As someone that uses vim full time all that happened is people started porting all the best features of IDEs over to vim/emacs as plugins. So those people were right it's just the features flowed.
Pretty sure you can count the number of professional programmers using vanilla vim/neovim on one hand.
Back in the early 2000s I worked for Cap Gemini in Birmingham England which had a part of the office that was some sort of partnership with IBM GS(I think IBM did the hardware and cap got the services contacts). They also had a big blinkin lights server setup in the middle of the office for clients to see. As a teenage geek in his first tech job I used to love going to peek at it even though I did tape rotation on the real servers in the basement most days.
I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr.....
You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you.
I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing or a second opinion on possible problems with a module.
> unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable.
The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. Same as the productivity difference between a developer with a good LSP and one without or a good IDE or a good search engine.
When I was a kid I had a text editor and a book and it worked. But now that better tools are around I'm certainly going to make use of them.
> The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively.
If you looked me or my work up, I think you would likely feel embarrassed by this statement. I have a number of world firsts under my belt that AI would have been unable to meaningfully help with.
It is also unlikely I would have every developed the skill to do any of that aside from doing everything the hard way.
I just looked and I'm not sure what I'm meant to be seeing that would cause me to feel embarrassed but congrats on whatever it is. How much more could you have developed or achieved if you didn't limit yourself?
Do you do all your coding in ed or are you already using technology to offload brain power and memory requirements in your coding?
I don't know, just a quick glance at that repo and I feel like AI could have written your shell scripts which took up several tries from multiple people to get right about as well as the humans did.
So your ok with using tools to offload thinking and memory as long as they are FOSS?
It took some iteration and hands on testing to get that right across multiple operating systems. Also to pass shellcheck, etc.
Even if an LLM -could- do that sort of thing as well as my team and I can, we would lose a lot of the arcane knowledge required to debug things, and spot sneaky bugs, and do code review, if we did not always do this stuff by hand.
It is kind of like how writing things down helps commit them to memory. Typing to a lesser extent does the same.
Regardless those scripts are like <1% of the repo and took a few hours to write by hand. The rest of the repo requires extensive knowledge of linux internals, compiler internals, full source bootstrapping, brand new features in Docker and the OCI specs, etc.
That took a lot of reasoning from humans to get right, in spite of the actual code being just a bunch of shell commands.
There are just no significant shortcuts for that stuff, and again if there were, taking them is likely to rob me of building enough cache in my brain to solve the edge cases.
Also yes, I only use FOSS tools with deterministic behavior I can modify, improve, and rely on to be there year after year, and thus any time spent mastering them is never wasted.
I decided to see if I could get an old Perl and C codebase running via WebAasembly in the browser having Claude brute-force figuring out how to compile the various components to WASM. Details
here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassemb...
I'm not saying it could have created your exact example (I doubt that it could) but you may be under-estimating how promising it's getting for problems of that shape.
I do not doubt that LLMs might some day be able to generate something like my work in stagex, but it would only be because someone trained one on my work and that of other people that insist on solving new problems by hand.
Even then, I would never use it, because it would be some proprietary model I have to pay some corpo for either with my privacy, my money, or both... and they could take it away at any time. I do not believe in or use centralized corpotech. Centralized power is always abused eventually. Also is that regurgitated code under an incompatible license? Who knows.
Also, again, I would rob myself of the experience and neural pathway growth and rote memory that come from doing things myself. I need to lift my own weights to build physical strength just as I need to solve my own puzzles to build patience and memory for obscure details that make me better at auditing the code of others and spotting security bugs other humans and machines miss.
I know when I can get away with LTO, and when I cannot, without causing issues with determinism, and how to track down over linking and under linking. Experience like that you only get by experimenting and compiling shit hundreds of times, and that is why stagex is the first Linux distro to ever hit 100% determinism.
Circling back, no, I am not worried about being unemployable because I do not use LLMs.
And hey, if I am totally wrong and LLMs can create perfectly secure projects better than I can in the future, and spot security bugs better than I can, and I am unemployable, then I will go be an artist or something, because there are always people out there that appreciate hard work done by humans by hand, because that is how I am wired.
> Even then, I would never use it, because it would be some proprietary model I have to pay some corpo for either with my privacy, my money, or both... and they could take it away at any time.
Have you been following the developments in open source / open weight models you can run on your own hardware?
They're getting pretty good now, especially the ones coming out of China. The GLM, Qwen and DeepSeek models out of China are all excellent. Mistral's open weight models (from France) are good too, as are the OpenAI gpt-oss models.
No privacy or money cost involved in running those.
I get your concern about learning more if you do everything yourself. All I can say there is that the rate and depth of technical topics I'm learning has been expanded by my LLM usage because I'm able to take on a much wider range of technical projects, all of which teach me new things.
You're not alone in this - there are many experienced developers who are choosing not to engage with this new family of technology. I've been thinking of it similar to veganism - there are plenty of rational reasons to embrace a vegan lifestyle and I respect people who do it but I've made different choices myself.
Not only have I been following a lot of the open models, you may find it surprising I have extensively tested some of them and coerced them to generate deterministic responses across different machines as a method to prove responses are not tampered with, as well as developing ways to run them in remotely attestable secure enclaves to ensure people that use them for sensitive applications can have provable privacy with end to end encryption.
I will admit that I find deploying and hacking on the tech itself super interesting. Hell I founded a machine learning company and got a paper published with the AAAI for my cheap bulk training data acquisition techniques back in 2012 before most cared about this stuff.
I even think there are a ton of great and exciting use cases for this tech. Like identifying cancer in large photographic datasets, etc. I have a lot of hope about medical applications in particular.
All that said, I just don't think LLMs are remotely competitive or useful at the type of threat modeling, security engineering, and auditing work I do on average. They are the wrong tool for my job, which require a level of actual reasoning that LLMs are nowhere near capable of right now, or are likely to be any time soon. Maybe they could help with a script here and there which might save me a few hours a month, but for 95%+ of it, they would just waste my time regurgitating the same industry standard bad advice and approaches that I am trying to change while making me duller at writing code by hand when I need to.
As contrast though, I would not fire someone for using LLMs for learning or inspiration as long as they consistently prove they fully understand and can explain every line of every PR they submit, can pair program or usefully contribute to engineering discussions without LLMs, and maintain a competitive level of quality with the rest of the team. Not everyone has to make the same tool choices I do, as long as they can hold their own in a team with me and are not dumb enough to regurgitate AI slop they don't understand.
It is amusing you use vegans as an example. I am not a vegan, but I often describe myself as something of a digital vegan that is very very selective about what tools I use and what I expect from them such as why I also don't use a smartphone or GPS.
You're criticizing me for directly crediting the original here. That's the correct and ethical thing to do!
Honestly, I've seen the occasional bad faith argument from people with a passionate dislike of AI tooling but this one is pretty extreme even by those standards.
I hope you don't ever use open source libraries in your own work.
Actually, my criticism was the result of my own misunderstanding of what you were claiming. My apologies for that, although I'm still unlikely to use these tools based upon the example when my own personal counterexamples have shown me that it's often as much or more work to get there via prompting than it is to simply do the thinking myself. Have a good day.
Originally I tried to get it working loading code directly but as far as I can tell there's no stable CDN build of that, so I had to vendor it instead.
FFS stop it with the “it’s just the same as a human” BS. It’s not just like working with a junior engineer! Please spend 60 seconds genuinely reflecting on that argument before letting it escape like drool from the lips of your writing fingers.
We work with junior engineers because we are investing in them. We will get a return on that investment. We also work with other humans because they are accountable for their actions. AI does not learn and grow anything like the satisfying way that our fellow humans do, and it cannot be held responsible for its actions.
As the OP said, AI is not on the team.
You have ignored the OP’s point, which is not that AI is a useless tool, but that merely being an AI jockey has no future. Of course we must learn to use tools effectively. No one is arguing with that.
I'm not saying it's the same as working with a jr developer. I'm saying that not using something less skilled than yourself for less skilled tasks is stupid and self defeating.
Yes, when someone builds a straw man you ignore it. There is a huge canyon between never use AI in engineer(op proposal) and only use AI for all your engineering(op complaint).
There's a very good argument for not using tools vended by folks who habitually lie as much as the AI vendors (and their tools). I don't want their fingers anywhere in my engineering org, quite honestly. Given their ethics around intellectual property in general, I must assume that my company's IP is being stolen every time a junior engineer lazily uses one of these tools.
I'm sure you never use any Google or Microsoft products at all, such as Google Search, Maps or Android, and none of the companies and engineering teams you've ever worked with have used such products, given how habitually they lie (and the fact that they're two major AI vendors).
If so, congratulations for being old or belonging to the 0.01%. Good luck finding a first job where that holds in 2025.
Not at all true, though. You see, I expect the Jr will grow and learn from those off-loaded tasks in such a way that they will eventually become another Sr in the atelier. That development of the society of engineers is precisely what I do not wish to ever outsource to some oligarch's rental fleet of bullshit machines.
I develop using a MacBook because I like the hardware and non-development apps but all my accrual work happens on a Linux server I connect to. It's a good mix.
They paid you close to $10k to work with them on a project related to your OSS. It should have been clear there would be a ton of overlap or a relicensing at this point. You still got to keep your open source stuff open source.
They didn't ask you to quit your job and with a single contract of unspecified scope you really shouldn't have. Did you ask your former employer for your job back?
You made a bunch of bad choices, it happens, you're young, I know I made a ton of my own at your age but they were your choices and not anything done to you.
I've done a few rounds of CV edits and reviews early on, it hasn't helped. It's worth noting that the initial CV I had was one where I never had trouble finding work with.
Edit: misunderstood "referrals" for "references" so edited my reply out. No, I've never asked for referrals from past colleagues.
Not having LinkedIn is ruining your chances. Candidates without a LinkedIn are going to come across as a scam in the very least, 90% of the time your application will just get tossed if you can't be found on LI.
Pretty much this. I know lot of people hate Linkedin but the fact is that if you are a job candidate and have little to no Linkedin, it's a huge potential red flag in today's world. Lot of scammers, overemployeds/moonlighters out there.
When I was moonlighting LinkedIn didn’t affect me. Every time I applied/interviewed and got hired for a w2 job, I just left my last non moonlighting employer on there, and checked the “please don’t contact current employer” checkbox. I hadn’t worked there in over a year.
Didn’t my new employer want me to update my LinkedIn? That never came up, but if it would have I would have delayed. Why should I support their business model.
At its most basic, this is a cult of qualification which no longer provides real value, it fails for a number of reasons I won't get into here.
When you disqualify arbitrarily, and can't find anyone because of that, its your fault for disqualifying everyone, not the market's fault for not having the ballerina that doesn't exist.
Want a programmer in a language thats only 10 years old with 15 years of direct experience? You aren't going to find it even when the creator of that language applies.
You pay to have the work done. That is the only legitimate requirement for hiring someone and remaining employed, and you can't go and change the requirements later when they show they can do more. Doesn't matter if they moonlight, are overemployed etc. That view to disqualify such people are in fact monopolistic practices designed to disenfranchise wages that are already low and distorted because of money-printing, they are not red-flags.
Its like the flawed type of thinking that "We need someone to do this work, but this guy is so overqualified he'll leave first chance; so we won't hire anyone".
You hire to have a job done. You don't get to be an arbitrary slave master.
The moment you lose sight of this is the moment you ignore your immediate needs, and drive your company on a path towards failure, and if its a consolidated large company, that failure and bad decisionmaking will impact a lot more people because of the centralization/concentration.
Financial engineering can decouple the need for immediate action, but the tradeoff is that the risk of not doing things you should have done becomes far greater to your long-term sustainability, and its completely invisible. There is no place for deception and coercion in the hiring process. If the job doesn't exist, don't jam communication channels. Jamming channels is tortuous interference.
The point is that when you have 100 Resumes to sort through for 1 role, you will have to use process of elimination. In 2025, with AI/scams/bots/moonlighters, Linkedin Profile is a good way to sort through. I am not saying having Linkedin is the only thing that matters but when there is so much noise, you need to stand out especially as a real human.
Sure, there is naturally a sieving process in any hiring, and the issue of AI/scams/bots is simple to solve because it was solved before AI was around before people got lazy. Fraud and misrepresentation isn't a new thing or even "being unsolve-able except in just one way, your chosen route".
The answer is simple...
Require that they come in and show up physically to the office to verify their CV/application/Driver's License, and at that time since there will be cost on the business side, also cross-check if they fit other open positions you have, or if they are interested in hearing about other positions (the answer will almost certainly be yes). Rapidly promoting from within naturally bubbles the competent to positions without a lot of external risk like what you've described.
This is how you build a resilient pipeline of talent, and vet the soft skills people who would be good at the job that you'll never find through an interview except by moonshot chance. When you structure it from the get-go to exclude excessively and use bad indicators, you have bad data in and get bad outcomes out.
> LinkedIn Profile is a good way to sort through.
Its not, there are plenty of fake LinkedIn Profiles. You can't stand out as a real human when you have pigeonholed everyone into a circular peg and set the sieve requirements to a square peg. Forcing people to all go through a online centralized portal, even when they show up in person, is what promotes these perverse incentives. Not rocket science.
As a business you can do a lot to solve problems, and there's no way you can stand out as a human among the noise of digital artifacts where bots mimic real humans in the same digital environment. Go physical.
I've friends who are executives that do hiring, their main complaints were we've tried to hire people for X positions, and our top 10 candidates were all fake, we spent months on this with numerous interviews (cost) and have to start all over from scratch.
I pointed out the answer is rather stupid simple. Go old school verify the inputs are real at the beginning of the process, not at the end after you sunk all those costs. That's what they've been doing since then and it works.
Finding the right talent is a cost you have to pay that you can't push off on other businesses through use of products or services where that business may lie/misrepresent because each business is different, and if you depend upon that one pipeline for talent they can and will eventually cause issues where you can't find talent.
The attitude you seem to have mirrors the same things I see in people who simply don't want to pay the cost to get competent people, and by extension don't want to actually be in business.
Also, conditions worsen when you spoil an entire labor pool over decades through bad management in consolidated hands, it gets harder and costlier to find qualified labor. Its the nature of ponzi; costs go up unti outflows exceed inflows.
If you don't get ahead of the labor crunch, it will crush you, and most competent people given the adverse circumstances in hiring are now retraining resulting in brain-drain, a hollowing out and watering down of the competency in the labor pool. What happens when you can't find qualified people at any cost because your practices drove them to other sectors. They won't come back because they wrote it off as a bad investment. Its psychologically sticky.
People always have a choice, even when others try to make it so they don't.
In addition to possibly being a scammer, some people found my resume to be less believable without a linkedin profile. One interviewer thought I was lying about my previous job title.
Why would it matter what your previous job title was? Why would I care if your previous job title was ‘Grand Vizier of Khyrgistan’? Can you do the job I want you to do now?
If your previous job title was "Doer of a Thing" then a prospective employer is more likely to consider you for a job doing the same (or similar) thing, as it shows you have prior experience doing a thing.
No, it shows that you previously had a job title that calls you a doer of things. I find that these don’t generally correlate with ability to actually do those things.
noobs on HN have been claiming this since the site was created. It's so tiresome that it's actually against site guidelines to make this kind of comment. If you want HN to be a nicer place than reddit, try to follow the guidelines.
Agree with this, unfortunately. I have a coworker who routinely calls people without linkedins "sketchy" and obsessively looks everyone else, vendors, functional area colleagues, etc up on linkedin. I didn't have a very fleshed out linkedin myself because I value privacy and was surprised how biased some people are about it. I've also seen candidates who have otherwise passed interview panels get veto'd because the dates on their linkedins don't match their CVs.
I don’t have a LinkedIn and it has impaired my job hunts in the past but I always worry that creating one now (without the references of colleagues from decades of past work) would look worse than not having one?
Nah that’s not a thing. Get involved spend an afternoon setting it up and then it will suggest a bunch of people you’ve probably worked with in the past. They’ll be happy to connect and then it’s a good point to catch up and drop the “I’m in the market”.
If anybody used to enjoy working with you and they know of something it, should be easy enough from then on.
Do people still do endorsements on LinkedIn? There was an initial flurry when that "feature" launched but I haven't been endorsed for anything for I think the past decade. Really the only things I do on LinkedIn are update my job history and accept connections from coworkers.
Imho, anything past where you've worked on LinkedIn is a waste of time.
And arguably even a negative signal. Productive people have jobs to do instead of grinding Monopoly karma. Yes, this absolutely includes LinkedIn thought leadership.
I know MS and recruiters love to push the 'it matters' line, but I'd ask the reader -- who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
> who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Who would you rather interview: someone who has a great resume, and a strong LinkedIn profile, and connections to a strong peer community who can endorse them, or a faceless rando that shows up in your inbox with a PDF, amongst thousands of others, with zero referrals?
I'm not endorsing LI grind -- I too hate it, but ignore at your own peril. OP seems to be in a rather precarious situation, so maybe it would help being a bit less dogmatic.
> who would you rather hire: someone who wow'd in an interview or someone with LinkedIn flair?
Wrong question. This is not about the hiring stage.
Who would I rather move on to a phone screen: someone with an empty or nonexistent linkedin profile, or someone with a profile which matches their resume and has many connections to other people who worked at the same companies?
While I hate to have to say it is the latter, that's where we are today with AI-generated fake resumes.
I have 344 resumes left to review tonight. Those that don't match their linkedin profile history have no chance (unless they are a direct colleague referral).
As I take a break on friday night from reading through an endless pile of resumes for a role I'm hiring...
I would suggest creating the linkedin profile but be sure to fully populate the job descriptions for each job (or as far back as you care to go) and spend some time looking up past colleagues from each one and send them invites to connect.
I'm finding that a completely blank linkedin profile (listing only companies but zero detail) is a bigger red flag than not having a linkedin profile.
But having a profile with job description info and a network of connections from each job adds credibility. When a resume looks borderline suspicious, I dig through the persons connections in linkedin to see if it looks like they really worked at each of those places. Even better if I find any shared connections, which is a stronger signal that I'm looking at a real person not an AI bot.
Also, building that network of connections can be a source of job leads on its own.
Man, for 15 years I’ve been working on projects that are not LinkedIn friendly. For example, online casinos where my coworkers all have pseudonyms. Or taking 1-2 years to work on a personal project that fizzles out. Not to menion, surfing for 2 years.
I'm in a terrible position for when I need to find a normal job, and comments like this don't let me forget it!
not a recruiter: I have never felt that recruiters pay attention to linkedin references specifically.
You can also make one, add people, and then ask for a few references. "I just finally made a linkedin in 2025 on a lark" is a perfectly cromulent icebreaker/reason to ask.
It is better to have 1 than not. I highly recommend you set it up now. Put a real picture. Too much noise these days and without a Linkedin Profile, lot of employers are not even going to look at you. Just stating facts.
Seconding. These days I will rarely talk to anyone without a verified LinkedIn or other presence like a clearly inhabited GitHub (and I’m not looking for hyperactivity by any means)
But why? Those things are easy to game, and speaking personally, I don't have an online software development presence like Github because I don't spend my off time working on anything I feel is worth sharing.
If i’m hiring for eng director in my industry I'm expecting at least a few 2nd/3rd common connections so i can backchannel. Without that i assume its someone who hasnt gotten along with anyone at beast or a scammer at worst
Numbers. I’ve read thousands of resumes over the past few months, screened dozens of applicants, and experienced a wide variety of weirdness and fakes both in resumes and on screen calls. Please note that I’m talking about raw “application box resumes”. Referrals and other semi-vetted sources don’t get this level of scrutiny.
I gave two examples of secondary sources, but what I’m really getting at here is that the numbers and noise are so, so high now (not to mention staffing firm fronts and foreign actors) that I usually need more signal than a solid-looking resume before investing even 30’ in a screening call.
Well, that sucks. The one thing I hate about Linked in is being up-rated on my skills by people who barely know what I do and certainly have never worked with me in any capacity or even discussed my work in any sense beyond "What do you do for a living?".
From where I sit, it's a tool for marketers and recruiters to gather data and it's otherwise completely useless.
One of my pet peeves are people who don’t understand what I call “gravity problems”. You may not like gravity. But that doesn’t mean you jump off of a 30 story building and hope to survive.
Whether I like LinkedIn or not is completely irrelevant. I play the game, add connections, post a few banal “Thought Leadership” posts, ask for recommendations, etc.
My remote job at BigTech fell into my lap in mid 2020 and at 46 because an internal recruiter reached out to me, I got my next job two years ago within a week after I started looking because of targeted LinkedIn outreach. My current job also fell into my lap two weeks after I started looking because an internal recruiter reached out to me.
It does absolutely no good being good at your job if no one knows it.
I think even in the current job market, someone would give me a job or a contract relatively quickly if I needed one based on my network, LinkedIn profile, and positive impressions I’ve made in my niche over the past 7 years.
How else would someone know about me and how would I connect with them? I can change my status to “Open to Work” and have 1200 people see it My specific niche is strategy consulting along with hands on keyboard work for smaller projects and before that, I was hired at 3 separate companies by a new to the company director/CTO to lead initiatives. At that level it’s all about knowing how to “influence” and communicate.
I’m not bragging, I’m old. I should have that type of experience and network.
How does LinkedIn factor into your experience and network is what I mean. You can’t tell me people cold call you through linkedin. If people contact you it might be through linkedin, but that’s only because their friends have been talking about you. LinkedIn isn’t what gives you work, it’s the fact that you’ve done good work for others.
I think that's the key difference. For strategy folks, it makes sense to demonstrate this kind of work through that kind of channel. But LinkedIn posts aren't relevant for non-networking roles.
The parent poster has “25 years of exp, director of engineering managerial/technical type”. He should be selling himself as a strategy person. In today’s market you have to be networking regardless especially for remote work. Even before I started doing the BS influencer mess, two of my last three jobs were based on internal recruiters reaching out to me.
So exactly how was a company in Seattle going to find out about me in Atlanta if not through LinkedIn to offer me a remote job paying 50% more than i was making? How were the next two companies where I worked remotely going to know anything about me?
In 2025 it basically means you're likely a bot/scammer. LinkedIn provides the social proof that at least you're a real person, with real business connections. It's sadly not optional.
I agree that it's not optional; in my book, a company mandating association with the degenerate cesspool that is LinkedIn as entry criteria for employment consideration is simply a non-starter, full stop.
If I disclose an email address that's directly traceable to my current employer---or even one provided to me by professional organizations I'm registered with---as adequate "social proof" (whatever that means) that I'm not "likely a bot/scammer", and a company's hiring manager is too blind to see the signal, then I'd write that off as a hidden trap passively dodged with confident relief.
Absolutely stupid advice for people who actually look for a job. You're participating in a social game, with well-defined signalling functions. If you'd like to actually have a positive outcome, you'll need to make use of the signalling functions commonly recognized, even if you don't like them.
(Plus, opting out of a commonly accepted path with the reason that you personally think other signals are as good and the other side is just too blind to see them sends a large amount of information about your ability to collaborate in larger teams)
You do you. There are jobs where you can get away with this, there are people with networks that allow them to play different games. But as advice to job seekers, it's actively detrimental.
> Hiring managers check you on LinkedIn 100 percent of the time.
YMMV. White collar work here follows connections and introductions - nearly exclusively. A few of my clients might have poked around Linkedin in passing but most have never used it.
As an aside, I deleted my LI because I've never had a legit contact thru it, only spam.
When I was a hiring manager (it's been a number of years) I always checked LI for applicants which looked interesting on "paper" but which had not come through a trusted source such as coworker from the past or present that I had respect for (both their technical skills and their willingness to be objective about others even if their observations were negative).
My primary reason for this was that unfortunately some resumes seem to include quite of bit of creative writing -- creativity which the applicant could bet only I, and my company, would see. If, however, the applicant had posted similar claims about past jobs on LI, it was public for all to see so somewhat likely to be less "creative" as most people find it embarrassing to get _caught_ claiming credit for work that someone else did or giving an overblown explanation of the import of their work. This is, of course, not 100% reliable as I've seen coworkers and past employees posting on LI claiming things they were "responsible for" or "implemented" when, in fact, they only had a tiny role (or, occasionally, even no discernible role) in.
Also, if I happened to notice a "connection" that I also knew, I could potentially ask them about the applicant (using due care to make sure that the applicant wouldn't be "outed" at their current job by my doing so).
> I always checked LI for applicants which looked interesting on "paper" but which had not come through a trusted source
This is a good observation.. rumination.. contribution? I can't find the right descriptive noun. Anyway, I get it. Perhaps the board is divided between regions inclined to use LI and not.
I have to disagree. I looked for a long time before I found my last gig (that ended in 2022). I had a LinkedIn and it wasn't much different, it took me months to find something. I still have a linkedin account to look for jobs, but that's it. No connections, no work history. What's relevant is on my resume anyway so I don't see what having a regular linkedin account would do. I deleted it when I found that job because, even as a job seeker, I saw no value in it and as a user, I saw no excuse to defend it.
You've applied to 400 jobs and had 3 responses and no success to be blunt your option about what you need to do to get hired is worth zero.
You refuse to change anything about your process, you aren't working to improve it, you are arguing against people telling them you don't need to do common/standard things.
This thread is a pretty good insight into why you are failing and what you need to work on.
Like I said, i had a legit linkedin account before i closed it and it never felt like it did anything for me. I have changed plenty about my process, from cv iterations and reviews, ai assistance to cater to job posts in cv and cover letters, etc. Of course i think all the information is great, but i also have first hand knowledge and experience. If you think all that's missing is a furnished LinkedIn account then i can tell you that it isn't accurate - in my experience.
I have a couple dozen open roles right now, at a 50-person company. Each posting gets thousands of applications. Most are fakes, or AI-generated, or AI-generated fakes. Realistically, we're going to respond to 1%, maybe 2% of them, because again, 50-person team. Half the time, you get someone named Ralph McGuinness on for a quick code screen and they have a thick Mandarin accent or something equivalently implausible.
The best first filter we have at the moment is to programmatically toss out any resume that doesn't have a LinkedIn, that has a hallucinated LinkedIn that doesn't resolve, that resolves to a name that doesn't match the resume, that has no connections or history, etc.
It's an absurd state of play that hurts those of us trying to hire and those of you trying to get hired, but also a trivial hurdle for you to clear, so stop arguing and just do it.
Of those 400 applications, my LinkedIn profile was viewed 16 times. LinkedIn is not as essential as everyone is trying to portray it. Especially outside of the US where people actually care about data privacy.
LinkedIn only shows you authenticated viewers. You have no idea how many automated systems have filtered you out because you didn't include a link in your resume/application or because, as you said, the account has no connections or activity.
Do you know of any such automated systems or are you just making that up? I've never heard of application systems or ATS that looks for a linkedin URL in PDFs, extracts it along with employment information and validates it against what's in the resume, or a form that validates that a given entry leads to a valid LinkedIn profile, and that the profile corresponds to the one that was submitted. Recruiters; yes, and those will show up - and they haven't.
Every job I've applied for in the last two weeks has asked for a LinkedIn link on the application. I have more interviews this month than you've had in three years.
Just saying.
I hate LinkedIn too but i very much consider it an important part of the "finding a job post pandemic" game.
to put it bluntly, the game has changed. what you knew from before is not correct now. if you keep applying your previous intuition and experience to a job search in todays market, you are going to be in for a hard time.
You are delusional if you think having a good LinkedIn doesn't improve your chances of getting hired... Maybe not for every job, but for many of them, surely.
I guess my experience hasn't shown value. I think people think of LinkedIn like Facebook - it only works if everyone agrees to stay hostage. I don't like the platform, I don't like that Microsoft is being all Microsofty about your data (have you looked at the new settings lately? That they added without telling anyone? Settings → Data Privacy → Data for Generative AI Improvement) and being a data-aware netizen, fuck linkedin.
Hiring manager here. It's standard practice for every hiring manager I know to review the candidate's LinkedIn as an additional input to the hiring process.
Not finding a LinkedIn page for someone can range from a neutral signal to a negative signal depending on the hiring manager. I personally don't read anything into it, but I know many hiring managers who feel that lack of a LinkedIn page is a negative sign. I don't like it, but it's how the world works some times.
A seasoned LinkedIn page is also becoming very valuable for applying to remote jobs. Remote employers are getting nervous with all of the overemployed people and fake applicants. Having a mature LinkedIn page with a decent number of connections to real people is a major positive sign for remote hiring.
It's not something you will be able to see or detect as a candidate.
I’m a manager in a cybersecurity consulting firm. I’ve hired half a dozen people for my team in the past year. I always check LinkedIn as well.
If someone isn’t on it, the chances are significantly higher they are fake or trying be be “overemployed.”
Does not having LinkedIn mean you’re not qualified or not real? Certainly not. Does it mean I will pass your resume over when sorting through a stack of qualified applicants? Absolutely.
Those people probably have very strong personal networks and a willingness to reach out to them for opportunities or a very high profile in their niche.
> You are delusional if you think having a good LinkedIn doesn't improve your chances of getting hired... Maybe not for every job, but for many of them, surely.
This isn't universal in every market. Business is very insular here and work follows referrals and introductions. You have those and you have work. Without them, Linkedin won't help.
I'm 35yr in IT; I plug into my clients in a way that I learn their processes - inc hiring. Few white collar employers here use Linkedin. I've never worked with one who did.
Seriously. I could write 20 years of fake FAANG experience, connect with every rando posting AI slop since they just farm connections, and that would be better according to what i'm reading here.
Referrals are the only way right now. The front door is broken everywhere. I spent 4 years off and I managed to come back, but only referrals were worthwhile in getting me roles worth anything
One small note -- what got you an interview before 2020 will often not get you an interview now. The market (as you obviously know) is much tougher. The last two managerial roles I've opened have gotten literally thousands of applications within the first week and it's harder to stand out. If you've done a few rounds already, there's probably not much incremental value, though.
Absolutely ask for referrals. You gotta painfully get on LinkedIn for maximum effectiveness -- if you're looking at a company and an ex-coworker you got along with knows someone there, ask for the introduction. It feels awkward and weird but it increases your chances somewhat.
If you are trying to get a job based on your resume and blindly submitting it to an ATS, you are doing it wrong. Every open req gets hundreds of applications and it’s impossible to stand out from the crowd.
Even if i did i would never post it publicly. And yes i understand that it means i won't be getting thousands of strangers looking at my personal experience, one of whom might want to hire me. I wouldn't post my resume either. I'm just not comfortable giving my data to a company i don't trust and to share it openly on the public web. And yes i'm ok with the consequences.
I am not the original commenter but I think something that younger people forget is that when you reach 2 decades or more into your career, your network starts to dry up for you. This is in addition to your skillsets and work cultural fit being suspect because of your experience and age (set in their ways, old thinking, etc…).
I have been in tech for nearly 40 years. Almost every one of my former bosses is either out of the industry, retired, or dead. My network is useless to me. If my current job ends…I won’t find another tech gig.
Surely your current boss or recent colleagues aren't out of the market though.
I've been developing for over 25 years and my early bosses are almost certainly retired but I still have connections from back then in colleagues that are still wording I could reach out to. Unless you stopped interacting 40 years ago you should still have current people regardless of time in the industry.
How much do you interact with colleagues from 2000 and how much do they really know about your current capabilities? Probably nothing or minimal…”he was a helluva cobol dev back in ‘00” doesn’t sound like a valuable reference if I am a hiring manager in 2025 looking for a Rust dev.
Current colleagues and bosses would have to cycle out themselves and land elsewhere before they will be a help as a network resource.
Also, for current colleagues—-consider the case if your whole team gets RIF’d. At that point they are no longer your colleague, nor really a good network resource until they land. What they are is a competitor and a competitor likely similarly skilled as you, competing for the same roles that you are.
Your best network resources don’t currently work with you, but are secure in a gig, and someone you have worked with or for in the last 3-5 years.
Old connections can still be helpful even if they don't know your current skills as long as they can assess what kind of worker you are. I've personally recommended people I worked with 17 years ago because I can remember how valuable they were with no consideration given to current specific skills. I currently regularly speak with 3 people I worked with over 20 years ago and check in annually with another half dozen or so.
If you don't keep any connections with your previous colleagues then you are self limiting your career options. But the second best time to plant a tree...
Just checked with the iOS keyboard development guide and app store review and see no rules against it. Why are you pretty sure it is limited due to the OS?
It's pretty terrible but it's still the best of what I've tried. Given the progress in LLMs the autocomplete/autocorrect choices and word suggestions are laughably bad. Swype and the MS one though still managed to be worse
Creating a crypto wallet to receive is just the first step though. If your mom needs her local currency then the same as with wise she needs to create an account on some form of exchange or pay an extortionate rate to use a crypto ATM.
If she doesn't need that then wise without a linked account or PayPal or etc is the exact same outcome without the crypto wallet security risk.
That's a fair point, but creating an account on an exchange isn't too bothersome.
I personally use a Ledger device for my crypto. It was super easy to set up (though I wouldn't advise it to my mom, because she tends to misplace things). I linked my crypto wallet to my bank account fairly easily. So we can still get nigh-instant crypto transfers and fast selling of crypto into local currency (Speaking from US here, I think it usually just takes up to one business day). It's still faster than bank-to-bank transfer for large sums, which again, can take weeks for whatever reason they decide.
> wise without a linked account or PayPal or etc is the exact same outcome
PayPal without a linked account is actually pretty terrible. I did a Google search of PayPal frozen funds and this was the first result.
Wise may have similar issues, I haven't really dealt with them outside of the occasional transfer, but I never let money sit in my wise account.
If you have custody of your own crypto wallet (IE not coinbase), no one can freeze your funds.
Again, I have my qualms with crypto, but the existing shitty state of ways to transfer money makes crypto very attractive. I have trouble even transferring money between my wife and my joint bank account and my personal account (held at two different institutions).
So your setup process is the same as wise or PayPal. You still had to do the process so crypto is best case harder since you also had to setup and manage a wallet unless you're just using the exchange one.
Go look at the subreddit of any of the major exchanges and they all regularly have stories of locked funds. Given the scales it would be far more likely there.
That's not a natural state of banking though that's a issue with your country. I have accounts at 4 different banks in Australia and regularly transfer funds between them without issue(I think my cap for instant transfer is around $5k though above that is usually only a few hours). Canada had a similar system(interac payments).
> Go look at the subreddit of any of the major exchanges and they all regularly have stories of locked funds. Given the scales it would be far more likely there.
Yeah that's why I wouldn't suggest anyone keeping a lot of funds on an exchange, and having custody of your own wallet. "Harder" is irrelevant (and relative) because a one-time setup in order to send money instantly — something that I need to reiterate that if our country's banking systems allowed us to do, I wouldn't look twice at crypto — is worth it.
> That's not a natural state of banking though that's a issue with your country.
Yeah I think that's my point though. If my country ("the great US of A") prevents me from easily moving money from me to me, and I've also had nothing but trouble trying to manage joint finances with my wife because of the difficulty of transferring money, then yeah I don't wanna play that game. In countries where bank transfers are instant then yeah, crypto doesn't make sense.
Pretty sure you can count the number of professional programmers using vanilla vim/neovim on one hand.