People told me I was supposed to be on LinkedIn but I found it too silly a place to make an account. Then again, I was laid off from my job a while ago and I don’t really have a “network” irl nor online through which to find a new job, so maybe I am the sucker after all.

Never being plugged into the matrix is an achievement to be proud of. Don't fall for the propaganda designed to lure you in.

I got away with not needing LinkedIn to find jobs up until last year. It's for me hard to tell if things have actually changed in terms of job postings elsewhere because the main constraint I have now is working fully remotely (due to my wife having an autoimmune condition that would make commuting/office work on a regular basis needlessly risky) and technically living within the boundaries of New York City (a weirdly large number of places with offices here require hybrid if you're in the city boundaries, which is ridiculous because I'm probably twice as far from Manhattan as any point in Hoboken, but Brooklyn counts as New York). Compared to when I had looked for a job in late 2023, there were far fewer remote positions, and many of them that did technically allow remote had constraints like the New York one I mentioned or even entire time zones ruled out (a number of Bay Area companies seem to require remote to be in either Pacific or Mountain time, and the fact that I already prefer working 11-7 instead of 9-5 is irrelevant I guess because it's probably a compromise between the factions that don't want any remote and the ones that want to allow it unilaterally). I ended up taking around six months of actively looking to land a new role, and out of a couple dozen interviews over that time (most of which didn't end up panning out because they weren't really as open to remote as they initially indicated or wanted me to fly to the west coast every few months, which is a great way to have me only like 80% productive from losing a week to travel and another to jet lag; I don't think either side would be happy with that tradeoff in the long run), only a couple came from applications or connections I had outside of LinkedIn.

I absolutely abhor it the "newsfeed" because it's never once had anything interesting on it, and my inbox resembles what I've heard described from women about using dating apps in terms of how so many recruiters will spam boilerplate messages to anyone with the most tenuous connection to what they're recruiting for, making it a lot of effort to sift through to find anything of substance. I've gotten messages that literally just refer to me having a "background in IT" as evidence that I'd be a good fit for their positions, which is somewhere between "you know how to write code in some programming language" and "you've touched a computer before" in terms of relevancy (and that's not even getting into what I've also heard from women about how men will try to DM them on LinkedIn like it's a social networking app; I have to imagine the experience is even worse for them). It honestly feels like companies have just become overly reliant on it for recruiting nowadays, and it doesn't even end up even working well because too many places can't be bothered to even properly describe the jobs they're hiring for (e.g. tagging them as "fully remote" and then putting in the description that they require 3 days a week in the office), and at least half of the postings aren't even from the companies themselves that are hiring but just from generic recruiting firms that describe a position but don't specify the name of the company. If you can avoid making an account, it's definitely preferable not to, and I envy you, because I wish I had that luxury, but unfortunately I just didn't have any other good prospects for finding a job.