![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurThe hot new feature on LinkedIn is "Endorsements". Basically, they show you a list of randomly selected people in your network, and random skills that they claim to have, and ask whether you can vouch for those skills. It's a fairly clever idea in theory.
The problem is, LinkedIn is trying to have it both ways -- to be both a professional resume site *and* a social network. And the result is that most of the endorsements (anecdotally, based on my experience) don't come from co-workers, they come from friends. Granted, I may be unusual in that I have a lot of friends online, but still -- I think 80% of the endorsements I've received are from people I've never worked with professionally.
The result, of course, is that the endorsements bear little resemblance to reality. So far, I have 2 endorsements each for Perl, Java and JavaScript, 1 for C#, and none for Scala or ActionScript. That is almost *exactly* wrong. I'm currently doing exclusively Scala, spent much of the past ten years working mainly in C# and ActionScript, haven't done Java in over a decade (aside from an abortive attempt to use it for CommYou, which convinced me that I can't stand the language any more), and have only spotty Perl experience at best. Indeed, the endorsements seem to mostly have to do with which buzzwords folks recognize -- that would help account for why I haven't gotten any for things like .NET or Multi-threading, which I actually *am* pretty expert in.
It's kind of too bad, since the high concept of endorsements is a good one. But it's a subtle reminder of why Identity is so important, and why *separating* Identities is important. Having a single LinkedIn identity that encompasses both friends and my professional career actually makes it much *less* useful in some respects, because it muddies the data so much...
The problem is, LinkedIn is trying to have it both ways -- to be both a professional resume site *and* a social network. And the result is that most of the endorsements (anecdotally, based on my experience) don't come from co-workers, they come from friends. Granted, I may be unusual in that I have a lot of friends online, but still -- I think 80% of the endorsements I've received are from people I've never worked with professionally.
The result, of course, is that the endorsements bear little resemblance to reality. So far, I have 2 endorsements each for Perl, Java and JavaScript, 1 for C#, and none for Scala or ActionScript. That is almost *exactly* wrong. I'm currently doing exclusively Scala, spent much of the past ten years working mainly in C# and ActionScript, haven't done Java in over a decade (aside from an abortive attempt to use it for CommYou, which convinced me that I can't stand the language any more), and have only spotty Perl experience at best. Indeed, the endorsements seem to mostly have to do with which buzzwords folks recognize -- that would help account for why I haven't gotten any for things like .NET or Multi-threading, which I actually *am* pretty expert in.
It's kind of too bad, since the high concept of endorsements is a good one. But it's a subtle reminder of why Identity is so important, and why *separating* Identities is important. Having a single LinkedIn identity that encompasses both friends and my professional career actually makes it much *less* useful in some respects, because it muddies the data so much...
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-09 06:33 pm (UTC)The problem with that approach is that it dumps people who endorse friends they don't work with into the same bucket as people who endorse friends they -have- worked on projects with (for instance, I have friends in my larp group who -have- worked on Perl projects with me because we wrote perl to help with production) and, for that matter, people who know each other and have worked with one another in the Open Source world (but not in any professional capacity.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-09 06:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-09 07:13 pm (UTC)The answer to that one is kind of a "Duh!" - you list projects like that as "places" you've worked, and list those individuals as colleagues!