I don't understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I login it's all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor images of people sounding like a parody of themselves ("what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling").
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
I got my last job there, and I have a steady queue of recruiters reaching out the whole time. So I will probably continue to use it as long as I need to eat. I don't engage with the feed at all though.
I've also gotten my last few jobs there. It's great for that. Even if it's 90% low effort recruiter spam.
It's also full of "greatest team in the world", pizza parties, "incredible" training sessions, and "meetings of great minds". And now it's turned into a bunch of comedy reels. Blah.
This. That's the only reason I'm on there too. I completely avoid the news feed, but it does help when you having people reaching out and you need jobs.
Over time, when I see a login gate on a website, I've gone from "I should join this exclusive site" ca. 2005 to "I guess they don't want me here" currently. If there are others like me, Linked in is a net negative for hiring. I literally have no idea what's on it anymore.
I use it sometimes to message ex colleagues e.g. I'm traveling to City X and I want to arrange a coffee with them but I don't have their email or phone number anymore.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work. It has all the negative attributes associated with a social network and none of the upsides (apart from the occasional recruiter message).
> It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work.
YMMV. I’ve heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work was treated as a massive red flag: “this person looks elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore”.
I work remotely so I had no idea. I'd have thought that unless you're in HR you wouldn't scroll a website whose primary purpose is to look for new jobs.
I've not understood why people wanted it to be a social network. That aspect always seemed bizarre to me until it had been true for long enough to stopped being strange. But this doesn't make sense to me either.
I wouldn't load the site at work because I wouldn't want to signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I very deliberately didn't accept invites from management at my last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn't work there anymore. I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
Microsoft wanted it to be a social network because they couldn’t buy Facebook. They did buy Yammer though.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
The same reason there’s probably some dude pitching adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
eh, that guy who pitched AI for Notepad was a product of M$lop push for AI everywhere. No one seriously though it needed AI, but if they're trolling for AI pitches, of course that's an easy target, it's already text based. GUI stuff is hard, but raw text?
> I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
If I'm not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this. You can edit your profile with or without a notification post. You can select "show open to being hired only to people outside your company".
Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but if I understood you right, these things aren't really issues.
In my experience, I am only connected with people I have worked with at some point, while taking the effort to mark posts as 'not interested' whenever it felt like ai-crap or boring enterprise slop. The few times I now browse the site, I see the odd interesting article that a college has liked and I barely ever see the pathetic stuff. The experience is fine haha. I think the algorithm just alters to what kind of person you are, thus in my case, the app mainly recommends similar things to what I find here on HackerNews.
It’s a great way to spot phonies if you don’t have a lot of time. If you encounter someone who seems to know things but you’re not sure what or how well, check LinkedIn.
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
The greatest value I see in LinkedIn is that it's one of the best places you can have PvP encounters with delusional C-suites making ridiculous claims in a world economy-defining hype bubble. Do I particularly think I am doing anything to change their minds? No, but I figure if enough people saw, at least some class consciousness could be built enough to resist some of their most inane excesses.
Recruiters keep reaching out. I didn't have to seek a new job in perhaps last 15 years, all I had to do was to flip "looking for opportunities" on and start sorting out the messages and emails.
I think it depends on who you follow/connected with. I only follow people that are prone to write their own posts, and I feel Linkedin is less filled with AI crap as mass public platforms like X.
LinkedIn feed now brings dumb posts from AI bots that contacts follow. All social networks tend to follow the same principles now: bring to everyone’s feed what’s most engaging, which is normally clickbaits or posts that use exaggerated words
I agree. I hate it with a passion and usually regret loading the page within about 10s of doing so.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
On the one hand, yes - and (to be reductive) enshittification is basically making decisions according to incentives that aren't aligned with your users, so it fits.
On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
Except those two divisions were at others ends of the hall, in between was the gauntlet of enterprise deference, with obstacles such as Service Now approvals and meetings about meetings about how to have good meetings… it’s an MBA’s wet dream.
A lot of people have answered that it is a useful tool for job searching. My experience was a bit on the other side of the coin. Our company wanted more of a presence on the site to gain visibility so managers like myself were encourged (told) to sign up and post on it. We also received video training on how to write catchy descriptions of ourselves (under 50 words ofc) and stuff like that.
Yes, it's low quality but you can find employment, you can establish some industry connections and you can find the right people to hire if you need to.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
I was going to respond, because of course the site has value if that’s where my network is and that’s where everyone posts jobs. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.
I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?
But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.
Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
I've been using LinkedIn for years. I'm one of those cynics who loath all those "inspirational" and "leadership" posts, but there's more than that. I've met some people who tremendously boosted my career. I've met people who later became friends and our kids play together.
I did meet a lot of incredible people in various jobs who I wouldn't have met otherwise(e.g. CEOs of very large companies- I'm just not in those circles to meet people in such positions). I'm often involved in interesting and challenging discussions on various technical and other topics.
The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.
I use LinkedIn as a forum; I only follow, comment and react to economics, society, ecology related posts (and therefore I only follow people posting these opinions). It's the closest we have from an Agora: I can debate with people I won't ever meet in my real life circles, and I discuss (disagree) politely with them because I'm CTO of a company and I can't publicly appear like a troll or douchebag. I unfollow or ignore every people sharing or creating the typical LI posts with one sentence per line and an emoji instead of ponctuation, they are the NPCs to me.
The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for looking stupid on internet.
This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!
The feed actually surfaced people working on open source projects adjacent to mine, that turned into real collaboration and shaped technical decisions I wouldn't have arrived at alone. It's not all good content, but it's a useful signal source for things outside your usual field of view.
As much as you all dislike LinkedIn and the cringy posts, keep in mind that for certain parts of the market it is >the< main professional forum. It is where your investors live, and their capital providers live. So, play nice, yeah?
Actually I think I'll play mean, specifically _because_ I want to be radioactive to investors and private equity. I sincerely believe there is a better way to exist and work without being beholden to a system that incentivises quarterly thinking at the cost of everything else.
For sure higher quality social network than Facebook. I personally like it. (Note that I follow only lithuanian posts. It may be our local language specifics.)
AWS has a similar RAM consumption. I close Signal to make sure it doesn't crash and corrupt the message history when I need to open more than one browser tab with AWS in the work VM. I think after you click a few pages, one AWS tab was something like 1.4GB (edit: found it in message history, yes it was "20% of 7GB" = 1.4GB precisely)
Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
I think a big problem is the fact that many web frameworks allow you to write these kind of complex apps that just "work" but performance is often not included in the equation
so it looks fine during basic testing but it scales really bad.
like for example claude/openAI web UIs, they at first would literally lag so bad because they'd just use simple updating mechanisms which would re-render the entire conversation history every time the new response text was updated
and with those console UIs, one thing that might be happening is that it's basically multiple webapps layered (per team/component/product) and they all load the same stuff multiple times etc...
My company started using slack in 2015 and at that time I put in a bug report to slack that their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE on a 1M+LOC C++ project. I used to stop slack to compile…
I noticed that there's a developing trend of "who manages to use the most CSS filters" among web developers, and it was there even before LLMs. Now that most of the web is slop in one form or another, and LLMs seem to have been trained on the worst of the worst, every other website uses an obscene amount of CSS backdrop-filter blur, which slows down software renderers and systems with older GPUs to a crawl.
When it comes to DeepL specifically, I once opened their main page and left my laptop for an hour, only to come back to it being steaming hot. Turns out there's a video around the bottom of the page (the "DeepL AI Labs" section) that got stuck in a SEEKING state, repeatedly triggering a pile of NextJS/React crap which would seek the video back, causing the SEEKING event and thus itself to be triggered again.
I wish Google would add client-side resource use to Web Vitals and start demoting poorly performing pages. I'm afraid this isn't going to change otherwise; with first complaints dating back to mid-2010s, browsers and Electron apps hogging RAM are far from new and yet web developers have only been getting increasingly disconnected from reality.
It's the user's fault. They vote for this crap with their attention. Junk sites like this shouldn't exist but they do amd aren't going anywhere until people stop using them.
Some users might enable these kind of features with their attention, but I don't think users actually want these features and any kind of "voting" is likely unintentional. It's manipulation. The fault lies mainly with the company and their carefully planned dark patterns. Ideally, users should punish them by e.g. leaving the platform but there's friction that may be a bigger problem than the dark patterns (depending on user). And I don't think there are any platforms that always guarantee good user experience now and in the future.
Not sure if users even realize what the dark patterns are and do. Users aren't all-knowing, with endless time, carefully balancing their attention to try to provide markets with the optimal signal to wisely guide the misbehaving actors.
So I pay for Global Entry only to have to play for Clear for faster screening. Now I have to pay another fee for a different service to get thru it faster AGAIN. I'm tired of the pay to win situation.
I don't understand why people get so hung up on Chrome using so much memory. A lot of this memory is "discardable" so will get dropped when the system is under memory pressure and the amount of memory allocated for this type of usage will depend on how much memory your system has available. If Chrome is using lots of memory then it's almost always because your system has lots of available memory. It allows the browser to cache large images and video assets that would otherwise have to be re-downloaded over the internet.
Or another process will die at random instead, which might be your desktop environment, the main browser process, Signal (10% chance at corrupting message history each time), a large image you were working on in Gimp...
Firefox has gotten very good at safely handling allocation failures, so instead of crashing it keeps your memory snugly at 100% full and renders your system entirely unusable until the kernel figures out (2-20 minutes later) that it really cannot allocate a single kilobyte anymore and it decides to run the OOM killer
but also
it's not cheap? Why should everyone upgrade to 32GB RAM to multitask when all the text, images, and data structures in open programs take only a few megabytes each? How can you not get hung up about the senseless exploding memory usage
That's not how it works. Process killing is one of the last ways memory is recovered. Chrome starts donating memory back well before that happens. Try compiling something and see how ram usage in chrome changes when you do that. Most of your tabs will be discarded.
I've already described above what the browser's behavior is. That your browser works differently is good for you; I'm not using a Google product as my main browser. There are also other downsides that this other behavior does not fix, mentioned in sibling comments
This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have something similar.
Well, a few GB here and a few GB there, soon you’re talking about real RAM issues.
The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs open.
Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from users.
The websites are jam packed with trackers and ads. I am utterly concerned about Chrome’s memory usage because it’s passively allowing this all to occur.
How about you let me blacklist sites that are using too much memory automatically, all that means is that those website owners FUCKING HATE THE REST OF US.
Any solution to this epic fucking problem would be wonderful.
uBlock origin on Firefox or Brave, which will block most of the tracker bloat, causing the RAM spike. It's not a perfect fix, but it will cut out a significant chunk of it. Tab Wrangler also helps by suspending inactive tabs automatically. You should try out both.
It probably depend on where you live and who you are. LinkedIn is my backup in case of a layoff. It's the site where I can reach everyone who worked with me or have made offers in the past.
If you do what I do, live in my general area and know the right people (which I do), LinkedIn will get you an interview or three lined up in a day or two. None of these people are on Indeed, HackerNews or even Slack.
try https://corvi.careers I been building it purely as job search platform, has good coverage of startups and public companies but I’d still recommend to use LI for network tho
Not only it's huge and slow, but the design is broken (some elements frequently masking others, like the top banner masking half the top menu, or the icons masking the search box), and it's full of errors.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
And on the same topic again, it's not "LinkedIn" but some managers most likely in marketing and tech who allowed this amount of bloatware. And I won't believe this RAM usage is really needed just for displaying static content or chat. It's like always trackers and ads.
Now I'm retired, linkedin's daily games are a fun way to do a little brain tai chi. Queens https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/ is my favorite, although my solve time is consistently about twice the average apparently.
I have to admit that this is also what keeps me coming back to LinkedIn. My brain is dangerously easy to motivate by dangling a virtual leaderboard in front of it.
But there’s so many good games out there. Check out Zachtronics/Coincidence.games for some cool examples. Walk to a bookstore and get one of their many sudoku/puzzle books. Check out the App Store for some puzzle games. Write your own puzzle game!
LinkedIN, showing why Reactive is such a good idea by refusing to use it....
No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state....rookie mistake
And also keeps showing a red dot on the feeds tab every time you navigate to another screen, so that they can trick you with interacting with one more ad.
Just like how Netflix makes you scroll through a bunch of shows, just to get back to what you were watching. It’s a way of forced interaction.
We’re slowly getting into the black mirror territory.
If I were PM at LinkedIn, I would do some cross social network info pollination to correct the LinkedIn. I would promote power users from bluesky or twitter who are technical or otherwise have lot of good analysis. Experts are prolific users and make use of Zipf’s Law to promote good content. Also through graph analysis, the users who get followed by power users will be promoted as well. Whatever you might say about Instagram and Tiktok, their recommendation system is SOTA. I even love ads from Instagram, they know exactly what kind of ads I might engage with.
Jira’s problem is that it’s effectively free-form, and there are no enforcements in place. You can have three teams - one using kanban with relative estimates, another using springs with story points, and a third using waterfall with time estimates - all in the same project, with the same workflows, and conflicting requirements. You have 3 different release fields, 2 are required, the third one is the one that your team are generating reports from.
I don't understand who uses that network anymore. Everytime I login it's all ai generated stories next to ai generated flavor images of people sounding like a parody of themselves ("what taking my kids to school taught me about business scaling").
Out of all places to doomscroll, why choose the one that feels like an episode of Severance?
I got my last job there, and I have a steady queue of recruiters reaching out the whole time. So I will probably continue to use it as long as I need to eat. I don't engage with the feed at all though.
I believe the same applies to many others as well
I've also gotten my last few jobs there. It's great for that. Even if it's 90% low effort recruiter spam.
It's also full of "greatest team in the world", pizza parties, "incredible" training sessions, and "meetings of great minds". And now it's turned into a bunch of comedy reels. Blah.
It's a difference between "using it" and just having a dormant profile you wake to live when interested, though.
This. That's the only reason I'm on there too. I completely avoid the news feed, but it does help when you having people reaching out and you need jobs.
Over time, when I see a login gate on a website, I've gone from "I should join this exclusive site" ca. 2005 to "I guess they don't want me here" currently. If there are others like me, Linked in is a net negative for hiring. I literally have no idea what's on it anymore.
+1 I haven't made an account on a new website in years, and god forbid I will ever link my gmail with anything other than g-suite.
I use it sometimes to message ex colleagues e.g. I'm traveling to City X and I want to arrange a coffee with them but I don't have their email or phone number anymore.
I see some people sharing info I care to reshare (we're hiring X/I'm looking for job X) and a ton of the same slop ("I went to pick up my kids. I realize this is the real breakthrough of agentic development. Let me explain.").
I genuinely can't understand why people write that crap, and who is their target audience.
It's still the main place where recruiter post jobs and look for candidates. That's why.
It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work. It has all the negative attributes associated with a social network and none of the upsides (apart from the occasional recruiter message).
> It's a social network that became socially acceptable to browse at work.
YMMV. I’ve heard a few stories where opened LinkedIn at work was treated as a massive red flag: “this person looks elsewhere, they are not committed to the company anymore”.
It depends on your role. People in sales have it open all the time since it's a legitimate research tool for them.
Yep. Sales and biz dev people use LI constantly not necessarily for connecting, but learning about contacts.
I work remotely so I had no idea. I'd have thought that unless you're in HR you wouldn't scroll a website whose primary purpose is to look for new jobs.
I've not understood why people wanted it to be a social network. That aspect always seemed bizarre to me until it had been true for long enough to stopped being strange. But this doesn't make sense to me either.
I wouldn't load the site at work because I wouldn't want to signal to my employer that I was looking for another job. I very deliberately didn't accept invites from management at my last employer (small company, ~25 people) until I didn't work there anymore. I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
Microsoft wanted it to be a social network because they couldn’t buy Facebook. They did buy Yammer though.
A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.
The same reason there’s probably some dude pitching adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.
In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.
Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.
eh, that guy who pitched AI for Notepad was a product of M$lop push for AI everywhere. No one seriously though it needed AI, but if they're trolling for AI pitches, of course that's an easy target, it's already text based. GUI stuff is hard, but raw text?
I actually didn’t know that was a thing. I was trying to cook up something quick and absurd. Truth is stranger than fiction!
> I wouldn't want them to get a notification if I suddenly revised my profile because maybe I'm shopping around for a new job, for example.
If I'm not mistaken, LinkedIn has options for all of this. You can edit your profile with or without a notification post. You can select "show open to being hired only to people outside your company".
Not that I have great (or any) love for the platform, but if I understood you right, these things aren't really issues.
In my experience, I am only connected with people I have worked with at some point, while taking the effort to mark posts as 'not interested' whenever it felt like ai-crap or boring enterprise slop. The few times I now browse the site, I see the odd interesting article that a college has liked and I barely ever see the pathetic stuff. The experience is fine haha. I think the algorithm just alters to what kind of person you are, thus in my case, the app mainly recommends similar things to what I find here on HackerNews.
It’s a great way to spot phonies if you don’t have a lot of time. If you encounter someone who seems to know things but you’re not sure what or how well, check LinkedIn.
If they are flexing as thought leaders, they are bullshit artists and readily ignored.
The greatest value I see in LinkedIn is that it's one of the best places you can have PvP encounters with delusional C-suites making ridiculous claims in a world economy-defining hype bubble. Do I particularly think I am doing anything to change their minds? No, but I figure if enough people saw, at least some class consciousness could be built enough to resist some of their most inane excesses.
This is a good opportunity to link to Cringebot 3000 which helps you scale your presence on LinkedIn.
https://www.cringebot3000.com/
I still use it to reach out to old colleagues or see what they're up to these days.
I was always saw LinkedIn, as nothing more than the best dating site in the world. My results so far have been stellar.
Recruiters keep reaching out. I didn't have to seek a new job in perhaps last 15 years, all I had to do was to flip "looking for opportunities" on and start sorting out the messages and emails.
This works.
I think it depends on who you follow/connected with. I only follow people that are prone to write their own posts, and I feel Linkedin is less filled with AI crap as mass public platforms like X.
LinkedIn feed now brings dumb posts from AI bots that contacts follow. All social networks tend to follow the same principles now: bring to everyone’s feed what’s most engaging, which is normally clickbaits or posts that use exaggerated words
Desperate job seekers. Nobody wants LinkedIn.
"No one goes there, it's too crowded" type energy
I agree. I hate it with a passion and usually regret loading the page within about 10s of doing so.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
You have to look at who owns LinkedIn and why building a meetings and calendar was not “part of the plan”
On the one hand, yes - and (to be reductive) enshittification is basically making decisions according to incentives that aren't aligned with your users, so it fits.
On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
Except those two divisions were at others ends of the hall, in between was the gauntlet of enterprise deference, with obstacles such as Service Now approvals and meetings about meetings about how to have good meetings… it’s an MBA’s wet dream.
A lot of people have answered that it is a useful tool for job searching. My experience was a bit on the other side of the coin. Our company wanted more of a presence on the site to gain visibility so managers like myself were encourged (told) to sign up and post on it. We also received video training on how to write catchy descriptions of ourselves (under 50 words ofc) and stuff like that.
The site is just a circle jerk. I hate it.
Yes, it's low quality but you can find employment, you can establish some industry connections and you can find the right people to hire if you need to.
Most people on LinkedIn do not waste their time there, they visit when they need to.
to investigate people of interest
I was going to respond, because of course the site has value if that’s where my network is and that’s where everyone posts jobs. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.
I frankly have no idea who uses the social media aspects of the site. Some of the “career coaching” groups suggest posting constantly because it ups your visibility to recruiters, but thats only the content generation part. I’d guess some recruiters follow it?
But even with careful curation of my feed, I have no idea who’s spending more than 30 seconds seeing “oh, John/Jane got a new job, cool” and then logging off.
Maybe it’s people stuck trying to find work who think there might, somewhere in the noise, be some useful, additive signal?
I've been using LinkedIn for years. I'm one of those cynics who loath all those "inspirational" and "leadership" posts, but there's more than that. I've met some people who tremendously boosted my career. I've met people who later became friends and our kids play together. I did meet a lot of incredible people in various jobs who I wouldn't have met otherwise(e.g. CEOs of very large companies- I'm just not in those circles to meet people in such positions). I'm often involved in interesting and challenging discussions on various technical and other topics.
The main point is that everyone can use it in a way they want to.It's perfectly fine to become some influencer if that's what one wants. It's equally fine to have 45 connections with people who are really good in what they do and perhaps exchange 5 messages a year. It's massive platform, so it's inevitable that there will be lots of crap out there,as in any other large forum without very strong moderation.
I use LinkedIn as a forum; I only follow, comment and react to economics, society, ecology related posts (and therefore I only follow people posting these opinions). It's the closest we have from an Agora: I can debate with people I won't ever meet in my real life circles, and I discuss (disagree) politely with them because I'm CTO of a company and I can't publicly appear like a troll or douchebag. I unfollow or ignore every people sharing or creating the typical LI posts with one sentence per line and an emoji instead of ponctuation, they are the NPCs to me.
The fun thing is the career related part of LinkedIn is just a collateral for the real intrinsic value of the platform: you have no interest in being anonymous like X or FB, therefore you have to act professionally. It's interesting to note that trolls are often retired people or professionals high enough on the social ladder they don't care anymore for looking stupid on internet.
This social network is in fact some kind of speakeasy!
The feed actually surfaced people working on open source projects adjacent to mine, that turned into real collaboration and shaped technical decisions I wouldn't have arrived at alone. It's not all good content, but it's a useful signal source for things outside your usual field of view.
It's legitimately useful for networking, and also for keeping track of professional events.
On the other side of the equation, it's also useful for sales teams using LI Sales Navigator as a lead enrichment platform.
This doesn't excuse any of the numerous dark patterns in the app, or the memory consumption.
As much as you all dislike LinkedIn and the cringy posts, keep in mind that for certain parts of the market it is >the< main professional forum. It is where your investors live, and their capital providers live. So, play nice, yeah?
Actually I think I'll play mean, specifically _because_ I want to be radioactive to investors and private equity. I sincerely believe there is a better way to exist and work without being beholden to a system that incentivises quarterly thinking at the cost of everything else.
Could you suck corporate dong any harder?
For sure higher quality social network than Facebook. I personally like it. (Note that I follow only lithuanian posts. It may be our local language specifics.)
I think I’ve legitimately taken career hits because I cannot stomach it. The culture of LinkedIn is absolutely repulsive to me.
AWS has a similar RAM consumption. I close Signal to make sure it doesn't crash and corrupt the message history when I need to open more than one browser tab with AWS in the work VM. I think after you click a few pages, one AWS tab was something like 1.4GB (edit: found it in message history, yes it was "20% of 7GB" = 1.4GB precisely)
Does anyone else have the feeling they run into this sort of thing more often of late? Simple pages with just text on it that take gigabytes (AWS), or pages that look simple but it takes your browser everything it has to render it at what looks like 22 fps? (Reddit's new UI and various blogs I've come across.) Or the page runs smoothly but your CPU lifts off while the tab is in the foreground? (e.g. DeepL's translator)
Every time I wonder if they had an LLM try to get some new feature or bugfix to work and it made poor choices performance-wise, but it completes unit tests so the LLM thinks it's done and also visually looks good on their epic developer machines
I think a big problem is the fact that many web frameworks allow you to write these kind of complex apps that just "work" but performance is often not included in the equation
so it looks fine during basic testing but it scales really bad.
like for example claude/openAI web UIs, they at first would literally lag so bad because they'd just use simple updating mechanisms which would re-render the entire conversation history every time the new response text was updated
and with those console UIs, one thing that might be happening is that it's basically multiple webapps layered (per team/component/product) and they all load the same stuff multiple times etc...
My company started using slack in 2015 and at that time I put in a bug report to slack that their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE on a 1M+LOC C++ project. I used to stop slack to compile…
Yes, its sometimes extreme. I often wondered if it was my FF browser, but then i'd switch to Opera or Brave, and i would see the same pattern.
Its quite insane
I noticed that there's a developing trend of "who manages to use the most CSS filters" among web developers, and it was there even before LLMs. Now that most of the web is slop in one form or another, and LLMs seem to have been trained on the worst of the worst, every other website uses an obscene amount of CSS backdrop-filter blur, which slows down software renderers and systems with older GPUs to a crawl.
When it comes to DeepL specifically, I once opened their main page and left my laptop for an hour, only to come back to it being steaming hot. Turns out there's a video around the bottom of the page (the "DeepL AI Labs" section) that got stuck in a SEEKING state, repeatedly triggering a pile of NextJS/React crap which would seek the video back, causing the SEEKING event and thus itself to be triggered again.
I wish Google would add client-side resource use to Web Vitals and start demoting poorly performing pages. I'm afraid this isn't going to change otherwise; with first complaints dating back to mid-2010s, browsers and Electron apps hogging RAM are far from new and yet web developers have only been getting increasingly disconnected from reality.
What us this AWS you talk about? :-)
my employer's choice of premium hosting provider
I wonder how much of that is from Linkedin checking what browser extensions you have, probably desperately trying to prevent screen scraping?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904361
Don’t go on that god forsaken hellhole of a dead internet website. Problem solved.
The fact that they hijack scrolling to artificially limit scroll speed is insane to me. Feels like I'm trying to navigate through molasses
Imagine the MBA that had this idea. This is peak, distilled Microslop engineering right there.
Nah, it's just bad engineering, period. I "like" aljazeera too - they hijack your freaking PageDn and PageUp keys.
It's the user's fault. They vote for this crap with their attention. Junk sites like this shouldn't exist but they do amd aren't going anywhere until people stop using them.
Some users might enable these kind of features with their attention, but I don't think users actually want these features and any kind of "voting" is likely unintentional. It's manipulation. The fault lies mainly with the company and their carefully planned dark patterns. Ideally, users should punish them by e.g. leaving the platform but there's friction that may be a bigger problem than the dark patterns (depending on user). And I don't think there are any platforms that always guarantee good user experience now and in the future.
Not sure if users even realize what the dark patterns are and do. Users aren't all-knowing, with endless time, carefully balancing their attention to try to provide markets with the optimal signal to wisely guide the misbehaving actors.
So I pay for Global Entry only to have to play for Clear for faster screening. Now I have to pay another fee for a different service to get thru it faster AGAIN. I'm tired of the pay to win situation.
Always thought people should be organizing cross industry unions and planning strikes on the platform.
Why not?
I don't understand why people get so hung up on Chrome using so much memory. A lot of this memory is "discardable" so will get dropped when the system is under memory pressure and the amount of memory allocated for this type of usage will depend on how much memory your system has available. If Chrome is using lots of memory then it's almost always because your system has lots of available memory. It allows the browser to cache large images and video assets that would otherwise have to be re-downloaded over the internet.
Or another process will die at random instead, which might be your desktop environment, the main browser process, Signal (10% chance at corrupting message history each time), a large image you were working on in Gimp...
Firefox has gotten very good at safely handling allocation failures, so instead of crashing it keeps your memory snugly at 100% full and renders your system entirely unusable until the kernel figures out (2-20 minutes later) that it really cannot allocate a single kilobyte anymore and it decides to run the OOM killer
but also
it's not cheap? Why should everyone upgrade to 32GB RAM to multitask when all the text, images, and data structures in open programs take only a few megabytes each? How can you not get hung up about the senseless exploding memory usage
That's not how it works. Process killing is one of the last ways memory is recovered. Chrome starts donating memory back well before that happens. Try compiling something and see how ram usage in chrome changes when you do that. Most of your tabs will be discarded.
I've already described above what the browser's behavior is. That your browser works differently is good for you; I'm not using a Google product as my main browser. There are also other downsides that this other behavior does not fix, mentioned in sibling comments
It's memory that the kernel cannot use to cache other applications' files.
This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have something similar.
Well, a few GB here and a few GB there, soon you’re talking about real RAM issues.
The other day Safari was using over 50GB with only a few tabs open.
Maybe we should also acknowledge that some companies particularly have no compassion for users (and their desires or needs) and see them as hurdles in their way to take money from users.
I want my compiler, language server IDE, to do that not LinkedIn
Um.
The websites are jam packed with trackers and ads. I am utterly concerned about Chrome’s memory usage because it’s passively allowing this all to occur.
How about you let me blacklist sites that are using too much memory automatically, all that means is that those website owners FUCKING HATE THE REST OF US.
Any solution to this epic fucking problem would be wonderful.
uBlock origin on Firefox or Brave, which will block most of the tracker bloat, causing the RAM spike. It's not a perfect fix, but it will cut out a significant chunk of it. Tab Wrangler also helps by suspending inactive tabs automatically. You should try out both.
for jobs - indeed is better or other small avenues in their heyday such as HN who is hiring (all my jobs have come through hn)
other avenues - local slack channels.
linkedIn - good for initial connection with strangers you don't know and might find valuable
linkedIn - good for keeping tabs on companies or new startups
It probably depend on where you live and who you are. LinkedIn is my backup in case of a layoff. It's the site where I can reach everyone who worked with me or have made offers in the past.
If you do what I do, live in my general area and know the right people (which I do), LinkedIn will get you an interview or three lined up in a day or two. None of these people are on Indeed, HackerNews or even Slack.
try https://corvi.careers I been building it purely as job search platform, has good coverage of startups and public companies but I’d still recommend to use LI for network tho
??? Who outside of startups (in a professional environment) even use Slack?
Not only it's huge and slow, but the design is broken (some elements frequently masking others, like the top banner masking half the top menu, or the icons masking the search box), and it's full of errors.
I had to use it this very morning (yes, that's a new low) and met two errors in two pages. Asked Claude about those bugs, and it made fun of me because they were well known bugs. Even for AIs LinkedIn website is slop apparently.
This HN post to collectively vent some frustration comes in a timely fashion.
(For the record: the first bug was "another admin is already editing this page" making it impossible to edit a business page translations, and the next one was wrong people count when associating personnal profiles to business ones).
And on the same topic again, it's not "LinkedIn" but some managers most likely in marketing and tech who allowed this amount of bloatware. And I won't believe this RAM usage is really needed just for displaying static content or chat. It's like always trackers and ads.
Now I'm retired, linkedin's daily games are a fun way to do a little brain tai chi. Queens https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/ is my favorite, although my solve time is consistently about twice the average apparently.
I have to admit that this is also what keeps me coming back to LinkedIn. My brain is dangerously easy to motivate by dangling a virtual leaderboard in front of it.
But there’s so many good games out there. Check out Zachtronics/Coincidence.games for some cool examples. Walk to a bookstore and get one of their many sudoku/puzzle books. Check out the App Store for some puzzle games. Write your own puzzle game!
For sure there is more to what they just show
Github hogging cpu when js is turned off
LinkedIn is full of crap. Unfortunately is the only way to get recruiters visibility.
LinkedIN, showing why Reactive is such a good idea by refusing to use it....
No joke, app constantly shows stale posts and stories,,almost like their devs do not understand what the limits to MVVM are for state....rookie mistake
And also keeps showing a red dot on the feeds tab every time you navigate to another screen, so that they can trick you with interacting with one more ad.
Just like how Netflix makes you scroll through a bunch of shows, just to get back to what you were watching. It’s a way of forced interaction.
We’re slowly getting into the black mirror territory.
linkedin is shit. i will get negative karma again
If I were PM at LinkedIn, I would do some cross social network info pollination to correct the LinkedIn. I would promote power users from bluesky or twitter who are technical or otherwise have lot of good analysis. Experts are prolific users and make use of Zipf’s Law to promote good content. Also through graph analysis, the users who get followed by power users will be promoted as well. Whatever you might say about Instagram and Tiktok, their recommendation system is SOTA. I even love ads from Instagram, they know exactly what kind of ads I might engage with.
> i will get negative karma again
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not as bad as JIRA, although JIRA is marginally more useful than LinkedIn.
Jira’s problem is that it’s effectively free-form, and there are no enforcements in place. You can have three teams - one using kanban with relative estimates, another using springs with story points, and a third using waterfall with time estimates - all in the same project, with the same workflows, and conflicting requirements. You have 3 different release fields, 2 are required, the third one is the one that your team are generating reports from.
That and its dog slow, of course.
Both of them are equally garbage.
kinda offtopic but as somehow currently outgrowing trellos capabilities, do you have any good suggestions instead of Jira?
Gitlab has pretty good Kanban functionality. People tend to hate Jira but there aren't a lot of great alternatives
The answer is unfortunately jira.
Linear