It is often said that one of the best tools you have in order to look for jobs/switch jobs is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is, of course, like Facebook but for "professionals" which means it's like Facebook but without any of the fun parts.

The point of LinkedIn, we are told, is that it's really good for networking in that if you want to work at a place, you can go on LinkedIn and find which friend of a friend of a friend of a friend knows somebody who works at that company so that friend of a friend of a friend can get in contact with that person and ask them to spend some of their precious time and talk to that person's friend of a friend of a friend so that they're aware enough of that person to help them get a job at that company. Now, besides the fact it's often hard to rely on getting all of those friends of a friends of a friend to hook you up, all of this is important if you know of a place for which you want to work. If you want to just work and don't particularly care, this isn't that much of a help.

The other way this is supposed to help one get a job by having all those networks of connections somehow get a recommendation up to somebody involved in the place who is close enough to the job so that it could possibly help them. Which hasn't really worked for some of us yet.

This brings up another big thing about it which is the people you add to your connection list. Naturally, the bigger the network, the easier it is to use those connections to help get a job. That means that a lot of people just add you to their connection list no matter how tenuous the connection. As a result, I have a lot of people on my connection list who

-Worked at the same company but maybe emailed with once or twice while I was there
-People I worked with but whose main interaction largely consisted of saying hello to while on the way to the bathroom
-People I worked with who I thought were dicks
-People who I worked with and liked but subsequently realized were dicks.

So, yes, I have them as a potential "connection" to use as part of my network but how much help could somebody with whom the extent of my relationship was saying to them "hey, how are you" and "did you see the game last night?"

Of course, there's your profile and you could puff up your profile in case somebody is looking through profiles to see if they could find somebody to hire or any sort of thing like that. So people get "recommendations" put up on their site or write mission profiles or any sort of thing, all of which is important to a profile I guess but not nearly as being able to post pictures of your cat or a list of movies that you've seen over the past few months. I also noticed that you can't not recommend somebody or even diss that person in any way shape or form (like if you interviewed with them and they jerked you around or carried on a secret inter-office affair with and they dumped you because they were having another secret inter-office affair with their boss). What's the point of that, then? You're only going to ask somebody for a recommendation who would give you a nice recommendation. I guess somebody out there cares about the stuff and maybe recruiters care about that stuff but if I were a recruiter, I wouldn't even give much notice to Steve Jobs recommendation. I mean, sure, his products are what Angels would make if they built computers and mp3 music players but not even Steve would ask for recommendations from people who wouldn't give him one.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that out of all my years of being unemployed, LinkedIn's done shit for me.