Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- LinkedIn is truly an odd place. I think it’s more performative than Instagram.by jmathai
- My wife got into a car accident.
On a sunday.
I didn't go to the hospital.
I had a client, and a project.
Ready to go.
On a sunday.
You don't give up when life challenges you, you move faster.
Keep building [ROCKET EMOJI]
by d2kx - Thinking that I've got at least 18 years of professional experience, and I've had my own website for years (maybe a different domain a decade back), with my work, experience and email address publicly available. With a few keystrokes, I can still find genuine conversations I had with people 15 years ago and if I want message them.
Of course that not everyone keeps the same email address, and plenty of companies disappear. But if you're genuinely interested in finding someone, it's surprisingly easy to find them.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would be different if I'd had a LinkedIn account. Maybe someone would have reached out 15, 10 or even 5 years ago, especially when some of my skills were in demand! Not everyone has access to the same opportunities, so maybe I shoot myself on the foot. But I remember the times I had a lot of recruiters contacting, sometimes offering free lunch, dinner or beer. Felt special! Maybe that's why I didn't want to have a Linkedin account. I was happy focusing, working, had my humble salary just enough to pay the bills. Or, I didn't know I could get paid much more...
But isn't it strange how we pretend to care about people, while so much of what we actually care about is visibility, connections, status and what someone can offer us? We've become worse at remembering people for who they are, what they're good at, or the conversations we once had with them. Preferring to look for exaggerated achievements, job titles, ghost jobs in fake companies, navigating a horrible looking website. Sort of a 1999 amazon.
Everyone complains, but few people are willing to leave it, because they know what happens when you disappear...
We're just replaceable profiles in the noise, and very few people will put in the effort to look beyond all the BS!
by punkbit - What I find hilarious about linkedin as I was recently looking for work a few months prior. I whipped up a job search agent to browse the site and others and find jobs that may interest me and match my resume skills. They intentionally obfuscate the site with all kinds of JavaScript bs which makes it hard for an agent to navigate. All this while the entire site is devoted to praising AI. Probably originally to prevent scraping. It's clear the same way back in the day sites didn't want you scraping they want you using their interface. This is extremely common, and none of these types of sites offer apis or automation. None of them want ai bots there either. So I don't understand how this whole agentic commerce thing is going to take off. It could have been done ages ago with simple scripting and a viable api, but it's obvious they do not want you doing that. So all of a sudden these types of sites are going to allow agent access? We're already seeing this between meta and Amazon. Agentic commerce is going to be a shit show if it ever happens at all.
- I'm not clear why people who hate LinkedIn stay on it. If it is not useful to you, leave. If you want an account but hate the feed, don't read it.
I agree that it has problems. I've also gotten multiple jobs from it. But more importantly, it is my digital rolodex. I absolutely get back in contact with people from prior gigs and we talk, catch up, act as sounding boards for each other's ideas. That has value to me.
But it is just a web site. If you don't like it and it has no value to you, don't use it. Seems like a waste of energy to put this much effort into hating it.
by codingdave - Slightly off topic. I've had exactly one consulting engagement come from LinkedIn, back in 2013. Someone met with a VC, was told they needed a Ruby on Rails developer, found me, and it was off to the races. That was it. No lead since, in any format. I paid for Premium for a while and eventually stopped.
I have connections, and friends occasionally like a comment when I share something. I'm convinced LinkedIn demotes anything that links off-platform, even in the comments. That makes it really hard to share a good blog post.
Honestly, I get more engagement on Facebook. My mom and in-person friends find what I do slightly interesting, at least when the algorithm decides to show it. Same story there, though. Links to a blog get buried compared to native content.
by rietta - You guys are playing it wrong. You don’t larpmax in general, you do it to hit specific targets.
The person who decides my promotions follows me on LinkedIn. I never really see her except at the Christmas party etc, so the only way to influence her directly is through getting in her feed. If she regularly sees how great I am, that establishes the thought in her mind, so when she is then asked to promote me by other people, she’ll think it’s a good idea.
- I don't have a LinkedIn account and don't really care about it. The one thing, however, that bothers me to no end is all the many, many times when a LinkedIn page comes up near the top of the results to a Google query, then I click on it, and chances are I don't get to the actual information, but to the LinkedIn log-in page.
Not that I think that this is LinkedIn's fault, but I assume Google's rationale is that "everybody has a LinkedIn account" so it's fine to include result pages that cannot be accessed without one.
by kleiba2