My take is exactly the opposite: the more people who know that I exist, the more likely I am to hear of jobs that might interest me.

Let them creep all over my profile: so far the only downside is that I have a pile of messages to sort through and say "no, thanks" to.

I have a very old linkedin account that has 10 years-outdated info. The company I'm supposedly working for does not exist anymore.

As soon as I would even touch one word in my profile, a pile of recruiters would be triggered instantly. From experience I know that these recruiters have zero added value for me and often even their customer. On the contrary even, they have a tendency to try to fill any job with any qualification, because when they succeed, they hit a jackpot.

Job vacancies are present on job sites like 'Indeed'. It is very easy to set an appropriate filter and just start sending out your CV to companies.

I had two pretty good jobs come to me from LinkedIn.

The majority of job leads I got from maybe the start of LinkedIn to about 8 years ago were crap.

These days, most job leads are not crap, they just are not competitive with my current job. Much improved! Granted, I just updated a couple months ago my profile to say, "Not open to opportunities" and because my profile is recently updated, I get people contacting me daily - even on the weekend.

It's even easier to do nothing and have people contact you.

I got my current job because a recruiter cold-called me about my Linked-In profile. It was a perfect match for a position she was trying to fill.

I wasn't looking, but it wasn't hard to persuade me to switch either.

I clearly need to do a better job with my profile, because recruiters never bother me.

I'm torn on this. Exactly once have I gotten a recruiting email from someone that turned out to be a good match for me. That job literally changed my life.

But... every other recruiting email I've gotten has been at best something I just wasn't interested in, while the vast majority of them are so poorly targeted, I'm embarrassed for the recruiter for clearly not having a clue how to evaluate if a candidate is a good fit in even the most basic ways. All promising job prospects I've had (whether they worked out or not) came through connections, or active work on my part to seek out positions that interested me.

(Obviously everyone's experience differs; I see you mention downthread that you once found a great match from a cold recruiter call.)

So... did that one life-changing job come to me because of a privacy-minefield site like LinkedIn? I'm not sure how that in-house recruiter found me: it was a cold email to an address that I hadn't used in years, and it was just dumb luck that I signed into it a week after it was sent, which seems at odds with the usual way to get in touch with someone you've found through a job-network site.

I'm at a point where I don't think I really need to maintain a LinkedIn profile in order to achieve my employment goals... but a part of me is too afraid it'll be useful (or even critical) to something in the future, so I haven't deleted it. Meh.

This is a big thing, too. The spam of those messages definitely makes it a needle in a haystack, even for a "loose potential match". 99%+ of the messages in my inbox are for short to mid term onsite contracts on the east coast as an engineer when I am a Product Manager in the PNW.

Just yesterday I got a phone call from a recruiter asking about my LinkedIn account. I said that I don't have one.

About an hour later she called me again with an invitation for a job interview.

I don't really know what LinkedIn would change here...

I have such public accounts but they are specifically for said creeping.

It's by no means a limiting factor if they don't have one, but when I'm interviewing for mid - staff+ level engineers in my specific field I absolutely love when they have some sort of project portfolio I can look at. Github, Gitlab, medium, whatever.

I learn so little from a persons bullet pointed resume that when I don't have those the interviews feel like I'm pretty much walking in completely ignorant to this persons interests and skills over and over again.

When I can go "oh neat, jbob99 worked on a foss project I used a few years ago!" it's nice.

But I also couldn't care less about being "creeped" on. Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.

You're using a completely random throwaway nick to stay anonymous on here, while I've literally gotten jobs from hn and grown my career from it. Just like I did on IRC when I was 13. It's an interesting difference of use.

I don't mean one is better or worse at all and I totally get wanting to be anonymous.

People often have reasons outside of their control for being anonymous. Others have employment contracts that limit what outside business interests they can be involved in, including open source. That being said, I've been on HN for 2 years longer than you, 2/3rds the karma, and zero job offers so what do I know.

I wasn't aware of any of this! Outrageous!

All kidding aside I totally get it. I was lucky and taken under under the wing of a very generous group of people who have pretty much followed one another around to various jobs/projects over the last decade and our skills have just grown non-stop. I WISH I'd gotten into FOSS projects way sooner, like when I was a kid instead of just learning linux and crawling up the sysadmin route.

Like, junior help desk tech support to principal architects nowadays, etc. I try to get my friends who want to level up or change careers to hop into foss projects, #goodfirstissue sort of things. A lot of people just have no idea where to start, and they don't think they're skilled enough to join a project like kubernetes or what not, but those projects actually have Contributor Experience people/teams to help bring new people in comfortably and they need all sorts of help, not just go developers, etc.

Hell, those contributor experience people are absolute diamonds and really make certain communities so inclusive and great to be in. There is a lot of cool ancillary work to be done and everyone has something in their wheelhouse they can contribute.

https://goodfirstissue.dev/

> Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.

I think this is a really important point. Most companies aren't going to hire some anonymous person on the internet with no track record or verifiable background. Most companies can't even legally put someone on their payroll without knowing a lot more about a person.

People without a real-name presence on the internet are only going to get a pretty limited amount of unsolicited job-opening contact. And that might be what people like that prefer, which is fine. The minimal cold emails that come in may even be of much much higher quality and relevance. But ultimately they're still leaving a lot on the table, even if much of what's on the table is probably poorly-targeted crap. (Again, that's fine if that's what they want.)

Linkedin is required to market yourself though or else you can't bullshit your way through the HR hoops.

I deleted my LinkedIn account fifteen years ago, and it's been fine. I don't have random recruiters beating down my door trying to interest me in jobs I don't want, but is that such a loss? I've had no trouble getting the jobs I do want.

Maybe you have a better history than I, but I've only ever had 2 or 3 very interested recruiters that got a hold of me but they were the real deal and weren't looking to fill entry level crap or stupid temp work.

All the other recruiters just make chat and email spam easily ignored and they never bother me.

No. I have plenty of clients over the years and not a single on ever asked my LinkedIn and / or any other social. And if they ever will the answer will be NO. Well other than HN I am not really on social media anyways. Just have couple of accounts to talk to a couple of people.

And yet I am gainfully employed and haven't had problems switching when I want to..

Is what they waht you to think. Fear of missing out is powerful marketing.

For the vast majority of developers, this is the smarter choice. If you contribute to a very popular project, it might be different. But otherwise keep a bit of privacy.

Companies already tried to get rights to software created in your free time. Why even allow any attack surface here?