I quit LinkedIn, and you should too

LinkedIn has been pretty successful in establishing itself as the premier online network for professionals. The same way Facebook has shouldered its way in between you and your friends & family, LinkedIn has wedged itself between you and the professional world.

I deleted all of my social media accounts well over a year ago, but each time I considered LinkedIn, I asked myself "but how will I find another job?". That's the brilliance of their platform. I despise it, but at the same time I respect their strategy and their success in carrying it out.

But let's look at the various reasons why LinkedIn sucks, aside from their parasitic position in the professional world.

The feed

Like all social media these days, LinkedIn provides a never-ending scrolling page that you land on first. And like all the others, it says something about their priority. Your profile isn't the first place you arrive. Job postings relevant to you aren't front and center. Maybe they'll show you one or two in tiny, cramped box off to the side. They want you to scroll.

Let's call the feed what it is: a stream of ads, self-agrandizing posts and commentary, public posturing, or a blend of the three. By my estimation, about half of it is from people you've never met or even heard of. Even then, I saw a post from an ex-colleague that I genuinely respect and admire, expressing thanks for help received after some recent career troubles. And it felt hollow. I thought about it, and it's likely because before LinkedIn, those thanks would have been delivered in-person, or via phone call or a thank-you card and gift basket, all without broadcasting to the online public.

The profile

Linked in has turned into a public, online, interactive resume where you are constantly faking it and never quite making it. The same way Internet companies vie for search engine dominance with "SEO" optimization, users have to doctor their job descriptions to appear as generic and uninformative as possible but capture as many buzzwords and key phrases as possible—that appears to be what recruiters look for. I could give you the sexiest, AI-enhanced description about being a senior software engineer that has ever graced the Internet, but at the end of the day, the most apt description is that half of my time is spent fixing stupid bugs, and the rest is a varying split between dealing with integrations with third party tools that somebody wants, doing code reviews, and implementing features aimed at maximizing revenue. Sprinkle in a few meetings and some tutoring, and that's my gig. That's not what recruiters look for, but it's reality. It's not glamorous, it's not exciting, but every job has its drudgeries.

Their customers

There's that relatively famous line: "If you are not paying for it, you are the product". Facebook and Google are the biggest companies that come to mind when considering this, but you can see it everywhere, especially social media. Your attention is valuable, and once they have it, they sell it to anyone they possibly can.

Sure, LinkedIn does have premium features, but it's still a free-to-use platform. That means you are the product. The paying customers are the recruiters who use LinkedIn as a farming system for candidates, which obviously embraces quantity over quality. The worst recruiters I've ever dealt with came from LinkedIn. Poor responsiveness, ghosting, and complete misreads of my resume and expertise are the norm.

Your privacy

I have on multiple occasions been directly texted or called by recruiters who somehow got my personal number from LinkedIn. This is more of a problem with the professional etiquette of the recruiters, and even if it's not LinkedIn's fault that they got my number, their "InMail" system is just as intrusive and obnoxious. Nobody wants to receive template emails for positions that are sent to you based on nothing more than a few meaningless words like "senior" in front of your title, or in my case, a programming language that happens to be in your job description. That's like contacting an English schoolteacher about an opening as an OSHA safety inspector because they both use clipboards (contrived, but it conveys my point).

We deserve better

There are people I genuinely respect and admire who play "the LinkedIn game". And having met them personally, I can tell you I don't respect them because they play it—I respect them despite it.

At the end of the day, it's important to consider that LinkedIn is social media, and to remember that jobs have been found and filled long before LinkedIn was a thing, and that you deserve better than to be a search result.