The Microsoft-LinkedIn hookup will be the END of DAYS, I tell you

In case you've been living under a rock, Microsoft has bought LinkedIn. Unlike many, you'll notice I'm not laughing. I am not amused. I'm am, in fact, quite afraid. In many regions – my home nation of Canada being one of them – LinkedIn absolutely dominates career discovery and acquisition. Note the term "career". Jobber …

[Wiltshire]

Perhaps now's a good time to test whether LI deep-archives any changes to your LI profile.

I've just had a job change, I've moved from being a .Net developer with 10 years of Cloud and DevOps experience to a McDonalds Retail Service Executive with 5 years of customer-facing targeted profiling of service options.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to see you're moving up in the world

At least MaccyD's won't call you in the middle of the night about some fries you served last year

[Anonymous Coward]

I've moved from being a .Net developer with 10 years of Cloud and DevOps experience to a McDonalds Retail Service Executive with 5 years of customer-facing targeted profiling of service options.

Well done on the promotion.

[hplasm]

"...many HR departments hire entirely by certification."

And if the certs you have aren't from MS, expect to sink below the threshold of visibility.

[Zippy's Sausage Factory]

Re: "...many HR departments hire entirely by certification."

This is perhaps the most worrying thought, and - probably - the most likely to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: expect to sink below the threshold of visibility.

That's all I want -- to stop LinkedIn spamming me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "...many HR departments hire entirely by certification."

.. and that includes HR droids, which makes it a self-perpetuating problem :(.

[Dr Scrum Master]

Re: "...many HR departments hire entirely by certification."

Warning Sign #1: having a HR department

Warning Sign #2: HR driving recruitment

[VinceLortho]

Re: "...many HR departments hire entirely by certification."

Most of the certified personnel I have worked with were incompetent in the position the certification was for. Then again, I worked with a PhD in IT that could not program.

[Jemma]

So that'll be another profile to delete then. It's not a great loss. It never did anything useful anyway.

[TRT]

So that'll be another profile to delete then

Good luck. If you are successful you will have demonstrated your superior IT skills. Pity nobody will know about them.

[msknight]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

At this rate, anyone worth working for, will be looking on places other than LI, so that's OK then :-)

[cambsukguy]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

Except. apparently, in Canada.

My experience in the UK is of mainly Job agents wanting connections, I am a contractor of course.

So, LI, not so useful for me, when I am looking for a contract, I use available contracts as a filter, not agents that I happen to know.

[grantham666]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

Isn't this an opportunity for an alternative to LinkedIn to be launched (open source no subscription but funded by ads instead?

[hplasm]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

Pity nobody irrelevant will know about them.

FTFY.

[TRT]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

I'm not pro LinkedIN, btw. Very much anti.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

@ TRT.. me too! But I do not have a smart phone, FB, Twitter or any "core" social media exposure. Well love to chat, but need to get back to work @ G4S for DHS. :/

[Jemma]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

Not very much point them knowing about them, fantastic or otherwise, since my health is a total wreck and I'm unable to work, and not likely to get any better. It might be worth keeping if I talked to any of the people on it but I don't. As has been mentioned in the UK it's mostly employment agencies or word of mouth, it doesn't seem to have caught on so much here as other places.

[TRT]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

I was more making the point...

"Why should we employ you?"

"My IT skills are the best in the business."

"We... err... we couldn't find any trace of you on the web. HR likes to do a bit of background research on prospective employees. No Skype, no Twitter, no Facebook, no CV on Monster, not even a LinkedIN profile."

*confident shrug* "Like I said..."

"You're HIRED!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

Monster still exists?!

Who knew?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

"Monster still exists?!"

Yeah, I was astonished to see it appear on the side of busses around where I live ... complete with lame slogan (which my memory seems to have automatically filtered as 'not worth remembering')

[energystar]

Take a look at the mirror, on the right...

"No Skype, no Twitter, no Facebook, no CV on Monster, not even a LinkedIN profile."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

Exactly the same situation here. I do get interesting problems to look at periodically, and I'm up for it. Word of mouth only.

[SVV]

Re: So that'll be another profile to delete then

No, don't do that.

I've just deleted a load of old stuff and have added a fulsome and unflattering description of my new role - Chief Idiot Officer (CIO) at Microsoft.

I suggest everybody does the same. As well as giving all your old IT colleagues a good laugh it will reduce the site's worth even more if everybody starts doing this.

[Moonunit]

HR rejoice! Now y'all can just ask Cortana who to hire ... good luck with THAT one!

$DEITY ... LI was bad enough to start with. While I see the marketing logic in MS's purchase, I cannot see how this at all lends any shred of credibility to LI.

My sad experience of LI has been that if you're a self-aggrandizing type, it probably works for you. Some of us prefer less of LI's BS-meter-popping endorsement and general ra-ra culture.

Bajayzus wept ... I have at least managed to banish W10 to a VM on an external drive, and my LI 'profile' is barest of bare bones and closed to public view. That small bit of stealth will now go away and be Cortana'd to buggery. Time to bow out completely.

ran rant dribble ... Nurse, my meds are late, please do hurry along if you would!

[Neil Barnes]

Re: HR rejoice! Now y'all can just ask Cortana who to hire ... good luck with THAT one!

Already done.

You have to change to the 'old' config page to find the 'account' section indicated in the first google 'how to' hit.

Now I wait to see whether the data did actually go away. Ah well, there wasn't a lot there anyway.

[Flywheel]

Re: HR rejoice! Now y'all can just ask Cortana who to hire ... good luck with THAT one!

" I have at least managed to banish W10 to a VM on an external drive"

That alone should make you marketable!!

[Netscrape]

So glad I am not on LinkedIn.

[Christopher Lane]

So glad I deleted my account a year ago too TBH.

Is it my imagination or is that a MacOS wall paper behind the Cortana graphic?

[WolfFan]

Is it my imagination or is that a MacOS wall paper behind the Cortana graphic?

It's not your imagination. There's even a Parallels Desktop tag. Someone's running Win10 on a VM on a Mac. If properly done, MS can't get any info out of Win10 'cause the VM isn't connected to the network.

Full disclosure: when I set up the Win10 beta on one of my machines, I used Hyper-V to create a VM and deliberately didn't connect it to the network, and put the beta into that VM. It whinged a lot about not being able to connect to the internet. How sad. Too bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not on Linkedln and never have been, but that doesn't stop recruitment recruitment wallies sending me requests to add them (or whatever they hell it is I'm supposed to do).

What makes it even more laughable, is that I put my CV "out there" about 5-yrs back for a Permie Role and haven't updated it since. It doesn't stop them from sending me Contract Positions - so either they don't actually read the CVs or they really are desperate for those with my skill-set.

[KroSha]

They don't read them. I regularly get offers for things I am not qualified for and are not in my skill-set. I think that a lot of them think IT is like reading; you can read a book, so you can read a thesis, no?

[Geoffrey W]

So glad I deleted my entire existence from both virtual and meat space. See y'all in the next life!

[Kevin Johnston]

and in the future?

This could be the death of 'Professional' level sites of this nature. Linkedin already had issues with fake profiles and an overload of recruiters but with the buyout the last fig-leaf is dropped and the value OF the users leapfrogs the value TO the users.

While other sites may exist or appear in the near future, would enough people be willing to give away all their data all over again?

[rnturn]

Re: and in the future?

> While other sites may exist or appear in the near future, would enough people be willing to give away all their data all over again?

I never found LI to be particularly beneficial in my previous job searches and only modestly useful in networking with other IT folks, anyway. There were (some years ago) competitors to LI and I did go to the effort of trying one or two out. They turned out to not have many members and I saw little activity and abandoned them after a few months. For job searches, I found Careerbuilder and Dice to be more than enough. There are enough recruiters frequenting those sites that I get emails and phones calls on a weekly basis based on the resume I have posted on those sites. I think people will find other sites when it comes time to begin another job search and they don't want their job search activity seen by the enterprise software.

Any betting types making wagers on when the first story hits the Net of someone getting canned for using LI for a job search and Cortana tipping off their HR department?

[Paul Crawford]

Cortana?

What is this Cortana you speak of? How will she/it spy on me? I have looked, but this is what I get:

$ apt-cache policy Cortana

N: Unable to locate package Cortana

Now then, to add "teledildonic DevOps using .net" over and over again to my Linkedin profile...

[Wensleydale Cheese]

Re: Cortana?

In the not too distant future...

$ apt-cache install Cortana

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

The following extra packages will be installed:

Windows-10 Windows-Telemetry

Suggested packages:

Office-365

The following NEW packages will be installed:

Cortana Windows-10 Windows-Telemetry

[Avatar of They]

Re: Cortana?

...And that is the day I think I retire my computer habits and get some old fashioned paper back books.

If they ever infect Linux to that level, I am off.

[Voland's right hand]

Re: Cortana?

The following NEW packages will be installed:

1. Lower case

2. More like Windows-12 or thereabouts (judging by the way SQL server is moving in the general Linux direction).

3. You will probably see portsnap fetch ; pkg install Windows-11 first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cortana?

4. pkg install rsync-w-NSA ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cortana?

Boy, am I so glad I decided not to use Ubuntu but kept on with Slackware.

Sadly the PHB's demand that we have to use Windows but not for much longer. Really looking forward to a Microsoft free retirement. Bring it on.

[energystar]

Re: Cortana?

Ubuntu will install by default ;D

[fajensen]

Re: Cortana?

What is this Cortana you speak of? How will she/it spy on me?

I suppose that you will at some point acquire a really fancy 3D printer from Microsoft. This will silently activate at 03:00 to print a Personal Cortana Terminal Node in a soft and pliable latex-like material. This brand new Cortana, still nekkid and smelling slightly of long-chain polymers, will then corner you inside your bedroom and persuade you to spill it all in the old & time-tested ways.

Paris, because she will eventually be printed too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cortana?

please, please

[Anonymous Coward]

fortunately v. doom and gloom

fortunately, a majority of the world's population do not occupy linkding-ding, or whatever they call themselves. Yes, in your proximity this might be 99.9%, but there are other people, you know.

And?

Well, just a broader picture, you know.

[Bloakey1]

Re: fortunately v. doom and gloom

I would agree. I have never needed to use it, word of mouth does for me. I would say that we are the majority and this news will have no affect on me whatsoever beyond reading articles and posts bemoaning the loss of LinkedIn.

So from wher I stand, not a single toss was given that day although i extend my sympathy's to those that have suffered a 'loss'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: fortunately v. doom and gloom

Yes, in your proximity this might be 99.9%, but there are other people, you know.

Isnt that kind of the point and why the article said "here in Canada."?

For me, in the UK, LinkedIn is a bit of a necessary evil. Four out of my last six contracts have been directly as a result of my LinkedIn profile and if we look at time, it accounts for four of my last five years work as all the LI-driven contracts ended up being 12 monthers. I currently work with permies in a company that effectively recruits almost entirely via LinkedIn for applications & CVs.

You are quite right that on the global scale, LinkedIn accounts for about 1 in 14 of the population but that is irrelevant if it is popular in your geography / market sector. Also the experience of "older" workers is going to be massively different from a workforce growing up using facebook/linkedin/twitter from puberty.

All in all, the somewhat boastful statements by people that they dont care because they dont use LinkedIn is a bit short sighted. Unless Microsoft manages to derail LI, in a few years it will be as essential to getting a job as having an email address.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: fortunately v. doom and gloom

my point was not about local proximity (by that I mean a human circle, rather than geography), versus global (7 billion and counting), but more about getting the perspective right. Yes, in some circles it's THE only venue to find a job and / or go up (wherever the up is), but - I imagine there are many, many areas (industries, etc.) where it's irrelevant to the point of "LinkedIn, what?" And while this portal is IT-centric, so presumably LinkedIn-centric much more than something less techy, it's worth pointing out that, on balance, this is NOT not the centre of the world, so potential doom and gloom is relatively local, even if counted in couple of milions.

And it's a fad anyway (I think). A few years ago quite a chunk of world population went crazy about that "virtual world" thingy, what-do-you-call-it which became (in)famous because of male members, fullsize (the register had its fair share of pointing out the ridiculous).

And even if MS linedln becomes too constrictive and withers, something else will crop up, and so it goes (on).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: fortunately v. doom and gloom

I have had this contract for 30 years, do I need LI?

Mines the one with the pension in the pocket

[Voland's right hand]

Re: fortunately v. doom and gloom

Linked in population is interesting from an entirely different perspective - it is concentrated in parts of the world with higher income per capita. The rest of the world has not tried the beauty of "workforce mobility" w*nking and there a headhunter generally means someone who cuts heads, not hires them.

[jinx3y]

Re: fortunately v. doom and gloom

Just to caveat...(about never needing it). I haven't either...though I do have a profile and have, in fact, been contacted a few times about opportunities, the jobs I have had in the past I have gotten using the direct approach. That's to say: Go out and get the job yourself...instead of waiting for someone to notice your so-called "skills". I have more success with finding the "careers" section of company website and sending in a rsume than with anything else. Do things that way and who cares if MS buysLinkedIn. Like a another poster here implied, being able to hide your online presence should speak volumes to your skillset...a company who doesn't recognize that is probably not worth working for anyway...

[djstardust]

Just closed

My Linkedin account today.

DWS Lite can help my PC but I'm not having MS slurping my personal and career data.

One step too far this time Microsoft.

Sad world when money can buy personal details for who knows what reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Just closed

The big question is 'were you able to wipe all your data', or is it still there lurking on their servers for MS to slurp as necessary?

They will most probably slurp the closed account details first.

[Mage]

Re: Just closed

It might help (or be pointless) to change email address, verify it, edit all data to believable nonsense and then delete the email address. Optionally close account.

[Wensleydale Cheese]

Re: Just closed

"The big question is 'were you able to wipe all your data', or is it still there lurking on their servers for MS to slurp as necessary?"

A recent set of emails from LinkedIn would suggest that yes, they still have some details (e.g. email addy) related to the account i closed about 4 years ago.

That might have been no more than a last minute drive to boost member numbers before the takeover, but we'll probably never know.

[rnturn]

Re: Just closed

> A recent set of emails from LinkedIn would suggest that yes, they still have some details (e.g. email addy) related to the account i closed about 4 years ago.

> That might have been no more than a last minute drive to boost member numbers before the takeover, but we'll probably never know.

That would be a sleazy way to pump up the value of the LI assets: grab a list of all the email addresses ever used for LI accounts and tout those as users of the site. (Just never mention how many of those email addresses are for defunct accounts.) It would not surprise me in the least if this tactic were found to be widely used when setting rates for advertisers on sites like LI, FB, and the like.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Just closed

I'm sure they will reckon that the list of people who closed their accounts after the take-over was announced is a particularly interesting dataset.

[Anonymous Coward]

@djstardust

"Sad world when money can buy personal details for who knows what reason."

Just wondering: do you happen to have a Facebook, Twitter or Google+ account by any chance? Because if the issue of buying personal details bothers you then trust me when I say that LinkedIn isn't your only problem here. Major difference is that this got fully open in the news, and that those other companies tend to keep a little more quiet about it. But don't think for one second that the data you provide those three companies with also stays with those three companies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @djstardust

Lets see

Facebook - No

Twitter - No

YouTube - No

What's App - No

Google - No

Pinterest - No

Microsoft - Yes

LinkedIn - Yes

Better clean those last two up then.

MS is really trying hard to be Google-Lite aren't they?

[TVU]

Re: @djstardust

"MS is really trying hard to be Google-Lite aren't they?"

Oh, I think it's worse than that - they are now giving every impression of wanting to out data-slurp Google at their own game!

My money's on all that Linkedin personal data being transferred right now on to Redmond servers.

[inmypjs]

Re: Just closed

Didn't close mine - check it out

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/andy-booker-64353b114

[Geoffrey W]

Re: Just closed

RE: "Sad world when money can buy personal details for who knows what reason"

Yeah, sad world when someone can buy your personal details from someone else who already has your personal details.

Surely if your personal details are that important then you shouldn't have given them to LI in the first place?

[Charlie Clark]

Meanwhile, elsewhere the sky fails to fall in

Other commentators seem to think that LinkedIn needs to merge at least as much as Microsoft with sites like glassdoor (no idea what it's like because I've never used it) becoming more and more popular for recruitment. Microsoft has yet to demonstrate that they can handle such an acquisition without completely bungling it.

For techies I think things like StackOverflow and GitHub could become more relevant. LinkedIn's endorsement and skills stuff just doesn't cut it but the connection metadata is useful, though the idea of being able to live solely from the network effect is starting to be debunked.

As with most recent deals, existing shareholders stand to benefit most from the debt-financed deal with income taxpayers standing to lose out. Sigh.

[Philip Lewis]

Re: Meanwhile, elsewhere the sky fails to fall in

Thumbs up for being able to spell "lose" ;)

[Geoffrey W]

Re: Meanwhile, elsewhere the sky fails to fall in

RE: "Thumbs up for being able to spell "lose" ;)"

Thumbs down for caring. :-P

Nah, not really. I don't care either way.

[Mage]

Canada?

"unless you're on LinkedIn, with a well-crafted and carefully curated profile, you're a nobody"

Must be a stranger place than I thought. I was advised to join LinkedIn about 10 years ago. I decided eventually it was a pointless.

The mutual back patting is tedious and I think even recruiters realise now how pointless it has become. People just collecting "contacts" and their "whatsapp" desire to get your address book and spam everyone on it.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: Canada?

It's just like a sect. A neverending circlejerk of the self-promoters where there are "friends" that are not friends and "news" that are not news and into which you are forced to put half an hour or so per day, possibly by a "mobile device solution" while on the move to increase the obnoxious encroachment on your mind. Then the Nigerian Prince texts you.

Adios.

At least the Cortana is designed to look sexually attractive to young males.

[Franco]

Re: Canada?

I signed up (under protest) when I started contracting, and whilst I have some useful contacts about 1 in 5 new contact requests is from a recruitment consultant who then never contacts me directly. And about half of the ones who do contact me haven't read my profile before getting in touch about a role I am "perfect for" but have no interest or qualifications for.

[rnturn]

Re: Canada?

> ... whilst I have some useful contacts about 1 in 5 new contact requests is from a recruitment consultant who then never contacts me directly.

My experience as well though I'd estimate that my ratio of contact requests from recruiters is more like 3-4 in 5. What irked -- heck... still does -- me the most about LI was the period when I was a paying member and had made the decision to pay the fee as that would allow me to see who was looking at my profile. I eventually came to realize that LI was then allowing others to pay a fee to be able to browse my profile anonymously regardless of the feature that /I'd/ been ripped off^W^W^W paid for. I estimated that a good 75%-80% of my profile visits were still being done anonymously and I canceled the paid membership and reverted back to the freebie membership.

[Ralph B]

Ransomware

> All that really remains is ransomware.

Haven't they kinda already done that with the Office 365 subscription model? Don't pay the subs and you won't be able to open your docs. (OK, at least the docs aren't encrypted. (Yet.))

[WolfFan]

Re: Ransomware

Haven't they kinda already done that with the Office 365 subscription model? Don't pay the subs and you won't be able to open your docs.

Not if you keep a copy of all docs somewhere other than OneDrive. MS Office docs can (usually) be opened with LibreOffice, etc., and be usable after some editing. Exactly how much editing depends on how complex the doc was.

(OK, at least the docs aren't encrypted. (Yet.))

Control-A, control-C, open new doc in LibreOffice, Control-V.

[Yugguy]

Sacked off Linkedin anyway

It always was a way to scout out your next job but I was getting indundanted with agencies sending me competely unsuitable job specs. Looking at the comments I'm not the only one. So I deleted my account.

[Pete 2]

Behind the curve

> Think of the analytics possibilities! What level of risk do your employees present if they decide to say negative things about you?

Meh, it's already been done.

There was a piece on /. the other day about a British (good to see we can still innovate) outfit that would trawl social media for landlords to determine whether potential tenants had any skeletons in their Facebook closet.

The thing is, once you know what "they" are looking for, it shouldn't be too difficult to feed a 'bot what it wants. One could suggest that for an IT person worthy of the name, it would be one of the 6 impossible things they do before breakfast.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Re: Behind the curve

And the breakfast will be at Milliways, I trust

[MonkeyCee]

Re: Behind the curve

Hmmm, and if this company falls for a fake profile (because no-one makes abusive profiles of people they dislike) tells your potential landlord that you've got the personal habits of Scarface, and you get refused a tenancy?

Bear in mind that you can get in trouble for giving someone anything less than a glowing work reference (even if it's true), so you have to resort to code "Bob worked here from x to y in role z." and nothing else can indicate a problem...

[xyz]

Don't worry...

Given their recent form, MS will break it in a couple of weeks and then flog it off for a tenth of the price they paid for it.

[Chris Evans]

Weeping shareholders!

If I was a Microsoft shareholders I'd have my head in my hands weeping!

I read an article a while back that explained big companies like Microsoft think they have to always continue to get bigger so when their main market becomes mature and stops growing they try and expand by buying up comparatively new companies. This almost never works. They can't get their head around managing a shrinking business and squander the cash they have that should be returned to shareholders. I suspect Apple will fall into this trap in a few years time.

Now if I was LinkedIn shareholder I'd have a big grin, though as I never thought anyone would be so stupid as to pay $26Bn for it I'm not a shareholder!

[Philip Lewis]

Re: Weeping shareholders!

"If I was a Microsoft shareholders"

If I were a Microsoft shareholder

FTFY

[Geoffrey W]

Re: Weeping shareholders!

If I wasn't not a pedant then I would punch you on your virtual nose for being a serial not not(sic(k)) a pedant. I think?

[Alan Sharkey]

Why are you on Linkedin in the first place?

I've never understood the reason for it. But then I've had the same employer for 30 years and I'm nearly ready for retiring.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why are you on Linkedin in the first place?

"I've never understood the reason for it. But then I've had the same employer for 30 years and I'm nearly ready for retiring."

I'm coming up for 43 years continuous service - I've been converted from Public Service to listed company, down-sized, right-sized, out-sourced, merged and, most recently, bought outright - but I'm still here.

Like you, I'm thinking about retirement (or at least a change of job) and I keep hoping that one day soon someone will decide to make me redundant, but no such luck so far - more money that way - the one time it did happen I wasn't ready to go and I managed to avoid the door long enough that I've remained for another 13 years since then.

[msknight]

So Precious....

I blanked all the information on my profile yesterday.

Today I check to see if I missed anything and I have a PM...

Hi Msknight,

Thanks for making LinkedIn great.

To help you grow and nurture your network, we’d like to give you a free trial of Premium Professional.

Use your free trial to:

*) See the full list of Who’s Viewed Your Profile

*) Reach out directly to any recruiter or job poster with InMail

*) View unlimited profiles from search results

Reach your professional goals faster with expert-led online video courses

Start your free trial today.

Sincerely,

The LinkedIn Premium team

BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA...... *choke*

[Nixinkome]

Re: So Precious....

His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

"...So now, today, we are in the 21st century. If we repeat the old thinking then the problem also will remain."

Jack Ma admitted that “we don’t know how to make money off data today, but we know nobody can live without data in the future.”

Hangzhou, China. 14062016

@Christopher Lane

Probably; Apple only announced their name change from OS X? to macOS yesterday.

@Chris Evans

See no evil; tell no evil; cry, no evil.

[oiseau]

How much?

>... everything ultimately boils down to how much - or if - you trust Microsoft.

This must be a new type of oxymoron: trust and Microsoft in the same sentence.

Cheers.

[Daleos]

Re: How much?

People tend to pick sides in this but lets face it... Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon...

Same meal, different sauce.

[jason 7]

Re: How much?

Yeah always amazes me that so many here and in IT just refuse or cannot realise this.

Lalalaaa not listening!

It's too late guys, it's all the same. You cannot escape it if you want to work in or with IT. It's one huge multi-corporation complex now. It's no longer the wild west.

Just stop whining and make the best of it.

[ChrisElvidge]

Parochial or what.

Lots of other professions on LinkedIn. Most of my connections are non-IT.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh, yet again

If you give your personal information to pretty much anyone these days then they are going to sell it for as much as they can get. If you post any real information to an internet company then guess what, they are going to use it to make money.

It is funny in a way though, having seen what people I have worked with have posted about themselves on there I would doubt that the intel MS paid for is worth the having. Those people who "bend the facts" on their CV seem to have gone all out taking credit for anything a company they worked for accomplished.

To those that are not BS'ers and are now going to be receiving a lot more spam and ID theft, can I suggest in future you provide only disposable email and vague personal details to people you really do not know and have little control over.

[disgruntled yank]

really

"Perhaps more to the point, unless you're on LinkedIn, with a well-crafted and carefully curated profile, you're a nobody. You don't exist."

And here I thought it was the gray hair, fat, and wrinkles that made me invisible to women.

Also, does a "curated" profile have something to do with junior clergy? I am acquainted with a few such, but they are not among the people who keep pestering me to connect with them on LinkedIn.

[kingwahwah]

Account Closed Today

Its been fairly pointless for me for years now. Getting most views from mysterious Indians.

My company almost threatens our sales staff who maintain a profile on the "the recruitment site". Being IT they leave me alone. My company even got Linked In to remove the Business profile.

I read MS paying $60 per subscriber. That's a lot of cash for Microsoft to make up by increasing software licences of "customers" to keep shareholders happy.

[Dadmin]

Re: Account Closed Today

OH NO! I just sent my funds to you via your LinkedIn email to have you unlock the special account so we can share in the wealth of my Nigerian Prince buddy who is setting up the whole deal! Now we'll never have nice things. :(

[People's Poet]

I've worked out my way to quit IT and become a millionaire....

I'm going to start selling tinfoil hats on Amazon and eBay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've worked out my way to quit IT and become a millionaire....

"you're all paranoid !!!!!!!1" said the poster AKA "people's poet"

[zen1]

Re: I've worked out my way to quit IT and become a millionaire....

""you're all paranoid !!!!!!!1" said the poster AKA "people's poet"

Who told you?!?!?!

[Dadmin]

Re: I've worked out my way to quit IT and become a millionaire....

YEAH! And The Man's gonna feel the hurt when the kids start getting into tinfoil hats! All the rastas, and the punks, and the skinheads are going to be like "I've got my People's Poet Tinfoil Hat, so take THAT, Thatcher!" Right on, right on, Rule Britannia.

[energystar]

No trust for the Poet...

Maybe Bluetooth. Build your own.

[hplasm]

Re: I've worked out my way to quit IT and become a millionaire....

Don't trust tinfoil hats from Amazon or Ebay!! Fake!!! 111!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I once worked for a company that needed a technical buyer, so they advertised internal/externally and then boss (middle manager) decided to employ his new wife instead.

The original role was for a technical assessor/project manager with purchasing experience but since the wife was getting the job it became just a purchasing clerk with zero technical expertise required.

On linkedIn she posts that she did the original job specification when her only real skill was operating a till in a small shop and allowing her boss, who was already married with kids at the time, to bend her over the counter.

Same boss employs an Exchange Administrator, job requirements are full knowledge of exchange, protocoles, DNS, networking etc, he employs a typist instead with zero technical knowledge who is again female.

All three are on LinkedIn and all of them claim to have technical knowledge/ability with each BS'er supporting the others, one gets a job and then the rest follow until they are found out then repeat.

To me, LinkedIn is exaggerated CV information gone wild and I would not believe a word I read on there, those real professional who still use the service are both validating it and being tarred with the same brush as the BS'ers so get out before it is too late.

[Havin_it]

That was a popcorn-tastic read!

So is the typist his next wife, or do they all play as well as work together?

I HAVE TO KNOW!

[Mark 85]

Damn... well done. Come here for comments and get a soap opera with all the innuendo of a former President's love life. I'll take popcorn with extra butter please. Can't wait for the next installment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linkedin is like advertising.

Both are needed by some parts of the population, and both are so full of nonsense that they've lost their actual value long ago.

And I'm lucky to have no need for either.

[Otto is a bear.]

There is always the hope

That if Microsoft is too rapacious in its machinations that we'll all move to a competing platform, like, um, is there one. Not that it would matter, I doubt most of us at the cutting edge of technology would want to bother embracing a new cutting edge professional social media platform.

I have noticed that whenever I talk to a new supplier they always look me up on LinkedIn, quite apart from the recruiters.

[Artaxerxes]

As far as I'm aware Linked In is only actually useful to recruitment agents to prove you are who you say you are and to scan for potential mugs so they can send you unsuitable job offers.

10 times a week. (Please. Stop. Please.)

Its about the only social media account I don't have locked down to hell or use an pseudonym for. Its also the only one I need to check every 6 months to deal with the backlog of recruitment people adding me as a contact.

[msaligned]

Wonderful story - funny, clever, acerbic, and oh so true!

[Florida1920]

A logical progression stemming from illogical thinking

Published job requirements sometimes snowed me. Having "experience" with some obscure markup language (there were others before HTML) in no way proved you could do anything useful with it. And most of the requirements were subjects a dab hand could pick up in a day or less. But being unable to parse actual ability, corporate drones created arbitrary hurdles to thin the pack. If you cleared them, presumably it was your looks or your tie that got you in, because for many contracts I never was asked to present completed work; it was all blah-blah-blah.

LinkedIn and the other social (?) media hurdles you poor working stiffs have to endure today are simply extensions of The Way We've Always Done It. MS ownership of LinkedIn is a problem, but LinkedIn is only a symptom of a deeper problem within the tech community: Pointy-haired bosses and clueless HR types looking for hiring shortcuts and hoping for the best.

[Milton]

Not LinkedIn

Pleased to see there are others who don't and have never used LinkedIn. It never occurred to me to advertise as if I were a cheap burger. I don't care if 500 employers whom I have no desire to work for get a chance to peruse my CV wondering what's true and what's not. I care very much that people I've worked with or for in the past remember me and, when asked if they know of the right guy for a job, might - just might - offer my name. Word of mouth is best. Work by recommendation is best. Gaming yet another set of shoddy algorithms which have zero insight ... unnecessary, boring, worthless.

The MS lunge for LinkedIn won't be the last desperate attempt to shore up a company which sees erosion everywhere. I concede that MS has some mileage yet with corporates, who are beset with stupidity and inertia; but the writing is on the wall, I think: perhaps MS and Yahoo! should have a suicide pact.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: perhaps MS and Yahoo! should have a suicide pact

They do. Ms is doing it by throwing money out the window, while Yahoo! is drowning in the lack of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Next purchase?

When is Microsoft buying Cyberdyne?

[zen1]

Re: Next purchase?

I think we're fairly safe there... first update to a terminator would have it walking around in circles, before its head explodes.

[cd]

So there's these two pestilences drowning. They decide to cling to each other, and should now drown faster. Sounds good.

[A Ghost]

Looking for a job!

Will work for bespoke fitted piss-bottle and all the Snickers I can catch with my net when the buzzer goes and Trevor throws them over the cubicle screen.

"Back to work you lazy bastards, I've just got the Telemetry in from Cortana and you don't need 3 minutes to eat a fucking chocolate bar. There's a drone in cubicle 23 that can unwrap it and 'tap' it in 1 minute 30. Oh, and clean out your own piss-bottle at the end of your shift or YOU'RE FIRED!"

Trevor's just exploring the possibilities here, which I think, is a good thing. But maybe not so much for his future employees.

[Trevor_Pott]

Re: Looking for a job!

Bottles are expensive. We just have you work over a grate and there's periodic flushing of the sub-floor. XD

[A Ghost]

Re: Looking for a job!

I was on the fence, but damn, you sold it to me.

A grate you say?

Sheer evil genius.

Aye, the appliance of science. See, technology can be put to making the world a more productive and happier place for all involved.

Where there's a grill, there's a way!

[energystar]

Re: Looking for a job!

Vultures prefer it a little undone!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Looking for a job!

And a hole in the bottom of the chair I presume?

[Fungus Bob]

Re: periodic flushing of the sub-floor

If the sub-floor is deep enough you don't even need to flush :)

[hplasm]

Re: periodic flushing of the sub-floor

If the sub-floor is above HR/management you don't ever need to flush :)

[captain veg]

"When you consider what a combined Microsoft and LinkedIn know about you"

Erm. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

I can't be the only one.

But who cares, in a few months Microsoft will have run LinkedIn into the ground and retired it.

-A.

[Howard Hanek]

The Potential SciFi Plots Here

In keeping with the author's theme...

Scenario: It is 2066 and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Calorwa (the new country formed from CA OR and WA) are the ruins of Redmond........

Scenario: A time traveling soldier from 2166 is sent back to thwart the merger of MS and LinkdIn that results in the eventual slavery of all techs.....

Scenario: A mega rich hedgefund mogul defends his tax haven island with a private army of highly trained mercenaries having absconded with $26B from MS......using technical expertise he recruited through LinkdIn....

[energystar]

Cortana finally got your a$$, Trevor.

You'll have to start thinking [and performing] analogically. Welcome to the club. Aren't you?

[energystar]

"On the other hand,.. [oh, god]

"On the other hand, many HR departments hire entirely by certification, resulting in IT departments full of certified idiots who can't actually do anything in the real world."

Better said: idiots, by certification. Not to forget that first directive is never more than needed.

[energystar]

Some servile servants...

Some servile servants are asked not to talk. [More than needed]. Why stare at future?

[Mark 85]

Re: Some servile servants...

I misread "servile" as "senile", but then realized we're talking HR here. Not much difference and many HR types seem to be both.

[Lord_Beavis]

And....

Now it's closed.

[dan-o]

I was a member for 10 years and found it quite useless, and the spam was over the top. When the US political merde starting showing up in the activity stream this year, I bailed and have not missed any of it. It's well past it's peak as a recruiting tool as far as we've found, so no loss whatsoever.

[energystar]

Your craft is so artistic!

"Or one of those pee-in-jars types that gets so into their work I can chain you to a desk and periodically throw Snickers bars over the roof?"

[Dadmin]

Hello, I'm Cortuna

How may I hjelp you friend fish today?

"Yes, Cortuna, can you send all calls from my wife to voicemail, and all calls from my girlfriend to speakerphone. No, wait, reverse that."

Okay, I will call your wife and girlfriend and send them both tuna baskets.

"No! The first thing!"

Okay, I will send those out via fistingtoday today.

"huh?"

[John 104]

Much A Do About Nothing

Man, there are some real freak idiots here. Concerned about your career and data slurping? Don't use Cortana. Don't use Linked In. For fucks sake, the deal hasn't even been approved yet and you lot are carrying on like it is the end of days.

[energystar]

For f_(*s sale.

"[Playing] away with worst-case scenarios ". Welcome to everyday Vulture Party, John 104.

[zen1]

fuck this... closing my li account now! stupid Microsoft... this is why we can't have anything nice anymore.

[energystar]

You can [still] have classic stationery and postal stamps...

[No, really. We're just playing here] ;D

[Stoneshop]

Re: You can [still] have classic stationery and postal stamps...

Clearly, energystar has overdosed not on Snickers, but on AManFromMars bars

[Anonymous Coward]

Worrying about the wrong thing

The end user experience probably won't change all that much. Well, it'll change but as with most changes it will be some good & some bad. They might try to monetize it by selling advertising etc. but that's not where the money is.

Think about what Microsoft sees themselves as. They are focusing more and more on enterprise, as anything they do that's consumer facing blows up in their face. Heck, look at Surface - it was a total flop when they sold it as a tablet running the "consumer friendly" Windows RT. When they said "screw it, let's make it a tablet in name only that's really an ultrabook that business people would like, so it'll have to run full Windows on a real x86 CPU" and then it started selling. What little success Windows Phone had was selling to corporate types.

If Linkedin is as important for job searching as the author claims, Microsoft might be trying to basically cut the whole headhunter industry off at the knees. They can sell hire staff to perform that role and tie it in with Linkedin, so if anyone needs to recruit they use Linkedin (as some are already doing) and if they need that personal touch they pay more and get actual MSFT employees who will facilitate the screening and initial interview, so companies don't have to deal with get 1000 resumes but can instead get a curated list of a dozen people to consider like they might get in the old days when people were applying via snail mail.

At least, that's the only thing I could see them doing that could make Linkedin worth $26 billion. Even if Microsoft tries this, I expect they'll find a way to screw it up though.

[nilfs2]

Good, it was time for LinkedIn to die already

Now, lets see if Microsoft can come up with enough money to buy Facebook and kill it, like it did with most of their purchases

[zen1]

Re: Good, it was time for LinkedIn to die already

Hopefully Microsoft will take aim at facebook then?

Oh I know... not going to happen, but a kid, who would love to short both at the same time, can always dream

[fandom]

Re: Good, it was time for LinkedIn to die already

They already have a big chunk of Facebook.

[Anonymous Coward]

Real Estate

This was the only way Microsoft could get a new office in Mountain View with "Alphabet" taking up all the other available blocks.

[W. Anderson]

Products and services moved to Microsoft preferred use again

In the same way that Microsoft screwed effective use of Skype and Hotmail by Linux users, offering sub-par and/or broken products as compared to services for Windows users, one can expect that any Linked-In user - in Linux/FreeBSD only end-user and Server environments like myself wil be eventually, if not almost immediately blocked out.

Are there any other professional contact/collaboration organizations out there where subscribers are not jerked around by large corporate marketing interest only?

[energystar]

Really bad behavior...

"... Microsoft screwed effective use of Skype and Hotmail by Linux users..."

Gmail chokes broadband of daughter' Win7_32b, after attempting any light file upload. Forced reboot.

[Fungus Bob]

Re: Products and services moved to Microsoft preferred use again

"Are there any other professional contact/collaboration organizations out there where subscribers are not jerked around by large corporate marketing interest only?"

You don't understand. The whole point of getting a job is to be jerked around by large corporate interests.

[rtb61]

This is all about insider trading scheme upon a mass scale. Tracking a companies employees, lets you track company performance. Executive looking for new jobs all of a sudden, company reports not out yet, whoops, sell that stock. Certain executives from certain companies planning a major bonus paid for holidays, hot, but that stock. Want to undermine a company steal it's key employees. This stuff is stupendously invasive when tied into Windows anal probe 10 and targets companies, this information will be bled off in or to gain huge, multi-billion dollar investment advantage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there an Alternative to LinkedIn..?

This article is great and echoes some of my worst fears.

I found this blog below and will be researching it in more detail

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/linkedin-alternatives/

Time to jump ship...

[Anonymous Coward]

LinkedIn

Well, sad thing to read ... always spot on, Trevor. Don't worry, real hard core techies will stay clear of that site and others will gain momentum ... everything MS touches turns to crap anyway ... I used linked-in as instructed by our marketing droids ... I do get lots of job offers, some are spot on for my current position (aka title), they just do not match "what I actually do" ...

[Hans 1]

Has the LinkedIn breach anything to do with this ?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/19/linkedin_breach/

I mean, it would secure MS some of the details of the accounts that will be nullified before the purchase ... and could have been a failed attempt to play down the share price ... $26bn ? That is a load of money to go down the drain ...

It would be greatly appreciated if the IT sector as a whole could stop sending $bn's to Redmond ....

[Unicornpiss]

Something went wrong :(

Actually I'm not that worried about MS owning LinkedIn. Now if they decide to buy "Classmates.com", that may indeed be one of the Four Horsemen...

Classmates is worse than the old Columbia House record/tape/CD "club" that was as impossible to get out of as a contract with the devil.

[SoloSK71]

As bas as

the raving apple fans are, the spitting anti-ms ones are as well

there is a middle ground

and if you don't like it that much then fill it out with fake information (like opus did in bloom county surveys) to reduce the effectiveness and accuracy

btw, not one company in canada that i have worked with has hired using linkedin, and as i have been in hiring positions i think i have a pretty good view of the various corporate policies

[Herby]

Only thing left to do...

Is for ElReg to setup a "personality" that all us commentards can link to (and will get approved).

As for "qualifications", I value my "silver badge" from ElReg as quite unique. It says that I might have something to say, and others appear to confirm it. Pretty good in my book.

[JoeK]

Is Microsoft LinkdIn a shill for Revolution R?

I tried adding a complaint about Microsoft R (in my long junior membership to the LinkdIn R Discussion Group) to a growing stream asking opinions about the Microsoft/Revolution R. The discussion was growing and I was only one of a smattering of negative criticisms. That discussion stream seems to have been quashed! So it seems to me that Microsoft is strictly controlling people's discussions of its now old Rev-R purchase using its newly purchased LinkdIn. This seems to me to be evidence of malfeasance in the intellectual and social-media world.

My criticism was that installing the MS/Rev-R version of R on your Mac makes it very difficult to switch back to the Open Source CRAN version of R, a legitimate issue for techies that could have an easy solution that the R-Discussion Group on LinkdIn could be helpful with. But Microsoft(?) has suppressed this communication seemingly protecting its own interest in its asset, Microsoft-R.