Open LinkedIn for five minutes as a developer.
You will see a founder crying about failure in an airport lounge. A recruiter posting "Excited to share that I'm hiring!" for the fourteenth time this week. A motivational quote about hustle printed over a sunset. Three humblebrags disguised as life lessons. One "I'm grateful and blessed" announcement with 4,000 likes.
And somewhere, buried under all of it, maybe one actually useful post.
This is the daily reality of LinkedIn for most programmers. They tolerate it because they feel they have to. They hate it because, honestly, it deserves to be hated.
Here is exactly why.
The Spam Never Stops
The moment you put "developer" in your headline, the messages start.
About 35% of LinkedIn connection requests are followed by aggressive sales messages, according to research from email management company Superhuman. That means one in three people trying to "connect" with you are actually trying to sell you something.
Recruitment spam is worse. You will receive messages for roles you are wildly unqualified for, roles that require seven years of experience in a three-year-old framework, roles where the salary range is "competitive" (which means they will not tell you), and roles that list seventeen required skills for what is clearly a junior position.
Job offers are often missing critical information, with many listings omitting salary ranges or listing an overwhelming number of requirements without clearly explaining what the actual job entails.
Developers have noticed. Only 12% of developers use LinkedIn as their main source of technical information, according to a Stack Overflow survey. Most are on the platform purely because they feel they have no alternative, not because they find it genuinely useful.
The Fake Everything Problem
LinkedIn has a trust problem that is getting dramatically worse, not better.
In the second half of 2024, LinkedIn identified and removed 80.6 million fake accounts at the point of registration, up from 70.1 million in the prior six months. In the first half of 2025, it removed roughly 83.4 million.
Let that sink in. Over 200 million fake accounts removed in a single year. And those are only the ones they caught.
Criminals are now using deepfake technology, AI-generated job descriptions, and automated recruiter bots to convincingly impersonate real companies, real recruiters, and even real HR executives, tricking developers into fake interviews and handing over personal data.
Gartner expects one in four candidate profiles globally to be fake by 2028.
When a quarter of the profiles on a professional network might not be real people, the word "professional" starts to lose its meaning.
The fake content problem runs deeper than just bots. LinkedIn has forced its users to project a facade where a perfect professional is the only persona who succeeds. The result is a platform full of people performing success rather than actually sharing it. Every failure becomes a lesson. Every setback becomes a growth story. Every ordinary Monday becomes an opportunity for a grateful reflection.
There is no measure to check if something is real or not. A developer could add "Frontend Architecture at Google" to their profile and it shows up without any verification.
The Algorithm Is Working Against Developers Specifically
Here is a problem that gets almost no attention but affects every developer on the platform.
LinkedIn's algorithm penalizes external links.
That means every time a developer does what comes naturally, sharing a GitHub repo, linking to a dev.to article, posting about a product they shipped, sharing a YouTube video of a technical talk, the algorithm actively reduces how many people see that post.
Posts are getting shorter, with 800-1,000 characters being the sweet spot, and links still hurt your post.
Think about what this means for developers. The most useful things a developer can share, working code, technical writeups, live products, real contributions, are exactly the things the platform discourages. Meanwhile, vague motivational posts with no external links thrive.
Sponsored content and ads now fill almost 40% of the LinkedIn feed. The organic space left for actual human content is shrinking every quarter.
Reach has dropped approximately 50% year-over-year for most creators according to researcher Richard Van Der Blom's data. Developers who were getting reasonable traction with technical posts two years ago are now getting a fraction of the views for the same quality content.
LinkedIn tracks what they internally call "viewer tolerance," reducing visibility for authors whose posts are consistently ignored. So if your technical posts land with a small but engaged audience, and get scrolled past by the majority of your connections who followed you for other reasons, the algorithm punishes you further.
It is a trap. The more developer-focused your content, the less LinkedIn wants to show it.
The Profile Format Was Built for Someone Else
Now set aside the feed entirely and look at the profile itself.
LinkedIn's profile structure makes complete sense if your career is: company A, then company B, then company C. Employment history. Job titles. Credentials. Start dates and end dates.
It makes very little sense if you are:
- A developer with ten shipped side projects and one job
- A student who has built three products with real users but no formal work experience
- An indie hacker running a profitable SaaS without employees
- An open source maintainer whose most important work exists in repos, not on payroll
- A developer whose most impressive skills are visible on LeetCode, Codeforces, GitHub, and YouTube, not in a bullet point list
There is no native space for your competitive programming ranking. No place for your LeetCode solve count. No way to surface your dev.to articles or Medium posts as actual content rather than buried links. No integration with your YouTube channel showing your technical talks. No live GitHub contribution graph. No product showcase with real metrics.
To put any of this on LinkedIn, you manually copy-paste links into sections that were not designed for them, hope a recruiter notices, and accept that it looks like an afterthought. Because it is.
LinkedIn was designed for a professional world that runs on employment. It was not designed for builders.
Your Work Is Scattered and That Is a Professional Problem
Here is the thing no one talks about.
Developers today have their professional identity spread across a dozen platforms.
Code lives on GitHub. Competitive programming rankings live on Codeforces and LeetCode. Technical writing lives on dev.to or Medium. Tutorial content lives on YouTube. Product launches live on Product Hunt. Side project metrics live in a Notion doc nobody else can see. Open source contributions are visible on individual repo pages but not aggregated anywhere meaningful.
Ask most developers to send you a link that shows everything they have done professionally and they cannot. They send you their GitHub and hope you click around long enough to figure out the rest. Or they spend a weekend building a personal portfolio site, which they update once and forget.
This fragmentation is not just inconvenient. It actively hurts developers professionally.
A recruiter evaluating you has sixty seconds. If your professional presence requires them to visit four platforms, read three readmes, interpret a contribution graph, and check a YouTube channel, most of them will not bother.
This is the gap forg.to was built to close.
Instead of hunting across platforms, your forg.to profile aggregates everything into one place. Your GitHub activity, your competitive programming profiles from Codeforces and LeetCode, your content from YouTube, dev.to, and Medium, your products, your milestones, your metrics. All visible in one profile, fully customizable, structured the way a builder actually works rather than the way an HR database expects.
A developer profile that surfaces your actual professional identity, not just where you have been employed.
The Cringe Content Problem
Every developer knows this feeling.
You open LinkedIn hoping to find a job, make a connection, or learn something useful. Instead, you scroll through:
A founder revealing the three lessons they learned from almost going bankrupt, written as a dramatic twelve-paragraph essay. A developer announcing they just got their first offer after 847 days of rejection, with crying emojis. A tech lead explaining why "soft skills are actually more important than hard skills" in what is clearly a post optimized for engagement, not truth. An AI-generated post disguised as a personal story, using phrases no human being would naturally say.
Developers are building open source tools, solving problems late at night with no company name behind them, but they find the platform's fake professionalism intolerable.
The content culture on LinkedIn actively rewards performance over substance. Emotional posts that make people feel something outscore technical posts that actually teach people something. This is fine for the platform's engagement metrics. It is useless for a developer trying to find their people or get found by the right opportunities.
The Verification Gap
One of the most specific frustrations developers have with LinkedIn is that nothing is verified.
Anyone can claim any skill. Anyone can claim any job title. Anyone can list any company as their employer. Anyone can list themselves as a React expert, a cloud architect, a machine learning engineer, regardless of whether they have ever written a single line of relevant code.
Endorsements are a joke. Thousands of people have endorsements for skills from connections who have never seen them work. The endorsement system measures social reciprocity, not competence.
For developers specifically, this is maddening. The whole point of working in a field where you can show your code is that the work is verifiable. The GitHub contribution graph is real. The merged pull request is real. The live product is real. The LeetCode rating is earned through actual problem-solving.
None of that verifiability transfers to LinkedIn. It all gets flattened into the same unverified list of self-reported skills.
What Developers Actually Need
The complaints about LinkedIn are legitimate and consistently made. What is less often articulated is what developers actually want instead.
The answer, reading across every developer community that has discussed this, is roughly the same:
A professional home where the work speaks. Where GitHub activity is a first-class signal, not a buried link. Where shipped products are visible alongside the person who built them. Where competitive programming rankings, writing, technical content, and open source contributions all live together in one coherent identity. Where the profile shows what you can do, not just who has employed you.
Where verification comes from the work itself rather than from unchecked self-reporting.
That is a fundamentally different kind of professional profile than LinkedIn offers. And it is what builders increasingly need as the proof-of-work era of hiring takes hold.
Platforms like forg.to exist because LinkedIn was not built for this. Your profile on forg.to connects your GitHub, your Codeforces and LeetCode rankings, your dev.to and Medium articles, your YouTube channel, your products and startups with real metrics, all of it aggregated into a single professional identity that you control and customize. Not a social feed optimized for engagement. A professional record optimized for truth.
The question is not whether LinkedIn is useful. It still is, for some things.
The question is whether it is the right home for your professional identity as a builder.
For most developers, increasingly, the honest answer is no.
A Note on What LinkedIn Gets Right
To be fair: LinkedIn is useful for passive job discovery, for staying loosely connected to former colleagues, and for appearing in recruiter searches.
These are not nothing. Most developers should maintain some presence on LinkedIn for these reasons alone.
But maintaining a minimal presence for discoverability is different from treating LinkedIn as your actual professional home. The platform was not built for builders, does not surface builder-relevant proof of work, penalizes the links and content that matter most to developers, and is increasingly overrun with fake accounts and AI-generated noise.
Use it as a directory listing. Not as the place where your professional identity actually lives.
That place should be somewhere built for people who build things.
Top comments (1)
Thanks for your post. Nothing new to me mostly, but fun to read. At least we now we are not alone!
Slop machine platforms have become the new norm, a dead-internet version of Facebook optimizing for the wrong KPI. I doubt that the stakeholders upholding these kinds of platforms will be held responsible when things fall apart. However still, they will fall apart eventually. Look what has become of StackOverflow, of (ex-Twitter) X, and whatever. But when they have completely enshittified LinkedIn they still have GitHub unless they let AI Agents take over that one.
Maybe there will even evolve something more useful after the current slop era. Who knows?