I find linkedin is the most useful social network I'm a part of, even though I rarely visit it. I have made many professional connections, and linkedin aggregates them nicely and I find the periodic emails of people getting new jobs or new titles to be very interesting. I guess I am not as annoyed about the shady tactics as you are, I just ignore them.
So I'm sorry that you don't like the site, but I politely decline your recommendation to delete my account.
Yeah, I have a love/hate relationship with LinkedIn.
I don't like the site, and I don't like the company. That said, I've had on-site interviews at Google, Facebook, and the like not via my StackOverflow profile (which is pretty good, 20k+), or my blog, but directly through being hit up on LinkedIn.
I'm about to start a dream job next week, again after being contacted first on LinkedIn by my new employer.
Perhaps it's alright if you can post online about all the great work you do, or you have a name for yourself in the industry, or you make lots of OSS contributions on GitHub. Unfortunately I don't have any of those (yet!). But I do have a LinkedIn profile, and that's what got me on the one-way flight from London to SF next week.
I'm not defending LinkedIn as a company: I think they're pretty scummy. But if I didn't have my account, maybe I wouldn't have got this job.
It would be interesting to hear first hand what your process looks like, and why you might find Linkedin to be a better fit as opposed to something like SO (which obviously I'm not sure you do).
The parent wasn't apologizing for LinkedIn so much as advocating for an active recruiting strategy rather than a passive one. If I were a recruiter mercenary, I'd look use both.
Recruiters might use LinkedIn because there are lots of good programmers whose community participation does not occur on Stack Overflow, but still have LinkedIn profiles.
Sorry if I was unclear. I was responding specifically to "They find you, instead of you find them." I use SO and Github quite a bit, but my point was simply that I'd MUCH rather find someone myself than just wait for resumes to come in, as the resumes that come in are often not very good.
There is a very high chance that a professional will end up finding a job through linkedin since employers, specifically recruiters find it helpful to filter prospective employees... but keeping in context an older post [1], is linkedin really worth the solution to find the right person for the job? Had it not existed, would we end up hiring the wrong people? I guess not. It is just an added layer of `sophistication` to the hiring process.
Its features don't really acknowledge an individual’s skill set, and are flawed. For example the `endorsing feature` of linkedin allows people who haven't even worked with technology X, to endorse people for the same technology.
In short, I don't see linkedin adds any value, but at the same time since recruiters are on it and we are forced to accept it.
You're talking about the "skills" section. I don't need to work with jQuery directly to know John Smith wrote my company's jQuery code and he has that skill. If you want to write an in-depth review of John Smith's code from a technical standpoint, you can do that on LinkedIn, too. Most often, LinkedIn asks me if they know XYZ and either I know that they know it or I don't know--the value I get from that, it helps me to see where my connections are going with their careers. That's helpful to know for a variety of reasons, use your imagination. Sometimes they go into "skill" areas I never would have expected. Likewise, if someone hates Java (even if they know it well) they're not going to list it as a skill. Also, you can turn off any profile section you find annoying, it's in the options/settings. For example, I have the "people who viewed PJ also viewed these profiles" turned off.
LinkedIn is the only "social network" I have anything to do with and it isn't so much on a regular engaged basis as a "well, someday it might be handy" sort of way.
It has never really benefitted me in any way (I haven't been actively job-hunting this century), but since I don't care for social networks and if I did, I wouldn't want professional contacts in the same circle as my friends and family and barely-acquaintances, it is a fantastic way to keep in contact with colleagues throughout my career, on my own terms and segregated from the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, it has become more of a nuisance in the last year. News feeds, streams full of discussions, streams full of people posting links, advertisements. That doesn't even take into account the constant spam email from LinkedIn. I'm an engineer. I know how to make sure I hit the right buttons --- and yet just when I think I have unsubscribed from nearly everything I want to be unsubscribed from, I get more spam. So and so has joined! You should join these groups! These groups might interest you! Here's what went on today! Here's what went on this week! Here's some articles from people in the industry! You should add your email accounts so we can reach out to your contacts! So and so has a new job!
It's really the only service of its kind with this sort of reach, but I'm concerned that they're going to slit the throat of their golden goose by engaging in the sort of behavior you'd expect from traditional social networks (or worse).
As an engineer at LinkedIn, this makes me very happy to hear. We work really hard on the product and try to improve the experience wherever we can, and it's nice to know people find some utility in the work we do.
The first thing I hear when I tell someone I work at LinkedIn is: "You guys spam too much." I can't blame them because even I get frustrated with the volume of email I get from LinkedIn each day. For the most part, each product team is responsible for the frequency of their emails. Our team tries to cut down on spam wherever possible. Unfortunately, there are differing philosophies within the company (and within the industry) regarding what constitutes spam.
As a user I don't mind the emails too much and I have successfully been recruited via LinkedIn so it does add value for me.
My big gripe is that clicking through emails on mobile is usually a bad experience. Mostly it either wants me to log in for something I normally would not have to on a normal desktop and it always, always nags me about opening in the app first which is annoying after the 50th time.
I also think the updated recommendations feature is not useful since 1) the UI can take away from the rest of your profile by taking up too much room and 2) people not qualified to give a recommendation for a given skill do so. Your Uncle bob may be qualified to say you are an awesome programmer but mine is sure not.
Oh, my god yes. Stop sending me email that just doesn't work on mobile. I process a lot of mail on my iPhone, I just delete the linkedin email now because it's useless to try to interact with it.
I just turn all notifications off (as I do with all of my social networks) and use it to connect with past and present coworkers that are either uncomfortable or unwilling to connect on facebook.
Fair enough :) like I said I really am open to the notion that it's a useful site for some people. But I have never met anyone who gets value out of it and I know plenty of people who feel like it spams them.
So I'm sorry that you don't like the site, but I politely decline your recommendation to delete my account.