I understand that Microsoft has handled some software they've acquired badly (Skype), but is the Microsoft of today not vastly different from the Microsoft of that day? I don't think this will be the downward spiral that some people think it will be. Time will tell though.
My primary concern is that I worry about an inevitable merging or linking with LinkedIn. As positive as my experience has been interacting with GitHub, it's been equally as negative interacting with LinkedIn. I worry that MS will see GitHub as the code management platform, and LinkedIn as the customer management platform.
It's important to me that my GitHub account and my LinkedIn account are allowed to be 100% separate. I don't want people able to hunt me down like that.
Almost everything? Aside from keeping an updated resume I've never had a single job come from it, nor anyone I know. As far as networking it's useless too. It's just recruiter spam and people you never met adding you to their network. They also did the whole MITM attack on your e-mail's contacts a few years back.
None of that is Microsoft's fault though, it's been useless for a while.
That's, like, your opinion man. Most of my jobs and most of my friends jobs have come through (or discovered thanks to) Linkedin. Before becoming an employee I used the site to find cofounders, people to interview for product feedback, check the background of possible hires...
You don't use it or like it, fine. Linkedin has created economic opportunity for so many, it's kinda ridiculous to dismiss it out of hand.
Ah, I did not relate that use of the word employee to becoming an employee of linkedin. Fair enough. Still, unadulterated hype by employers of companies with questionable ethics doesn't hold a whole lot of weight in discussions like these.
If that's the reality you like to live in more power to you, but mine is not hype, is my personal experience, stuff I lived through. Can't you accept that someone's experience might be different than yours?
My experience with linkedin: Countless emails suggesting that someone has 'added me on linkedin' when I never made an account, they clearly bought a list and kept on spamming it over and over again.
A website that leaks data like a sieve, one failed attempt after another to create a sense of community, utterly meaningless endorsements and competency system.
On and on. I really wonder what the draw of linked in is, I would never use it as a decision in whether or not to hire someone and I think it is one of the worst possible experiences on the web.
And that's before we get into it now being a Microsoft subsidiary, another major strike against it.
The sooner linkedin goes away the better, it's been ripe for disruption for many years.
