I think we're still learning how to deal with abusive relationships in the tech world. Consider this scenario:
Act 1: When I'm not paying attention, my friend says, "hey, do you mind if I go through your address book and contact all your friends and family and ask them to be my friend too? If you consent, say, 'what' or 'huh'"
Act 2: When I'm not looking, this friend goes through my address book and spams all my contacts with whatever they're selling under my name.
What would you advise me to do after that? You'd probably say, this person is not your friend by most definitions of the word, you should cut them out of your life and ask them to not contact you anymore.
To which I may say, but this friend is well connected, they might be able to get me a job in the future. (Although I've never gotten a job or even a lead through LinkedIn personally.)
What would you say to that? Probably something like, they're abusive and deceitful, whatever they have to offer, they'll probably damage your life more than they'd help you.
And that's why I closed my account and added a "delete on sight" filter for their emails.
My first experience with LinkedIn was being spammed by them, after a friend signed up with them. Asking, he had no idea why they were sending emails to me. A few years later, it came out that LinkedIn was using lots of dark patterns to trick users. With that as a first impression, I have no intention of using LinkedIn.
My first experiences were getting these because I was in the corporate address book at a big corp, and I guess people were looking for work.
At the time, Linked In wouldn't even let you opt out of mail without making an account, which is definitely never happening. (Thankfully, they eventually added a way to tell them to not contact me again, but I'm going to carry my grudge)
As mentioned by another poster, not in every area or situation (covid...) it's feasible to find jobs without LinkedIn. I kind of agree with you, however I just keep my contact list small. Probably I miss some opportunities with that but at the same time it mostly consists of people who have little interest to traverse my contacts. As soon as there's an equally well working alternative for job hunts, I'm off but I don't see that yet. I'm curious about honeypot.io etc. but I don't like the idea to put people with price tags online
I have used WeAreDevelopers for my job hunts since I prefer curation over quality. On LinkedIn anybody can post a job ad. On WeAreDevelopers you atleast know that there is a selection process behind it.
> What would you say to that? Probably something like, they're abusive and deceitful, whatever they have to offer, they'll probably damage your life more than they'd help you.
I don't really understand how you make the jump to this part
The benefits are calculable, but the consequences of abuse are unpredictable, and if someone has crossed your boundary once, you don't know how far they will go.
With the abusive relationship example, if someone's gone as far as snoop through your phone and text your friends without your knowledge, there is no telling what they'll do next. It's common for someone who does this to also be a verbal and physical abuser, which is rarely worth sticking it out for, regardless of how well-connected they are.
With the specific LinkedIn example, they may e.g. sell your data to third parties, leak your data publicly via irresponsible data storage, and allow employees to access your data without authorization. Not to mention spamming your entire contact list with LinkedIn invitations in your name.
Is that worth it to you in exchange for some networking?
But right there is where the power of your metaphor breaks down. It is quite unusual for a website to also be a verbal and physical abuser (recent eBay cyberstalking being the incredibly rare exception).
I grew up with the Internet and learned to navigate fake "download" buttons, ads etc. Not to brag too much, but I don't find it hard to use LinkedIn without accidentally consenting to spam my friends. I've never accidentally spammed my contacts via LinkedIn nor ResearchGate nor Academia.edu.
If you use it right, it can be useful. LinkedIn isn't your friend, but you can use their platform for your advantage.
>"hey, do you mind if I go through your address book and contact all your friends and family and ask them to be my friend too? If you consent, say, 'what' or 'huh'"
At some point I spent some hours to investigate how they did it and trying to tell google (gmail) to not let Linkedin do it (again?). Not sure how much success I had. I think it is a mistake/problem of Google to allow such things.
Of all the categories of social media apps I genuinely believe an entirely new professional networking app reimagined from the ground up could very easily “disrupt” a legacy app like LinkedIn. I’m honestly surprised I haven’t seen anything yet (or maybe just not paying attention).
I’m curious how many users (%) are annoyed by this. My gut feeling tells me only HN/Reddit/tech is annoyed by this, most people aren’t. Which is why we haven’t seen a competitor arise
You want to know how to make LinkedIn even worse? Retire. You might as well be dead because you are now useless to LinkedIn. How about some cool projects other retirees with your interests are working on? Nope. You're suddenly in a graveyard.
I actually retired and changed my status and it has worked perfectly - very few contacts. Superb!
My new LinkedIn job title is ‘space Marshall’, partly because my new role as a conservation volunteer sometimes involves enforcing social distancing. Also channeling Mark Watney.
I put retired in my profile as well, but didn't come up with a snappy title like space Marshall (I'll work on that.) My actual complaint is hat I expected to get sent stuff about other interesting things retirees were doing. I mean, a lot of people in the tech field retire relatively young with a lot of money and they just don't sit home watching wheel of fortune. LinkedIn is really missing the boat IMHO. I'm happy looking elsewhere, but it would be cool if LinkedIn did a smooth transitions for retirees. I wrote to the CEO about but got no response, which only heightened my feeling of being a ghost on LinkedIn LOL
Perhaps because post-retirement activities (such as volunteering for charity) are usually unpaid, so there is little if any incentive for recruiters to engage. Not sure how LinkedIn supports charity work. I'd check that out, except that it would mean logging in.
I can see how this would be jarring and upsetting, but I think it's ultimately the right thing for LinkedIn and its users.
I hate any feature that makes LinkedIn more social. It is a great resume hosting service, but a terrible social network. Since I have to use it for work, I'm hoping the culture on the site continues to be business-focused.
For shared interests, Twitter, reddit, and Facebook groups seem to work well. Have you had any luck with those?
I'm not retired, but I run a website. I don't need to convince people to work with me. LinkedIn just highlight the most toxic aspects of growing your career.
Having an online network of professional contacts makes sense. LinkedIn has that. But on top of that it also has unbelievable amounts of toxic profit seeking garbage which makes us abhor the thought of even logging in.
The network effect makes it almost impossible to compete with it. If anyone did manage to compete, they are likely to be sucked into recreating the same abhorrent garbage layers over time.
This is social media in a nutshell. I doubt blockchain is going to solve it, so wtf will?
I'm working on flockingbird (dot social), which is a federated professional network. No blockchain, just activitypub (mastodon, peertube, pixelfed et.al.)
The only feature is to be 'a Rolodex on steroids', or 'an adressbook in which some entries are maintained by the contacts themselves'
No social network features beyond that. We're doing our best to align the businessmodel with this. And truly believe it can carve out a niche (and slowly grow from there) without adding all the perverse attentionseeking, 'garbage layers'.
Anyone interested can drop me a mail at ber at berk dot es for a longer version. I try to post some updates and insights on @flockingbird@fosstodon.org as well.
Not sure if this is an appropriate thread to drop this, but since you asked:
The idea is simple, though: you have a profile on which you put contact details, a list of aspirations and competences. Each such data can be kept private, shared public, or within your network. You add people to your contact list, tag them, keep notes on them or add rich oneway relations (Foo has worked for Bar, from datex to datey at Acmeinc.). Basic crm features. Again, each such data has several privacy levels.
You can search through your contacts and search through the contacts of your contacts. E.g. if you need to find a translater, but don't know any yourself, one of your contacts might know one, and might have shared some data, notes, tags and relations with that translator.
A 'network' is basically a server, instance, in fediverse-speak. An instance would be hosted by your startup-hub, coworking-space, university, etc. You register with one (or more) such instance, and become part of that community, but can add anyone from any other instance, as long as they have a public profile.
I wanted to view your website, but the SSL certificate expired yesterday (fingerprint 01:03:F8:89:77:72:11:C2:BC:45:12:E9:EF:04:8E:21:D8:BC:77:83:81:26:B4:38:6E:9C:81:A6:4B:07:C2:70).
This is one of my last servers with nginx. Nginx and letsencrypt is ... cumbersome, unstable; once every few months I have to manually reboot and/or renew the certs. ugh. Time to move this one to Caddy too.
Going offtopic here; but this is exactly the problem. There is a cronjob that restarts nginx after a certbot rerun. This makes at least three assumptions, all of which will fail at some point:
1. certbot does not need to stop nginx to renew a cert (some modes do).
2. the certbot run succeeded (all certs have been renewed, no network issues, etc)
3. all certs are written correctly so that nginx config is valid (can reach and parse the certs)
In this particular case, for some reason, one of the 7 sites hosted here had a misconfigured DNS, letsencrypt servers could not reach it, certbot failed, no nginx restart was attempted. This case falls in #1, fixable by force-reloading nginx every day after certbot run regardless of whether a cert has been renewed.
All solutions with nginx are cludges like that. Don't get me wrong: certbot/letsencrypt is miles ahead of automation before they came along (I've built en ran several hosting companies, certs automation is a disgrace), but it remains hacky, cludgy and therefore unstable and somewhat unreliable.
huh i hear ya, but really the only thing ive ran into is updating certs not taking till nginx restart, in fact im suspect certbot might restart it for you at this point. i dont doubt it drops on the floor in any intermittent outages which isn't unheard of when it runs every 3 months
1. As a digital resume which recruiters/other people can find on their own, and can contact me if they really need to.
2. As somewhat of a soft sign that I "know"/"have been accepted as a connection by" people who work(ed) in the same company/area in the past. Kind of a signal that "maybe this guy is who he says he is".
Everything else on Linkedin is treated as trash. People I connect to are manually unfollowed almost immediately. Notification settings are modified so that I don't get any emails except inmails and connection requests. I thankfully haven't seen much spam from that till date.
Here are some firefox ublock origin filters I use to make the site a lot more bearable (basically removes the feed, the "news" sections, and other things which don't directly relate to the home page or connectivity). Only bad thing about this is that your list of connections won't show up; I haven't had the time to fix that yet.
It’s bad at #1, because LinkedIn causes unauthed viewers to hit a signup/loginwall. You’re better off putting it on your own website, because then even people who don’t subscribe to Microsoft’s user-hostile bullshit can read and view it.
The good ones do. I've got friends with blogs who post twice weekly with programming examples and tutorials. You wouldn't believe the jobs they get offered unsolicited. It sorts out the chaff because most recruiters don't know about blogs or can't be bothered.
I was hopeful that after Microsoft got its hands on the stinky pile, it would revamp it. But, no, it's still the ridiculous place for irrelevant recruiter spam!
Microsoft made it worse, at least UI-wise, after buying it. The other website I hate by I’m registered on because of coworkers is ResearchGate. Spam, gamified portal, with only value being allowing non computer savvy people to build a publication list online.
Yeah, researchgate is a shame. There ought to be a niche for an academic website, but it hasn’t worked out. I get more value from connecting on Twitter. Turns out that plus biorxiv/arxiv/[insert your discipline’s version] works better.
Yes, but again you’ll see there is pattern here: *rxiv are still kinda geek oriented, in addition to being for preprints. Twitter is indeed more accessible to people in other fields like humanities, but that’s another silo that has even bigger problem and more disgusting behavior.
Yeah I mostly have a LinkedIn account just to have one. I feel like a professional social network is a bit of an oxymoron. Social networks tend to amplify unprofessional voices. "Hey guys, today I went to work and did my job" is not intriguing content.
Unfortunately, I find that many companies, especially in engineering it seems, require a linkedin account to apply for internships. Honestly, I don't really mind having it, probably because I don't get much spam.
On the other hand, having a linkedin doesn't seem to be helping me get a job, but that may just be confirmation bias.
I get spam to my username+linkedin@myaccountdomain.com email address constantly. I think LI used to let your connections download the email lists of people they’re connected to on the platform, and I got added to innumerable “hustler” brand-building nonsense lists.
I keep calling LinkedId "the saddest social network".
Create an account to list yourself in a CV catalog. Add connection with people you worked with to build credibility. Otherwise only ever open it when you're looking for a job. Otherwise you're risking getting cancer from looking at all that shameless self-promotion and posturing.
I'm a mid-level software engineer/SRE. I get tons of recruiters messaging me on LinkedIn, and it's how I landed my last 2 jobs ultimately. So while I'm not a huge plan of using the platform, I can't say it's not worth having a profile on.
The main point of the post is not that LinkedIn isn’t useful, it’s that it is useful but takes advantage of your professional need to be on the service whether you want to or not that is akin to a hostage-like situation.
The hostage dynamic allows it to get away with really annoying and awful features that you put up with anyway because you have little choice.
How is it a hostage situation if I don't have to read all the nonsense, didn't know that most of their features are a thing, can restrict my notifications and only need to really use the site for a few weeks every couple of years?
You’re still creating a profile on a site where you admit is full of nonsense. You’re just saying you ignore it as best you can.
That is still a situation where you’re using something even though you realize there’s a lot of nonsense because there’s value to you. LinkedIn still takes advantage of this dynamic whether you choose to ignore it or not.
I liken it to the fact that porn sites can get away with extremely intrusive ads because people demand their service and have little alternative. Whether you try to block or ignore the ads as much as possible isn’t really the point.
> Whether you try to block or ignore the ads as much as possible isn’t really the point.
I think that it is. If you're blocking them, you're getting whatever you want from the website without the downside of the ads. If you're putting up with the ads, that's a bit closer to a hostage situation. Same with LinkedIn - as long as you're using it in a way that's okay with you, I don't see a problem.
I deleted my linkedin account. Still employed, no problem in finding new jobs. LinkedIn had negative value for me, took my time and attention and gave nothing back.
There's a lot of hate on LinkedIn here, sorry to say I find it a highly useful tool and it appears to be the defacto way most companies hire so embrace the monster or some other pithy phrase but you get the idea
But the point of this post isn’t that LinkedIn isn’t useful, it’s that it does have value but at the same time takes advantage of your need for their service in a hostage-like way by using lots of dark patterns and psychological tricks to get you to do things like pay for it and put up with being stalked by unsavory people (particularly if you’re female).
It’s a story about how a useful service that is difficult to quit for professional reasons takes full advantage of that dynamic to get away with doing really annoying or awful things.
I'm not talking about whether you individually choose to ignore the bad parts. I'm saying that LinkedIn takes advantage of your need to be on their site whether you actually want to or not to introduce some very annoying features that they know will not churn you because, again, you "need" to be on it.
The fact that certain individuals are more deft at ignoring or blocking or turning off the annoying parts of the service does not change the dynamic at all.
There are many features that make LinkedIn a good tool for professional networking, but as a social media platform LinkedIn has a hugely problematic culture - far worse than Twitter.
While I think LinkedIn’s issues are best understood as symptoms of larger issues in corporate / middle-class culture, the article is on-point.
For me, like many I'm sure, it turned recruitment completely on it's head.
Previously I would spend hours trawling job boards, composing cover letters and get excited at the prospect of one successful reply. It was soul destroying.
Now I can construct a post, complete with trendy hashtags, and passively watch _hundreds_ of recruiters reach out to me in 24hrs. Now I can sit with a coffee and easy filter out the crap. It's taken some time to build up the 8,000+ contacts, mostly of senior tech people amd recruiters.
Every job in the last 5yrs has been through LinkedIn and due to the ease by which I could change jobs, salary has sky rocketed too.
Maybe I am in the minority of people who use it as a tool this way?
Edit: I also have an emoji as the first "letter" in the string of my first name. This instantly allows me to visually/programmatically filter out genuine "human" messages from bots. I also reply to these messages, as let's be honest, a human took time to compose the message to me. A quick "thank you" (one button click!) goes a long way.
It's fairly simple: Find people you would like to connect to, find their email address, send a request.
It helps if you have a "weak ties" connection to them, even if you don't really know them: you may be connected via someone else (in which case, asking for an introduction will almost certainly work), you may both be alumni of an org or institution, you may both have attended the same event (this works in a sort of 'missed connections' fashion), and so on.
One somewhat counterintuitive tip: you don't need to connect to a lot of hyper-connected folks, probably just one or two that are actually in your industry. Intros through indiscriminate folks like that tend to be disregarded unless there is a highly targeted ask simply because most of the folks they are connected to don't actually have an existing relationship or particular affinity with them. Similarly, so called "LinkedIn Open Networkers" that accept all incoming connection requests are also something of a red flag, unless you are actually in an industry like recruiting, marketing, or PR, where a 'reach' numbers game is a viable strategy.
Once your network starts growing, you'll start to get more incoming requests from folks trying to do the same thing you are. Don't accept the ones that don't make any sense (eg. If you are a medical software dev in the Midwest, feel free to decline that random connection request from an accountant in Azerbaijan), or you'll start to get a lot more of those (because folks who connect to lots of random folks tend to be mostly connected to others who do the exact same thing).
Absolutely reject and report requests that are outright spam. If you aren't sure, you can reply to ask what led them to try and connect with you before you make the decision to accept ignore or reject the request (saying "Hi, thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry, but I have a terrible memory, and I don't recognize your name or profile image. Did we meet at an event last year?" will work without being insulting).
It all boils down to this: if you want to have a large but high quality/relevance network, you need to be prolific but not indiscriminate in making connection requests.
What sort of posts are you writing that get recruiters to come to you in the post? I feel like all the posts I see are just people going in like vultures to raw meat trying to get some scrap
Social media hashtags exist for people to follow. By finding out the current trendy hashtags that recruiters themselves use/follow, your post pops up on their feed.
Do you ever talk to your peers about this? I get grossed out by this kind of behavior generally because it seems so artificial and narcissistic. Hearing your perspective is interesting because it at least adds the nuance of gamesmanship to the list.
Have you ever tried declaring yourself a thought leader? What kind of mileage does that get you?
I've begun doing recruitment in a professional capacity recently, after having been the type of dev that dismissed this kind of social media, LinkedIn hashtag feed nonsense for the same reasons you do.
And I still don't love it, but I have to admit it's got a place in the strategy. Posting a job req with some focused hashtags seems to help get more responses. Posting a few industry-appropriate articles does seem to help keep our company in folks' minds.
In an ideal world every company I work for will be so amazing and so well known that I don't have to sell it to folks because the right folks are coming straight to us. Or that all of my friends and all of their friends will magically be capable of switching jobs to come build a new team with me whenever I need to grow.
But reality doesn't work like that, and so things like LinkedIn end up being table stakes. It isn't the whole of my recruitment strategy, but certainly it's a functional part.
There are recruiters who spend their days following tags like “#iot” or “#blockchain” or “#machinelearning” and think that the people who posted them are good targets for recruitment?
Dear god...
Self promotion is a skill directly translated into $$$ in terms of raw compensation.
It's one of the biggest blocks I see from developers who are otherwise qualified for positions like that but they don't know how to advocate for themselves.
There is a games element to hiring and you have to put aside the thoughts of it being gross because at the end of the day it's a major component in earning more which for most people is one of the reasons they work.
That is a personal decision. It may or may not be a rational decision, but depends on short and long term goals, and one's self-awareness and self-honesty.
It becomes very quickly a real-life game of "would you do X for Y money? ".
Saying "I wouldn't use a linked in hashtag for $10k/year (25k a year? 100k a year?) " is a pretty strong principle.
A solid reputation among people I already know. Short of that, a good portfolio of prior work. good internet presence which shows how a person handles disagreement, conflict. This is why a small GitHub presence is extremely valuable. Not because I want to see people grind away at weekend work or have a full commit graph. Simply because you can hope to see people interact with others in e.g a bug report or PR. How did they behave when their PR was rejected or their bug report was dismissed?
This obviously is a step beyond self promotion. At this point I’m already reviewing someone’s resume. So the question is perhaps how would you get noticed to begin with? How do you market yourself? I don’t know. Work? No better form of self promotion than doing a good job.
Not sure. Something just seems off. Perhaps it's because you have a category of not-very-close friends on LinkedIn promoting themselves really hard and the correlation between people self-promoting in that very "LinkedIn fashion" and being a really big asshat seems strong. Anecdotal, but still.
Fair, but I did not read the parent post I replied to as whether hashtagging/self-promotion is effective/positive or ineffective/negative.
I read it as: "Assuming hashtagging and self-promotion on LinkedIn was effective, I still would not do it no matter the money", and that's the interpretation I replied to - perhaps erroneously.
In a broader discussion - it's all about the fit. I don't think there's a single advice, action, characteristic, attribute, or effort, that won't increase your chances with X% of employers/recruiters/HR and decrease your chances with Y% of employers/recruiters/HR.
[FWIW, I personally have Linked In, it's my online resume, but I don't interact with platform in any other manner; Self-promoting posts are indeed a turn-off for me personally - but I'm neither actively seeking a new job nor promoting my business, so it'd be a bit of dishonest to claim that situational personal preference for a larger truth :]
Wrong lesson: "I have seen stupid and incompetent people do X to get prestigious roles and big salaries. As a smart and competent person with self-esteem, I would never do X, lest people accidentally think I am one of them."
Right lesson: "If X can help even stupid and incompetent people get prestigious roles and big salaries, I wonder what it would do for a smart and competent person. Probably the same, only more of it."
Also, all three of those hashtags don't exactly inspire job security. I would sooner make a living by playing blackjack than be employed in blockchain.
Both iot and machine learning are the tail wagging the dog. You use a tech because it's appropriate, not because it's trending. The number of businesses trying to shoehorn ML into their sales deck is hilarious, I don't know how much my previous employer spent on continued failed attempts at that trend.
Past ten years or so ive gotten most of my jobs via recruiters reaching out to me on LinkedIn.
I always enjoy seeing how much the market will bear when answering them with I'm making $400k(just a number) now what is this web developer position offering? Meaning I bump my salary to see what the market will bear .. if i didnt go too high they will go higher and I boosted my salary by double or more. This trick is best though when your a junior to mid level developer ... salaries do cap out Ive noticed. But, it's always fun to see what you might be able to get.
I use to see a lot of HN readers complain about recruiters. Some are overzealous and shady like I told one recruiter i just met this girl two weeks ago at web dev Meetup who just started at same company. He hunted her down and kept leaving voicemails on her work phone & then calling the receptionist when she didnt answer him(omg lol). Another forced me to lie to owner of company they placed me at, which I very begrudgingly did(hide recruiters shady business practice). Though I sold her and her company out once she threaten to make up false stories so he wouldnt hire me full-time(he did hire me). Though out of ten years and dealing with 100 to possibly 100s of recruiters those two are outliers in my experience.
The name has an actual emoji (a stormy cloud, the link is in his profile) in front of it, not an emoji that looks like a letter or something like that.
I know someone who had trouble finding a job for a couple of years after taking time off to have children. Right before covid hit she took a class on using LinkedIn to find a job. Initially she was going to wait until covid was over, but circumstances forced her to start looking right in the middle of the first covid wave. She applied what she learned from the LinkedIn class, and had a job within two weeks.
"Filtering through the crap" is a skill that many reading your post may not have. There are a ton of companies who use recruiters because they have shitty jobs. So the recruiters make the job sound much better than it is.
This may just be to discourage you from doing it. I've been on a number of hiring committees, and job hopping was never discussed as a negative. By the time you've been on the job for 1.5 years, chances are the hiring manager and recruiter have both moved on.
Also, I'm hired to do a job. Around 1-2 year long job. I finish it and move on to what excites me next. My best hiring/HR managers and recruiters understand this, it makes our cooperation a bliss.
Personally I consider it a yellow flag when hiring. It could be a sign that they are likely to hop to the next thing and not worth investing in, or it could just be that they are looking for the right place to settle in. I will generally ask about their experiences and what they are looking for to try to discern which camp they may be in.
As with all hiring though, this is far from perfect.
I’m more talking about less than or equal to 12 months. It takes months of investment of my company to train a new hire. At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee and the investment is starting to see returns.
Leaving early means the investment wasn’t worth it (compared to hiring someone who doesn’t job hop)
Someone mentioned "At 12 months they’re likely just becoming an effective employee"...
I haven't seen a job like this in a decade or more. The last two jobs I had expected you to be fully productive in a month, and if you not had made major contributions in by 12 months (and more specifically didn't fit in with management) you were going to be let go. Letting go of employees used to be relatively rare, but I find it's becoming standard practice these days.
I can't think of a single job I've had where ICs weren't deploying code to production within two weeks and at full productivity in about a month.
Decades ago it used to be the case that you could take time to fit in, find your strengths and start growing. But the idea that you would "just be getting started" at 12 months is laughable.
Job "hopping" used to make sense a few years ago because it was the fastest way to get promoted. Now I would say it's an essential survival skills as any place you aren't happy at is likely seeing that an planning when they can start to pip you.
It definitely changes the bar for me. If I see someone has a long string of 1-2 year jobs on their resume, the conversation changes from:
"Is this someone with high potential who could grow / be trained into a high performer?" to
"Is this someone who can hit the ground running and be productive within a month?"
It's very possible the answer is still yes, but I'm not going to spend time investing in a more uncertain candidate, if it's pretty clear they'll jump as soon as my time investment starts to pay off.
I was job hopping in Amsterdam where the market is saturated by VC-backed SaaS startups. The churn rate was insane. Many of the teams I worked on have churned so much not one member is still there I worked with - in a space of 18-24 months (this was pre-COVID).
It is also worth noting a 12 month fixed term contract for any new full-time employee is standard. Due to Dutch employment law, the employer only has to offer a perm contract after a number of years (after the 3rd I think). This hardly encourages career growth and it if it takes 12 months to be "up to speed" you would have been fired already!
At the end of those 12 months they don't have to offer you anything more. Struggling and need extra training? Nope, you're gone. Particular project changing course (new CTO, new management)? Nope, you're gone.
Pay rise? Lucky for 1% without threatening to leave... but other companies will add 15% for a new contract in a similar role. It's a no-brainer.
There was no sense of loyalty on either side.
The large professional network I made in the city helped enormously and heard about open positions on a weekly basis.
Now I am in a new role (outside of the Netherlands) where I genuinely hope I can stay with the company for many years and have a long career with them (with opportunities to progress internally). Their niche is something which I believe in and have a sense of pride about what they do.
As a former recruiter of 6 years... Most companies do not care. If you can do the job and pass their interview process they will make you an offer. I very rarely had anyone look down on "job hoppers" and if they did it would be when someone had 4-7 six month stints in a row. Normally those people would just say those were contract gigs and then the company wouldnt care.
In the summer of my junior year at undergrad engineering school I attended a "career accelerator" course, a week long series of lectures from entrepreneurs and practicing engineers. One gentleman working for a multinational industrial corporation said specifically he recommends people get a new job every two years. He said he was on track to become CEO of this multinational company. Sometimes a new job can be found in the organization you work already.
When I entered the industry in 2010, it was the middle of a recession and I was coming from a non comp sci STEM degree.
My first job was a 40k per year IT job. I changed jobs every 1.5 years or so, and was able to find a niche in Big Data followed by Real time bidding in ad-tech, and now ML work in one of the FANG’s as a senior engineer.
Not many people care about tenure at this point, and working in multiple environments has served me well. It’s worth calling out that I usually took a pay cut when I switched in order to better align with my career objectives (although the raises always made up for the opportunity cost )
I found every opportunity through LinkedIn, along with many that I passed on. I was always immediately connected with a person (recruiter) rather than a blind resume/email response.
For comparison, I started around the same time, never used LinkedIn and still ended up with a job title similar to yours, making a little more than 400k. This is simply a standard rate for someone with 10 yoe who bothers to change jobs.
These FAANG salaries mystify me. Here I am, in the mid-west, working for a manufacturing company, as a programmer/sysadmin/devop in an engineering department, with 25 years of experience, making almost the top end of what's possible for a non-managerial role, and my salary is NOTHING like that. I just worked with 2 of the world's leading experts in my field -- they literally wrote and created systems to implement the government spec which governs most of our work -- and learned that their salaries -- while staggering in this industry -- weren't even half of this. Sometimes I look at this disparity, and want to take a crack at switching industries, but, frankly, it's intimidating. I guess it's 25 years of conditioning. In old-school manufacturing companies, $400K is VP-level pay. There's probably only a couple dozen people making that at my 30K-employee company. And here you are telling me that it's just a "standard rate" for a devop with 10 years of experience. The difference in worlds is hard to wrap my head around.
Same deal here. 400k, hell even 200k to me would seem like "I've made it", and that's just accepted as normal for others? Also, been doing IT way longer than 10 years.
The main difference in my observation between FAANG and the rest is the growth rate, profit margin, and preference for equity compensation. When starting at a FAANG you'll often receive a high but not outrageous compensation package with equity making up 20-30% of compensation. 4 years later the equity will often have compounded by 20-40% annually yielding the TC packages you see today.
In another industry with stock that appreciates slowly or depreciates over time, the model wouldn't yield the same packages. The company buys your equity grant when you start, and has limited incentive to renegotiate/fight over the outsized reward.
Money is crazy! Here I am, making less than 150k in a VP role of a Silicon Valley startup living in Mexico. Even though 150k living in Mexico is a great salary, $400k just is out of any proportion I can think of in my wildest dreams.
No offence, but in most startups, even the CEO is just a line manager who wouldn't make more than 200k in a second tier company. Unless you own 10% of the preferred shares in that startup, you're giving them a huge discount. If I were you, I'd exchange this VP title for a L7 manager job at bigco, make there a couple millions and start my own shop, now in the founder role.
I'm old enough to remember when having two or three two-year jobs in a row classified you as a job-hopper to employers.
These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending.
> These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending.
I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky. I wouldn't think of being at several places for two years each as complacent or lucky...
I do not think being at places for less than two years as the ideal scenario or a great candidate. Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps) - I look at it like how I've had it... They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
> I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky.
What's your lower bound on 'several years', in this context? Taken literally it's 'three or more', but not everyone uses the word that way.
> Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps)
I wasn't thinking of pay bumps per-se, but of promotions for increased responsibility.
> They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
Sure, but employers are often insecure. The thought that follows that is "what if they think this job is shitty and then leave?"
Employers hate turnover and tend to like having evidence that you will stick around. No matter what the reason is that you didn't stick around somewhere else, however justified or understandable, that reason can't provide the evidence they want.
If someone doesn't use few and uses "several" then I presume "several" means "seve"n or more. Yes, literal language of several allows for 3 or more but we'd use few then. And it's clearly not many - which I put in the 10+ bucket typically.
In my opinion, several years in this context between two companies would be at least 7 years total - however, I think 4-5+ years at one company is a sign of complacency or you got lucky. So, I'd think spending 10 years at two companies very much a sign of complacency or luckiness. I can't imagine doing it unless I got really lucky. Great managers, great organization, great team, decent work, and, of course, great pay... but that is incredibly rare as far as the social circle I'm involved in goes. So, chase the pay at least.
I've never made a post, but I do think I've experienced some of these benefits. Then again I've also become a more attractive job candidate. Tough to separate these things
Do you make a post looking for a job while you're still working at another company? Wouldn't this raise red flags at your existing workplace? I've been told that it's a good idea to look for your next job while you're already working somewhere else, and I'm curious how the 'writing posts' strategy would hold up in this situation.
+1 to the hundreds of views that posts get. LinkedIn is insane that way.
> Do you make a post looking for a job while you're still working at another company? Wouldn't this raise red flags at your existing workplace?
I’m not OP, but as I read it OP just makes a post saying e.g. “my experience with #cryptocurrency and #blockchain combined with #ai on #iot devices has taught me...” etc.
In other words, not a text that says “I’m looking for a job”, but just something that reveals areas of expertise.
While that seems great, it's still a recruiter enablement platform where almost all opportunities will be vampired in the bill rate or salary by commissions.
The fact that linkedin can't provide direct-to-company recruiting and opportunity research shows the platform is largely a failure.
LinkedIn has been a huge win for job seekers and employers alike. The rest of it is quite strange largely because LinkedIn is trying to deal with users who appear for a job search, get something, go dormant for a few years, rinse & repeat.
Not at all.
From my experience (consulting/marketing/advertising/finance), its the same in most professional fields... Job hopping can be a great way to advance your career and your salary.
Until not so long ago I was astonished how such big site can be made so poorly. You had to reload five times to get all elements to load (navbar especially). I tried to use mobile app, which... hadn't allowed me to log in.
Now at least this problem with website is fixed. I don't know whether app already works.
I visit LinkedIn whenever I suspect that I might be experiencing slow Wi-Fi service - their site is so bulky it seems ideal for manually detecting connectivity issues.
IMO LinkedIn provides decent value as an address book for business contacts and as a way for people (recruiters, investors, potential partners) to find you and get in touch with you as a "semi warm" introduction via mutual contacts.
None of this requires the timeline feed. But as long as you ignore the inspirational posts and pictures of wolfs walking in a line, it provides easy networking for people with little natural propensity to do so (like myself)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadAct 1: When I'm not paying attention, my friend says, "hey, do you mind if I go through your address book and contact all your friends and family and ask them to be my friend too? If you consent, say, 'what' or 'huh'"
Act 2: When I'm not looking, this friend goes through my address book and spams all my contacts with whatever they're selling under my name.
What would you advise me to do after that? You'd probably say, this person is not your friend by most definitions of the word, you should cut them out of your life and ask them to not contact you anymore.
To which I may say, but this friend is well connected, they might be able to get me a job in the future. (Although I've never gotten a job or even a lead through LinkedIn personally.)
What would you say to that? Probably something like, they're abusive and deceitful, whatever they have to offer, they'll probably damage your life more than they'd help you.
And that's why I closed my account and added a "delete on sight" filter for their emails.
At the time, Linked In wouldn't even let you opt out of mail without making an account, which is definitely never happening. (Thankfully, they eventually added a way to tell them to not contact me again, but I'm going to carry my grudge)
I don't really understand how you make the jump to this part
With the abusive relationship example, if someone's gone as far as snoop through your phone and text your friends without your knowledge, there is no telling what they'll do next. It's common for someone who does this to also be a verbal and physical abuser, which is rarely worth sticking it out for, regardless of how well-connected they are.
With the specific LinkedIn example, they may e.g. sell your data to third parties, leak your data publicly via irresponsible data storage, and allow employees to access your data without authorization. Not to mention spamming your entire contact list with LinkedIn invitations in your name.
Is that worth it to you in exchange for some networking?
If you use it right, it can be useful. LinkedIn isn't your friend, but you can use their platform for your advantage.
At some point I spent some hours to investigate how they did it and trying to tell google (gmail) to not let Linkedin do it (again?). Not sure how much success I had. I think it is a mistake/problem of Google to allow such things.
Every single one I've ever seen just shits out any old piece of text here and something else there.
My new LinkedIn job title is ‘space Marshall’, partly because my new role as a conservation volunteer sometimes involves enforcing social distancing. Also channeling Mark Watney.
(I'm not KineticLensman on LinkedIn but searching for the Space Marshal skill should find me - at the Hawk Conservancy Trust)
I hate any feature that makes LinkedIn more social. It is a great resume hosting service, but a terrible social network. Since I have to use it for work, I'm hoping the culture on the site continues to be business-focused.
For shared interests, Twitter, reddit, and Facebook groups seem to work well. Have you had any luck with those?
I think Linkedin could carve out that niche but it would require a proper effort to do so.
I now receive continuous emails "Hi Steve (Remote Only) Jones, I have this open position in Omaha .."
The network effect makes it almost impossible to compete with it. If anyone did manage to compete, they are likely to be sucked into recreating the same abhorrent garbage layers over time.
This is social media in a nutshell. I doubt blockchain is going to solve it, so wtf will?
- Premium Career: $29.99/month.
- Premium Business: $59.99/month.
- Sales Navigator Professional: $79.99/month.
- Recruiter Lite: $119.99/month.
The only feature is to be 'a Rolodex on steroids', or 'an adressbook in which some entries are maintained by the contacts themselves'
No social network features beyond that. We're doing our best to align the businessmodel with this. And truly believe it can carve out a niche (and slowly grow from there) without adding all the perverse attentionseeking, 'garbage layers'.
Is that naive?
Not sure if this is an appropriate thread to drop this, but since you asked:
The idea is simple, though: you have a profile on which you put contact details, a list of aspirations and competences. Each such data can be kept private, shared public, or within your network. You add people to your contact list, tag them, keep notes on them or add rich oneway relations (Foo has worked for Bar, from datex to datey at Acmeinc.). Basic crm features. Again, each such data has several privacy levels.
You can search through your contacts and search through the contacts of your contacts. E.g. if you need to find a translater, but don't know any yourself, one of your contacts might know one, and might have shared some data, notes, tags and relations with that translator.
A 'network' is basically a server, instance, in fediverse-speak. An instance would be hosted by your startup-hub, coworking-space, university, etc. You register with one (or more) such instance, and become part of that community, but can add anyone from any other instance, as long as they have a public profile.
At least I wouldn’t consider it a serious professional network just based on that.
That may be incredibly shallow, but those are the only datapoints I have right now.
I guess it’s a matter of adoption though. I’d never have considered google either :)
Any pointers as to what puts you off? From your feedback, I get that you find the name and domain too much hinting at a social network?
1. You couldn’t afford/find a good/similar .com 2. It’s meant to be, well, a social network.
The name flockingbird just sounds casual to me, maybe I get an association with twitter? It doesn’t scream business network to me anyway :)
That said, I like the name flockingbird too. I would want to try it based on the name. I just wouldn’t expect what you just described.
This is one of my last servers with nginx. Nginx and letsencrypt is ... cumbersome, unstable; once every few months I have to manually reboot and/or renew the certs. ugh. Time to move this one to Caddy too.
1. certbot does not need to stop nginx to renew a cert (some modes do).
2. the certbot run succeeded (all certs have been renewed, no network issues, etc) 3. all certs are written correctly so that nginx config is valid (can reach and parse the certs)
In this particular case, for some reason, one of the 7 sites hosted here had a misconfigured DNS, letsencrypt servers could not reach it, certbot failed, no nginx restart was attempted. This case falls in #1, fixable by force-reloading nginx every day after certbot run regardless of whether a cert has been renewed.
All solutions with nginx are cludges like that. Don't get me wrong: certbot/letsencrypt is miles ahead of automation before they came along (I've built en ran several hosting companies, certs automation is a disgrace), but it remains hacky, cludgy and therefore unstable and somewhat unreliable.
1. As a digital resume which recruiters/other people can find on their own, and can contact me if they really need to.
2. As somewhat of a soft sign that I "know"/"have been accepted as a connection by" people who work(ed) in the same company/area in the past. Kind of a signal that "maybe this guy is who he says he is".
Everything else on Linkedin is treated as trash. People I connect to are manually unfollowed almost immediately. Notification settings are modified so that I don't get any emails except inmails and connection requests. I thankfully haven't seen much spam from that till date.
Here are some firefox ublock origin filters I use to make the site a lot more bearable (basically removes the feed, the "news" sections, and other things which don't directly relate to the home page or connectivity). Only bad thing about this is that your list of connections won't show up; I haven't had the time to fix that yet.
www.linkedin.com##.feed-follows-module
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.feed-shared-navigation-module.overflow-hidden.Elevation-2dp.left-rail-container
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.pv3.feed-shared-news-module
www.linkedin.com###launchpad-wormhole
www.linkedin.com##.right-rail
www.linkedin.com##.ember-view.sticky
www.linkedin.com##.artdeco-card.share-box-feed-entry__wrapper
www.linkedin.com##div[class^="feed-shared-update"]
Linkedin was already like that before Microsoft bought it.
former coworker rolodex
spamming internal recruiters to bypass portal applications
flexing on people who previously rejected you by adding them after you get a job at a way better employer
On the other hand, having a linkedin doesn't seem to be helping me get a job, but that may just be confirmation bias.
Using LinkedIn Jobs for finding a new opportunity? It's slightly better than Indeed et. al., at least in my experience.
Using LinkedIn to network with interesting people and potentially engage in new opportunities with them? It's amazing.
Using LinkedIn Recruiter? Nothing else compares.
That's basically how I see LinkedIn.
Create an account to list yourself in a CV catalog. Add connection with people you worked with to build credibility. Otherwise only ever open it when you're looking for a job. Otherwise you're risking getting cancer from looking at all that shameless self-promotion and posturing.
The hostage dynamic allows it to get away with really annoying and awful features that you put up with anyway because you have little choice.
That is still a situation where you’re using something even though you realize there’s a lot of nonsense because there’s value to you. LinkedIn still takes advantage of this dynamic whether you choose to ignore it or not.
I liken it to the fact that porn sites can get away with extremely intrusive ads because people demand their service and have little alternative. Whether you try to block or ignore the ads as much as possible isn’t really the point.
There are certain news sites like Forbes that are so annoying that I don't deal with it.
The point is LinkedIn is in a category where you "need" it but don't necessarily want it, and that dynamic allows them to do very annoying things.
Sure a lot of websites can try to hold you hostage but, again, the question is whether they even offer something you need enough to deal with it.
I was just adding that most of the internet is this way, not just porn sites.
We can say that most websites are on a spectrum of ad-driven BS and Linkedin (and porn sites) are further to one end.
So for me, the problem is less about Linkedin and more about the difficulty of building alternative business models that are sustainable.
What offering will eventually replace Linkedin and will we have to endure more or less BS?
I think that it is. If you're blocking them, you're getting whatever you want from the website without the downside of the ads. If you're putting up with the ads, that's a bit closer to a hostage situation. Same with LinkedIn - as long as you're using it in a way that's okay with you, I don't see a problem.
It’s a story about how a useful service that is difficult to quit for professional reasons takes full advantage of that dynamic to get away with doing really annoying or awful things.
The fact that certain individuals are more deft at ignoring or blocking or turning off the annoying parts of the service does not change the dynamic at all.
While I think LinkedIn’s issues are best understood as symptoms of larger issues in corporate / middle-class culture, the article is on-point.
OTOH, I do the kind of work you don't do fizzbuzz tests for in an interview, and soft skills are a larger part of my job.
Previously I would spend hours trawling job boards, composing cover letters and get excited at the prospect of one successful reply. It was soul destroying.
Now I can construct a post, complete with trendy hashtags, and passively watch _hundreds_ of recruiters reach out to me in 24hrs. Now I can sit with a coffee and easy filter out the crap. It's taken some time to build up the 8,000+ contacts, mostly of senior tech people amd recruiters.
Every job in the last 5yrs has been through LinkedIn and due to the ease by which I could change jobs, salary has sky rocketed too.
Maybe I am in the minority of people who use it as a tool this way?
Edit: I also have an emoji as the first "letter" in the string of my first name. This instantly allows me to visually/programmatically filter out genuine "human" messages from bots. I also reply to these messages, as let's be honest, a human took time to compose the message to me. A quick "thank you" (one button click!) goes a long way.
It helps if you have a "weak ties" connection to them, even if you don't really know them: you may be connected via someone else (in which case, asking for an introduction will almost certainly work), you may both be alumni of an org or institution, you may both have attended the same event (this works in a sort of 'missed connections' fashion), and so on.
One somewhat counterintuitive tip: you don't need to connect to a lot of hyper-connected folks, probably just one or two that are actually in your industry. Intros through indiscriminate folks like that tend to be disregarded unless there is a highly targeted ask simply because most of the folks they are connected to don't actually have an existing relationship or particular affinity with them. Similarly, so called "LinkedIn Open Networkers" that accept all incoming connection requests are also something of a red flag, unless you are actually in an industry like recruiting, marketing, or PR, where a 'reach' numbers game is a viable strategy.
Once your network starts growing, you'll start to get more incoming requests from folks trying to do the same thing you are. Don't accept the ones that don't make any sense (eg. If you are a medical software dev in the Midwest, feel free to decline that random connection request from an accountant in Azerbaijan), or you'll start to get a lot more of those (because folks who connect to lots of random folks tend to be mostly connected to others who do the exact same thing).
Absolutely reject and report requests that are outright spam. If you aren't sure, you can reply to ask what led them to try and connect with you before you make the decision to accept ignore or reject the request (saying "Hi, thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry, but I have a terrible memory, and I don't recognize your name or profile image. Did we meet at an event last year?" will work without being insulting).
It all boils down to this: if you want to have a large but high quality/relevance network, you need to be prolific but not indiscriminate in making connection requests.
Have you ever tried declaring yourself a thought leader? What kind of mileage does that get you?
And I still don't love it, but I have to admit it's got a place in the strategy. Posting a job req with some focused hashtags seems to help get more responses. Posting a few industry-appropriate articles does seem to help keep our company in folks' minds.
In an ideal world every company I work for will be so amazing and so well known that I don't have to sell it to folks because the right folks are coming straight to us. Or that all of my friends and all of their friends will magically be capable of switching jobs to come build a new team with me whenever I need to grow.
But reality doesn't work like that, and so things like LinkedIn end up being table stakes. It isn't the whole of my recruitment strategy, but certainly it's a functional part.
It's a negative signal. Go build something instead.
It's one of the biggest blocks I see from developers who are otherwise qualified for positions like that but they don't know how to advocate for themselves.
There is a games element to hiring and you have to put aside the thoughts of it being gross because at the end of the day it's a major component in earning more which for most people is one of the reasons they work.
I say this as a dev myself and not a recruiter.
It becomes very quickly a real-life game of "would you do X for Y money? ".
Saying "I wouldn't use a linked in hashtag for $10k/year (25k a year? 100k a year?) " is a pretty strong principle.
This obviously is a step beyond self promotion. At this point I’m already reviewing someone’s resume. So the question is perhaps how would you get noticed to begin with? How do you market yourself? I don’t know. Work? No better form of self promotion than doing a good job.
What don't you like about it?
> how would you get noticed to begin with?
- - -
Thanks btw for writing about how you think about GitHub PR discussions etc.
Btw i didn't post at all to LinkedIn at least not yet
Not sure. Something just seems off. Perhaps it's because you have a category of not-very-close friends on LinkedIn promoting themselves really hard and the correlation between people self-promoting in that very "LinkedIn fashion" and being a really big asshat seems strong. Anecdotal, but still.
I read it as: "Assuming hashtagging and self-promotion on LinkedIn was effective, I still would not do it no matter the money", and that's the interpretation I replied to - perhaps erroneously.
In a broader discussion - it's all about the fit. I don't think there's a single advice, action, characteristic, attribute, or effort, that won't increase your chances with X% of employers/recruiters/HR and decrease your chances with Y% of employers/recruiters/HR.
[FWIW, I personally have Linked In, it's my online resume, but I don't interact with platform in any other manner; Self-promoting posts are indeed a turn-off for me personally - but I'm neither actively seeking a new job nor promoting my business, so it'd be a bit of dishonest to claim that situational personal preference for a larger truth :]
Right lesson: "If X can help even stupid and incompetent people get prestigious roles and big salaries, I wonder what it would do for a smart and competent person. Probably the same, only more of it."
Both iot and machine learning are the tail wagging the dog. You use a tech because it's appropriate, not because it's trending. The number of businesses trying to shoehorn ML into their sales deck is hilarious, I don't know how much my previous employer spent on continued failed attempts at that trend.
If you get 100 likes on someone on LinkedIn you will have a massive amount of recruiters see it.
I'll ask LI to restart their computer.
Maybe only people who are connected to people already connected to you can find you, or the profile is private.
I always enjoy seeing how much the market will bear when answering them with I'm making $400k(just a number) now what is this web developer position offering? Meaning I bump my salary to see what the market will bear .. if i didnt go too high they will go higher and I boosted my salary by double or more. This trick is best though when your a junior to mid level developer ... salaries do cap out Ive noticed. But, it's always fun to see what you might be able to get.
I use to see a lot of HN readers complain about recruiters. Some are overzealous and shady like I told one recruiter i just met this girl two weeks ago at web dev Meetup who just started at same company. He hunted her down and kept leaving voicemails on her work phone & then calling the receptionist when she didnt answer him(omg lol). Another forced me to lie to owner of company they placed me at, which I very begrudgingly did(hide recruiters shady business practice). Though I sold her and her company out once she threaten to make up false stories so he wouldnt hire me full-time(he did hire me). Though out of ten years and dealing with 100 to possibly 100s of recruiters those two are outliers in my experience.
How many jobs have you HAD in the past 5 years?
As with all hiring though, this is far from perfect.
Leaving early means the investment wasn’t worth it (compared to hiring someone who doesn’t job hop)
I haven't seen a job like this in a decade or more. The last two jobs I had expected you to be fully productive in a month, and if you not had made major contributions in by 12 months (and more specifically didn't fit in with management) you were going to be let go. Letting go of employees used to be relatively rare, but I find it's becoming standard practice these days.
I can't think of a single job I've had where ICs weren't deploying code to production within two weeks and at full productivity in about a month.
Decades ago it used to be the case that you could take time to fit in, find your strengths and start growing. But the idea that you would "just be getting started" at 12 months is laughable.
Job "hopping" used to make sense a few years ago because it was the fastest way to get promoted. Now I would say it's an essential survival skills as any place you aren't happy at is likely seeing that an planning when they can start to pip you.
"Is this someone with high potential who could grow / be trained into a high performer?" to
"Is this someone who can hit the ground running and be productive within a month?"
It's very possible the answer is still yes, but I'm not going to spend time investing in a more uncertain candidate, if it's pretty clear they'll jump as soon as my time investment starts to pay off.
It is also worth noting a 12 month fixed term contract for any new full-time employee is standard. Due to Dutch employment law, the employer only has to offer a perm contract after a number of years (after the 3rd I think). This hardly encourages career growth and it if it takes 12 months to be "up to speed" you would have been fired already!
At the end of those 12 months they don't have to offer you anything more. Struggling and need extra training? Nope, you're gone. Particular project changing course (new CTO, new management)? Nope, you're gone. Pay rise? Lucky for 1% without threatening to leave... but other companies will add 15% for a new contract in a similar role. It's a no-brainer.
There was no sense of loyalty on either side.
The large professional network I made in the city helped enormously and heard about open positions on a weekly basis.
Now I am in a new role (outside of the Netherlands) where I genuinely hope I can stay with the company for many years and have a long career with them (with opportunities to progress internally). Their niche is something which I believe in and have a sense of pride about what they do.
My first job was a 40k per year IT job. I changed jobs every 1.5 years or so, and was able to find a niche in Big Data followed by Real time bidding in ad-tech, and now ML work in one of the FANG’s as a senior engineer.
Not many people care about tenure at this point, and working in multiple environments has served me well. It’s worth calling out that I usually took a pay cut when I switched in order to better align with my career objectives (although the raises always made up for the opportunity cost )
I found every opportunity through LinkedIn, along with many that I passed on. I was always immediately connected with a person (recruiter) rather than a blind resume/email response.
In another industry with stock that appreciates slowly or depreciates over time, the model wouldn't yield the same packages. The company buys your equity grant when you start, and has limited incentive to renegotiate/fight over the outsized reward.
> How many jobs have you HAD in the past 5 years?
I'm old enough to remember when having two or three two-year jobs in a row classified you as a job-hopper to employers.
These days, it seems like having several two-year stints ought to classify you as either complacent about your career progression or pretty lucky, depending.
I'd think of being at two places over several years being either complacent or lucky. I wouldn't think of being at several places for two years each as complacent or lucky...
I do not think being at places for less than two years as the ideal scenario or a great candidate. Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps) - I look at it like how I've had it... They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
What's your lower bound on 'several years', in this context? Taken literally it's 'three or more', but not everyone uses the word that way.
> Unless the person is hopping from FAANG to FAANG (hopping for pay bumps)
I wasn't thinking of pay bumps per-se, but of promotions for increased responsibility.
> They had to go from one shitty job to another because they couldn't get the right one.
Sure, but employers are often insecure. The thought that follows that is "what if they think this job is shitty and then leave?"
Employers hate turnover and tend to like having evidence that you will stick around. No matter what the reason is that you didn't stick around somewhere else, however justified or understandable, that reason can't provide the evidence they want.
In my opinion, several years in this context between two companies would be at least 7 years total - however, I think 4-5+ years at one company is a sign of complacency or you got lucky. So, I'd think spending 10 years at two companies very much a sign of complacency or luckiness. I can't imagine doing it unless I got really lucky. Great managers, great organization, great team, decent work, and, of course, great pay... but that is incredibly rare as far as the social circle I'm involved in goes. So, chase the pay at least.
It was four years.
+1 to the hundreds of views that posts get. LinkedIn is insane that way.
I’m not OP, but as I read it OP just makes a post saying e.g. “my experience with #cryptocurrency and #blockchain combined with #ai on #iot devices has taught me...” etc.
In other words, not a text that says “I’m looking for a job”, but just something that reveals areas of expertise.
The fact that linkedin can't provide direct-to-company recruiting and opportunity research shows the platform is largely a failure.
I cry when I read linkedin (for work opportunities).
I feel like vomiting when closing linkedin (for work opportunities).
(PS, looking, fullstack UX/UI/Vue/Node/Go/Python/Swift etc. Aus.)
Now at least this problem with website is fixed. I don't know whether app already works.
None of this requires the timeline feed. But as long as you ignore the inspirational posts and pictures of wolfs walking in a line, it provides easy networking for people with little natural propensity to do so (like myself)