> I have not suffered in any way

You don't really know that, maybe you missed out on interesting jobs and you'll never know.

At the very least, receiving recruiter emails from LinkedIn allows me to do networking and meet a lot of influential people at various companies, even if I don't end up landing a job there. It also builds my recruiter network, which is never a bad thing: if I ever need a job one day, I am planning to spam my entire network of recruiter, let them know exactly what I'm looking for and let them do the work for me. It goes both ways.

I respect deciding to opt out of LinkedIn but there is an opportunity cost to such a decision that you seem to have overlooked.

If his current situation is good who cares what other jobs he missed out on? More options isn't always worth the sacrifice of being distracted

Not always, but how distracting is it really?

Obviously, everyone will be different but I get 2-3 emails from recruiters on LinkedIn per week. Managing them takes me about one minute per week.

Compared to the number of times where I ended up on a phone call or having lunch/coffee with a CTO, VP of Eng, architect or senior engineer, it's totally worth it to me.

My suggestion: don't cut out that option until it really becomes unmanageable. Chances are you'll find it's worth the occasional disturbance.

Well, unless you're actually really happy with your current employment and income. In that case, why even bother looking for something "better"? At that point that's just greedy.

The best time to interview is precisely when you're happy with your job.

You have zero pressure, you can practice interviewing, network and you can make extravagant requirements. If it doesn't work out, no big deal, you like where you are. But if it does, your career can make quantum leaps.

A quantum leap is the smallest possible state change

Free time is limited. I'd like to spend it doing something more rewarding than job hunting.

Job hunting can be a life changing moment. Something that will, literally, affect the rest of your life. If only because salary increases compound over an entire lifetime of working.

In other words, a $10k increase in salary might not seem much but it will add up, and not only will raises compound as well but future jobs will start at a higher negotiation level as well.

Of course, spend your time wisely but I think it's really short sighted to think "I'm happy at my job, I am going to completely block out all the recruiters out there".

You know what could give you more free time? A better offer from a different job. Or more money. That can typically be exchanged for free time too.

I'm very happily employed anyway, and at no point in the 4 years since I quit LinkedIn have I struggled to find meaningful, well paid employment. If I had stayed on LinkedIn just maybe some amazing job offer would have appeared that otherwise hasn't - but I doubt it. For 8 years as a member of LinkedIn I never had one interesting conversation. And I could say "what if I moved to New York?" or "what if I learned to speak Spanish?" There's an opportunity cost to not doing those things as well.

I understand that some people can find value from LinkedIn, but I just don't feel that I'm one of them. I attend lots of meetups in London, and participate in online discussions, and that's good enough for me.

Don't underestimate the network effort. Maybe that recruiter you just connected with won't find you something interesting but they will share your resume with their colleagues. Present and future. And these colleagues will look for things on your behalf. And so on.

LinkedIn didn't invent the network effect, nor do they exclusively own it. In my opinion, for my situation, they don't even have the best implementation of it.

I recognise that I could belong to LinkedIn as well as those other networks, but I get enough value out of my existing tools that LinkedIn isn't worth it.

The scummy data collection practises and the constant recruiter spam are what drove me away from LinkedIn. There is nothing pulling me back.

Perhaps purely anecdotal, but in the years I've been working, I can't say I or anyone I've talked to has perceived an opportunity cost in not having / ignoring LinkedIn (especially the folks who had one and then got rid of it)

I've really only ever received an inordinate amount of entry level recruiters "connect" with me using the same canned email they send everyone. I thought the references feature was nice, but the past few places I've been at have officiously discouraged using the feature because of PR issues (I might personally give someone a recommendation which could then not actually represent the company's perspective of the person)

In my opinion, LinkedIn is just a very creepy and annoying service.

I don't buy your line of reasoning. There's also an opportunity cost to wasting time on LinkedIn instead of focusing on other avenues of finding employment. The end-result is the same, these are unknowables that you can never account for. The only real question is, does LinkedIn provide you value? Y/N and proceed from there.

Most recruiters are lazy and just blast emails by language keyword search. No, I'm not interested in a 6-month PHP contract. No, I'm not interested in a junior IT role.

I've found that removing any mention of specific languages and technologies has dramatically reduced the number of job offers, all of which were a complete waste of my time. Now if only recruiters would stop offering me my same title at a 20% pay cut, I'd be fine.

I have never received that sort of offer. Maybe your resume isn't competitive for the better jobs.

I am sure this is a carefully considered opinion backed by an analysis of the anonymous user's work history, connections, technical competence, geographical location, and personality. And that you have offset this against your own to arrive at the observation that you are more "competitive for the better jobs" than him.

Apologies for the snark, but all of this is anecdotal data. Your analysis is unwarranted.

The point is that recruiters also don't do that. They often do stupid keyword searches for people without really understanding them.

Another possibility is that they already have one of the better jobs, and most jobs do not offer a competitive salary.

No, I don't think that's the problem. But thanks for insinuating I suck at my career. LOL

I have had the same experience after deleting my account several years ago (for different reasons). I do keep wondering if it will pop up as an issue, so I'm very curious about other people's experiences when not participating in LinkedIn.

I had a LinkedIn account ages ago but found it useless and chock full of recruiter spam. It was the first of all my social networks to go.

I am always astonished when I hear phrases like "it's required". Really? By whom? I'm glad to hear there are other people out there who don't have it, because all I hear about is the other side: People bemoaning LinkedIn's existence but parroting this idea that their professional career would be all but ruined without it. I just cannot understand this, but I always feel like I must be naive or living in a tech bubble, or just outside the mainstream.

Do people really hurt their job prospects without LinkedIn? (Or did they when this was written in 2013?)

We're u getting 100s a week?

I don't understand fellow coders who view recruiters as a nuisance when u can use them to get a way better deal on your next gig.

With my LinkedIn I am vague re: where I currently work and provide them all with my spam contact info(spam email and spam google voice number that is a voicemail box which messages go to my email).

Maybe it's the volume of recruiters? I get ten a week and enjoy seeing what they can do for me.

I'm getting maybe one a month, but I specified clearly that I'm not looking for career opportunities. Either it's from always the same companies (Amazon and ARM are 80% of it) that won't let me work from home or it's completely outside my domain (web stuff---good companies to work for, but I work on the kernel not on web back-ends).

I did apply for my current job through LinkedIn, that's the only reason why I haven't deleted the profile. That said it was my first job, seven years after I would be able to find another job just through email if I needed one.

My solution to the problem was to simply "connect" with every recruiter and friend on linkedin until I hit the "500+" connections tier, then disabled all forms of notifications from the site. Now my profile is very much idle, but when any business-type person looks me up, I still have a presence of sorts.

You could just filter the mail to spam and save all the effort.

I changed careers and deleted my account 2 years ago. I still get occasional offers from recruiters. I guess deleting an account on LI doesn't really make it invisible.

That's a silly position. You could have said "I disconnected from the internet, and haven't suffered in any way since, and have definitely benefited from not having constant spammy job offers".

You just don't know what you missed.

It doesn't really work like that.

To do anything right, you need to devote time and attention to figuring it out. If you won't or can't devote that time and attention, then you're way better off just not doing it.

This is how you rapidly sift through all the myriad opportunities the world offers you to find the most salient ones. You can't devote your time and attention to just anything, so first you select for those you can reasonably see yourself putting in the time and effort to actually get something out of it.

Returns follow a power law distribution, it's tempting to think that there are activities that you can do that provide returns on the same scale as the effort you put in, but in reality 80 percent of the returns on practically anything go to the 20 percent of the people that take the time to do them effectively. The rest get the other 20% divided amongst them, basically nothing.

Spammy job offers is precisely what LinkedIn offers those who can't or won't take the time to do LinkedIn effectively. What does it offer those who do take that time? I have no clue. My guess would be a slightly accelerated path up the career ladder. Not really worth it. I have a tough time even imagining a possible return that LinkedIn could offer me career-wise that would offset the opportunity cost of working out how to get it.

You could say the same for not learning Swahili (which I presume you don't speak) or going into Biology rather than computer science.

In other words, the argument from ignorance is useless -- reminds me of a very weak version of Pascal's wager.

Not only because he's still doing OK, but also because statistically I can assure you that the people I know who still have the LI account haven't gotten anything worthwhile out of it career wise.

Besides, the whole argument is oblivious of the notion of Opportunity Cost.