
I just don’t get LinkedIn, do you? - bigiain
http://stilgherrian.com/internet/i-just-dont-get-linkedin-do-you/
======
Lewisham
LinkedIn, at its core, is very simple: its a replacement for the big Rolodex
you see in 80s movies. Instead of trying to keep a network together using
business cards, you use LinkedIn.

You lean on your network when you need something from it: a contact, a new
job, help finding people for a job you need to fill.

LinkedIn does this _very well_ because the people using it all understand
this. It's not supposed to be Facebook. It's OK to not check in on it or the
people you're connected to for a year. You just have a social contract that
when someone does need you, you scratch their back, and you will have you back
scratched karmicly in the future.

If you don't "get it", you're expecting it to do something it doesn't. You
probably expect Facebook for business.

~~~
ghshephard
Totally agree - that's exactly what LinkedIn is - It is a replacement for the
Rolodex with a few key advantages.

1\. People keep their email addresses reasonably up to date, so I can contact
them if they change their info.

2\. Somewhat useful - people keep their jobs/companies they are working for up
to date.

3\. If someone introduces themselves to me in a business context, one of the
first steps we take is to establish a relationship on linked in. That
immediately gives me insight into their background, and, some clues (but no
guarantees) as to their legitimacy. In particular, 95% of the time we're only
two-hops away, and more than 50% of the time we know somebody in common - so I
can quickly drop a line to someone I trust personally and get the inside scoop
on this new associate of mine.

Anybody who is trying to use Linked In for more than a Rolodex is missing the
point. It really is nothing more.

Also, (And I'm not sure if this is just me) - I have about 300 or so facebook
friends, and about 400 Linked-In contacts, and, with maybe a half-dozen
exceptions - there is no intersection between the two sets. I don't share
pictures, wall-history, or personal updates with business colleagues, and, I
have no desire to pollute my linkded in rolodex with every aunt, uncle, niece,
nephew, ex-girlfriend that I've acquired in the last 10 years.

~~~
_delirium
_Also, (And I'm not sure if this is just me) - I have about 300 or so facebook
friends, and about 400 Linked-In contacts, and, with maybe a half-dozen
exceptions - there is no intersection between the two sets._

Among people I know, there's much more overlap, but probably because there's
much more overlap IRL as well, so it's not clear who should go in the
"personal" versus "work" buckets. If your circle of friends includes a half-
dozen people from the office, and you know their spouses and kids and go out
together regularly, which group are they in?

~~~
ghshephard
If we would go out regularly regardless of the fact that we work together,
then they would be the exceptions. The difference is that a lot (most?) of the
"Social" engagements I have with coworkers are clearly work related. Those
dinners, weekend picnics, and snowboarding weekends I have with them are
business/work related, not something I would have likely done if I had never
worked with them.

Ergo, they stay in my linkedin compartment.

------
tptacek
LinkedIn is such a standard part of business that it's weird-seeming to me
when I find out someone I've worked with isn't on it. I can understand why, if
you're in the kind of business where your associates will tend to be Facebook
friends, LinkedIn will seem superfluous. But most people aren't in businesses
like that.

It is, at the very least, most people's best resume (most people don't put
recommendations on their resume, for instance).

Not one of LinkedIn's extra features has ever done me any good; it's never
enabled an intro for me through friends of friends, its paid messages have
never garnered a response, and it has been a uniquely crappy place to run job
ads (weirdly enough). But just having everyone's current up-to-date resume is
actually a very useful thing. I use LinkedIn more than I "use" Facebook
(mostly, Facebook just sucks time out of my day).

~~~
Swannie
Agreed, especially when I can't find ex-co workers who I want to follow up.

Except my resume is better (apart from the few recommendations I have).
LinkedIn format is a little stifled, but it is great for checking out other
people as it is consistent.

I've been getting good contacts from recruiters, and finding jobs in the
appropriate groups for my expertise. The groups generally seem best for
grouping these job postings :-)

------
TamDenholm
Totally agree, i just dont get it at all, then again i dont do "networking" in
real life either, i'm just not wired like that at all. I find that whole
ecosystem of networking, sharing contacts, phoning people to "touch base" very
fake, incestuous and pretty sleazy, so i just dont take part in it at all.

I know though that people who are good at it can be extremely successful
business people because they know how to work the system, its definitely a
flaw of mine, but its not one i want to correct because of my general distaste
for how its done. Luckily, i do ok on my own path.

~~~
danenania
I share your general distaste for this stuff, but remember that by getting
out, going to events, having a lot of conversations, you will also encounter
people who are not full of shit. Networking doesn't have to be all buzzwords
and phony smiles. If it is, you're not networking with the right people. The
term has been captured, so substitute 'talking shop', 'sharing ideas',
'finding inspiration'. Whatever you call it, it can enrich your life and it
doesn't have to be shallow or unpleasant. All it really means is getting to
know others in the world around you and keeping an eye out for mutually
beneficial opportunities.

~~~
mentat
"you will also encounter people who are not full of shit"

I'm particularly curious about how to maximize this. Is it a fixed percentage
that you have to get out more to increase the number of not full of shit
people you meet?

I've long felt "there's got to be a better way". Theoretically comments on HN
could be part of how you meet these people but really I like talking to people
face to face and on IM. Where's the social graph of people I would think are
not full of shit but I don't know already?

~~~
bergie
In the field of open source, a good indicator is whether an event costs
something. The free ones are full of people interested in having beers and
talking about code. The expensive ones have suits discussing _leveraging
strategic synergies of converging core competencies_ , or whatever.

In Europe this means that great events to have interesting conversations
include Fosdem, the Desktop Summits, etc. I'd love to hear what events in US
are like that.

------
mwexler
I am very surprised that after all this time, they really don't have a way for
someone to say "freelance" or "consultant" without giving yourself a company
name. They literally pollute their database by forcing users to make up
company names and overload the job titles. It's been this way since the early
days: they must have their reasons, but its a messed up data model that
doesn't really reflect they world they are trying to reflect.

------
shaggyfrog
I use LinkedIn like a "validated" resume -- people can see where I worked, and
know I worked there, because people at those places have written
recommendations and are my connections.

~~~
barista
This is the specific part of linkedin that I don't get. Why do I have to make
my resume open to the world? If I have something that I am realy proud of then
I agree I will put a couple of sentences about it. But the whole resume?

I do see that people painstakingly keep it updatesd so I'm sure they get some
value from it. It's just that I don't understand what.

Maybe not having to ever look for a job is the cause of it.

~~~
shaggyfrog
> Maybe not having to ever look for a job is the cause of it.

Then you are living the dream, my friend. :)

------
kovar
LinkedIn is what you make of it. And if you're saying "LinkedIn is full of
fakes", or "it is for the unemployed" then I suspect that you're only looking
at a small segment of it. Any community will have outliers, and the fakes and
unemployed on LinkedIn, in my experience, are the outliers.

LinkedIn is a professional resume sharing service, among other things. I find
some people sharing a link to their LinkedIn profile rather than sending a
resume. It is great for reconnecting with ex-colleagues, seeing who is joining
and who is leaving some companies, and finding contacts at potential clients
and employers.

It isn't a social networking service and it isn't a service for making lunch
dates for networking, though you could use it that way.

The Groups are moderately useful, though people tend to set up too many
different yet related groups, diluting the value. I really hope the Twitter-
like link and comment sharing does not catch on as a) I have Twitter for that
and b) it pushes other useful information off the bottom too quickly.

------
forcer
What is this post? Is it a negative reaction on few LinkedIn posts that were
published in the media recently, how they are successful etc?

Personally, I find LinkedIn one of the best tools / or probably only business
tool we use in our company. What is it great for:

1/ keep in touch with former colleagues/employees and see what they are up to
2/ hiring - if your network is big - (I can reach to over 1 million people for
free) - then you can search job candidates and send them offers of employment
- essentially hand picking the best candidate for a job, rather than posting
jobs online 3/ business development - so easy to contact your potential
partners, and so easy for them to see whether you are legit by looking how
connected you are in your industry. 4/ journalists / and other hard to get to
people - you send them email - it won't work , it might not even deliver, but
LinkedIn message gets delivered, and again, they can see your whole profile
whether you are legit.

------
danbmil99
Funny -- I'm more or less anti-social, and I LOVE LinkedIn precisely because
it has a narrow, well-defined use case. I don't have to update my status, or
comment on your comment on your wife's update. I just have a place to go to
find the people I know in a business capacity, and they can find me.

------
mopoke
For me, the most useful case is when hiring. I usually look up a candidate on
linkedin. I can see if their work history for public consumption is similar to
the one which is on their resume (tailored for the position). I can also see
if anyone I know has worked with them before and then get an off the record
assessment of their previous work and a feel for them as a person. Neither of
those directly contributes to a hire/no-hire decision but it does help with
getting to know what the candidate is like. As a side note, I tried posting a
job recently and was hugely underwhelmed with both the quality and quantity of
applicants.

~~~
tomjen3
>I tried posting a job recently and was hugely underwhelmed with both the
quality and quantity of applicants.

Then you are properly like the companies that gets featured in from time to
time saying "we can't hire engineers" who then turn out to offer 50k/year
positions in nowhere, Arizona.

Or not, but if you get neither that many or that good applicants it might be
time to see why. Salary might be a good place to start (it is easier to fix
than location).

~~~
mopoke
Location is probably it - there is a much smaller pool to draw from where we
are (Malaysia). It may get better responses in the US, Europe, etc. It was as
much an experiment as it was a job ad - we also use other channels to recruit.
But given linkedin is a global site, I was disappointed with the results.

------
jaysonelliot
I'm a big fan of the LinkedIn groups for professional discussions that just
don't feel appropriate to Facebook.

I have a group of UX people that talk shop on LinkedIn, as well as finding new
people to hire, new places to work, or gigs to do.

Sometimes you want a place to go for work-related things that isn't Facebook,
with all its farm games, ads, spam, and photos of people's pets.

------
webuiarchitect
I feel in the urge of commercializing it, the builders have forgotten or
wondered away from its primary goal.

So, thinking about what its goal could be (1) Connecting professionals of same
interest - to some extent it has succeeded but not fully (2) Help recruiters
find authentic talent - it has failed (3) Help expert employees to build
credential portfolio/profile that can be trusted by future employers - It
could have done a lot on that front but doesn't seem to be

Some of the feature I personally used and felt frustrated because of its
incompleteness: 1) Adding professional contact - for many of us, colleagues
are from different companies e.g. client side team working with us on the same
project. There is no relevant option to add these contacts which would say
"worked together on a project" 2) Polls - Don't know what's wrong; may be many
things, but never got it working as I could liked it to be. 3) Status update -
why does this site need one? Have you seen a single person posting updates
regularly through this feature and telling people what he is working on? 4)
Travel Info - What's the point? If you are travelling to a city, what was the
site expecting? People would come receive you at the airport? Or schedule a
business meeting with you without any prior talks? Or plan something like
that? Would you find time, if so? 5) Misused by HR people.

My observation is it tried to do many things without having a clear goal and
so haven't succeeded in any of it. I am not measuring 'success' by number of
active users but how well it satisfies those users with everything they want
to achieve through this platform. Whether it failed or not that's a debatable
question; but some focused business goals and then technically making the site
'usable' would help it a lot.

One credit that it should definitely get is trying to do something for which
there is a great real-life need and no other better alternatives.

------
alain94040
Agreed. LinkedIn, in its current implementation, is a glorified resume
database. I use it to look up people and find out their background. It's
terrible at helping me make new connections.

I should know, that's partly why we founded <http://letslunch.com>. We felt
that the LinkedIn introduction "the InMail" just didn't work. So we
implemented a sort of reverse-Facebook concept: meet people who are not your
friends yet. So far, it has been really successful at growing people's
connections, where LinkedIn, in my opinion, failed miserably. I met people
through LetsLunch who are great, cool, entrepreneurs, and I would never have
met them otherwise.

------
endtime
I get it completely. It's Facebook for your professional life.

It's not perfect, and I'm not disagreeing with any of the criticisms people
give below, nor am I on LinkedIn more than once every few weeks. But it has a
clear purpose in my eyes.

------
m0nastic
LinkedIn serves as a "Someone I Know Looking For a New Job Early Warning
System".

If I get an email that someone has updated their LinkedIn, then I know that
they're looking for work. It's the same thing if someone I know gets their
CISSP.

~~~
maigret
Point, though it produces lots of false positives... Should I "friend" my boss
to get my raise in time? ;)

------
jamii
I've never gotten any use out of LinkedIn. Maybe my network just isn't big
enough but the only messages I ever get are recruiter spam and job offers at
dodgy hedge funds. I've had much more success recently by adding 'PS - I'm
currently looking for work, check out my resume' at the bottom of my site. It
gets much more visibility and its seen directly after reading a blog post
about my work.

------
markkat
I deleted my account a couple of months ago. After a few years, I got nothing
out of it. My gmail serves as a better contact list. My day job is research,
and linkedin doesn't serve our type of networking very well. It's more
business-oriented.

As for my work outside of research, I don't want to cross-advertise in one
place.

------
modeless
LinkedIn is a service that allows recruiters from companies you want to work
for to pay for the privilege of contacting you. What's not to like? You don't
need to cultivate a forest of connections and recommendations and other
profile doodads; just update your resume once in a while.

------
grishick
LinkedIn, unlike other social networks is actually useful

------
paul9290
When job searching I use LinkedIn to see who I need to send my resume too.
From there I search them and the company on facebook to see if we have any
mutual contacts. Even we dont have any mutual contacts I'll send them a
message to see if i can send them my resume directly. This has always been
successful for me to land interviews and get job Im qualified for and want.

So, LInkedIn for me has the purpose for serving as a directory to then connect
with who you need to via Facebook. Everyone visits/interacts with FB everyday,
so sending them a message there, you will get you an immediate response over
sending via LinkedIn.

------
ozziegooen
I've been working to create a more portfolio approach with Holono (see:
<http://holono.com/> ).

Even if LinkedIn works for resumes, resumes just don't work well for a lot of
people. They summarize huge technical projects into a few sentences.

While LinkedIn has been optimized for business professionals, I feel like a
lot of other groups (Engineers, Entrepreneurs, Public Sector workers,
teachers, etc) who could use better. Right now they just use LinkedIn because
that's what everyone else uses, even though it's not really made for them.

------
drpancake
For larger companies doing a fair amount of hiring, it's quite useful for
trying to figure out what they're up to. Browsing to a company's page shows
you the latest hires.

I also use it as a research tool if there's someone in the hierarchy I want to
get in front of. As a bonus they'll often maintain a public profile describing
themselves, detailing their past experience and possibly linking to their
Twitter account. Now you can guess a little about what this person is about
and what's on their mind.

------
teyc
From the revenue numbers LinkedIn generates, I gather it prequalifies people
who may want to contact you for professional purposes. Kind of a better Inbox.

For example, you might try to email someone at a Uni directly, but it'll be
competing for his attention in the inbox. With LinkedIn, it is clear to him
you are willing to pay to contact him, so it is something you clearly place
value on. In addition, it allows him to take a quick look at your professional
profile.

------
crasshopper
To paraphrase somebody from the Nuclear Phynance forum (PostIDKey=147507):
it's a place for unemployed people to hang out and brag about themselves.

~~~
crasshopper
Does HN allow downvoting because you disagree with the poster's perspective?
This comment was legit. See the NP post, and senior user Cheng's comment to
the computational biologist who wants to become a quant, about the market for
quants nowadays and how he refers to LinkedIn in that regard.

~~~
kovar
Yep. You can apparently down vote for any reason you like. Figuring out why
you were downvoted is part of the game...

------
luckystrike
Personally, LinkedIn has worked for me in allowing me to connect with a number
of people working in the Education sector. (My startup targets K-12 space in
India.)

This includes School Principals, Teachers, and other firms with whom I can
possibly collaborate in future.

LinkedIn certainly ain't the best in many respects, but does serve a purpose
at times.

------
yesimahuman
I get it but I don't find it very interesting. Even their new social news
features seem obvious or manually procured (it's easy to show me 5 Internet
news related articles, but difficult to find me news that will improve my
career).

I don't know. I log in at most once every two weeks, which is more than I can
see for most sites.

------
flatleftwrist
I get LinkedIn, find it rather useful from time to time. What I find
completely useless are LinkedIn recommendations. It's almost an inverse
relationship, the more recommendations you have, the worse employee you are.

~~~
grishick
I disagree. I think it varies depending on profession. An offline analogy
would be framing all the little awards and recommendation letters you ever
received and hanging them on the walls of your office. If I see something like
that in an engineers office, it is a bad sign, because it is not a good
measure of an engineers quality of work. However, when I am in a doctors
office, I expect that, because I want to see that this doctor has been
certified, re-certified and recommended by a thousand other people. When I am
interviewing a marketing or a PR professional, I expect them to have a baggage
of flashy nominations and awards that they got for their previous
jobs/clients, because that's a fair measure of the quality of their work,
because I will want them to do the same for my business. Recommendations by
clients is a good thing to have for direct sales reps, it shows that their
clients are happy with them, are willing to spend a few extra minutes on a
paragraph of good words and are likely to become clients again.

------
pinaceae
it is a self-updating address database. connect once, be sure to be able to
contact those people anytime.

added benefit: work history. super useful when used in a sales context.

by now this is big problem: sales guy builds a huge network in linkedin. then
leaves the company and takes all that data with him. added bonus - his network
gets automatically notified, that he has left the company.

------
thekevan
I am in sales and honestly, the most use I have had is researching (cyber-
stalking) names for making sales prospecting lists.

------
dvanduzer
LinkedIn is fantastic. It tells me which people already know each other. This
is more useful than I would have imagined.

------
dusing
linkedin is for the unemployed. And as others have mentioned very fake, there
is no incentive for honest reviews, everyone is too nice about everyone for
fear of breaking or narrowing their network.

~~~
aashpak1
I've been waiting for some really useful apps to come out of linkedin platform
- unlike the reading list kinda apps which are not at all making use of the
real potential of the platform. I think the linkedin API is very very limited
at the moment.

------
farout
I remember looking up a former coworker who was a great coworker who I was
trying to recruit.

It was so odd that he had links to people that he hated. Not only that they
each had written about each other and how good the other person was. It was
all made up. It was weird since I had worked there and knew the calibre of
their work.

I remember asking him why. He just said that is how he and the others
networked. Or maybe they all hoped that the others would get another job and
leave -- you know when someone gives a stellar reference.

Linkedin is too faked.

~~~
bborud
Concluding that "Linkedin is too faked" based on what would appear to be a
really small sample seems a bit rash.

If I were to quickly generalize over "my neighborhood" in the Linkedin graph,
I'd say that most people I am connected to are rather careful about whom they
endorse and how.

These two conflicting observations aren't really surprising. I have evaluated
a lot of resumes over the years from people across the globe and how people
present themselves, their skills, and their work experience seems to vary a
lot.

~~~
farout
Yes you are right. One sample is not representative.

I should have added that I also noticed - of the 35 people (that I knew very
well) that I checked in LInkedin, all 35 had misrepresented themselves in
Linkedin to some degree.

As a statistical analyst, I realize that a sample size of 30 or greater is
actually pretty good. So... I stand with my conclusion to be weary of Linkedin
profiles since they are in the end what all resumes are: marketing collateral.

I guess the issue is this marketing does not accurately represent the product
or service. And in a sense this has nothing to do with Linkedin specifically.
Only that they display the marketing pieces and I somehow misunderstood that
what I would find there would be more realistic/truthful and match my
empirical info.

Edit: My editing and typing skills suck

------
svlla
it's where you go to update your profile to indicate to others that you're
looking for a new job.

