[simonw]

"Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat"

I don't think that's true at all. Some of the best engineers I've worked with have had very small online footprints (they're too busy building awesome things at their company to spend much time on Twitter etc). Now that I'm responsible for hiring, I consider knowledge of that kind of person to be incredibly important.

[dagw]

I have to agree here. Most of the best people I've worked with don't have much in the way of twitter and github accounts. Github and twitter only seems popular within a fairly narrow professional and cultural niche.

[pawelwentpawel]

I understand using github/twitter a lot if you're a developer. When you work on something you might want to get some immediate feedback/testers on it.

Yet still, linkedin (even though useful) scares me away a little bit. Each single time I get back, I see more and more people inventing longer and more exotic job names and descriptions, pitching around with some void statements and uploading their pictures in suits.

[nathan_long]

My problem with LinkedIn is other people. People want me to say I know them when I don't (hey, networking!). People want me to recommend them when I have only seen them in the hallway and don't even know what they do.

I am very conservative about these things. Does LinkedIn's own model disagree? Does it push people towards larger networks, instead of smaller, higher-value ones?

Am I doing it wrong, or is (seemingly) everyone else?

[pawelwentpawel]

There is quite a lot of recruiters/randoms just adding as many people as possible. Without any introductory message, I would just consider that as spam. However, if you know somebody in person but don't know him very well then I don't see a huge problem. I get quite a lot of invites from my former class mates that I had no real connection with. But hey, you never know where your life takes you. Those connections might accidentally come in very useful one day.

As for the recommendations - they've got nothing to loose really. In the worst case they won't get one.

[vellum]

I agree. Github is like a portfolio. But you don't need a portfolio if you're a great developer with a strong network.