I Closed My LinkedIn

I saw a post from PC Maffey and it was weird because I closed my linked in the same day. I imagine this happens all the time, just no one writes about it.

Since I’m writing weekly now, I should probably take more notes throughout the week of things that happen and then on wednesday look at what happened and just pick something interesting (or make it interesting to write about).

I agree with them though, I kept my linkedin all this time because I thought it would “increase my luck surface area” but I realized that after 8 years or something of having a linkedin, it never really got me a job, or even helped me get one. Ironically, twitter helped me get more jobs than linkedin did, even though it’s not a “professional social network”. I would argue that the best social network is the one you check the most often, and in programmers’ cases, that’s twitter and probably github for now.

I also agree with the author of that post that a weak linkedin was probably hurting me, better to not have one at all than look like an anti-social candidate. I am social, just mostly offline which I haven’t quite translated to online activities yet, via videos or livestreams or something, but don’t worry programming videos and podcasts are coming.

To me, videos or livestreams of you programming are waaaay more valuable than static text on linkedin, prospective employers get to see you work through problems and at the moment anyway, the vast majority of software engineers don’t record daily/weekly/monthly videos/podcasts so you’ll stand out when you submit a resume full of links to artifacts you produced that only take a click and a few minutes to show how you solve problems or at least how you work on side projects which is better than weak connections on linked in.

If linkedin were to be recreated in 2020, or any social network, it would probably be better to start as an aggregator or at the very least a link to a bunch of other links to side projects/personal sites for programmers, way less effort to maintain and the value is in the content, not the social links. The world changes more slowly than we want to admit, but I think linkedin’s time has come as something plainly not valuable.