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Comment by United857 | Hacker News Reader

In their quest to copy Facebook's formula for professional networking, LI's growth/engagement team makes a huge effort in promoting users to endorse their connections.

As a result, nearly all the endorsements on my LI have come from non-technical folks who just know buzzwords (e.g. python was my most-endorsed skill even even though this isn't my most used language by far, and any engineer taking a quick glance at my projects -- almost all native C/C++/ObjC -- would realize it. Now I'm getting lots of pitches for python gigs...)

If there was a way to (optionally) approve an endorsement beforehand, that would help.

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Actually, LinkedIn endorsements have to be accepted by the endorsee before appearing on their profile. This has always been the case, I know because I haven't accepted endorsements for `Cascading Stylesheets`, but for `CSS`.

Endorsements for skills you HAVEN'T listed must be accepted, but if you have a skill listed, anybody can endorse it for you. I think that's what OP meant - he had Python on there because maybe he knew a bit about it, and a bunch of randos just clicked the + next to it.

that's more on the fact that linkedIn asks "does x know y" rather than "here's a list of skills, select which is more applicable".

I also agree though, people randomly endorse stuff. I see D.o.D. all the time or Security Clearance. What does that even mean? That's not a skill as much as, hey I worked there, or hey I have one.

You have the ability to hide specific endorsements - for instance, if someone endorses me for a skill that they don't actually know that I know, LinkedIn provides the ability to hide that person's endorsement.

Hah, I agree, I think I removed some endorsements or something to the effect, maybe I just removed the skill the endorsements where aggregating under. Now LI keeps harassing me that I have pending endorsements to display or something to that effect. Endorsements do feel really phony to me so far, maybe in the long run endorsements at the end of a career would have a different look.

We at NetIn take a different approach, we look at open source languages you've written your code in and what skills other engineers at your organization are known for before we rank you for a given skill.

Yeah but I bet you still endorsed Cindy/Bob from accounting for Excel. It's a noisy metric but it survives through social and professional motivations.

You actually have to accept the endorsement before it shows up on your profile, if you accept noise, I don't think you can complain that your profile is noisy.

I meant noisy in terms of accuracy in all universes.

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