Of course I'm speaking only from personal experience, but as both candidate and hiring manager LinkedIn holds next to no value for me. I see it as a commons that has been largely ruined by recruiting agents who are incentivised by their employers to maximise candidate throughput at everyone else's expense.
There is some residual value in LinkedIn groups, where peers can network for mutual benefit, but these pools of genuine interaction inevitably attract recruiting agents - if indeed they aren't already present as groups admins, happily lurking while candidates posture and parade.
But I'm not about to close my account (if that is even possible). I'm very fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.
I think almost the exact opposite. Linkedin is still missing many features that could turn it into a bit of a game changer for business.
Maybe as a recruiting tool it's currently trash. I can get behind that. But if Microsoft manages to bring in a fresh set of users with some new features it could expand into something actually useful instead of a marketing hellhole.
I do think there's room for a turnaround.
As I was undergoing the transformation to engineer, it was a fantastic platform for me to reach out to people in my new industry and city, people who had gone down my path before, mentors, and etc. Then when it was time for job search, LinkedIn and Angel.co had the highest quality postings. Also, on LinkedIn when looking at a job posting I could see if someone from my bootcamp or university worked there, as a link right under the job posting.
Hence why I closed my account a year ago. As an engineer it provides me with nothing but recruiter spam.
I also use it to keep track and keep in touch with previous coworkers.
One of my coworkers talked me into playing this game. We look for the most professionally pointless endorsements our contacts have and add to them. So maybe someone ends up 3 endorsements for Econometrics and 18 for Microsoft Powerpoint.
http://lifehacker.com/this-video-explains-why-you-should-tal...
Adam Ruins Everything - Why You Should Tell Coworkers Your Salary
In fact, I'd love to know what they can offer in the way of assurances against this.
Edit. For example, I'm not sure if this current policy will continue into the future. It's easy for me to get used to handing them my salary information and for them to change the privacy policy under me.
One of the interesting dichotomies with compensation data
is that many users want this information, but don’t want to
have their individual data exposed or connected back to them.
Salary information is personal to each of our members. With
this in mind, and consistent with our Members First organizational
philosophy, one of the first goals we established when we set out
to embark on this project was to provide powerful salary insights
in aggregate without risking an individual’s private information.
In the end, we built a salary collection system to provide the
strongest protections for the anonymity of all of our members—no
easy task. Parts of our approach are detailed later in this article.
Because we proactively separate a member’s submission data from their
Member ID when compensation data is submitted, it enables us to
secure the system in such a way that we cannot even support the
ability for a member to update their previously submitted salary
information - they have to resubmit. Furthermore, our system provides
protection not just from hackers out in the wild, but also provides
access control against unauthorized use by internal users.
"Hey employers, tell us how much your employees earn, so we tell you where you could save!"
E.g. I hold the title of "Senior Software Engineer" despite only have 2 years/4 mo. of experience and very little of that experience is project management or non-code things.
When talking to recruiters in my area for a new position and giving a base salary of $90k, they routinely come back with "You won't get that offer with your level of experience".
In practice, I routinely cut the Senior from my title to avoid expectations I can't meet.
Dice.com has a much better idea behind this, which is tying skills and years of skill to estimated salary. The backend for LinkedIn's site honestly does not look more complex than a few straight-forward SQL queries.
For other industries where titles are a little more controlled, it may be a fine measuring stick, but people hire in software based on what skills you have and what you've done. Not by title.
I worked as a Software Developer for a company that used the data as base for their salary negotiations and it worked quite well.
[1] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/...
[2] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfsstatic/dam/assets/6937/master
But the more important problem is the selection bias.
HR departments can purchase salary benchmarks from companies like Mercer. Everyone on the developers side would like better benchmarks that are free or nearly free to even the odds when negotiating job offers or raises from current employers.
I haven't created a site yet in part because of the self-reporting problems. Will developers trust an unknown start-up with their real salary data plus the education, skills, experience and location data needed to make this targeted and really valuable? Can we have a process that is sufficiently rigorous and accurate that HR departments would acknowledge it in negotiations? How can we prevent developers from inflating their current salaries and other compensation? How can we prevent companies from coming on the site and using bogus accounts to drive down salaries?
As someone else mentioned the guys at step.com - seem to have an interesting idea of having developers post the background and skills and then have people anonymously value that background. I suspect that this approach will also face issues of acceptance in negotiations.
Or possibly have users upload paystubs, though you'd have to have someway to verify. I'm sure that's possible.
* People contribute between 0 to X% to a 401k.
This couldn't be deduced from take-home.
* Many companies have a Employee Stock Purchase Program,
which is deducted from payroll.
* Some (Many?) programmers get a large chunk of
compensation in options or RSUs.
Years of experience, education, and title are never enough to gauge performance or pay.
Can you think of other factors that would help?
Ha! I didn't even think about that!
Plus with Microsoft owning them, it's directly integrated as a core feature of Exchange Server. Probably rolled out in the most recent "security update" patch.
I don't really see this as a fundamental shift in anything, just an attempt to tack on a competitor's featureset.
From my (arguably limited) experience, if you want a truly meaningful job, nothing beats your own business as in a corporation you'll always be subject to office politics, wishes and desires of your superiors, corporate deciding to change course etc., that's at least what I am planning to do in order for my work to be truly "meaningful".
The trouble is, you'll usually have to take a pay cut for the first couple of years and it's a greater risk than most people are willing to take.
The map at the bottom of the landing page would be cool to have as a proper tool (seeing salary-per-title comparisons across the map), but I can't seem to find it anywhere for actual use.
It's not perfect, but it is helpful when trying to get an idea of what someone is making. The upgraded version has salary conversion support for different currencies for other countries.
Unlike most of HN, I actually appreciate recruiters reaching out and I try to get back to each of them, if only to just understand what's out there, what possibilities I may be overlooking.
Fuck linkedin. It is a closed service which disproportionately provides value in a way that makes it nearly useless, while simultaneosly selling data to recruiters and companies. So this wont help anyone as much as linkedin and I am skeptical this data will be open.
So these kinds of reports are useful for supporting our answers to questions like "Why do you say none of the applicants for this developer position are qualified" when we answer "because you'll only offer $50k/year".
Now as for whether that will actually play out and result in salary increases remains to be seen.
I find most companies are generally in the know on how well they're paying their employees (employee retention, counter-offers, etc), it's the employees that lack this information.
But they have to be fairly on the ball, and many people just aren't.
This seems pretty flawed. You can still put in a random number in some band, skewing the data (probably) upwards.
I thought Patil invented that term for LinkedIn (along with Hammerbacher at Facebook).
Or to oversimplify it: never stop learning and you'll never stop earning.