No, you don't need them, but have fun filling in those blanks on your own time for 10x-100x the effort. Hope none of those missed connections are important, and I hope nobody gives you a pregnant pause after you insist, "no, I don't use Linkedin" at your next networking event.
That’s just it. I don’t have to “find work”. Work finds me. I would have never found my latest job - working for BigTech in the comfort of my own home on the East Coast - if a recruiter hadn’t contacted me out of the blue. Every job I have gotten since 2012 (5) has been through a contact who found me through LinkedIn. Why would I reduce the ways someone contacts me?
Because for some is us the signal to noise ratio was too low (did I get that the right way around?).
For me LinkedIn for me was a total waste of time. Good you find it useful use it, but I don’t and I don’t like the company so I am deleted my account.
Also most of the contacts weren’t other devs or dev companies but recruiters. A lot of those recruiters flooded the feed with bullshit recruitment feel good articles and other trite. That combined with all the estalking and slimes dudes on there it just isn’t somewhere that is worth being around.
It’s just like the general rule of the Internet - Don’t read the comments. The purpose of LinkedIn for me is a Rolodex of former coworkers and a curated list of local recruiters. I have a separate email for LinkedIn. I would go through it once a week to see if there was anything interesting.
I literally setup almost everything I personally need in about a day on a VPS. As for services like LinkedIn I almost never got anything of value from it, it is worse than most job board it is filled with slimey recruiters these days and not a lot else.
I bought a NAS for backups with freenas and moving my email to a domain with a provider literally took me a few minutes (plugging DNS entries into my domain provider). It not that hard.
People should be making tools for helping people move away from platforms. I am personally going to write it all up and identify pain points.
I get plenty of business through (gasp) word of mouth and ex-colleagues. So I am fine.
How someone get off GMail if they have already been using it for a decade or quite a few years more than that? Has anyone done this? How do you do that with the fewest issues possible?
Having the most important communications with other people and companies, and the login verification all in the hands of one company which could shaft your access in all sorts of ways (screw up, removing service, ban) is just terrible in the long term. And if someone is using their ISPs email address, that is something that would keep them signed to that ISP even though another may offer a service much better for them.
Anyway, anyone migrated away from their email provider after a long time signed up and could answer some of the questions in the first paragraph? Thanks.
> How do you do that with the fewest issues possible?
You just create another email and register all your new accounts with it. Whenever you get any old notifications to your old email you recofigure them to your new email account, one by one. After about a year you will be practically free. You do not have to delete your Gmail account, you can just forward all its emails.
I've personally never used facebook actively and deleted my account soon after I made it. LinkedIn I have an account but I honestly never find a use for it even though I wouldn't be super against it.
A lack of both of these would not inconvenience me in any way personally and I find the claim that going without them being a lot of work questionable. Maybe I've just been lucky in who I work for/with?
Network effects are strong. Too strong.