Redditors clash over LinkedIn. Is it the ultimate tech recruitment goldmine, or just a circus filled with ghost jobs and cringe corporate influencers?
Scrolling through Reddit over my morning coffee, I spotted a junior asking the most innocent question ever on r/webdev: "Anyone ever got a job from LinkedIn?". Sounds silly at first glance, but the post instantly blew up with over 1k upvotes. Time to grab some popcorn, because the tech community went full combat mode exposing the reality of the world's most "professional" social network.
Let's cut the crap. Beyond the cringe inspirational posts, fake gurus, and HR humble-bragging about treating employees "like a family," LinkedIn is still the biggest meat market for tech talents globally. But lately, the market has been brutal. OP probably spammed their resume into the void, got ghosted by 100 companies, and started questioning if LinkedIn is just one massive scam.
Diving into the comments, the community split into a few very distinct camps. Let's see which one you belong to.
First, we have The "It Pays My Bills" Camp. A senior dev named snlacks (sitting at the top with 306 score) straight-up said: Almost every job and freelance client they've had since 2012 came from LinkedIn—either direct applies or recruiters sliding into their DMs. Other fellas like steve228uk and GfxJG echoed the exact same vibe, landing their very first real dev jobs through headhunters on the platform.
But then came The Plot Twist. The very same snlacks immediately followed up with a reality check: "That being said, I hate LinkedIn. The people posting on there suck, and 99% of the jobs are fake." Ain't that the brutal truth?
Finally, we have The "Dark Ages" Camp. A lot of devs are noticing a severe drop in quality lately. User unicorn-beard noted that while most of his jobs came from there in the past, recently it feels like a total shit show. Another user mybutthz added more salt to the wound, saying that for the past year or two, it's been a dry desert. No callbacks, no emails, just endless ghosting, pushing them to abandon the "dead platform" entirely.
Let's be real, the LinkedIn feed is radioactive right now. It's full of "How I made $100k using AI prompts" and "10 lessons I learned from walking my dog." But deleting your account is basically shooting yourself in the foot. Headhunters still live there.
The survival guide for devs? Polish your profile, turn on that green "Open to Work" badge, and let the recruiters do the heavy lifting. Don't doomscroll the feed. Focus on building solid side projects, host them on a reliable vps, drop the live link in your bio, and go touch some grass. Let the algorithm work for you, not against you!
