[hashemian]

Well, my experience with LinkedIn has been very different. To start, I don't have my mom in my LinkedIn! Not only I have found my current job from LinkedIn, I also regularly received interview invitation for positions from other companies (from large scale ones like Google, FB, Amazon, etc. to smaller companies).

But to me the best advantage of LinkedIn is it helps separate professional relationships/conversation separate from my personal life. My contact network at LinkedIn showing my professional connections is very different than my contact network in Facebook, and while I use both, I don't want them to be mixed.

Plus, it keeps my CV and I don't have to always look for my CV in bunch of doc files if I have to send it to someone.

Maybe you would have a different experience if you would spend more time on setting it up? (writing the CV, adding the right people. etc)

[kylnew]

Honestly, I put a good amount of effort into LinkedIn before quitting. I even subscribe to the job seeker's tier for a month before realizing what a piece of junk it was (pure vanity metrics, little substantial information of use).

My problem was actually getting too many recruiters contacting me offering me jobs out of my interest and it ultimately felt like that email inbox you check once a month to wipe only out the spam.

While I understand some developers find use in LinkedIn, I still think that this might be biased if alternative ways of job seeking weren't also simultaneously pursued. I believe that having a good GitHub, releasing products, blogging, tweeting, and attending meetups can all be affective means of network building.

[wodenokoto]

I'm interested in how you use it to handle communication. I would never try and contact anyone through LinkedIn unless there were no other alternatives. In my experience there is so many junk notification on LinkedIn that any attempt at real communication would drown out.