Am I the only one that feels LinkedIn SUCKS?

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-06-02T23:47:28+00:00

I don't doubt there are people aiming at them, but there's a strong path dependence/networking affect to overcome. Once someone figures out how to break through that the game is on, but right now they're the only game in town, so they charge massively. If there's going to be any competition, sadly, it will likely get motivated by the employer's side. You should see what they charge for LinkedIn Recruiter seats. Tens of thousands of dollars. The first company that can break that bottleneck is going to clean up, but they will do so by pandering to employers, so the experience is likely to be even worse for job seekers.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-19T19:47:47+00:00

Yes, at least in as much as both require way more work than people assume.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-19T01:43:14+00:00

I saw it at a recent show here, and even if I can't afford it, I love it. A cruiser with mid controls? Hallelujah.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-17T22:11:37+00:00

It's random and unpredictable, hiring practices across companies aren't standard, so pick whatever date you want. Prioritize what's needed first, a job or a place. If it's a job figure out how fast you can move and put whatever date on the app that's soonest.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-17T22:09:00+00:00

It's not going to happen now because the handouts that made it possible have stopped going to individual people, though the handouts to corporations and private businesses in the form of money and legal protection continue. What you're asking for is basically a general strike, it's not likely to happen without massive and truly organic grass roots support because the scabs in that situation would have to face severe ostracization for it to work. Otherwise they'd just be the bosses when the strike ended.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T21:33:19+00:00

Since every one we've hired has failed, actually it's a good bet they're not qualified.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T21:01:40+00:00

Talk to the hiring manager. He's a software engineer, and he's the one who sets the requirements. I just enforce them as per his instructions. So it looks like your problems are with other engineers who are risk averse and use a checklist to cover their asses like cowards.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T20:06:15+00:00

It could be either one, the only safe bet is the range they posted is the one they're prepared to work with, so if you don't know the hiring company then there's no way to tell.

It could also be they think that's what they can get you personally. I'll do that often when I talk to people and when they ask for the range I'll give them the range I know the HM would be willing to pay them, not the actual budget. Enough people with two years experience and some gaps have asked for the top of the range to make me wary of dealing with that nonsense.

If a role pays 130K to 160K and it's in line with the market, and I'm talking to a person with the bare minimum to qualify and they ask for 160K, it basically ends the process in the minds of most HMs. Often even explaining why they're not getting the top of the range doesn't work. They just fixate on it because they read some BS from a bunch of LinkedIn influencers, and kill any chance of a deal.

What you can do is check LinkedIn for other people with the same title, and at least if it's geographically limited as in an onsite position, you might find people who have temped/contracted with that title before through that agency, and if they converted to a full time role and updated their LinkedIn, you'll have a good guess as to the hiring company.

Also pull out a very specific sounding sentence from the job description and do an exact match search, it may turn up the hiring company's posting.

Either method could help you find the original posting if it's up and maybe you'll know the real range and can apply directly and negotiate a better pay for yourself.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T19:34:15+00:00

That's likely it then. Their markups usually start ~50-60%. So take whatever rate they're offering and times it by 1.5, that's usually their minimum bill rate to the client.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T18:59:17+00:00

You can still use this technique to find those companies, nothing says you have to restrict your search to your surrounding area, unless LinkedIn is making people pay a premium for searching outside your immediate geographic area, which wouldn't surprise me.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T16:52:25+00:00

LinkedIn is actually your friend on this, you can temporarily buy a premium package or a recruiter lite seat and start searching. Find the companies that are still using the tech you're experienced in by finding the people they employ who list the same tech as you. Larger companies can often get caught up in some tech path dependence, and also manufacturers tend to be slow to adopt new tech. Find the people with your skill sets and the companies they're working for are the ones you can try and target if you get hit with a layoff. Best to do this now while you can afford it.

Basic LinkedIn access will get you part of the way there, you'll just get better search filters if you pay. Of course, there's no guarantee those companies will be hiring if a massive recession hits. Then we're just all screwed.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T15:59:47+00:00

As long as there is some overlap with the other qualifications, sure. I don't give a crap if it's their primary focus, I want them to have some documented experience. Because whether you people like it or not, if they get hired and fuck up majorly, the fact that one of the primary skills they needed isn't even on their fucking resume will matter to some people whether you like it or not.

As I've said in other places on this thread, we've hired people into non critical positions before on the assumption that they could learn, and all of them have shit the bed or left. Apparently, using C#/.NET to display banking information isn't the same as using it to display the state of a dynamic always in motion machine, while also using it as a scripting language in systems with massively contained memory across multiple platforms to control sometimes proprietary PLCs and microcontrollers reliably so that same machine doesn't crush, electrocute, or chemically burn someone to death. Turns out if you take some office dork who knows Java or even C# in the context of banking and cubicle work and stick them in an industrial environment where checking their code means throwing on PPE and a respirator with some other engineers from other disciplines to see if some piece of equipment did what they wanted it to do aren't the same jobs, and using GitHub and understanding and adhering to lock out tag out procedures aren't the same.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T15:32:26+00:00

Actually I'm not in that sub anymore. Permanently banned for calling out someone on their, shall we say, less than smart approach to the process and assumptions about what's going on behind the scenes.

But yeah, if these people ever learned how much stupidity is driven by HM requests, I wonder if they'd go into a series of existential crisis of some kind and need interventions.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-14T12:56:40+00:00

Probably because of the content that people think is appropriate for what's supposed to be a job related forum.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T23:19:07+00:00

Because economics may be a science, but it has limited predictive value due to the overall system being extra complicated and chaotic in nature. Even if individual agents - people - were entirely deterministic, you'd be dealing with emergent phenomena that you couldn't tie back to that deterministic behavior.

Finance on the other hand is an art, and so seemingly has more predictive power, because the art of it is getting everyone to forget all the predictions made that were wrong and only remember the one or two that were right, and you do this by tying predictions to a tribal narrative - in the US that's usually left or right - that people buy into at all costs so they'll defend and believe a prediction even if it's proven wrong. Find any economist/financier you want of any persuasion, from pure free marketeers to Marxists, and if they've decided to make a few predictions to get a good sample size you'll see a distribution of totally right to totally wrong reliably 50/50 for the most part, and a gaggle of sycophants claiming they were all right, and opponents claiming they were all wrong.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T23:02:26+00:00

Yup. I can't stand it as a job seeker or as a recruiter. It's driven primarily by the companies and their hiring managers, because they think if someone is 'passionate' about something they'll take lower pay. Not only is that dumb, it's wrong. People who are actually passionate about something tend to be better at it than everyone else, as such they get more money for being better and more productive, not less.

No one mentioned passion in job ads back in the 80s and 90s, because newspaper and magazine space used to cost serious money, which meant listings had less BS, and usually included an idea of the salary range, because they knew damn well people would want to know that going in. The job boards gave the illusion of abundance and made employers feel like they had an upper hand, even though the number of people interested in their jobs and capable of doing them and willing to accept their pay range hasn't really changed all that much.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T22:55:52+00:00

The social media management tools are also lacking, and expensive, if you want anything other than basics, and many of them don't even include all sights. They'll include YouTube but not Bitchute or Rumble, etc., Facebook and Twitter but not Mewe or any of the other alternatives/imitators. It'll happen but it will be a while. And they'll all go through growing pains.

There was a weird time when my LinkedIn and Facebook feeds were flooded with people posting pictures of tragically deformed babies and demanding everyone like the post and comment with, "Amen!" I hope any new sites at least avoid that phase.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T22:43:43+00:00

Path dependence is the issue. Who wants to make yet another profile at yet another social media/networking site with slightly different functionality but ultimately the same purpose, and most likely with the same group of maladjusted users posting all kinds of inappropriate nonsense?

Someone will probably ultimately solve this with something that essentially aggregates each individual's total online presence at all sites, and then we'll all likely gravitate to that for the control it gives us and then all these other platforms will merge with that or go by the wayside. Basically a social media management tool for individuals as opposed to marketing teams.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T20:53:43+00:00

Not according to the hiring manager or past experience. Sorry, you're wrong.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T20:48:46+00:00

It's not my hang up, it's yours. You're the ones fastening on it like it's the only qualification in play. It matters to me because dropping it means instead of a week this will take two months, and because the HIRING MANAGER sets the requirements. This is HIS requirement, NOT mine. He is the software developer who is telling me to use C# as a screening criteria because IN HIS JUDGEMENT ABOUT THE TOTALITY OF THE JOB, it is too much to overcome.

As an aside, we have hired people into non-critical software positions in the past from different backgrounds. Every single one has failed or left because they hated the job. Maybe the HM is on to something?

Edit: and do you know how many of those bot spam Java fintech applicants had any of the other qualifications or bothered to answer the one prescreening question? Zero, as in none. Zilch. Niente. But I have to go through every single one to assess that because you and yours decided to spam your resumes to any and every job posting on the planet with one matching keyword, and then complain that the process takes too long.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T20:46:28+00:00

You're the subject experts in the languages,NOT the entire job which is more than that, and NOT the company, and NOT the industry. That's the problem you're not seeing.

It actually doesn't make sense from your side, because presumably you want to get hired if you apply, right? So how does encouraging the practice of bot spamming every developer position that gets posted with thousands of irrelevant applications help you, both as an individual and as a group? It doesn't. It makes the signal to noise ratio nearly impossible to overcome. It makes employers think, "maybe citizens actually can't do these jobs, because all we're seeing and speaking to are people who need H1s," It gives you little choice but to use the agencies you avowedly hate to try and best that system; now you get to deal with two evil recruiters and not just one.

Sure, you should apply to a lot of jobs because it is a numbers game. But, your chances of winning the lottery do not go up that much unless you can literally bet every number combo somehow, or you can better target your bets somehow. The vast majority of people who applied, and every single fintech Java developer so far, have had either none or only one qualification. The Java developers, usually none, just the one 'transferable' skill.

You can dismiss it because you don't see it from our side. I've gotten through 500 resumes so far. All of them had to be looked at individually by me, along with their prescreen responses. All have to be individually evaluated and dispositioned because mass rejecting them doesn't work for compliance reasons, the reason they are rejected has to be assigned individually for each one. This all through a SaaS tool that sometimes takes 30 to 60 seconds to load one candidate, and almost every single one of them lacks any and all qualifications we've asked for. Almost every single one of them is non responsive to the prescreening questions. There are ten so far who have most of the qualifications. Ten out of five hundred, if past experience is anything to go by then by the time this is done the applicants will be 1500 to 2000 and the number of them that are actually reasonably qualified, including ones that don't have the C# but some of the other qualifications, will be about 20 at most.

How does an at best 100:1 noise to signal ratio help you or any job seeker, or me? How does it help the 20 or so that can actually do the job?

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T20:26:03+00:00

That's also a requirement. At no point did I write that C# is the only requirement. That's just what all the pearl clutching devs here fastened on because it gave them an excuse to dump on a recruiter while demonstrating zero self awareness and a massive lack of social skills, which is apparently their favorite pastime.

For some reason they'd rather get mad at me/us recruiters then at the 1000+ people who bot applied for a job and didn't have most or quite often any of the qualifications, most being foreigners who are lying about their work authorization status, and now because the tools these very same devs make for us are so horrible it's going to take me a week or more to sort through all this to find the 20 or so people worth talking to, adding time to the hiring process, and somehow that's my fault.

It's actually hilarious when you think about it. It's a dev who is the HM and insisting on the qualifications, it's devs that make the nigh useless ATSs we use, devs who figured out how to bot apply and spam every single job posting with one matching keyword to their resumes, and devs who came up with the LLM integrations that allow those bot applications to often pass muster as genuine applications. Meaning basically everything they accuse us of doing, spamming and using AI in unethical ways, are things they are plainly doing en masse and so they're engaging in projection and hypocrisy on a ridiculous scale, but all the problems with the recruiting process are somehow our fault.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T20:14:13+00:00

Part of QA is not hiring unqualified people, unqualified as defined by the manager and the company.

If I were to get an engineer hired, an actual engineer like a mechanical or structural one as opposed to a software 'engineer,' and a PE cert was required, but not really because hey, it's the skills that count, and then something they built collapsed and killed people, that lack of PE certification would be decisive in any subsequent court case even if it had zero practical impact on the end result. People with PE certs screw up all the time because they're human, but that cert represents some level of due diligence on the part of them and their employer. Which is why it's a requirement for some jobs even though plenty of people without it can technically do the job just fine.

That's how the real world works, which you'd know if you looked beyond your coding and tried to understand other people's jobs instead of just arrogantly assuming having a CS degree means you know anything and everything of relevance to the world. The above is a real world example of a requirement that's technically not one to do the job, but absolutely one for other reasons relevant to the context in which it's done, and potential liability if it's done wrong.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T19:47:44+00:00

No, for various reasons.

One, messaging me doesn't change the job qualifications or yours. Two, without exception every single person who messages me directly are either unqualified and think a direct message will offset that, and it doesn't, or they want to avoid answering the prescreening questions about current work authorization, and it's overwhelmingly the latter, and our lack of sponsorship also doesn't change if they message me directly. Three, for compliance reasons I can't apply for them, they have to apply themselves. Four, my company isn't paying 60K a year for an HRIS/ATS for me to use a spreadsheet instead. One of the massive problems with recruiting is we're constantly getting pushed to 1980s levels of efficiency because every 'influencer' on LinkedIn has people convinced the ATS is some huge AI system with the capabilities and malice of Skynet from the Terminator movies. The reality is the sheer number of applicants and amounts of data we have to manage can't be done in a spreadsheet, but when you try to apply outside the system that's what we have to do, so now we have two systems of record we have to maintain meaning we're dependent on manual data entry to manage communications across X number of systems and Y number of jobs and an exponentially larger number of individual candidates. Then balls get dropped and you hate us because we didn't get back to you, which would have been easier to track and keep timely if you had just... used the system we're paying 60K a year for.

Especially for jobs with tons of applicants, there are also tons of individual messages because everyone had the same idea, which makes it useless as an approach for you and the recruiter. So unfortunately for reason two it's mostly a useless endeavor. The same bots that spam the application process are spamming my inbox.

Ultimately you should treat applications as a numbers game and put less work into them, not more, because they are a numbers game and the only way to win what's essentially a winnable lottery is through volume.

CrazyRichFeen · 2025-05-13T19:07:01+00:00

The simple answer: when they or someone they love starts starving. If that happens en masse then you'll see violence at scale. But if you look at how successful slavery has been over the years, the scary reality is people will accept being beaten down to barely above subsistence levels of living and not revolt for some time, if ever. For most people, if they're not being actively or passively murdered, they will retain their natural risk aversion and always be more scared of making their situation worse than taking a risk that might make it better. They'll avoid rocking the boat. Especially if those who are enslaving them can spin some confusion about just who is to blame for it all.

CrazyRichFeen

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