Clojurians Log v2

i wouldn’t recommend. I’ve never seen a lack of linked in as a positive. Probably doesn’t matter at an extreme level of competence, but obscuring skills or not having a real presence on the internet makes it hard to verify or perhaps likely that your application is an AI bot.

I also think a lack of a linkedin profile may hurt for many job applications. What’s your rationale for deleting your profile, @v1nc3ntpull1ng?

we have lots of heuristics for AI applications which are increasing. Having older linked in profiles is helpful determining that the applicant is a real person. Profiles made in the last few months are highly correlated with seemingly fake applicants

I'm very curious why anyone would delete their LinkedIn profile...

mine is inoffensive and infrequently used. never bothers me, and i have no expectations about it except essentially a resume at a glance. kinda win-win for me

It seems an easy way for companies/recruiters to find you/your resume, so not having one seems a net negative to me.

I’m actively using mine to grow my Clojure network. It makes LinkedIn fun for me, even. And I have had super nice use of it when I have needed work, getting help making that visible.

I am not really that active on LinkedIn; but I do have a profile. I have to say though that when I tried to set up a job alert for Clojure, I couldn't even get a match (LinkedIn requires you to use a pre-existing "title" from their list; boo) for "Clojure". The closest I could get / think of was "Scala developer". 😞

Linkedin job search is not ideal. They show everything when I search for Clojure. Even if there are Clojure jobs sometimes. The keyword search sometimes simply doesn't seem to work.

Presumably you get access to more specific filters if you pay for premium? Most of the filters are not available for free accounts.

Just so I hear you all clearly, you would pass up a good candidate because they do not have a linked in profile?

LinkedIn is cringe. But if you already have a portfolio page, I find it actually more important than your Github profile.

That is not what you asked originally. I generally research applicants online to see what footprint they have. Not having a LinkedIn profile seems weird but wouldn't be a disqualifying "red flag". I just think it's foolish not to have a presence there.

I might mistake a lack of linked in as indicia of not a real candidate. But if the person is known it’s completely irrelevant

True, if you're hiring through your personal network then you'll already know the candidate - I've hired some folks I've known well with a very minimal process and minimal references. But that's not true of most job situations...

Good or bad, I've come across multiple applications (Clojure jobs included) that have a required linkedin profile link. Well it's got the * saying it's required at least. I guess you could put a link to your portfolio or github there and see what happens.

I'm very curious why anyone would delete their LinkedIn profile...My now-resurrected profile was deleted for five years or so. I had a few reasons, which all boiled down to: • "The Algorithm, The Network, and The Posturing of People had way too much power over my brain / emotions". As a consequence, though I genuinely felt I had no real utility for the service, an irrational fear of missing out gripped me, when I thought about deleting my account. Nobody is immune to status games / FOMO, and I was one of those 500+ connections people. I have a thumb rule: "When in fear, do it because of being irrationally afraid." I had applied the same principle to deleting Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp when those got too much for me. As it turns out, I didn't miss any of it. Having grown up without the Internet and always-on instant global communication has its perks, I suppose. If I'd had childhood / teenage exposure to this stuff, I'd have been a hopeless dopamine addict. And I now I am better adjusted to use these like social utilities, rather than social life/presence when I need to. The reality is that The Network is not on any of these applications, it is in the feelings people have for each other. So... • Whatsapp is very useful in India, so it's back in circulation. I aggressively opt out of large / chatty groups. • LinkedIn, I think I can use, so that's back in circulation. If it annoys me again, out it goes again. • The others are more trouble than they are worth. I'd rather hang in nice communities like this one, read long rambling blog post by Internet randoms and have long rambling email conversations with them. Now that I'm back on LinkedIn... Y'all can add me to y'allses professional networks and hire me :) https://in.linkedin.com/in/adityaathalye

Yes, but for what audience? Clojure community is so small, that you probably recognise other participant’s by their handle/name, their blog and their projects. I think that what you’re talking about is just “feeding the machine”…

As you said, the Clojure community is so small...

And as someone else once said, "Utility is contextual". I am back on LI after years of not having a profile, for distribution and outreach. An art that @michaeldrogalis is winning at. If one wants to sell something, one has to go where the buyers are.

In my head, I've framed LinkedIn as just a business card with social proof that points to my website.

I'm curious to know if the idea of LinkedIn is inherently bad, or if it is only the specific implementation of the idea that is poor. i.e. could an alternative both out-compete LinkedIn in the marketplace and provide a better user experience.

Depending on who's asking, I believe there are, in fact, more useful, professional networking utilities (not to mention venues). Among the "big network alternatives", Instagram, for example, is for artists and creatives and fitness trainers etc. All my friends who are in those professions have a token presence on LinkedIn, if at all, and are heavily on the 'gram. I, by contrast am not on the 'gram, or FB, or X, or any other microblogging service. Generally-speaking, the gravity well of giant networks is immense. The bigger a network is, the bigger it becomes. But by virtue of that, it serves everyone equally badly, and becomes like any other giant network the average is part of. LinkedIn's utility has (d)evolved to the mean of #{Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Twitter Telegram Threads BlueSky}, in a mutually-fed-back-and-forth influence of social behaviours.

And what a cringe-fest LinkedIn's "feed" is... it's like people have no idea what's useful or professional or personal or, well, sensible. Or rather they who "Influence" know that humble brags and hot takes and hot memes and hot pics grab eyeballs anywhere. Because under the pressed suit and starched collar, is a human doomscrolling twitter and stalking Insta hot bods.

For a magical time, its early years, twitter was so great to meet cool nerds and erudite people from across the world. Then it got too big and idiotically algorithmic to remain nice and fun and generally positive.

isn't that true of all/most social networks?

Yup, and I speculate why in the prior message ☝️

someone need to do some research in to that... how to determine that tipping point.

Twitter's firehose used to be a goldmine for that... I'm pretty sure people have been doing it for a while. "Organisational Behaviour" is a pretty old discipline. Anthropology and Sociology even older.

I'm getting some interesting results for this query: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=human+behaviour+as+networks+grow&ia=web

I'm old enough to remember the golden days of Usenet before "the general public" got access... most of the people I dated in my 30's I met on Usenet (including my wife of 25 years now). It was a very social "network" :)

Just saw this. I’m honestly shocked, surprised & disappointed that LinkedIn became a thing that people use seriously.

Sad, but if anything, it's only going to get stickier. In the context of LLM-generated applications and LLM-answerable coding interviews, a visible social graph becomes a keener signal of the person-ness of a person.

I did wonder when opting to use Clojure at my current company whether that would make hiring harder. Obviously, it is impossible to reliably compare against the counter-factual, but it seems to have been fine and fits with what @seancorfield is saying. We've generally had a small number of candidates, most of which have been interesting to talk to, and enough of which have been worth hiring that we've ended up with a team of really thoughtful, delightful people. I've never tried to hire a JS developer though...

I removed all my job entries from my LinkedIn so that I get less spam from recruiters. but kept the account just in case.

> Profiles made in the last few months are highly correlated with seemingly fake applicants Uh-oh, I just made one. I'd better say things that no AI is foolish enough to say! 😅

it’s evidence, not conclusive. The clojure side is esaier, but any javascript position can easily have 1,000s of fake applicants with fake linked-in profiles or a lack of them that 404 because linked in removed them. It can be difficult to look through applications.

Hiring for JS is an absolute nightmare! When we had an open JS req (a year or two back), we got a huge number of applicants who were mostly completely unqualified 😞 I think out of about 1,000 applicants, there were just 2 or 3 that were worth interviewing? Something of that order. By contrast, for our open Clojure req, we got just "tens" of applicants but maybe a dozen were worth interviewing. Orders of magnitude difference. That's why I kind of roll my eyes when someone expresses the opinion that it would be harder to hire for Clojure than for JS (or Java).