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Data on the uselessness of LinkedIn endorsements

354 点作者 leeny大约 8 年前

48 条评论

mendicantB大约 8 年前
Your analysis is extremely flawed.<p>I really appreciate your sharing the data with us and I like your service. But, this is a poorly done and a far from subtle plug of your business at the cost of LinkedIn.<p>1) Technical ability vs # of endorsements<p>Jesus. Hiding stats that you don&#x27;t like through aggregations? And please read up on Simspons Paradox, which is clearly the case here just by looking at your plot. Try a basic t-test, or rather some statistical rigor, the next time you try to make conclusions from data.<p>2) Most endorsed vs Language of Choice<p>As pointed out, this is not the way to frame your problem. By obfuscating what&#x27;s happening in your histogram (which isn&#x27;t technically constructued right either) you are again hiding what you dont like through aggregation. By the way, language matters greatly here, and you&#x27;d have benefitted by standardization.<p>3) Your conclusion<p>&quot;After running some significance testing, though&quot; and not posting your results or methodology, which is at best questionable after reading your analysis.<p>Again, I enjoy your service, but blog posts on technical ability that are ironically lacking in technical ability don&#x27;t really make me want to come back.<p>PS: A little birdie told me that endorsements are quite strong in predictive power for jobs :)
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United857大约 8 年前
In their quest to copy Facebook&#x27;s formula for professional networking, LI&#x27;s growth&#x2F;engagement team makes a huge effort in promoting users to endorse their connections.<p>As a result, nearly all the endorsements on my LI have come from non-technical folks who just know buzzwords (e.g. python was my most-endorsed skill even even though this isn&#x27;t my most used language by far, and any engineer taking a quick glance at my projects -- almost all native C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;ObjC -- would realize it. Now I&#x27;m getting lots of pitches for python gigs...)<p>If there was a way to (optionally) approve an endorsement beforehand, that would help.
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ben1040大约 8 年前
I&#x27;ve been considering just deleting my LI account. It essentially has just been a sink for terrible recruiter mail; in 12 years of having an account I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve once received any sort of actionable message through it.<p>I&#x27;ve also turned off the endorsements because I was just getting driveby endorsements for things like J2EE.<p>Is there a job-search downside to deleting your account, provided you have a decent Google cross section otherwise via conference talks, blog, github, etc?<p>I can&#x27;t tell if LinkedIn has marketed itself into an actual perception that not having an account means you don&#x27;t care about career or the like.
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deftnerd大约 8 年前
Up until the LinkedIn redesign a few weeks ago, I used to run a bit of javascript every day that would pick a 100 people randomly on my LinkedIn &quot;friends list&quot; and endorse them for one of their listed skills that I hadn&#x27;t already endorsed them for.<p>Every time I did that, it caused about 20% of the people to view my profile, which gamed my LinkedIn statistics so my profile was ranked higher in various searches.<p>I haven&#x27;t rewritten the script since their redesign, but I&#x27;ll get to it soon.
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fecak大约 8 年前
When writing LinkedIn profiles for my resume and coaching clients, I advise them to turn endorsements &quot;off&quot;. Under the Skills section is a &quot;Adjust Endorsement Settings&quot; listing that you can click to turn it off.<p>Endorsements tend to be just extra noise with all those pictures, and on many profiles there is rather important information (education, projects, etc.) <i>below</i> the skills section. You don&#x27;t want your reader getting lost in the endorsements before getting to some useful info.
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yellowbeard大约 8 年前
Not sure linkedin really cares if the endorsements are accurate or not. I heard endorsements were &#x2F; are massively successful at re engaging users, which is the real aim of the product.
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austenallred大约 8 年前
Just as a test I added &quot;laughter yoga&quot; as one of my skills to my LinkedIn profile. So far it&#x27;s received 5 endorsements.<p>Proof: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;austenallred&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;austenallred&#x2F;</a>
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sebringj大约 8 年前
I remember making several comments over the years about that on LinkedIn asking why endorsements were relevant. Recruiters or IT companies looking for favors would randomly give me credit for skills they had no idea I was capable of or not. In the beginning I would message them back saying &quot;You don&#x27;t even know me, why are you endorsing me?&quot; and people would be surprised like it was rude or something like they were doing me a favor with bullshit endorsements.<p>After that, I just cared only about getting recommendations from CEOs and CTOs etc. on LinkedIn. These actually are useful and are a true marker of your reputation. Endorsements need to be completely overhauled or abandoned. They have the potential to be cool if somehow there were rep points that could be distributed for the given skill set that people were actually qualified in to give but that would be way too complicated for most people to even understand or care about.
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nickbauman大约 8 年前
I&#x27;ve been endorsed for <i>sarcasm</i> on linked in. When friends want to tease, we endorse each other for things like <i>ms-dos</i> and <i>j2ee</i> it&#x27;s beautiful.
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andy-x大约 8 年前
I believe endorsements on LI are fake. I&#x27;m receiving endorsements for random things from my former and current co-workers and I know for sure they never sent any (either because I asked them or I know it&#x27;s entirely outside their expertise).
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shimon大约 8 年前
LinkedIn is highly focused on metrics of user engagement. Endorsements motivate a lot of engagement by providing a low-effort way for users to articulate generally positive information about each other. Although skill endorsements could be shaped into something more rigorous and useful, that conflicts with engagement&#x2F;virality goals which call for easy ways to quickly message dozens of contacts.<p>In other words, no kidding endorsements are useless. That isn&#x27;t the point.
ocschwar大约 8 年前
I have endorsements for &quot;potato salad&quot; and &quot;teenage paranormal romance&quot;.<p>My potato salad is pretty good. My twilight fanfic, however, only deserves endorsement because I have not yet written any.
kevinpet大约 8 年前
I read these articles until I get to the first major methodological problem. In this case, it is this claim:<p>&quot;It turns out that people’s interview language of choice matched their most endorsed language on LinkedIn just under 50% of the time, so, you know, just slightly worse than flipping a coin.&quot;<p>That would only be true if there were only two programming languages.
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verelo大约 8 年前
Without trying to blow my own horn too hard here, I&#x27;ve never really taken these all that seriously and have strongly thought that people who have more (serious) recommendations are often the most useless people.<p>Screenshot: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.imgur.com&#x2F;uyXXEPl" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.imgur.com&#x2F;uyXXEPl</a><p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;andrewjohnmcgrath&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;andrewjohnmcgrath&#x2F;</a> [my recommendations]
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ceekay大约 8 年前
This post is as good as &quot;new study finds cholesterol causes heart disease&quot;. We know that LinkedIn endorsements are only as good as the person looking at them. In the new UI, LinkedIn highlights endorsements from &quot;people that are highly skilled at this&quot;, which, in my observations so far, is fairly reasonable. In my mind endorsements only matter when they come from people that <i>I</i> trust. I&#x27;ll take <i>highly skilled at this</i> with a grain of salt, but that&#x27;s a lot better than endorsements from random people. I don&#x27;t know anyone that hires engineers based on endorsements.
dnautics大约 8 年前
one of the linked to articles has the following excerpt:<p>&quot;Most jobs are never available publicly, just like most worthwhile candidates are not available publicly (see here). Information about the position travels at approximately the speed of beer, sometimes lubricated by email.&quot;<p>How does interviewing.io plan to attack this problem? I recently have had a lot of trouble getting placed - through one of interviewing.io&#x27;s competitors (still not employed), but am now somewhat cynical about the process.
leovonl大约 8 年前
My experience with endorsements tells they can be not only deceiving, but also a trap.<p>There&#x27;s this guy which I used to work with that was not very good in the job and used to distract others at work very often, not being really productive most of the time - but he was generally nice to everyone, so nobody really disliked him.<p>He ended up leaving the company, and was hired by another company which we had business with. After some time, his new employer called our boss to tell he left, taking with him all the code of the project he was and starting a company by himself with this code.<p>This may seem bad already, but it was not the end: a few years later, the guy comes back asking me for recommendations on LinkedIn - when I checked his profile, I found he got a lot of code from the first company as well - where we used to work together - and put on his Github, with copyright headers stating he was the author. In fact, he did that with code <i>I personally wrote</i>.<p>Of course, I didn&#x27;t endorse him - but if I go to his LinkedIn page today, there are tons of recommendations by ex-colleagues, including recommendations for things that he barely worked with.<p>And this is just one example. Most co-workers I have or had that were really good in what they do have zero to a few recommendations, and usually in very specific stuff that don&#x27;t every start to cover their knowledge.<p>So, my advice is: if you use LinkedIn recommendations to anything serious, you are doing something wrong.
msoad大约 8 年前
LinkedIn is very useful to keep a list of past and current colleagues and touch base with them in case you need to.<p>Instead of deleting my LinkedIn account to get rid of recruiter spam, I deleted my entire history. My profile is just my name and my photo. That way I can expand my network of colleagues without getting bombarded with spam.<p>I highly recommend doing this!
shultays大约 8 年前
For anyone that wonders what the hell is the loading bar that is on top of the page, it loads the data for graphs at the bottom of the page.<p>I was semi-worried that my computer will explode when it is loaded. It takes so long and gives no visual feedback what it is loading. I would either put that near graph or better just use a static image
aeijdenberg大约 8 年前
I&#x27;d always assumed the primary goal of LinkedIn endorsements is the same as every other email I get from LinkedIn, to keep user engagement with the site - and based on the number of colleagues I see accepting them, I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s been pretty successful at achieving that goal for LinkedIn.
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DopamineHigh大约 8 年前
Yep, I&#x27;ve been asked by friends to endorse them. But they are in a different industry and I have no proof whether or not they know the skills. Ethically, I don&#x27;t think this is right. But no one I know has looked at endorsements during the hiring&#x2F;interviewing process.
greggh大约 8 年前
Wait, you mean my 1500+ endorsements, mostly by people I don&#x27;t know, are worthless?! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;gregghoush&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;gregghoush&#x2F;</a><p>I am pretty sure I already knew this.
S_A_P大约 8 年前
I have anecdotal evidence that endorsements are useless. I endorsed myself for &quot;Rocket Science&quot;, &quot;Brain Surgery&quot;, &quot;Smooth Jazz&quot;, and &quot;Yacht Rock&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve received several endorsements for each.
Humdeee大约 8 年前
Their notifications are top notch too:<p>&quot;You have 1 new notification!&quot;<p><i>tap</i><p>... &quot;Do you know these people?&quot;
orthecreedence大约 8 年前
Shouldn&#x27;t we start with the assumption that LinkedIn endorsements are already worthless and then try to prove that they have some sort of value? Hint: you can&#x27;t.
Ntrails大约 8 年前
Here&#x27;s my anecdata on LinkedIn Endorsements. I&#x27;ve got endorsements for Malbolge a language I put on as a joke that I only know about vaguely from a wikipedia article.<p>Turns out when they released them and every time people logged in they got prompted to &quot;endorse&quot;, they just pressed all of the buttons (and expected reciprocation) whether or not they knew the first thing about the skill they were endorsing that I had...
throwaway7658大约 8 年前
I wouldnt start my marketing spiel with &quot;get a job at uber&quot; unless I was going to follow it with &quot;... and bring your wiiiifeeee&quot;
pbnjay大约 8 年前
There&#x27;s a hand-wavy footnote about recruiters not being able to divide by number of connections for every search result candidate, but I still think this would be a much more meaningful metric. I&#x27;m willing to bet the good recruiters already look at number of connections (too many&#x2F;too few being flags), so I don&#x27;t think it would be much of a stretch to compare the ratio.
latently大约 8 年前
A better way to do this analysis would have been to create an extremely sparse matrix with one column for every possible endorsement category with the value being the number of endorsements (normalized). Then try to predict various <i>aspects</i> of coding performance.<p>Definitely wouldn&#x27;t endorse the author for machine learning :)
BrandoElFollito大约 8 年前
What is the theory which states that the relationship is the cover graph is linear? There must be one otherwise the fit does not make sense, it could have been ax^3 + e^9x, or heart shaped.<p>There should be a law punishing arbitrary linear fits and ridiculous claims which are concluded from their correlation.
minimaxir大约 8 年前
Out of curiosity, why are the data manipulation controls (zoom&#x2F;share) on the plot.ly charts explicitly disabled (specifically, no hover popovers which plot.ly sets by default + the parameters link=false and modebar=false)?<p>At that point, why not use static images for data visualizations instead?
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tyingq大约 8 年前
I wonder if they are useful at all just as: number of endorsements &#x2F; number of connections.<p>Even if the tag is wrong, that someone vouched for you in some minor way might be statistically significant.<p>Of course, it could be that the UI encourages mindless tagging, therefore it&#x27;s all cruft.
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OliverJones大约 8 年前
Yeah, the endorsement stuff is just tag spam.<p>They encourage people to endorse their friends, and they give us some tags. Lots of people will, on the theory they&#x27;re somehow helping their friends, do this thing.<p>But the tags they offer have a tenuous relationship with reality.
nottorp大约 8 年前
I don&#x27;t need an article full of statistics to tell me the endorsements are useless; everyone I know who has endorsed me only did it in the hope that that box with &#x27;endorse your friends&#x27; will disappear off their Linkedin.
charles-salvia大约 8 年前
I&#x27;d like some endorsements for Hypercard, Police Quest 3, and obscure x86 opcodes
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tn13大约 8 年前
Depends on what that data means. Endorsement does not mean X knows Java. I would take it as X is somehow related to Java.<p>This is very useful and a collective statistics while being completely useless for individuals.
Havoc大约 8 年前
My employer set up a similar app thing - also allowing endorsements. Crucially it allowed freeform endorsements.<p>Didn&#x27;t take long for people to endorse each other&#x27;s BASE jumping and pole dancing ability.
voycey大约 8 年前
Haha I have always thought this though, I love that Tammy the waitress who I knew from school endorsed that I am capable of Network Architecture and Geospatial databases....
endswapper大约 8 年前
Looking for input from LinkedIn users:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13738855" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13738855</a>
s1gs3gv大约 8 年前
Good article. So true about LinkedIn. In my experience, its a circle-jerk with no real checks and balances.. Don&#x27;t let the LinkedIn darlings here ruin your day.
chx大约 8 年前
Well, after a certain event last year, I have added &quot;The cyber&quot; to my skills and got endorsed for it. I do not need to be told they are useless.
xexers大约 8 年前
I wonder how valuable the written recommendations are? Anyone have data on that?
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nsxwolf大约 8 年前
I love when I receive an endorsement for something like &quot;XML&quot;.
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bsou大约 8 年前
I&#x27;d like to see the residuals from that model
partycoder大约 8 年前
If people claim: &quot;I know C++&quot;... then I rub my hands and the fun begins. It usually ends with leaving that one off the list.
aarongeisler大约 8 年前
Amen
grabcocque大约 8 年前
Threatening to endorse a colleague for PHP was a popular way of trolling at a recent workplace. Childish, but amusing.
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wallace_f大约 8 年前
FWIW I noticed many lower-level employees who did a lot of heavy lifting for the company had skill sets and productivity that may or may not have been correlated with ability to get linkedin recommendations or endorsements. I&#x27;d even heard talk of management refusing a recommendation because: &quot;is he looking for another job? why is he asking me for that?&quot;<p>If you look at the world through rational self-interest recommendations and linkedin profiles should be viewed sceptically.