So while linkedIn may have opened doors, it is pretty unlikely through something like HN or your own irl network, you wouldve ended up unsuccessful. My own feelings towards linkIn aside, anecdotally it certainly seems that it was useful for you. It certainly has the ability to provide great things, or speed up connections/opportunity.

I agree with the article in that it is a soft requirement for a lot of things:

Entrepreneur: Helpful for hiring, networking looking at competition, finding investors.

Freelancer: Getting gigs, proving reputation.

Bigcompany: online presence, hiring.

Recruiter: obvious.

Etc.

So while you certainly aren't unique in finding value in linkedIn, it is utterly painful to use and sometimes i feel like if I put my cursor in the wrong place I'll accidentally agree to realtime uploading of all my data & that of my friend.

As an aside, it really can't survive much longer:

* Users hate using it

* it is totally unpleasant and insisistant on you conforming to what it demands.

* signal to noise is so out of alignment it is painful.

* Companies have to deal with the need to be on the platform and endorse enployees who are incentivized to self-promote sometimes to the company's detriment.

* I personally, and I largely suspect this to be very common, have connections I don't know. Either we have drifted apart, were breifly engaged in something, or I was just to lenient with accepting/reaching out.

* Increasingly, it is becoming less profitable as it struggles to give away enough data to be useful, but hold back enough to upsell premium packages.

While facebook certainly seems to care little about privacy, there is a compelling engagement and feeling of human connection that is just not there with linked in.

They should just sell to salesforce, that way the data and privacy could stay just as exploitive, but they could allow users latitude to enjoy/benefit from it a bit more.

LinkedIn has been amazing for me and I find recruiter's messages flattering and a way to increase my salaray by telling them Im making more then I am. How high can they go. There are tons of recruiters hitting us tech people up each week on Linkedin ... one of those messages will turn into your next and way better opportunity.

I a HN reader since 2007 find LinkedIn incredibly useful and I use it everyday. The UI on mobile is fine, even the recent updated UI/design is decent; was really used to the previous.

That may very well be, but I have never heard anyone say this except on HN

Professionally, it is dangerous as you can't show coworkers the great job you found. Most of the articles are advertisements or a logo and smiling people holding laptops, and the jobs (as all sites) are just crawled from every other companies site.

I can only assume that if I have to pay to send you a linkedIn mail we're not connected, and if we are connected I would send you and email.

So, the only reason I go on linkedIN, is because it is too hard to write a crawler to parse what I can only imagine is like 10K LOC of JS, and copy paste the source into my crawler to pull the info. Also, for potential investors & enterprise customers to view these profiles is $80 a month. So the top people who don't want to talk to us get unsolicited inbound emails from us because linkedin sold them out for $80 a month.

so yes this is HN, and yes I bloody hate LI.

I'm originally from Germany, so my professional network I developed while being a student turned almost useless after moving to the US.

I could have probably tried to establish a bit of an online presence through e.g. open-source work, but that tends to be a lot more time-intensive compared to just adding a few keywords about what I like and can do and a bit waiting :)

LinkedIn most definitely has its warts, but I think as an online resume and a way to connect professionals, it succeeds.

Exactly. And very importantly: it doesn't have any real competition. It is the social network for professionals to network on, get contacted by recruiters, post their resume, etc. Facebook doesn't have all that, and FB is for your personal stuff anyway, and anyone who mixes their personal life on Facebook (with inane posts about politics or cat videos or whatever) with their professional life is asking to never be hired anywhere. Twitter obviously is useless for the things LinkedIn is used for.

So until something comes along which does the stuff LinkedIn does, but better, we're stuck with it.

This is an interesting angle. There was a time when Facebook was only friends and family. My impression is that (for better or worse) this is changing rapidly. I wonder if Facebook will try to get into one of the fields mentioned in the four points in rdli's comment.