[_fat_santa]

LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.

1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.

2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.

My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"

[parpfish]

I like it as a “place that hosts resumes in a standardized format that can be imported to other applications correctly”

[parpfish]

Also good for “hey whatever happened to that guy from high school”

[filoleg]

Yup, agreed heavily with your take.

I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).

For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.

As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.