Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Why I Do Not Like LinkedIn Groups

I don't find this particularly helpful, but maybe that's just me. 

4 comments:

  1. The ACS division of med chem is a joke, have you been to their website? It looks like someone's geocities page (yes, you're a fossil if you know what that is). Med chem as a whole is a sinking ship and everybody knows it. That they have volunteers filling positions at all is remarkable.

    Back to the original topic, a lot of the LinkedIn chemistry (and science in general) groups are very crowded by internationals trying to break into the US job market, many of them in embarrassingly bad ways. And while I'd like to say that it's just the internationals, I have seen Americans act equally embarrassingly. Most notably, arguing with a job link because wasn't updated with candidates' application status. No joke, they argued with a job link. PhD scientists.

    In my personal experience, the quality of the LinkedIn science groups is on the decline. The ACS groups are all overrun by propaganda for their different promotionals. Aside from that, there's 4 people in particular who manage to argue in circles over nothing, and that's also not interesting to me. The other science groups are full of questions (usually by internationals) on how to do a particular reaction/use a piece of equipment, or asking if someone is hiring in the US. None of this is meant to be xenophobic, just an observation.

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    1. As an international, I can confirm your lack of xenophobia. It really is mostly people who have either no connection or just desperately want a connection to the relevant country. I'm not sure why these people are so unaware that their behaviour in public places online is traceable and accountable.

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  2. Back in the old days, the LinkedIn groups were quite good. One of my former colleagues/acquaintances used them brilliantly to show that he was a really good writer; I suspect that it raised his professional profile significantly.

    Yeah, this is a problem with online forums in general, and not a dig on international chemists or the ACS in particular. But online real estate needs to be defended; otherwise the weeds grow fast.

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    1. Definitely! And there's still some value to most of them, but they're all struggling in my opinion. In terms of job hunting I've found it to be an awesome resource.

      If you want to see how a site goes to hell due to lack of management, try the copycat site ResearchGate. Yikes.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20