Why Doesn't LinkedIn Do Anything?

On paper, LinkedIn is where professionals live. In practice it has spent years shipping features nobody asked for while the two reasons people actually use it stay half-broken.

I'll start with the absurd part, because the absurd part stopped being a joke: why the hell do I need a games sidebar on LinkedIn?

That isn't a detail. It's the symptom. LinkedIn ships products the way a company fills a roadmap to justify headcount: games, carousels, engagement prompts, half-finished pages. Meanwhile contacting people and finding a job - the real reasons to be there - feel more hostile every year.

What LinkedIn actually is

LinkedIn is mainly two things:

1. A platform to contact other professionals.
2. A job search network.

The feed isn't terrible. Sometimes it's even useful. The problem isn't that a wall of posts exists. The problem is that the entire job search machinery is broken, and that one matters.

Jobs: noise with a UI

You open Jobs and the first thing missing is a useful status. Something basic like:

• how many applications you've sent
• what happened to the latest ones
• metrics that say anything about your actual search

Instead you get sections that look different and collapse into the same mush:

• Jobs based on your preferences
• Jobs matching your profile
• Recent job searches
• Find jobs (a button that dumps you into search)
• More jobs for you

Almost all of it is the same useless information. Roles that might interest you, roles you may already have applied to, roles going nowhere. It becomes noise.

Then comes search. You can tell filters and alerts exist somewhere behind the UI, but the surface is confusing. It feels designed so you guess the system instead of using it.

Two buttons deserve special mention:

• Not interested. You click it and nothing seems to happen, because the same jobs keep coming back.
• Have you applied to this job? Yes. Sometimes it just doesn't work. No useful error. It fails quietly.

And then the applications tracker. For a product the size of LinkedIn, it's abominable: a table with filters where you can't really search, can't take quick actions, can't filter properly by company, job type, or title, can't review LinkedIn applications cleanly, changing an offer's status is tedious, and there's no multi-select for batch actions.

In short, that menu looks like it came out of the Spanish government.

Mobile web: install the app or get kicked out

The mobile browser version breaks on purpose. LinkedIn pushes you to install the app. Fine, call it product strategy. But if I don't want the app, there's a reason.

You scroll the feed and the install prompt appears. You hit No, or dismiss the modal, and the feed reloads in a way that makes you lose your place. It happens again. Eventually it throws you off the page entirely, like sending you to about:blank.

That drives me insane. It isn't a minor bug. It's interrupting reading until you give up and open LinkedIn again. As if the product punished you for not using the app.

Professional services: a section that feels unfinished

The professional services page looks incomplete, or at least neglected. I struggle even to find it. LinkedIn does not give that section much visibility.

The whole area is confusing. I don't know exactly how it works under the hood, but I've received work requests that look a lot like spam. When a professional product can't explain its own flow, spam stops being an accident and starts looking like design.

Emails: lies, paywalls, and the only things that work

The email situation is unhinged:

• messages about visits you've had that aren't true
• messages about who viewed your profile - and to see them you need Premium
• alerts about who visited your company page that add nothing

Commercial noise dressed up as useful notification.

The only emails that work cleanly are the ones when someone wants to connect and when someone messages you through LinkedIn. Those work. There, the product remembers what it's for.

It has money. It doesn't fix it.

LinkedIn is not a cash-strapped startup. It has money, data, teams, and a near-monopoly on the professional network. It could fix Jobs, the applications tracker, mobile web, and notification spam.

It doesn't.

Probably because Microsoft is behind it, and the incentive isn't a good job search. The incentive is staying the default platform: Premium, forced app installs, filler engagement, and features nobody asked for.

Meanwhile users keep trying to contact people and find work inside a product that would rather invent games in the sidebar than fix the obvious.