* They steal the address book of any user who installs their app, collecting private information of people who have given no such consent
* They then proceed to create shadow profiles of all those people that haven't registered, creating the illusion that more people are on LinkedIn than really are (not sure if they still do this)
* They then start spamming all those contacts with multiple emails per day, for several days, asking them to register with LinkedIn. There is no "fuck off and stop emailing me" button, the only way to make it stop is to register for an account
I've blacklisted linkedin.com in my mailservers for this reason. And I would agree with the GP that they are scum and that working there lowers my opinion of a person.
From now on I will only use my personal network and services I have more respect, like SO Jobs, if I have a need for new opportunities.
I use the site but I'm deeply skeptical of the way their business tactics appear in my interactions with the site.
Edit: I would probably meet them for an interview to get a feeling for the company and team, but as a company they start on the minus side for me.
P.S. I never took any jobs from that platform.
The people who are talking publicly seem very excited about how things are going. Chris Thoburn (runspired) was on Ember Weekend a few weeks ago talking about the work he's doing on Ember Data over at LinkedIn.
It used to take a huge amount of time to initialize a repository as well, but they recently switched to Yarn and that helped a lot.
I'm planning on leaving because as parent says, it's been a disaster from start to finish. Developer tooling does not help you be productive, the app performance is quite poor, and it's just not enjoyable to work on.
In some cases it makes sense, but very few websites really need to be SPAs yet everyone these days is using React, Angular, Ember, etc.
Facebook created React to not depend on other frameworks. They also added HTML and CSS into JS because their application is huge and complex. At their size it makes sense to have all the bits needed to work on something in the same place. Redux, same thing. It's a solution that is intended to solve problems at the 1B users scale.
The truth is 99.99% of web applications won't come close to that level of complexity, but devs insist in using solutions React and Redux because... hype? It's like driving with a school bus to carry 1 person. Dan Abramov has said himself that it doesn't make sense to use Redux until you need it.
Same thing with all those JS UI benchmarks. There must be a use case for rendering and doing data binding in 10000 UI elements at 60 fps, but those are very rare edge cases.
I'm guilty of this myself. I've spent 2016 working with React on a few SPAs and I have to admit I only got in it or the hype. Everyone was doing it which must mean it's the best way to go, right? Wrong.
I'm moving away from SPAs in 2017. Going back the classic route of generating dynamic HTML in the server and sprinkle pages with JS "widgets" whenever I REALLY need those UI enhancements.
If I need an SPA for a particular use case, sure I'll do it, but not as a default option.
Edit: In mobile SPAs makes even less sense. Sure you may be reducing requests, eventually, but the CPU usage is bigger and the initial load is also bigger. And sure, you can really optimise an SPA but this adds complexity on top of complexity.
Sites like HN and Reddit have proven that content is king.
No one likes it and it takes over 20 minutes to "build" the code from scratch.
We're talking about frontend code, mind you.
At a certain level in LinkedIn, someone decided to standardize on Ember. Fine. But there were many issues, and instead of finding a more suitable and workable pragmatic framework, LinkedIn is instead deciding to hire Ember people to fix up their framework so it's actually useable. We really do work in the only industry where you can get hired to fix a mess you created yourself.
Anyway, besides the recruiter app, is LinkedIn really worthy of a SPA experience? Last time I checked isn't most of the traffic a quick "accept connection" or reply to inmail, or maybe check who viewed your profile bounce? Does the average user actually spend time in it? Probably not.
I'm reminded by a certain quote from a friend: "At a certain level in McDonald's, the managers start thinking of themselves as restaurateurs, and not fast food servants."