ‘helps employees qualify for loans and demonstrate stable earnings’ if the companies will just only send them payroll history. So it may not have been scraped necessarily, just “shared” in the ordinary course of business.
Further to that, my feed have been filled with Certification posts. Folks would boast about their 3 hour Certification courses with long cringe posts! And LinkedIn would not stop it, because they need to sell LinkedIn Learning!
Honestly, if it were just people bragging about how they took a 3 hour class and got a useless certification, I don't think it would bother me. LinkedIn markets itself as a glorified resume, and it's pretty common for people to fluff up their meaningless certs.
I just feel like there should be somewhat of a boundary between personal and professional life. There are things I would say to my friends that I wouldn't tell anyone in charge of giving me money, at least not directly, and I feel like LinkedIn (purposefully or otherwise) is actively trying to erode that boundary. It's horrible.
There's not much I would post on Facebook that would cause me heartburn if a potential employer were to see it. (And most of my Facebook friends would be profoundly uninterested in most tech topics I would post on.)
But, yeah, I keep my LinkedIn--to the degree I use it at all--very anodyne except to the degree you have relatively extreme opinions on specific tech topics.
I don't have a facebook, but I don't think I post anything that's likely to get me fired to any social media. However, there's sort of a difference between "not being fired" and "being hired".
My political opinions are pretty normal (basically typical American lefty), and if my employer were to find a blog post I wrote about universal healthcare or something it's doubtful that they'd fire me. That's a little different than me plastering "BIDEN 2024!!!" all over my resume, and that's why I utterly hate LinkedIn.
anodyne, great word
It's a perfectly cromulent word
> some job applications even require it!
I've never encountered this, but if I did, I'd be pretty thankful for the advance warning that I would not likely enjoy working there.
I can't remember where, but it was a fairly typical form where you put your name and information, upload your resume, required fields have a red asterisk, and the LinkedIn profile was required.
Now, I have no idea how much parsing they actually did; you might have been able to put "asdf" to make it validate.
There's very little correlation between a company that's deeply integrated with LinkedIn tools and what it's like to work there. If you're going to judge all companies based on their recruitment toolchain, good luck finding an acceptable position!
It has got worse.
But there’s a right way to use LinkedIn.
Keep in mind that the majority of people only want to network when they need something. You can use LinkedIn to do the opposite and create meaningful connections.
1. Judgment-free support. That lady you barely remember from your previous job is starting a business. Encourage her. Some person is starting yet another podcast? Ask a couple of kind questions.
2. A low effort contact list. Next time you go out to an event and meet with new people ask to connect on LinkedIn. You have a better chance of maintaining that connection with LinkedIn reminders than if you exchange phone number or email.
Why do this? Life is short.
I've never had a Linkedin nor any other type of social media, not even a public Github page, and I've received many simply great job offers, especially in 2022-2023.
Putting this out there so people don't think they need to join some absolutely shit random corporate social networks to get a job.
What's your secret?
Either Indeed, or from email. The emails usually come from recruiters using databases, but I've also received emails directly from the companies using word of mouth, too.
I aggressively clicked "not interested" on meme/fluff posts for a while and now when my LinkedIn page always starts with some sort of system design diagram. My next click is usually straight to the jobs page anyways.
The site will be done for once they start putting trending topics in the jobs page.
The best is 'unfollow'. I have a a bit less than a hundred connections, all real people I know, and I follow 0 accounts. So there is no feed. It's empty.
4chan is way better than HN, sorry.