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.