Hello Developers 🖐🖐
In this article, I'm discussing why I don't use LinkedIn much and why you should also stop using it. LinkedIn is used by millions of humans, as I am a developer I can only write about the perspective of a developer. Disclaimer everything in this article will be from the point of view of a developer.
Why you should have a LinkedIn account.
First and foremost, let's discuss why everybody tells you to have a LinkedIn account.
- You will gain exposure to Hiring Managers and Recruiters
- You will get offers from your LinkedIn profile.
- You will get to know about Job Postings.
- You can gain social proof of your skills and talents
- LinkedIn can help rank your name on Google
These points seem fair and promising, but this is not the reality of LinkedIn today.
The Reality Check 🙀 !
It's all fake, fake, and fake. Yeah, you heard me right. It's all fake, what I see whenever I open my LinkedIn. MOTIVATION, Some random dude did some small thing and shared it by over-exaggeration, someone likes or comments on something, random job posting, which I would never apply to.
What I hate about LinkedIn
MOTIVATION, the number of motivational quotes that are there in my feed just makes me irritating. There are more people wanting to motivate than the number of people who want to get motivated.
Job alerts, I wonder who is posting tens of jobs on a daily basis. And the information about the job is useless. They want you to have the knowledge of all the programming languages from the time they are made 🙂🙂🙂. And the cherry on the cake it the pay range is not disclosed by the company. If the employers of LinkedIn read my blog (It will not reach them probably) please make the requirement limited and make the pay range mandatory.
Some likes or comments on something. For the sake of humanity I don't want to know what my connections are linking and commenting on, please just remove this feature or make it an optional feature so that people who want it can enable it (Hopefully no one wants to).
It's all fake. There is no measure to check if something is fake or not. For instance, I have added in my experience that I am working at Google as a Frontend Architecture from Jan 2020 and It is showing on my profile. Check it here.
I could go on like this for hours, but I think you get my point.
Alternatives of LinkedIn.
- Github. Github is a great website to show your coding experience and your consistency through daily commits. However, it is only limited to developers.
- Dev Community. Dev.to is a great blogging site, and I get plenty of offers from my Dev profile.
- Hashnode. It is also a blogging site. It offers a lot of features free of cost.
- Twitter. I don't promote Twitter as much as Github and Dev, but I would say it is better than LinkedIn.
Let me know what are your thoughts, agree, or disagree. Let me know in the comments.
Closing here
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Oldest comments (47)
I use LinkedIn a lot as part of my job as developer advocate. I did hire once through LinkeIn. I do get a lot of job offers through LinkedIn which I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
I use Twitter a lot too and I'm not sure if it's any better though.
Social networks are marketing apps where you are the product. If you fully understand that and take everything said there with a huge salt mountain... Then it's good.
Yeah!
Thanks for sharing your view. 😊
It's the huge salt mountain that always get's me. You're totally right of course Shai it's a marketing app and at that it's great at what it does.
You make valid points in that there are no legitimacy checks on LinkedIn, and how these days it's quickly becoming "professional Facebook", which is undeniably aggravating considering the platform should be focused on career-related matters and not personal affairs.
However, I think you are incorrect in saying ANY of those sites serve as a real alternative to LinkedIn. If used properly, LinkedIn can be the only tool you need to find your next job. You don't have to follow LinkedIn influencers, just like you don't have to post your wedding pics on LinkedIn; It's all about how you use it, and honestly falsely claiming to work at Google is just contributing to the problem.
It is a disservice to your readers to suggest Twitter is a feasible option for the average person to find a job, and is likely far more hindering to their search than having to filter through the occasional JS meme or personal post on LinkedIn.
You have made a good point.
Yeah, I know Twitter is not a perfect alternative to LinkedIn.
I got offers from my Dev and GitHub profiles.
Thanks for sharing your views 😊.
I can relate with all the points here. LinkedIn was a good platform but now all we see there is some sort of chaos!
Pardon me for my shameless plug here, but there is something we started a year back because of these issues only! You should once try peerlist.io
We are building this platform specifically for the people in tech!
On a side note, loved every animation on your portfolio site. You made them flawless 🙌
I haven't heard about peerlist. Will give it a try in the near future. Thanks for the review. 😊
My friend just made 60k$ within a year using linkedIn. Can't argue with that.
I think many of us would love to hear how he did it. Or anything which can show us how to do that.
btw thanks for sharing it. 😊
Starting with
& ending with
seems a bit akward to me.
I personally use Linkedin to stay in touch with former colleagues and fellow students from my university time. It's a swiss army knife for professional networking. What you make of it (or it makes of you) is up to you.
😅
It ends like that because recruiters want to see my LinkedIn profile.
It's a good point btw.
LinkedIn help me find 5 successive jobs in past 10 years. Each time my salary went up minimum of 10%q
😮😮😮
Good for you.
Thanks for sharing that info.
So am I worng or you are suggesting people to stop using LinkedIn and to use Twitter instead? 😂😂😂
Enough internet for today.
Now being serious, LinkedIn is the biggest platform to be in order to get job alerts to jump to a new job.
I simply disabled all the notifications but messages on LinkedIn, still check it once a week to politely reject any job request and that's all.
If I suddenly want to jump to a different company it's easier going to LinkedIn and check the inbox or already known recruiters.
Twitter only makes some sense if you are selling any product, i.e. if you are an indie game dev. The rest is a fake parallel reality.
I don't really agree with this, and yes, probably I'm biased because LinkedIn is the social media platform that I use the most. More than Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
It is true that it's full of motivational quotes (which I like anyway, they inspire me to do better).
LinkedIn is a great platform because:
A friend of mine who graduated from uni managed to get a role at a tech company just because I liked a post published by the recruiter from that same company.
To me, it's underrated.
Perhaps you need to clean up your news feed and follow people who execute and not just talk.
One thing that LinkedIn definitely should improve it's LinkedIn groups.
Still, I believe it's a great platform.
This feels like quite an angry post against LinkedIn.
I completely respect your opinion and it’s a shame you don’t feel you got the most out of it. As someone below said I believe it’s more about who you follow and how you use it to get the most out of it.
I follow a lot of tech groups and so the majority of posts I see are relatable to me and so I don’t mind that. I never post about my personal life as that’s what Facebook or Instagram is for. Also I enjoy celebrating others achievements because sometimes people are just proud of stuff they’ve accomplished in their careers and so they’re free to celebrate that.
I never used LinkedIn much until recently but now I post regularly and network with other likeminded developers. If I get a recruiter in my dms I just politely decline.
It’s all just perspective. I do personally enjoy using this platform too for writing my thoughts and learning things from others and I have my GitHub account attached but I don’t use my GitHub to be social that’s just for my projects.
I don’t see however how saying you work for google when you don’t on LinkedIn is any different to writing that on a CV, your portfolio or anywhere for that matter.
When it comes to programming and IT field, linkedin + github is a great combination
despite the cringe social media features of linkedin, it's one of the best websites to find job offers you probably won't know about otherwise