I think you'd either need a better job market or a platform appealing to an audience that isn't on LinkedIn to better it and end it. Right now, you aren't moving the white collar recruiters because LinkedIn caters to them so people who want jobs aren't going to your alternative.
Maybe a platform targeted at first towards blue collar and minimum wage workers that makes it easier for them to find new jobs? Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf.
Now that this is the second comment is added to your comment, wait for another 5-7 minutes, then edit your initial comment adding something short and witty about life, the universe, and everything, and see the comments and karma exploding!!!
:)
Speaking as someone who worked on doing exactly that for a while [1]: as long as all the jobs are there and all the job seekers are there, it's very hard to dislodge. Empirically, users want "all the jobs" more than they want UI improvements or lack of engagement-bait posts.
One of the very first things I wrote down for my current company was "build a service, not a product", where "product" here might as well mean "platform". There was good reason for that.
Some users want 'all the jobs'. Many other users would prefer access to job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment, perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers, etc. Many job posters don't like dealing with it either, but "that's where all the job seekers are!". No, they're really not. It's an overloaded marketplace optimized for engagement rather than good outcomes for either party.
...is all very easy to say, but empirically didn't work. Or at least, our specific attempt at it didn't.
One of the reasons I wrote the blog post I linked in my previous comment is to tell a story, in concrete terms, of why this kind of "well why don't you just" story fails in all sorts of ways both obvious and not. It's thousands of words long, and it doesn't even cover all the big points of how complicated actually trying to build something better is. It omits many things I spent weeks thinking about in the moment, and barely mentions people who worked on the problem for years, in the interest of being only a twenty-minute read, in an effort to just give a taste of the complexity of working on a problem in its full complexity.
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> job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment
What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for?
The vast majority of applications, anywhere, suck. Some platforms suck more than others (and LinkedIn is one of the worst), but if you've never done hiring yourself, I'd like to impress on you just how bad the average applicant is. Even on places like Work At A Startup or Wellfound or direct apps on your company website (which tend to be higher-quality on average), most applicants are awful. And thus, the acknowledgement will almost always be "nope sorry bye now".
If that's the acknowledgement you're looking for, lots of places do do that (in our case, we'd close out an app if not actioned on in a short period of time and send a message saying the company hadn't acted). But are you really going to use an entirely different platform because they say "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of energy to sign up?
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> perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers
We did this. We did the same for recruiters, actually (limiting the number of messages they could send candidates).
In practice, this didn't make the average message significantly better (granted, this was pre-GPT), and it created a new set of problems. Recruiters would get pissed at us if a candidate didn't work out, because they hadn't just spent a minute sending a message, they'd spent one of their precious message credits. They stopped being willing to consider borderline candidates or candidates with non-traditional backgrounds for fear of wasting messages (even though in the vast majority of cases they weren't exhausting their limit! FOMO is a thing, and user behavior is frequently irrational or uninformed!).
Nor did candidates put meaningfully more effort into the apps they were sending out. Nor did recruiters meaningfully value applications any more than they did elsewhere. Unless you're doing very vigorous tracking, the difference between applications being 99% crap and 97% crap is not very noticeable and requires rather large sample size to detect. That's a 200% improvement that can go totally unnoticed (and good luck achieving that much of an improvement in the first place).
That's even assuming your users are statistically-rational, which of course they are not. Recruiting is low-information, high-emotional-valence, low-trust, low-sample-size, low-agency, and high-noise, and that's about the worst possible mix you can stir up for cognitive biases of all kinds. Most recruiting advice is one step removed from "you should message candidates with a Q in their name only on tuesdays under the first full moon of the harvest" as a result.
And that's even setting aside the adverse-selection effects that mean alternative platforms tend to end up dominated by (a) hard to fill roles and (b) desperate candidates (since those are the ones that don't get matched through default channels).
And yes, you can come up with solutions for these things - when you know they're problems. But t...
By no means was I trying to say these will solve everything at all, and thanks for detailing a bit more of what you did.
Was just having a conversation with someone today about this topic too. Some companies get 80 applications, and someone will indeed actually at least put eyes on all 80. Other companies get 80, and they'll just look at the first 3-5 then stop and move on to other stuff.
>
> I'm saying that "the existing solution is bad" is not sufficient to draw people to alternatives by itself, and that building a better solution is harder than it seems.
Without a doubt. I've been asked a couple of times to join 'job board' startups, and there's never been a compelling hook as to how to differentiate or compete with indeed/linkedin/etc. There were ways to differentiate, but to me, they weren't compelling enough to throw my lot in with them. And... not surprisingly, years later, neither got very far. In one case, the 'hook' was to provide as detailed a profile as you could, asking users to input things like various NAICS codes to classify their work in various industries, so that people who know NAICS codes could search for your skills faster. That's certainly differentiating your platform, just not in a good way.
> What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for? ... But are you really going to use an entirely different platform because they say "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of energy to sign up?
Not on its own, no. There likely are platforms that automatically close stuff out and send an acknowledgement that the hiring company has passed on you.... but I don't think I've ever engaged with one in 20+ years. And the 'takes a bunch of energy to sign up' - ideally that's already something that is taken care of.
The one place I see some growing value in 'job boards/markets' is in niche/focus - industry/skill niche and/or geographic niche. Job boards focusing on .net, or matlab, etc run by orgs who have some ability to bridge the gap between the hiring industry folks and the workers seem to be where it's at, but I seem to only know of a few (but expect that trend to grow).
Is LinkedIn a good place to find jobs? I deleted my account a decade back over some privacy slight and I thought it was just some weird blogging platform for posturing now. Is it worthwhile as a jobs platform?
I'm sure it varies a lot by type of job, but in my field it is not the first or even fifth place I would look for a new job. There's a lot of noise and postings can often be stale or in some cases are missing details, maybe because they were scraped from other job boards. If you have a large network, you may hear about upcoming jobs directly from colleagues' posts, but I think the general job search features on LinkedIn are pretty useless.
That said, I did learn some time ago that you can use various search operators (Boolean, parentheses, and quotes) which make it a little easier to actually get relevant job search results.
No platform is really a good place to find jobs, but if you - like the average job seeker - think of things mostly in terms of volume of available jobs, it'll win at that, as will the other incumbents. (The trade-off is that, precisely because they're the default and open to everyone, your chance of getting each job is very low. But you only figure that out after using the platform, and conversion is half the battle from the perspective of someone operating the platform.)
In general though, applications are always a terrible way to find a job. They're a last resort when your networks and other connections and "ins" fail.
actually doing some contract work for a competitor that is tackling job searching/candidate searching from a referral/recruiting perspective and i am very optimistic. i think if the execution goes well, it's going to be huge. they've raised a fairly sizeable seed round. somebody needs to kill linkedin--it's awful.
You know, there is this maddening trend on HN to bemoan how networks owned by large centralized corporations with profit motives enshittify everything (Skype, Reddit, LinkedIn)
But then as soon as an open, decentralized alternative not driven by the profit motive is introduced, it’s knee-jerk criticized and downvoted. How do you expect anything to change if you won’t support any solutions? (Other than, let’s use the government regulations / antitrust / whatever).
Here is a free and open alternative that I have been working on for 12 years:
There are other solutions too, like Mastodon and Matrix. I just think they are much further behind and people expect features comparable to Facebook and Twitter, much like they expect the Impossible Burger to be as good as a meat burger as possible before they can switch. It’s not easy, but we need to support open source projects that get that done, rather than tear them apart. Just my 2c.
PS: If anyone with any sort of skills wants to contribute to this, more than happy to talk. My email is greg at the domain qbix.com
I have no trouble sharing links. Even multiple links in one post, although the first one will define the preview. Nor do I have a problem sharing images and including urls in the post body. Nor do I understand why people only share the link in the top comment.
What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other than that, how is sharing links painful?
I think LinkedIn is fantastic. Early in my career my LinkedIn resume was how I got work. At this point, sharing links and my own blog posts to keep my 6,500 followers interested in me as an expert is how I get work.
The only part I don't like is sharing a Post to All in a group... one group at a time. Sharing in a few groups is a good way to drive views but I've developed excellent motor skills at navigating all those clicks necessary to do it.
Reading the article, I guess he's just saying that sharing a link will make the algorithm rank your post lower. This has been happening everywhere, I suppose, recently on Twitter, quite a while ago on Facebook... a combination of social networks wanting to keep readers captive on the platform, preferring content that's been adapted for the platform, and some (probably justified) suspicion that links are more promotional than informative.
So what's "hard" is using SEO-style tricks to share a link without your post being pushed into obscurity. And for people without the time or desire to hack the algorithm, it means sharing links on LinkedIn isn't very effective.
> What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other than that, how is sharing links painful?
It’s explained in multiple parts but often sharing a link will “downrank” your post simply because it contains a link.
This is also very common on social media sites, not just LI.
lol which is funny because i think twitter updated their post rankings to boost those with images/links...but i guess that makes sense considering twitter is mostly text-based trying hard not to get left behind the other more video/media-centric socials like tiktok.
Author here. You seem to be intentionally conflating the ability to post a link with my critique of how LinkedIn affects its reach through the algorithm.
To be clear: Your links will physically “work,” as in you can post them. But they lose much of their organic reach, in part because LinkedIn treats links as second-class citizens. It wants you to stay engaged on the platform.
(The guy I quoted in the piece says he figured this out through research.)
The result is that, if you’re trying to build an audience on that network, you have to spend inordinate amounts of time building lengthy content that is built for the network itself, which is why every LinkedIn post seems huge.
It’s the difference between a handful of likes and comments and hundreds, possibly thousands. Think of it this way: You are driving a car that cannot switch gears, and using that to dispute the claims of a post that is critiquing the inability to switch gears.
To be clear, you may be OK with that, but the problem is, it intentionally does not play fairly with the open internet, and it means that people have to do a lot of additional busywork to use this service that they prefer to spend on something else.
There’s a difference between being able to do something, which is what you’re describing, and it actually functioning to the best of its capabilities. Sure, you can run with a sprained ankle, but you’re going to go a lot slower and feel a lot more pain than someone who doesn’t have that impediment.
LinkedIn is artificially adding impediments to linked posts, just like every other platform. But they appear to be doing so in ways more dramatic and extreme than some of their competitors.
Thank you for taking the time for this thoughtful reply. I did not mean literally posting works. What I meant was I do get followers for my link posts but... actually one where I posted just a photo did 10x better than any of my previous posts. The best posts I've done have been LinkedIn Blog Posts.
I'm not an expert at this, and you are, so tell me... should I really not use images? Like, I often post a link to a paper and then I will summarize it and rather than a link I will post one of the figures from the paper. What's a better strategy than that?
My only guess as to why people put so much effort in trying to use platforms that are so obviously user-hostile, is the fear of missing out — not being where everyone else is.
If the company you're applying for cares whether you're on LinkedIn, consider withdrawing your application.
My previous employer's evil HR director weaponized employee Linked In profiles. The hr department would actively monitor employee linked in pages. You were expected to regularly post positive stuff about the company (it would come up in reviews), BUT if it looked like the employee was buffing their resume they would have the employee's manager bring the employee in to try and figure out if they were getting ready to quit, and in certain cases use those updates as the impetus for us to "find a reason" to PiP/fire the employee.
Or, if you were a manager on HR's shitlist as someone they wanted gone, they would use employees updating their profile it as cause for the manager's manager to investigate if the manager should be fired for low staff morale, since the employees were seen as getting ready to quit, and so it must be the managers fault.
The company's position was, you should only use your linked in profile to talk about how good the employer was, and anything else to promote the employee or look for a job was a trigger for "finding a reason to fire".
I do think Cory Doctorow has done an unwitting disservice with the
word "enshitification". It's great to name a phenomenon, but after
that it serves to hide more than it reveals. Far less often discussed
is the emotional dynamics around 'social media'.
Way I see it, most all BigTech social media is bitterness and
resentment. The platform owners have as much contempt for the users as
the users have for the platform.
I honesstly don't understand why anyone posts on LinkedIn. It seems like such a pick me move from anyone who can't build an audience on Twitter. The only people who I see post on LInkedIn are wanna-be "thought leaders" and people who are looking for a job.
LinkedIn is such a user-hostile platform with no value proposition to anyone who isn't in those two groups. You have a LinkedIn profile as a CV with connections as a kind of social proof and never think about it otherwise.
As for the "trick" in this post, it seems like every platform with a feed have this issue. I've seen people recommend posting Youtube Shorts and untick the box "send notification to subscribers" because most subscribers are dead accounts so if you do this Youtube thinks the video has poor engagement.
Twitter is how I built my entire network in the Bay Area... it was amazing at flattening hierarchies, I could talk to anyone. Then at some point the recommender system changed and people in my network never saw tweets from one another. At that point it became useless for my career.
Concurrently, LinkedIn sharing grew from nothing to awesome. I get most of my news about the latest developments in my field from LinkedIn. I get jobs by posting blog posts on LinkedIn, or summaries of interesting recent papers.
Computer science. More and more researchers are on LinkedIn, and if you post a paper and @ their account, you are instantly on their radar since most are never recognized like that. Pro tip ;)
It's cancerous how important "building an audience" and "engagement" has become to chronically-online people, and how it's seeping into meatspace, even into job applications.
I hereby swear to never set out to "build a personal brand" in my life. Total toxic waste. I wish humanity could get over itself.
Because LinkedIn is where people bring their "professional" persona and can actually write in-depth on a subject. Which means those who know what they're talking about can actually write something worth reading.
Twitter is a flaming toxic dumpster fire whose only purpose seems to be to post hot takes, or to gang up on and bully people who disagree with you 280 characters at a time.
I've never been a big user of LinkedIn but started writing the occasional blog post a few months back after my employer said I needed to increase my "external eminence". I was pleasantly surprised at the number of reactions and comments I got. More recently I have shared a few external links along with some commentary on them and hardly gotten any reactions or comments. I guess that explains it.
LinkedIn is a safe place for raising eminence. Praising each other could safely be mandatory by the T&C with the retaliation of locking you out for life while keeping your profile public but clearing all your achievements and contacts except the very first one, very very few people would trigger that clause.
Not only that. LinkedIn is now plagued by these little diagrams posted and re-re-posted that tell absolutely nothing about a topic, useful just to some people that only want to get traction/attention on the platform. Then you have all these annoying suggestions of topics that at least for me 99% of the time I'm absolutely not interested in wasting my time on. Suggestions and posts that are from someone on the other side of the planet that I have absolutely no relation to. When I negatively posted about these diagrams, after few days my critic "magically" dissapeared from the platform. Gone. Then you are also invited to answer random questions I have zero interest on. I lost the count how many times I clicked "Not interested in topic" only to see it coming back over and over again. The list goes on and on. It is an absolutely rotten platform. Many many years ago LinkedIn was something completely different, and was quite enjoyable to use. Big companies really know how to ruin products.
LinkedIn was never perfect. It worked for some who had extensive people networks to bring to the platform, but the platform itself was always hot garbage. I still tell younger folk about the days when they would spam your entire address book. I'm still seen as the loony in my peer circle for having no LinkedIn presence. It's an industry standard of hot garbage.
I feel like there are two types of LinkedIn users: The ones who think it's good/great/useful, and then the other 96% who wish it didn't exist, but have a profile because you have to play the game. I learned from a recruiter years ago that the most valuable part of your LI profile is what you did (a short resume) and your connections number. If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing. The quality of those connections does not matter to the people who look at that number.
So basically LI is a huge sales/marketing/MLM echo chamber with 19 out of 20 users there against their will.
That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's utterly useless.
Would you take more into consideration a person who has more connections than other even tho they have the same resume?
Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing.
Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network".
Fortunately quite many, maybe cause my sector is highly demanded, but having 1k,2k or whatever number of connections is not a metric for a lookable candidate. Years of experience, your github projects, open-source contribs are valuable metrics IMHO.
Maybe recruiters after all also look a the connection number, could be, but its like saying a photographer is better than other cause he just simply posts more pictures.
I think you're reading in too much to the above comment... from what I can tell they're just trying to say "it's a dumb metric because recruiters are dumb"
Maybe I am overlapping my personal experience with others, but since I have a small number of connections, my job requests from recruiters in LI are normally optimal, quite elaborate and high-quality.
> That correlation between connections and being good/bad it's utterly useless. Would you take more into consideration a person who has more connections than other even tho they have the same resume?
Would I? No, but I also have never once looked at someone's LinkedIn when in the hiring process. I used to carefully curate who I connected with so that when looking at my connections, you could see it was a list of respected people in their fields, but I had barely over 100. Several recruiters told me point blank that doesn't matter at all. So I stopped bothering to care about my LI profile and connections, and suddenly had a LOT more activity with recruiters when I added more connections. Seemed quantity is truly valued over quality there.
> Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing.
Yes, that was my point.
> Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network".
You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in the end.
>You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in the end.
Maybe a high number of connections causes a better first-impression, but if the candidate does not know how to write or articulate a word makes things much harder. Overall, seeing how a person expresses their ideas in their natural language gives you a better impression of how a person thinks/operates.
Which in the end matters, cause you are dealing with persons, not statistics.
For first instance recruiters, having a large number of people in your LI can get you into the first recruitment stage, but you won't pass if you don't know how to communicate, express and confront ideas, that's how it works.
I never really understood the negativity towards LinkedIn and I'm probably not one of those 4% considering I basically never use it. To me LI is the perfect sort of social network, where it's actually useful when you need it, and the rest of the time you can simply ignore it. In years where I'm not considering changing jobs I'll usually only open LI to add new colleagues, or click an e-mail to accept someone wanting to link up with me, and that's it. Well, I'll admit that I kind of use it as an online resume for myself because I dislike updating my old doc (I really need to get that written in something that isn't doc). If I get some big brain-think which is related to my professional life I'll write it down in a note app and keep it for when I actually want to "activate" the LI algorithm.
To do that I'll post a few comments over a week, which seems to make LI think you're an active user, and then I'll post the most relevant / well written brain-think from my collection. If I'm feeling frisky I'll post two. A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15 years), but usually there is something interesting in the ocean of shit. Some of my colleagues use it actively and dislike it, but use it because they think they have to. In my experience that's not the case at all. The 500+ may be true, I crossed that long ago even though I've generally worked in non-tech enterprise so 80% of my connections have nothing to do with SWE.
Maybe this means that I do fall under the 4%, but even if you hate LI, you should know that you can play it extremely casual.
I don't hate it, I just don't care about it. I'm in a field where I get jobs by what I've done, not how many work-friends I have on a website. I wish I didn't have to play the LI game but for some reason business execs think that connections number means something, so I have to play the game a little.
> A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15 years)
Ditto, except I'm not even a programmer and never have been but I still get a flood of Java programming offers. I actually get so many I have "java developer" as a filtered phrase in my email. I get 50+ a month, every month, for a decade now.
And really that's what most people get on LI, oodles of connection or sales spam, and irrelevant communications from people casting nets rather than actually being good recruiters and finding good people. That's why most people "hate" it, it's junk mail we actually have to interact with sometimes. I spend maybe 2 minutes a month there, and wish I didn't have to at all.
I get one or two recruiter messages a year, and I’m in the market for a job. Posts mentioning how many contacts they make me wonder what’s wrong with my profile.
I don't know but I'm guessing recruiters have access to some sort of algorithm on who's a likely target based on what skills / projects you have listed on your LI. The recruiter spam I get is much more on target after I "cleaned up" at least. The reason I get so many Java offers is because my area is very Java/C# rich, and since I may one day want to work with Java/C# again I've kept them on my LI profile, at least it's relatively easy to filter out.
The actual "job" site of LinkedIn is terrible for me though. It's probably because I worked in the public sector and was involved with medical software, but LI seems to think I'm a doctor, a nurse and a firefighter (for whatever reason) at the same time.
Hate is maybe a little strong. I don’t hate LinkedIn, though I barely have an account. LinkedIn is like being back in business school - everyone is the next CEO of $household_name and they all have this incredibly profound wisdom to share on how you too could be the next CEO of $household_name.
I went through business school once and every second was a little worse than the last one. I’m good without LI.
They spammed your contacts list in the early years. All my coworkers have detailed job history peddled by various data brokers who scraped or bought the data from LI. That is a significant security threat if you are a worthwhile spear phishing target to a state level actor.
LI had that, ages ago but also, and this is the dark pattern, got your contacts (like from phone app, or email extension) and then LI messaged them saying "@PaulHoule is on LI! Update your profile or become insignificant! Do it NOW!!"
I absolutely abhor LinkedIn but I play the game when I need to change paths. I do everything I can to never, ever log into it. I get immediate stress and second hand embarassment/cringe feelings when I do log in to update something.
I have 15-17ish years in tech at various levels up to FAANG and over 1000+ connections but nothing crazy, I don't go out to make connections or anything so its purely organic job search/leave stuff. I don't add anyone I don't know and never have.
When I log into it some of those 1000 connections are people from jobs I worked at that were so miserable that as soon as I see their names pop up I'm like, fuck, I'm glad you got away but now I'm reminded of my experience at XYZ.
Then you have the Tony Robbins hustle culture people. They're impossible to avoid. "I sleep under my desk m-f! HUSTLE!" These aren't even my connections usually, it's just LInkedIn doing its for you page thinking I want to read that stuff while writing grpc services.
It feels so much like performative bullshit. Everyone trying to impress one another with nothing impressive. Nobody talks serious tech. I've worked on some incredibly complex distsys stuff and we used to all network with one another on twitter. Never, ever linkedin. We'd add each other for the connection clout but we only discussed projects and real tech stuff on twitter or discord. I DO contribute my knowledge to some LinkedIn posts when I am around to do so, that usually consists explaining to someone how OCI containers or kubernetes or something works or to help them have a better process but those questions rarely start out with any technical depth beyond "this is how I shrink my docker images! Copy vs ADD!!"
I'll log in and "Super Smart CTO Evangelist Hyper 10x Guru" who was a level 2 sysadmin who did piss poor work is still spouting that bullshit 10 years later. And I don't have only one of those, I have tons of those.
I have a new manager as of about 6 months ago. He's horrendous. I made the mistake of not interviewing him (I'm staff level so it would've been me and 2 others yes/nos) and he got hired. I finally looked at his LinkedIn (not logged in, because I don't want that creepy site to tell him I'm looking at him) and he had the "SWE Manager Guru" bullshit and I just.. sighed.
LinkedIn is a vastly different culture from the actual tech social media/communities I'm in. It's straight up performative sell-yourself bullshit. I just think it's gross.
That site is made for recruiters and sales people.
As every social it is mostly used by attention seekers and provides very little utility.
I swear I never found a job (or client now that I'm freelancing) nor I have found decent candidates on it.
I'm consistently spammed by Indians and middle eastern devs every time I open a position, it's just endless which my current client does not want to hire due to timezone and language issues and definitely some bias for the quality of their coding and task understanding abilities.
Well why then don't you put a sign on your "position ad" (assuming it's real and not dreamed up) saying "no negroes allowed"? Coze surely that's the vibe of your message.
It's not my fault that the experience with developers coming from those areas has not been good and my current company does not want to repeat the mistake.
There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do.
I don’t think anyone was blaming you personally, nor am I.
> that the experience with developers coming from those areas has not been good and my current company does not want to repeat the mistake.
> There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do.
Whether or not racism is involved in this case, it is absolutely possible to be racist against Middle Easterners and Indians without being racist against Africans. Racism is not a single binary yes/no question.
Also, is the time zone (whether of residence or of work) really the determining factor, or is it where the person personally or ancestrally comes from?
For example, would the client consider someone personally and ancestrally from India or the Middle East who currently lives in Germany or Africa and works in the local time zone there, or who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country but nevertheless can work at the same times that the Europeans work instead of asynchronously?
(Tangent: Egypt is usually considered to be both in Africa and in the Middle East, and it’s in a Europe-compatible time zone like the rest of Africa. The rest of my comment will ignore this, but it highlights how weird it is to exclude the Middle East but not Africa for time zone reasons.)
What about a Swedish or British person who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country and works in the local time zone there?
And does the client’s policy treat Israel like the Middle Eastern country that it in fact is, or is “Middle Eastern” a short hand for “majority Arab or certain other ethnicities such as Persian but not African”?
I’ve worked with plenty of good and bad people from all regions - including not only good and bad people from India and the Middle East, but also including good and bad people from Europe and the Americas. The same is true when I’ve interviewed people as a hiring manager.
Your client’s biases are not supported by most data or anecdotes, unless there is something very unusual about the particular candidate pool they attract, in which they should fix their outreach methods.
Rather than true racism, my suspicion is that your client is simply unaware of how to get past the cultural differences that developers from India and many Middle Eastern countries have to overcome in order to work well in European (or American) companies, none of which are inherent to their level of talent or skill. For example, they need to learn that it’s okay for an individual contributor to take initiative, to admit problems, and to (politely and with data) question potentially bad decisions made or proposed by people above them in the hierarchy.
There are ways to either retrain people from that region or to filter at an early stage of the hiring process for candidates who have already made that adjustment.
It's obvious that there are good and bad engineers everywhere, and we consider most applicants crap regardless of where they come from.
The average developer in the world struggles at being proficient at its craft and can, at best, poorly glue some APIs in an unreadable mess of code. That's true globally. And that's true regardless of the candidate having graduated in CS/SE or not. In fact we have been so far been happier with self-taught devs rather than people who went into programming just to find a job and never really learned much besides trying to pass the exams.
But Indian/Middle Eastern developers tend to be, on average, even worse. Indian news sites have different articles about that and tie it to the level of education, not just university one.
But on top of that, we couldn't match culturally too. As a German/Dutch company my client is all about straightforwardness and no bullshit, whereas devs from those regions focused on impress and not create issues and would hardly raise their hands in case something got wrong. They would consistently do A' when asked for A.
Even very simple task like add a translation key or a tracking event took eternities.
Obviously there was much we could do to onboard them better, and we tried, but it was always difficult and though, in the end these devs tended to add more work in supervision than what they would accomplish but we simply have no time/budget/patience.
Again, I want to reiterate, that's the experience we have and what we feel about devs from any part of the world, but statistically it was worse in India/Middle East (again, probably for cultural/education reasons).
It's like if you get burned twice/thrice by a car brand, even if stats tell you it's an okay brand, you're not gonna buy it again.
Even other stuff like payments and contracts was complicated. And them being up late at night (for them) when we were still in the morning/early afternoon, was an issue. They were obviously tired and in their circadian low.
And no, we don't hire from any other time zone than Central Europe +-2.
My experience is quite similar. On top of that, 99% of the time I am unable to understand what they're speaking (Indians and many other Asians). Their writing is slightly better - but still has a large room for improvement in understandability.
Do you perceive a difference in quality when you compare the content and comments on HN, vs. LinkedIn?
Or if I understand your comment correctly, the quality of content on LinkedIn doesn’t really matter because you use it infrequently – as an online resume?
That's literally the conversation we're having. Half of us only log in and post our job updates and the other half+ seem to sit on LinkedIn all day long posting performative bullshit and use it like your grandmother uses facebook.
I mean, go log in and literally scroll down on the main page and you'll get it.
I don't really think about the quality when I post on LI, what I do think about is whether or not my comment is likely to get reactions. Often I'll "attach" myself to one of the "open source in the Danish public sector" threads that are relatively common in my feed. Obviously I don't post something silly, but it's a very low effort area for me. Partly because I've spent a decade in the Danish public sector partly because it's a very ideology driven community where it's easy to "farm" a few reactions without much risk of pissing someone off.
On the flip-side I don't really use HN for anything job related but here I only engage in things I think are interesting and that I think I can contribute to. So in a way HN is actually much more "unhealthy" for me than LI, as it's my SoMe drug of choice and I should probably spend less time here.
having come out of job search, i had to use the site regularly and i see why people have grievances.
to me, it seems like the facebook for the working class. a vast portion of the "500+" club might be those with that many followers and not connections. a lot of them post stuff that your grandma who also works in your industry might do.
if you filter the noise out, there is a lot of benefit to having some networking opportunities. but personally outside of job hunting, i would prefer not to partake.
I had about 1000 connections and found my linkedin homepage completely useless as it wasn't showing me anything about the people I care about (mostly uni friends, colleagues).
I went through and whittled the list down to about 150 people I would either consider a friend or.close colleague.
My homepage is still useless as linkedin shows me random trending posts, so that effort was a complete waste of time.
It hadn't occured to me that recruiters would see less than n connections as a negative trait. I'd expect the opposite, someone with 1k connections (e.g) seems like someone who connects regardless.
I'm at the point where I'd rather recruiters who care about useless metrics like that skip over me. The true signal makes itself known amongst the noise of spam-all recruiters.
the correlation (if any) is negative IME, as the lowest count people are long-term employees who haven't need to build a pseudo-employment network to get their next job; they've been busy heads down doing work. The content served up by LI is either low effort/low value listicles with vague, click-baity headlines, or grand, ego-puffing requests to generate said content (you've been selected to answer this question about database design!)
This is some sort of the third type of users but really non-users -- real people you know that actually exist (like colleagues) but never have had a LinkedIn profile, yet they have a successful career.
Ah. I have a profile because it seemed like the professional thing to do to get professional jobs, etc.
However, I only have about 100 connections mostly because I feel weird about adding people on any social network. Which I know is weird, but, I am. But I only add people I personally know or have a good reason for trying to connect with me.
And now you're saying that's basically worthless. Which, sure, I'll buy that. My LinkedIn hasn't really provided me with much worth.
But, what I'm curious about is why the number of connections is important? Is it just a measure of potential engagement/reach etc. like any other social media network?
From what I understand, they use that to determine if you've met a lot of people in your work life which somehow means you're better at jobs. I never understood it.
I just use it, so people can find out about me. Unlike many folks on the Internet, I have no issues with people finding me, but I'd like to have some curatorial control over how they do so, so I have a [rather stale] LI profile, and "placeholder" profiles on many other sites.
I enjoyed learning a bit about Tedium. Its mission reminds a bit of the book Outside Lies Magic[0].
Maybe my SE niche is different but I've never gotten a job where they cared about my LinkedIn profile. To the point where I deleted it last year because it was totally worthless.
> If you connections number is over 500, that's a plus, under 500 and it's a bad thing.
It's the opposite. If you have less than 500 connections as I intentionally do it's a filter for fools who think that number means something. If someone is that shallow I don't want to have anything to do with them.
I just auto-accept anyone that comes in. I only ever open LinkedIn when I'm switching jobs to update my profile (basically to mirror my CV), but unfortunately the people screening the hires care about stupid shit like that
i bet this one anecdote is from the time when those companies hired a bunch of people who then proceeded to post their lifestyle of do-nothing all day on tiktok.
I have been very surprised at how good LinkedIn is as a news aggregator. I work in the energy industry and there are a lot of consultants who share genuinely quality articles or links to reports, sometimes with quite insightful analysis. However to achieve that, it takes effort to block people very liberally (I block people who have no interesting technical insight, even if they are perfectly pleasant) and I follow anyone who links a good article.
The benefit of LinkedIn (for now) is that it actually respects the user's choices and curates the feed rather than filling it with whatever junk it wants (like Facebook)
My connection number is mostly driven by how many times I accept recruiters' requests to connect. I don't think accepting these more often would make me (or anyone else) a better person?
I could easily inflate that number further, by pro-actively reaching out to recruiters. But I feel, if I want to do self-promotion, my time is better spent eg contributing to some random projects on github.
> “Back in the day, people used to sort of get around LinkedIn stuff by just dropping a link in the comments and saying, ‘Hey, check out the comments,’” Jung explains. “Problem is, LinkedIn actually parses if you're the first person to comment in your post, if you're the first person to add a link, even if you actually write, like, the website, but remove the .com and say ‘dot com,’ this algorithm is on to you. It's immediately going to take your post and downrank it.”
Is that really true? It sounds like the kind of superstition that shows up in opaque systems like LinkedIn and TikTok all the time. But maybe it IS true?
I'd love to see experimental confirmation of this, but it's hard to design transparent experiments like that without the risk of burning a valuable LinkedIn account.
As if most of the people who post prolifically on LinkedIn trying to be seen as “thought leaders” aren’t spamming the site regardless of whether it has a link.
Hillel Wayne asked this on LinkedIn, and people came out of the woodwork to suggest they'd personally measured it. It does sound like something that could be a superstition, but it seems to be real.
So I am tiny fish, https://www.linkedin.com/company/crime-de-coder/, so not quite sure what typical impressions look like for the big influencers (currently my company webpage has 2700 followers). LinkedIn lets you grab your stats for posts over the past year -- have only recently heard the thing about urls, I pretty much always shared posts with URLs. (My company webpage for along time was not indexed at all on Bing, but my LinkedIn posts did come up.)
Here are my stats aggregated to domain for impressions for all domains I posted 2+ over the past year. I suspected youtube links are not promoted, and this confirms this. Also the local Raleigh newspaper is not doing so hot. But otherwise my NO URL posts don't do any better offhand than the linked ones.
Is there such a thing? Are there people actually interested in reading Thought Leader Posts?
> the road they need to take to attain LinkedIn success
I have no idea how one defines such a thing, but is... is it at all correlated with anything? Or is it just warm fuzzy feelings, equivalent to Reddit points?
Anyway, this reinforces me view that LinkedIn is a bad company that has not fundamentally changed its dark patterns in any significant way, and I'll be staying off of it until I'm on the brink of homelessness.
Why is so fking hard to use the web version of the site on my mobile. Constant popups to force installing the app. I dont want apps. I only want websites. I hate you linkedin product owners.
In defense of linkedin: there are different strains of toxicity and malevolence running rampant on every other major social media platform (body shaming, bullying, harassment, predation, scams, various kinds of radicalization, etc.), and many of those strains are rather subdued on linkedin.
Linkedin, of course, has some strains of its own (e.g. workism), but, surprisingly, I find it to be by far the healthiest social network out there.
That's probably owing more to self censorship than to moderation or algorithmic curation: your "professional" persona is more on display here than anywhere else.
So, yeah, sure, seems reasonable to suggest that linkedin has an anti-link bias, and the incentives for that bias are fairly intuitive. That being said, is it actually a bad thing, or does it also function as another tenet of their quiet but, in my mind, reasonably effective moderation approach?
To me, LinkedIn is another social media website where I find people posting achievements every month and get the feeling that I'm leftover with me doing PhD and wasting my time doing some less cool research. I find people getting titles, posting about their new certificated, moving to another job. Some are participating in some events in their company that I don't know about because the only events we have is seminars with some free food. I also find people from the same field of research posting about a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm that is going to change the world. All of that while I sat down and debug some weird CUDA bugs and do fits for a data that will measure some elementary particle and improve our physics understanding of the world (which actually seems much less cool that my writing made it sound). I don't know if that is just me or that people on LinkedIn are really those super cool people who have all these achievements and cool stuff to share. I updated my LinkedIn twice in a decade. One of them after I got my Masters, and the other one was reposting a post by mistake.
Yes, I hate LinkedIn and I hate that many people in industry and academia expects you to have presence there. And I hate that networking is the first thing you should focus on to have a job.
I don't want to be famous or influencer or grow an audience. I'm not interested about all marketing yourself aspect and keeping track of how do algorithms changes affect that. I really wish that I didn't have to create an account. I don't like visiting the algorithmic timeline with this all probably fake/not-very realistic posts.
People want to sell themselves. But in the stiff competition the way to remain in the race is by lowering their price (value), and so they easily get far from this (where thoughts could be exchanged with value produced): https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3bdb31644d5f165aa6342...
Concerning LinkedIn I lower the ammount I believe the way and extent it is told.
The UX of LinkedIn is terrible. Once I went into a futile debate with a support person (yes, it was that ancient time couple of years ago), so I had to conclude the 'support' is even worse. I do not use it that much like when I thought it would be good for finding a job (I did eventually, but not there) and memories fade, but I recall that searching for keywords is like triggering a random number generator, search profile gives notifications about dozens of new positions but when I trigger manually the very same search then it is 0 results, and whenever I did something then I got a notification that I just did that, very useful thanks, and it stayed there until you manually close it, also you have more and more otherwise, very annoying. Feels like genuine Microsoft quality.
LinkedIn straight up stresses me out when I think about using it. So many things that work counter-intuitively to the way you'd expect any social media platform to work.
From the emails they send you, with the sender set to the name of someone you know, and the subject written in first person asking you to add them, even though all they did was click an "add" button. Obviously because they get better engagement if their automated emails look like they were hand-typed by a person reaching out to you specifically by name.
Or the fact that viewing someone's profile notifies that person that you did so. I'm too scared to just click around, let alone post because last time I snooped on what some ex-coworkers were up to now they started sending me messages to try and recruit me for their startups. And now I look like I've committed an act of rudeness by snooping the profile of a guy I knew but not taking the time to reply to his messages.
All of my business comes from Linkedin. I get inbound leads from content I post to Substack. I then promote it with a pithy summary on Linkedin. I don't encounter any of the stuff in this article. I typically get 5-30K views of my posts and have 38K followers.
I was in the first cohort of the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator program which was held the three months before I launched my SaaS. The secret to hacking the algorithm is no secret. Post original content four times a week. Because my SaaS is a data platform on cybersecurity and 95% of my followers are in cybersecurity I get tremendous engagement.
I remember all the hacking community deriding Twitter when it launched. Back then the cool kids were on Digg. Now they are on Twitter deriding LinkedIn where they cannot pose as something they are not.
For people who complain about the LinkedIn feed, I agree it’s almost entirely useless, but I wonder what people would prefer as an alternative? If your answer is “no feed” you can accomplish that by exiting the app when you’re done with it. It’s pretty clear the only purpose for the feed is to deliver ads, but I wonder how much revenue that really makes.
I would prefer the app was rearranged though. It’s core functionalities are 1) update my profile 2) chat with recruiters and 3) search for jobs. It doesn’t need a feed, it doesn’t need a video tab.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadMaybe a platform targeted at first towards blue collar and minimum wage workers that makes it easier for them to find new jobs? Once you secure that market, you could then move upmarket onto LinkedIn's turf.
Probably won't work because of classism
One of the very first things I wrote down for my current company was "build a service, not a product", where "product" here might as well mean "platform". There was good reason for that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40634774
One of the reasons I wrote the blog post I linked in my previous comment is to tell a story, in concrete terms, of why this kind of "well why don't you just" story fails in all sorts of ways both obvious and not. It's thousands of words long, and it doesn't even cover all the big points of how complicated actually trying to build something better is. It omits many things I spent weeks thinking about in the moment, and barely mentions people who worked on the problem for years, in the interest of being only a twenty-minute read, in an effort to just give a taste of the complexity of working on a problem in its full complexity.
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> job listings/postings with a bit more integrity behind the them. Submit something, get an acknowledgment
What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for?
The vast majority of applications, anywhere, suck. Some platforms suck more than others (and LinkedIn is one of the worst), but if you've never done hiring yourself, I'd like to impress on you just how bad the average applicant is. Even on places like Work At A Startup or Wellfound or direct apps on your company website (which tend to be higher-quality on average), most applicants are awful. And thus, the acknowledgement will almost always be "nope sorry bye now".
If that's the acknowledgement you're looking for, lots of places do do that (in our case, we'd close out an app if not actioned on in a short period of time and send a message saying the company hadn't acted). But are you really going to use an entirely different platform because they say "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of energy to sign up?
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> perhaps limit number of applications to reasonable numbers
We did this. We did the same for recruiters, actually (limiting the number of messages they could send candidates).
In practice, this didn't make the average message significantly better (granted, this was pre-GPT), and it created a new set of problems. Recruiters would get pissed at us if a candidate didn't work out, because they hadn't just spent a minute sending a message, they'd spent one of their precious message credits. They stopped being willing to consider borderline candidates or candidates with non-traditional backgrounds for fear of wasting messages (even though in the vast majority of cases they weren't exhausting their limit! FOMO is a thing, and user behavior is frequently irrational or uninformed!).
Nor did candidates put meaningfully more effort into the apps they were sending out. Nor did recruiters meaningfully value applications any more than they did elsewhere. Unless you're doing very vigorous tracking, the difference between applications being 99% crap and 97% crap is not very noticeable and requires rather large sample size to detect. That's a 200% improvement that can go totally unnoticed (and good luck achieving that much of an improvement in the first place).
That's even assuming your users are statistically-rational, which of course they are not. Recruiting is low-information, high-emotional-valence, low-trust, low-sample-size, low-agency, and high-noise, and that's about the worst possible mix you can stir up for cognitive biases of all kinds. Most recruiting advice is one step removed from "you should message candidates with a Q in their name only on tuesdays under the first full moon of the harvest" as a result.
And that's even setting aside the adverse-selection effects that mean alternative platforms tend to end up dominated by (a) hard to fill roles and (b) desperate candidates (since those are the ones that don't get matched through default channels).
And yes, you can come up with solutions for these things - when you know they're problems. But t...
Was just having a conversation with someone today about this topic too. Some companies get 80 applications, and someone will indeed actually at least put eyes on all 80. Other companies get 80, and they'll just look at the first 3-5 then stop and move on to other stuff.
>
> I'm saying that "the existing solution is bad" is not sufficient to draw people to alternatives by itself, and that building a better solution is harder than it seems.
Without a doubt. I've been asked a couple of times to join 'job board' startups, and there's never been a compelling hook as to how to differentiate or compete with indeed/linkedin/etc. There were ways to differentiate, but to me, they weren't compelling enough to throw my lot in with them. And... not surprisingly, years later, neither got very far. In one case, the 'hook' was to provide as detailed a profile as you could, asking users to input things like various NAICS codes to classify their work in various industries, so that people who know NAICS codes could search for your skills faster. That's certainly differentiating your platform, just not in a good way.
> What kind of "acknowledgement" are you looking for? ... But are you really going to use an entirely different platform because they say "no" rather than letting you infer it, even if that platform has 1/10th the jobs or takes a bunch of energy to sign up?
Not on its own, no. There likely are platforms that automatically close stuff out and send an acknowledgement that the hiring company has passed on you.... but I don't think I've ever engaged with one in 20+ years. And the 'takes a bunch of energy to sign up' - ideally that's already something that is taken care of.
The one place I see some growing value in 'job boards/markets' is in niche/focus - industry/skill niche and/or geographic niche. Job boards focusing on .net, or matlab, etc run by orgs who have some ability to bridge the gap between the hiring industry folks and the workers seem to be where it's at, but I seem to only know of a few (but expect that trend to grow).
Thanks for the input and insights.
That said, I did learn some time ago that you can use various search operators (Boolean, parentheses, and quotes) which make it a little easier to actually get relevant job search results.
In general though, applications are always a terrible way to find a job. They're a last resort when your networks and other connections and "ins" fail.
That phase of the internet has gone so I do not think this is possible anymore.
But then as soon as an open, decentralized alternative not driven by the profit motive is introduced, it’s knee-jerk criticized and downvoted. How do you expect anything to change if you won’t support any solutions? (Other than, let’s use the government regulations / antitrust / whatever).
Here is a free and open alternative that I have been working on for 12 years:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Here is exactly how it would reinvent the profit-driven ecosystem behind the current centralized social networks:
https://qbix.com/ecosystem
It does to LinkedIn, Twitter et al what the Web did to AOL, MSN etc. Putting the control in the hands of the community. Here is what that looks like:
https://qbix.com/communities
And here is an application of the technology in one vertical, that I’m building using it. You can build your own:
https://rational.app
There are other solutions too, like Mastodon and Matrix. I just think they are much further behind and people expect features comparable to Facebook and Twitter, much like they expect the Impossible Burger to be as good as a meat burger as possible before they can switch. It’s not easy, but we need to support open source projects that get that done, rather than tear them apart. Just my 2c.
PS: If anyone with any sort of skills wants to contribute to this, more than happy to talk. My email is greg at the domain qbix.com
Well done for just walking the walk.
What in the hell is he talking about? It is a good idea to include some quotation or a summary of the link's content. Other than that, how is sharing links painful?
I think LinkedIn is fantastic. Early in my career my LinkedIn resume was how I got work. At this point, sharing links and my own blog posts to keep my 6,500 followers interested in me as an expert is how I get work.
The only part I don't like is sharing a Post to All in a group... one group at a time. Sharing in a few groups is a good way to drive views but I've developed excellent motor skills at navigating all those clicks necessary to do it.
So what's "hard" is using SEO-style tricks to share a link without your post being pushed into obscurity. And for people without the time or desire to hack the algorithm, it means sharing links on LinkedIn isn't very effective.
Huh? People would read a post to understand its content. People read novels. Those don't have links.
It’s explained in multiple parts but often sharing a link will “downrank” your post simply because it contains a link.
This is also very common on social media sites, not just LI.
edit: maybe not links but just media
To be clear: Your links will physically “work,” as in you can post them. But they lose much of their organic reach, in part because LinkedIn treats links as second-class citizens. It wants you to stay engaged on the platform.
(The guy I quoted in the piece says he figured this out through research.)
The result is that, if you’re trying to build an audience on that network, you have to spend inordinate amounts of time building lengthy content that is built for the network itself, which is why every LinkedIn post seems huge.
It’s the difference between a handful of likes and comments and hundreds, possibly thousands. Think of it this way: You are driving a car that cannot switch gears, and using that to dispute the claims of a post that is critiquing the inability to switch gears.
To be clear, you may be OK with that, but the problem is, it intentionally does not play fairly with the open internet, and it means that people have to do a lot of additional busywork to use this service that they prefer to spend on something else.
There’s a difference between being able to do something, which is what you’re describing, and it actually functioning to the best of its capabilities. Sure, you can run with a sprained ankle, but you’re going to go a lot slower and feel a lot more pain than someone who doesn’t have that impediment.
LinkedIn is artificially adding impediments to linked posts, just like every other platform. But they appear to be doing so in ways more dramatic and extreme than some of their competitors.
I'm not an expert at this, and you are, so tell me... should I really not use images? Like, I often post a link to a paper and then I will summarize it and rather than a link I will post one of the figures from the paper. What's a better strategy than that?
If the company you're applying for cares whether you're on LinkedIn, consider withdrawing your application.
Or, if you were a manager on HR's shitlist as someone they wanted gone, they would use employees updating their profile it as cause for the manager's manager to investigate if the manager should be fired for low staff morale, since the employees were seen as getting ready to quit, and so it must be the managers fault.
The company's position was, you should only use your linked in profile to talk about how good the employer was, and anything else to promote the employee or look for a job was a trigger for "finding a reason to fire".
It was horrible. Glad I'm not there anymore.
This is apparently what happens when your HR org is large and bored.
It’s exactly where all the LLM, SEO, “LeadGen” spam goes to and comes from.
Social networks are awful but I think I despise this one the most.
Way I see it, most all BigTech social media is bitterness and resentment. The platform owners have as much contempt for the users as the users have for the platform.
That is no basis for a 'community'.
LinkedIn is such a user-hostile platform with no value proposition to anyone who isn't in those two groups. You have a LinkedIn profile as a CV with connections as a kind of social proof and never think about it otherwise.
As for the "trick" in this post, it seems like every platform with a feed have this issue. I've seen people recommend posting Youtube Shorts and untick the box "send notification to subscribers" because most subscribers are dead accounts so if you do this Youtube thinks the video has poor engagement.
Concurrently, LinkedIn sharing grew from nothing to awesome. I get most of my news about the latest developments in my field from LinkedIn. I get jobs by posting blog posts on LinkedIn, or summaries of interesting recent papers.
I hereby swear to never set out to "build a personal brand" in my life. Total toxic waste. I wish humanity could get over itself.
Twitter is a flaming toxic dumpster fire whose only purpose seems to be to post hot takes, or to gang up on and bully people who disagree with you 280 characters at a time.
So basically LI is a huge sales/marketing/MLM echo chamber with 19 out of 20 users there against their will.
Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing.
Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network".
I have to ask, have you interacted with many recruiters?
Maybe recruiters after all also look a the connection number, could be, but its like saying a photographer is better than other cause he just simply posts more pictures.
Would I? No, but I also have never once looked at someone's LinkedIn when in the hiring process. I used to carefully curate who I connected with so that when looking at my connections, you could see it was a list of respected people in their fields, but I had barely over 100. Several recruiters told me point blank that doesn't matter at all. So I stopped bothering to care about my LI profile and connections, and suddenly had a LOT more activity with recruiters when I added more connections. Seemed quantity is truly valued over quality there.
> Saying this cause connections can be fakely increased so it's a dumb metric that shows pretty much nothing.
Yes, that was my point.
> Would think it's more useful seeing how that person expresses themselves or which posts shares rather than how many people has accepted into their "network".
You would think so, yes, but it's not how things work in the end.
Maybe a high number of connections causes a better first-impression, but if the candidate does not know how to write or articulate a word makes things much harder. Overall, seeing how a person expresses their ideas in their natural language gives you a better impression of how a person thinks/operates.
Which in the end matters, cause you are dealing with persons, not statistics.
For first instance recruiters, having a large number of people in your LI can get you into the first recruitment stage, but you won't pass if you don't know how to communicate, express and confront ideas, that's how it works.
To do that I'll post a few comments over a week, which seems to make LI think you're an active user, and then I'll post the most relevant / well written brain-think from my collection. If I'm feeling frisky I'll post two. A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15 years), but usually there is something interesting in the ocean of shit. Some of my colleagues use it actively and dislike it, but use it because they think they have to. In my experience that's not the case at all. The 500+ may be true, I crossed that long ago even though I've generally worked in non-tech enterprise so 80% of my connections have nothing to do with SWE.
Maybe this means that I do fall under the 4%, but even if you hate LI, you should know that you can play it extremely casual.
> A few days later my inbox will be flooded with recruiters spamming me with random useless stuff. Like this or that great Java opportunity (I haven't worked with Java in 15 years)
Ditto, except I'm not even a programmer and never have been but I still get a flood of Java programming offers. I actually get so many I have "java developer" as a filtered phrase in my email. I get 50+ a month, every month, for a decade now.
And really that's what most people get on LI, oodles of connection or sales spam, and irrelevant communications from people casting nets rather than actually being good recruiters and finding good people. That's why most people "hate" it, it's junk mail we actually have to interact with sometimes. I spend maybe 2 minutes a month there, and wish I didn't have to at all.
The actual "job" site of LinkedIn is terrible for me though. It's probably because I worked in the public sector and was involved with medical software, but LI seems to think I'm a doctor, a nurse and a firefighter (for whatever reason) at the same time.
I went through business school once and every second was a little worse than the last one. I’m good without LI.
I have 15-17ish years in tech at various levels up to FAANG and over 1000+ connections but nothing crazy, I don't go out to make connections or anything so its purely organic job search/leave stuff. I don't add anyone I don't know and never have.
When I log into it some of those 1000 connections are people from jobs I worked at that were so miserable that as soon as I see their names pop up I'm like, fuck, I'm glad you got away but now I'm reminded of my experience at XYZ.
Then you have the Tony Robbins hustle culture people. They're impossible to avoid. "I sleep under my desk m-f! HUSTLE!" These aren't even my connections usually, it's just LInkedIn doing its for you page thinking I want to read that stuff while writing grpc services.
It feels so much like performative bullshit. Everyone trying to impress one another with nothing impressive. Nobody talks serious tech. I've worked on some incredibly complex distsys stuff and we used to all network with one another on twitter. Never, ever linkedin. We'd add each other for the connection clout but we only discussed projects and real tech stuff on twitter or discord. I DO contribute my knowledge to some LinkedIn posts when I am around to do so, that usually consists explaining to someone how OCI containers or kubernetes or something works or to help them have a better process but those questions rarely start out with any technical depth beyond "this is how I shrink my docker images! Copy vs ADD!!"
I'll log in and "Super Smart CTO Evangelist Hyper 10x Guru" who was a level 2 sysadmin who did piss poor work is still spouting that bullshit 10 years later. And I don't have only one of those, I have tons of those.
I have a new manager as of about 6 months ago. He's horrendous. I made the mistake of not interviewing him (I'm staff level so it would've been me and 2 others yes/nos) and he got hired. I finally looked at his LinkedIn (not logged in, because I don't want that creepy site to tell him I'm looking at him) and he had the "SWE Manager Guru" bullshit and I just.. sighed.
LinkedIn is a vastly different culture from the actual tech social media/communities I'm in. It's straight up performative sell-yourself bullshit. I just think it's gross.
That site is made for recruiters and sales people.
Also, https://old.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/
I swear I never found a job (or client now that I'm freelancing) nor I have found decent candidates on it.
I'm consistently spammed by Indians and middle eastern devs every time I open a position, it's just endless which my current client does not want to hire due to timezone and language issues and definitely some bias for the quality of their coding and task understanding abilities.
There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do.
I don’t think anyone was blaming you personally, nor am I.
> that the experience with developers coming from those areas has not been good and my current company does not want to repeat the mistake.
> There's no racism involved, African applicants are very welcome as they live in the same timezone as most of Europe do.
Whether or not racism is involved in this case, it is absolutely possible to be racist against Middle Easterners and Indians without being racist against Africans. Racism is not a single binary yes/no question.
Also, is the time zone (whether of residence or of work) really the determining factor, or is it where the person personally or ancestrally comes from?
For example, would the client consider someone personally and ancestrally from India or the Middle East who currently lives in Germany or Africa and works in the local time zone there, or who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country but nevertheless can work at the same times that the Europeans work instead of asynchronously?
(Tangent: Egypt is usually considered to be both in Africa and in the Middle East, and it’s in a Europe-compatible time zone like the rest of Africa. The rest of my comment will ignore this, but it highlights how weird it is to exclude the Middle East but not Africa for time zone reasons.)
What about a Swedish or British person who lives in India or a Middle Eastern country and works in the local time zone there?
And does the client’s policy treat Israel like the Middle Eastern country that it in fact is, or is “Middle Eastern” a short hand for “majority Arab or certain other ethnicities such as Persian but not African”?
I’ve worked with plenty of good and bad people from all regions - including not only good and bad people from India and the Middle East, but also including good and bad people from Europe and the Americas. The same is true when I’ve interviewed people as a hiring manager.
Your client’s biases are not supported by most data or anecdotes, unless there is something very unusual about the particular candidate pool they attract, in which they should fix their outreach methods.
Rather than true racism, my suspicion is that your client is simply unaware of how to get past the cultural differences that developers from India and many Middle Eastern countries have to overcome in order to work well in European (or American) companies, none of which are inherent to their level of talent or skill. For example, they need to learn that it’s okay for an individual contributor to take initiative, to admit problems, and to (politely and with data) question potentially bad decisions made or proposed by people above them in the hierarchy.
There are ways to either retrain people from that region or to filter at an early stage of the hiring process for candidates who have already made that adjustment.
The average developer in the world struggles at being proficient at its craft and can, at best, poorly glue some APIs in an unreadable mess of code. That's true globally. And that's true regardless of the candidate having graduated in CS/SE or not. In fact we have been so far been happier with self-taught devs rather than people who went into programming just to find a job and never really learned much besides trying to pass the exams.
But Indian/Middle Eastern developers tend to be, on average, even worse. Indian news sites have different articles about that and tie it to the level of education, not just university one.
But on top of that, we couldn't match culturally too. As a German/Dutch company my client is all about straightforwardness and no bullshit, whereas devs from those regions focused on impress and not create issues and would hardly raise their hands in case something got wrong. They would consistently do A' when asked for A.
Even very simple task like add a translation key or a tracking event took eternities.
Obviously there was much we could do to onboard them better, and we tried, but it was always difficult and though, in the end these devs tended to add more work in supervision than what they would accomplish but we simply have no time/budget/patience.
Again, I want to reiterate, that's the experience we have and what we feel about devs from any part of the world, but statistically it was worse in India/Middle East (again, probably for cultural/education reasons).
It's like if you get burned twice/thrice by a car brand, even if stats tell you it's an okay brand, you're not gonna buy it again.
Even other stuff like payments and contracts was complicated. And them being up late at night (for them) when we were still in the morning/early afternoon, was an issue. They were obviously tired and in their circadian low.
And no, we don't hire from any other time zone than Central Europe +-2.
Or if I understand your comment correctly, the quality of content on LinkedIn doesn’t really matter because you use it infrequently – as an online resume?
To me, LinkedIn is a place to post my resume and communicate with recruiters, and that's it. Why would you ever use it for anything else?
I mean, go log in and literally scroll down on the main page and you'll get it.
On the flip-side I don't really use HN for anything job related but here I only engage in things I think are interesting and that I think I can contribute to. So in a way HN is actually much more "unhealthy" for me than LI, as it's my SoMe drug of choice and I should probably spend less time here.
to me, it seems like the facebook for the working class. a vast portion of the "500+" club might be those with that many followers and not connections. a lot of them post stuff that your grandma who also works in your industry might do.
if you filter the noise out, there is a lot of benefit to having some networking opportunities. but personally outside of job hunting, i would prefer not to partake.
I went through and whittled the list down to about 150 people I would either consider a friend or.close colleague.
My homepage is still useless as linkedin shows me random trending posts, so that effort was a complete waste of time.
It hadn't occured to me that recruiters would see less than n connections as a negative trait. I'd expect the opposite, someone with 1k connections (e.g) seems like someone who connects regardless.
If that’s what some company cares about, then I’m glad they won’t message me.
How is this supposed to be correlated with employee quality? I doubt there's a positive correlation
How long ago was this? I’ve been talking to lots of recruiters and the most common points I hear are
- add every skill
- keywords in your descriptions so you show up in searches
- gaps and job tenure
Remote jobs apparently get a ton of fake candidates so some recruiters have started checking for verification and profile age as additional signals.
Here I was accepting connections judiciously after lightly researching their connections..
However, I only have about 100 connections mostly because I feel weird about adding people on any social network. Which I know is weird, but, I am. But I only add people I personally know or have a good reason for trying to connect with me.
And now you're saying that's basically worthless. Which, sure, I'll buy that. My LinkedIn hasn't really provided me with much worth.
But, what I'm curious about is why the number of connections is important? Is it just a measure of potential engagement/reach etc. like any other social media network?
I enjoyed learning a bit about Tedium. Its mission reminds a bit of the book Outside Lies Magic[0].
[0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/ou...
Maybe my SE niche is different but I've never gotten a job where they cared about my LinkedIn profile. To the point where I deleted it last year because it was totally worthless.
It's the opposite. If you have less than 500 connections as I intentionally do it's a filter for fools who think that number means something. If someone is that shallow I don't want to have anything to do with them.
The benefit of LinkedIn (for now) is that it actually respects the user's choices and curates the feed rather than filling it with whatever junk it wants (like Facebook)
My connection number is mostly driven by how many times I accept recruiters' requests to connect. I don't think accepting these more often would make me (or anyone else) a better person?
I could easily inflate that number further, by pro-actively reaching out to recruiters. But I feel, if I want to do self-promotion, my time is better spent eg contributing to some random projects on github.
Is that really true? It sounds like the kind of superstition that shows up in opaque systems like LinkedIn and TikTok all the time. But maybe it IS true?
I'd love to see experimental confirmation of this, but it's hard to design transparent experiments like that without the risk of burning a valuable LinkedIn account.
Here are my stats aggregated to domain for impressions for all domains I posted 2+ over the past year. I suspected youtube links are not promoted, and this confirms this. Also the local Raleigh newspaper is not doing so hot. But otherwise my NO URL posts don't do any better offhand than the linked ones.
So no experiment, but some hard numbers at least!Is there such a thing? Are there people actually interested in reading Thought Leader Posts?
> the road they need to take to attain LinkedIn success
I have no idea how one defines such a thing, but is... is it at all correlated with anything? Or is it just warm fuzzy feelings, equivalent to Reddit points?
Anyway, this reinforces me view that LinkedIn is a bad company that has not fundamentally changed its dark patterns in any significant way, and I'll be staying off of it until I'm on the brink of homelessness.
Linkedin, of course, has some strains of its own (e.g. workism), but, surprisingly, I find it to be by far the healthiest social network out there.
That's probably owing more to self censorship than to moderation or algorithmic curation: your "professional" persona is more on display here than anywhere else.
So, yeah, sure, seems reasonable to suggest that linkedin has an anti-link bias, and the incentives for that bias are fairly intuitive. That being said, is it actually a bad thing, or does it also function as another tenet of their quiet but, in my mind, reasonably effective moderation approach?
Yes, I hate LinkedIn and I hate that many people in industry and academia expects you to have presence there. And I hate that networking is the first thing you should focus on to have a job.
I don't want to be famous or influencer or grow an audience. I'm not interested about all marketing yourself aspect and keeping track of how do algorithms changes affect that. I really wish that I didn't have to create an account. I don't like visiting the algorithmic timeline with this all probably fake/not-very realistic posts.
Concerning LinkedIn I lower the ammount I believe the way and extent it is told.
I get the impression that they are, and I'm a little skeptical of the legality of it
Even the marketing tools (which I was forced to use by a marketing company we hired) were so bad they made my skin crawl.
The link related functionality only adds to the hell of this vile, spammy platform.
From the emails they send you, with the sender set to the name of someone you know, and the subject written in first person asking you to add them, even though all they did was click an "add" button. Obviously because they get better engagement if their automated emails look like they were hand-typed by a person reaching out to you specifically by name.
Or the fact that viewing someone's profile notifies that person that you did so. I'm too scared to just click around, let alone post because last time I snooped on what some ex-coworkers were up to now they started sending me messages to try and recruit me for their startups. And now I look like I've committed an act of rudeness by snooping the profile of a guy I knew but not taking the time to reply to his messages.
I refuse to keep an account, if that's a deal breaker I'm not interested.
I would prefer the app was rearranged though. It’s core functionalities are 1) update my profile 2) chat with recruiters and 3) search for jobs. It doesn’t need a feed, it doesn’t need a video tab.