Dammit LinkedIn, I'm a college dropout (2009)

This rings true for me. I'm a high school dropout with a GED and a couple of community college credits, but nevertheless found success in tech. I know a lot of people my age took this unconventional path, but LinkedIn basically tells us to fuck off.

LinkedIn also only wants to consider jobs in the modern sense, not the traditional sense. So I decided to list myself as &quot;Co-CEO of the Ganz Family&quot; with the description &quot;Full-time stay-at-home mom. Job description includes cleaning up other people&#x27;s poop, so it actually isn&#x27;t too different from corporate life...&quot;<p>EDIT: And if you think that this approach would cut down on the dumb recruiter spam, you&#x27;d be sadly mistaken. :-&#x2F;

I have never paid attention to any of the &quot;you aren&#x27;t complete!&quot; messages or indicators. I don&#x27;t care.

I finally gave up complaining about this issue late last year, and filled in the education section of my profile with the following:<p>Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry<p>Master of Wizardry, Arithmancy, Passed all N.E.W.T.s with grades E and O<p>1985 – 1989<p>Activities and Societies: Ravenclaw House, Dumbledore&#x27;s Army<p>Thesis: &quot;Extending Turing&#x27;s Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-dimensional Summoning to Account for Quantum Many-Worlds Hypothesis using Dho-Nha Geometry Curves&quot;.

Facebook did something similar and I entered &#x27;Bovine University&#x27;, which it turns out has tens of thousands of students.

I never went to high school, and this option doesn&#x27;t really exist in many sites and forms on the web. It is what it is.

Dammnit Linkedin, all you do is let recruiters spam me.

Is a 100% filled in linked in profile something to strive for? It seems like the poster has chosen an arbitrary goal, then seeks to manipulate the goal so he can finish it. Why not just choose a different goal?

If liked-in does not make your &quot;percent complete&quot; available to others then who cares? If it does, that could be bad because people will think &quot;this guy didn&#x27;t bother...&quot;<p>So what is the answer to this?

It&#x27;s not about LinkedIn. Apparently companies today don&#x27;t care about your work or skills. All they want is a dog that is trained to obey. School education is part of that. Questions like &quot;Where do you see yourself in 5 years?&quot; are a sign towards that direction.

Holy shit, posted in 2009 and still no change. I see this every time I&#x27;m on LinkedIn--I hate it. Still nowhere for me to add my book (sure, publications, but it will drown under more recent talks and papers), but it can harass me about my non-existent schooling.<p>What would be the harm in making the widgets modular and more customizable? I&#x27;m not asking for CSS, but let me completely remove sections that don&#x27;t apply, and add new generic ones as I see fit.

I just put &quot;School of Hard Knocks&quot; on my LinkedIn and leave it at that. If that&#x27;s unacceptable to a prospective employer, I&#x27;ve successfully weeded out a bad fit.<p>So far it hasn&#x27;t been.

For eduction I put down &quot;Various&quot; - that seemed to work.

I put down the school that I attended, but no mention of a degree. Do they still let you do that?

Meh. I don&#x27;t need LinkedIn to judge or validate my life achievements.

I recommmend avoiding it entirely. That has worked well for me so far.