Is Linked in Worth It?

Question

Whenever i hit Linked in, i get this long list of different people spamming certificates of courses they just completed, some machine learning project to detect masked and unmasked face or even machine playing dino on chrome, it really irritates me, is it really that important to advertise your project on Linked in which is not even open source, or advertise how with extreme difficulties you just completed a course, contents of which you are gonna forget next summer? How much this advertising-yourself thing works? Secondly, is it really that important to do fancy projects? What if am interested in less fancy stuff, say cli tool development or compiler development, will the society accept me?P.S.:Asked by a Junior year college student.

Communitivity · Accepted Answer

For what purpose? If you use it to help with connecting to people and staying in touch, yes. It doesn't replace the main ways you connect though: conferences and other meetings where you connect face to face, and connecting through shared efforts on Open Source projects, standards, etc.
Yes, there are recruiter spammers. Ignore them, or better yet fire off a polite "Not interested right now, but who knows down the line." type of email. It never hurts to keep doors open.
For advertising your project on LinkedIn, no..that's not where I see value in LinkedIn for most people.
Advertise your project instead in the relevant forums for your language, toolkit, interest. For example, make something that developers or startups might find interesting? Post it on HN with a Show HN. Make some new Rust crate? Post it on /r/rust, or Rust Weekly. Launch a new MVP site? Post it on Techcrunch and HN.
Individual communities such as telecom, ICS, geospatial, defense, etc. have their own forums to post on.
The more utility what you create has for others, and the more freedom you give others to leverage that utility, the more your project will get your name out there.
Another way of thinking about it: don't worry about optimizing your brand right now, create useful interesting things, let the people who share your interest in those types of things know about them, and incorporate any feedback you receive into new things. Also, make yourself available to help people learning the things you've already learned.

theshrike79 · Answer

Linkedin can be used in many ways. Some bottomfeeders even use it as a dating service.
This is how I see it: It's a place to connect to a professional network of people you know or have worked with. When you are looking for a job, the recruiter and interviewer WILL look you up on Linkedin.
After that they'll see if there are any shared 1st level connections and reach out to them for comments about you.