Why I don't have a LinkedIn profile

If you're reading this, you probably searched for me on LinkedIn and found nothing, or found an empty profile for "Janitor @ Point One Navigation" and were (understandably) confused. That's okay. This post is for you.

I deleted my personal LinkedIn account in 2015 and never opened another one. I wish I could say I ran a clear analysis and took decisive action. In reality, it started with noticing I was tired and ended with a spear phishing campaign.

If you're a real person trying to verify I'm also a real person, please connect with me here.

Otherwise allow me to underwhelm you with a story about the least-exciting social media platform.

Out of memory

I was peak 2014 productivity™. I was at inbox zero. I was mind mapping¹. I was pomodoro-ing. I was four-hour-work-weeking 60 hours a week. I was working out, prioritizing sleep, and ingesting a third of my income in supplements and nootropics.

So imagine my surprise when one day, around 3pm, I forgot how to write C. This was weird, because I knew how to write C 20 minutes earlier.

I noticed this happening more and more. I'd hit an inexplicable wall of mental fatigue in the late afternoon. I'd gone full April Zero by then, so my various biomarker and sleep trackers all seemed to say that I was getting quality sleep and was in good health. I had lots of historical data, and nothing physical had changed. So why the cognitive change?

I mentioned the issue in passing to a friend, who said it sounded like the symptoms they experienced with "decision fatigue".

"With all that quantified-self stuff, are you tracking what decisions you make or give your attention to?"

I didn't have an answer so I set out to measure. Because I'm me, I wrote a browser extension, a vim plugin, and a process watcher. Between them they captured the bulk of what I did on my computer. Each one output a CSV that I'd cat together and run through a Python script to visualize. It was clunky, but it did the job.

The number that jumped out was how much time I spent on LinkedIn. If you had asked me, I would have guessed ten minutes a week. I wasn't job seeking, and I wasn't writing recommendations after a layoff.

At the time I was running the largest Node.js meetup in the country, speaking at conferences regularly, and working closely with a local startup accelerator. It was routine to connect with people after an event, and conversations would continue in LinkedIn organically. It was also the channel for working with meetup sponsors and a subset of clients in my side consultancy.

The data showed I was interacting with LinkedIn for an average of 87 minutes per day, over roughly 20 sessions. It interrupted nearly every working hour. My browser extension wasn't sophisticated enough to break down what those interactions were, just that I was typing.

My naive solution was to treat it like email, time box it, and move on.

Rate limiting

I gave myself two time boxes.

• Five minutes in the morning to triage messages for anything time sensitive.
• Thirty minutes in the afternoon for thoughtful response and to schedule anything actionable.

Five minutes of triage highlighted how much noise there was in my inbox. I'd underestimated how much energy it takes to determine if any of dozens of unsolicited messages are legitimate, spam, or scams. I had to extend it to ten minutes after missing a sponsorship request in a soup of product pitches and unknown job seekers.

Still, it felt like a good enough solve. I convinced myself that I was "habit stacking" by working my LinkedIn inbox alongside email, and left it there.

Untrusted input

One morning I woke up to a flurry of text messages.

A meetup attendee had connected with me a few days earlier. Because of how LinkedIn's connection system worked, he could message any of my hundreds of contacts directly. Because it showed me as a connection, it lent credibility to his claims that we were working together, or that he was a referral of mine. I spent a good part of the next few days doing damage control.

Other people I'd connected with went straight to HR and hiring managers at my various employers, claiming to be a referral and trying to bypass the application process.

Revoke and rotate

The final straw came a few months later. An attacker created a fake employment history that included my employer, then used my LinkedIn profile and network to target employees in my org for a sophisticated spear phishing attack. A second round of spear phishing messages went out to meetup sponsors shortly after.

They had no privileged access. There was no opsec mistake and nothing leaked from internal discussions. Everyone was using the features of LinkedIn as intended, and it was still a viable attack surface.

None of the targets fell for it, but I locked down my account immediately.

I rerouted meetup comms through Gitter. I wrote a nurture email for existing clients and moved them out of LinkedIn and into other channels. The whole thing took three days.

Then a few weeks passed and nothing bad happened. The thing I had made time for twice a day was suddenly a non-issue. So I deleted the account, and I haven't had a personal one since.

Read-only

In the years since leaving LinkedIn (and all other forms of social media), I've learned to be protective of my attention and energy. It's made me a better team member, a more present father, and a happier person.

That got tested in 2023, when I needed a burner LinkedIn account to read job applications as a hiring manager. A profile that reads "hiring manager" is an invitation for third parties to route around the process my team built, which is exactly what I watched happen a decade earlier. So the account says "janitor" instead. Nobody tries to route a candidate through the janitor. That's the profile you found. He isn't hiding anything, he just doesn't take meetings.

At the end of my first week of wading through sponsored messages and marketing blasts mixed in with legitimate candidate applications, I took a break to work on a product feature.

It's 3pm again.

Service accounts

I still run LinkedIn accounts for my companies, so employees have somewhere to say where they work. That part works fine. It's the personal profile I don't need.

Would I recommend deleting yours? For a company, no. For yourself, maybe. It's possible I missed an amazing opportunity I never knew about, but that doesn't keep me up at night.