The majority use LinkedIn only for job searching and keeping contacts.
I do some times wonder if any hiring managers see a lot of LinkedIn social post activity as a positive thing. The few times we’ve interviewed candidates who had a lot of LinkedIn posting activity it was considered a risk: We could go through their LinkedIn activity and see that they must have been spending hours posturing on LinkedIn and replying to people everyday during the work day, which looks like a big distraction when they’re doing it constantly.
I think the dynamic you're observing is partly people just reacting to stuff (or if posting actively, fluffing up their "professional presence") as they do a job hunt.
Yes, but many of the people who matter in professional domains do. Much like all social media, the prolific few who do post have outsized influence, and engaging with them can often be to your benefit.
How? Legitimate question.
About a year ago I had a friend recommend me to their management. After three rounds of interviews, the CEO overrode the process and rejected me because I didn't have enough on my LinkedIn profile.
As far as I'm concerned, I dodged a bullet. If the CEO cares so much about LinkedIn filler that he'd overrule the hiring process, I'm certain I would have hated every moment working there.
One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.
So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.
At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.
Even if we could quantize someone into a feature matrix, every hiring process demands unique matrixes.
Even if I pass all the quantifiable stuff… the first answer to an HR “off limits” question will be given soon enough if I get the job.
Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement.
Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it underground. Over the years it's done more good than harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
I read somewhere that in Norway (small sample, yes I know) LinkedIn is supposedly a more popular social network than X/Twitter.
You can have whatever opinion you mean about Elon, X, free speech and whatever. I'm not here to have that discussion.
All that considered, as a Norwegian this had me quite surprised. I don't have the source anymore, but I'd love to dig into it to see what sort of metrics they use to measure this sort of popularity.
Literally nobody I know uses LinkedIn except for business-SPAM.
EDIT: Data from 2023: https://medias.smart-home-fox.de/SDE/Social%20Media%20Statis...
Definitely outnumbered by the inspirational slop, but I think it is a real mix and really depends who you connect with.
Anyway yeah the main point of LinkedIn is to get jobs. I've got several through recruiter spam.
I believe the same applies to many others as well
It's also full of "greatest team in the world", pizza parties, "incredible" training sessions, and "meetings of great minds". And now it's turned into a bunch of comedy reels. Blah.
Hey kids, you know how influencerslop sucks? proceeds to write influencerslop
I can't stand any of the other social media sites and have deleted accounts there years ago. So, if I need to organize a small reunion with friends from highschool, linkedin is the easiest solution.
Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually use.
One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever there is incentive to gain advantage.
(My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick, that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)
Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.
A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful: sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on, the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of the recruiter's recommendations...
Recently, a good human recruiter found me an interesting AI startup opportunity. But they were "we're AI-first!" using an AI call scheduling thing instead of Calendly, and it seemed to mess up, so I emailed a quick heads-up about that.
Spent 2 days prepping on their market niche before the call with CTO, and then he no-showed. I got an AI-sounding email from the CTO, after I waited 10 minutes in the call, saying I no-showed, and California-nice offering to reschedule. I replied immediately that I'd been waiting in the call, referenced my earlier heads-up about the AI scheduling, and would continue waiting there in case now was still good. No response...
I wondered whether the CTO wasn't seeing my email due to broken AI managing his inbox, or if he had just blown me off and ghosted after a mess-up on their end that he didn't want to deal with. So I asked the recruiter to make sure employer knew what happened with the AI, and that rescheduling wouldn't just repeat the no-show and ghosting.
No joy after a few days, so I bowed out.
Don't use bad AI; or if you accidentally do, fix the situation when it messes up.
My favorite is this:
The LinkedIn Renaissance Man. It reads like this: "Visionary, Recruiter, Climber, Marathon Runner, Co-founder, Author. Father."
That's the sales guys we charge with finding us jobs.
Our past co-workers are all CEOs, CTO's, AI experts, and various flavor of Leonardo da Vinci that surely puts my income and achievements to shame.
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand how dismal the platform is.
YMMV. I’ve heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work was treated as a massive red flag: “this person looks elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore”.
1. That’s the default presumption (rather than someone doing networking for their current role)
2. Where “looking for another job” is a point of contention
Any good senior engineer should be keeping in touch with others in the industry. And good teams are made up of people with good communication skills who want to be there.
I wouldn't load the site at work because I wouldn't want to signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I very deliberately didn't accept invites from management at my last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn't work there anymore. I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
If I'm not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this. You can edit your profile with or without a notification post. You can select "show open to being hired only to people outside your company".
Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but if I understood you right, these things aren't really issues.
If they hate you, they're less likely to go through a termination process including severance.
I used to always worry about them finding out. Now, I'm having trouble not blurting it out from the rooftops.
But agreed, it is getting harder and harder to dig to the gems.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-s... & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274676 discussion
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
It might be not obvious for those living in English-speaking countries but amount of native words replaced by this corporate jargon is irritating
FWIW starter kits and topical feeds are a great way to jumpstart your algorithm.
All those Indeed, Stepstone,... feel much worse.
Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.
If you aren’t in a location with meetups , the best bet is finding online game dev communities.
This works.
Doomscrolling is on you, other people use the resume and jobs parts?
On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.
This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the app, or the memory consumption.
But let’s be honest…
it’s not just a social media platform.
It’s a mindset. A daily ritual. A lifestyle. A place where every thought becomes a “lesson”
...
Contributors can lay out their every boring thought in strange staccato posts.
Every now and then there are genuinely interesting things happening in your industry you can learn about.
But you have to suffer through the fake team building and work family dribble.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
I think a lot of accounts are playing the algorithm and have AI generate a post every week. I just ignore those. Most of my posts are one sentence followed by a link to a blog.
Truthfully, I think it’s easy to rise above the slop since so much of it talks about the same stuff in the same format.
The brief period where LinkedIn didn't ban you for joke posts was glorious:
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/man-shares-fake-stor...
It's useless otherwise.
I mostly check it to follow up on recruiting messages.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?
But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.
Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.
The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for looking stupid on internet.
This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!
Sprinkle in a few business sociopaths and various opportunist "influencers" and you have a semi-self sustaining feed.
So, failing social media platform, full of bots, when is Elon Buying it?