Networking: Does LinkedIn work?

I'm a member of LinkedIn, and I get virtually no spam, if spam it can be called. In terms of actual 'spam', I get none. Some people are 'premium' members, which means they can search the entire network for specific skills, tasks, jobs, whatever and directly attempt a contact.

You can, however, refuse a contact. They don't use those contacts much as they cost money each time.

Ordinary members have their own contacts, but to contact beyond there, must be 'introduced' by someone who is in their direct contact group. If you don't want to entertain a contact (and you get the email from LinkedIn clearly marked as such, incidentally, regardless of who, why and how someone is trying to connect), you simply decline. The point in the chain (for instance if it was a friend of a friend of a friend) is not identifed to the requestor.

I do find it very useful professionally - a lot of headhunters use the network to find suitable people, but I find they don't overload my inbox. I've had 3 consulting RFQs in the last 2 months, so you may find it particularly useful for that, but as always, YMMV.

Just my experience

Cheers

PeteS

Hello Pete,

Looks very encouraging, thanks. Guess I'll give it a shot then.

It's probably the same as with doctors or contractors where referral sites want you to file a request form through them (except that the recipient pays). When that gets to be cumbersome people just google them directly.

If these three RFQ's were serious stuff then that's pretty good for a peer-to-peer site.

IEEE tried to set up a network called virtual communities. I don't use it anymore as they totally over-sophisticated it to the point where the user interface is IMHO no longer useful.

Hello Pete,

Ok, did it. Let's see. I wonder how one finds people with common names in there (there are 225 Peter Smiths...). Anyhow, my name is the other way around, unique (Schulze-Clewing) but prone to contain typos. Nice thing is they let you pick a kind of "internal domain name" so if you key "analog" into the little search window only three guys come up. I am number three.

Potentially useful, but who knows. I signed up, creating a new E-mail address for them. If it turns out bad I'll simply delete the address ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I don't think I've gotten any leads from it (I've done much better by politely answering questions here and on some other groups), but once I made it clear that I was _only_ interested in consulting I haven't gotten any spam, either.

I suspect that what I'm _really_ good at is specialized enough that people have a better chance at finding me through web searches on topics that find my posts, rather than any kind of a keyword search.

Hello Jim,

So far I just don't see it as being an easy way to get in contact with others. You have to loop through all the intermediate contact stages. The search engine, well, whatever I did it found over 200 Peter Smiths and 145 Jim Thompsons :-(

OTOH I did see my former boss there because he has an unusual name. Of course it doesn't let me see his email contact but I have that anyway.

I'll wait and see if it gets any good leads since I want to slowly migrate away from medical. Can't buy any PLI in the US anymore. Unless you know a nice tropical paradise I could relocate to and where there are no leftists ;-)

Hello Tim,

Similar here, most leads come through my web site (not so much from usenet).

We have a very dry tropical paradise here, except it rained horizontally last night ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Hello Jim,

I have spent a lot of time east of Phoenix and from what I remember the climate is more Sahara-like than tropical. That would be ok though but then you guys (well, not you personally, of course) elected a liberal governor and that got me concerned.

But she's impotent ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Gilligan tried that, and you know how it turned out, don't you?

Just a note:

Two of the RFQs I had were because the companies in question could not buy a critical component any more (RoHS) because the mfr decided the cost of converting was not worth it in both cases, and the RFQs asked for a conversion using the same PCBs. They gasped when I told them they either had to change the PCB or piggyback a converter plus available components (pin mapping, basically). Haven't heard back yet - we'll see.

When there's not something like that going on, I don't get a more than

Cheers

PeteS

You play it smart, Tim, and never seem to get dragged into political discussions! ;-)

Hello Pete,

My wife always scolded me that this ain't the stuff intelligent people should watch but I have to confess that I used to like watching it a lot :-)

We are going to see a lot more of that. Plus some serious reliability issues. The cases I got were mostly related to circuitry where someone had designed in a panacea chip that had become unobtanium. This always resulted in a totally new design but after that the clients had almost total peace of mind about it.

That's ok, considering that some trade association databases where you have to pay seem to produce no meaningful leads at all.

Hi Joerg

As a practical matter, make sure your profile is broad enough to attract search results - some keywords such as Analog, digital, design, consulting seem to work, but there are no doubt others.

On the RoHS debacle, I concur fully with your assessment. There are going to be a lot of issues that will take a lot of work and studies yet to be done to solve. I am not aware of any definitive studies on the long term reliability of leadfree solders; how could there be? It hasn't been around long enough ;)

I look at the 'components can not longer be found' as helping me to make some money on the side, apart from interesting experience.

Cheers

PeteS

Hello Pete,

Thanks for the hint. I did make pretty detailed entries, actually banged against the 1000 letter per box limit a few times.

I can already smell the EBay bids for tha "pre-RoHS cell phone".

Yes, but no one sees the flames that I write then delete.