{"id":5211,"date":"2019-10-07T10:58:07","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T16:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=5211"},"modified":"2020-05-20T08:43:41","modified_gmt":"2020-05-20T14:43:41","slug":"linkedin-invites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/linkedin-invites\/","title":{"rendered":"LinkedIn Invites"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m posting because I gave a lecture on ray & path tracing<\/a> last Monday, and at the end gave a little career advice, at the request of the people running the class. One thing I ranted about was getting LinkedIn invites without any explanation. I did say to the audience, students, that they could ask me for a connection, if they wanted. I guess I didn’t make it clear that they, too, should add an explanatory note – “loved your lecture, you’re the best person on the planet” or whatever – as I then received two invites without any notes that I tracked down as being students at the lecture (and so accepted). Next time I’ll be clearer…<\/p>\n

I get a lot of LinkedIn invites – I suspect most people do. My rule is I accept if (a) I clearly know you or (b) you work for the same company as I do or have some other obvious direct connection or (c) you added a little note as to why we should connect.<\/p>\n

I see varying advice on this. LinkedIn itself blogs<\/a>\u00a0on the topic, saying not to connect to random people. But most of the people who want to connect are semi-random – they usually are interested in computer graphics. Some site with an icky (to me) URL of linkedinriches.com (with “$” for that final “s” on the website itself) says I should accept everything<\/a> except the utter randos, which does have a logic to it – who really cares who connects? But, if I get a note from the inviter, I’ll go with the assumption that I know them somehow. And if I see I have a connection with someone, I’ll assume I can contact them, as we somehow know each other – I don’t want to be the rando if I DM them.<\/p>\n

My own feeling is that if someone doesn’t know me and doesn’t spend half a minute to write me a sentence for why we should connect (I always do, when connecting with someone else I don’t know), then I’ll ignore the request. As LinkedIn says<\/a>, such requests are indistinguishable, disingenuous, lacking creativity, or lazy. Am I missing something here?<\/p>\n

Reply on Twitter<\/a>, if you’re interested (sadly, spammers have led to us mostly turning off comments on this blog itself).<\/p>\n

And if you did make a no-explanation invite and would like to explain why we truly should connect, great: email me, erich@acm.org (once upon a time I would not post my email address, but Gmail’s spam filter is quite effective). I currently see 35 pending invites, and you all look to be fine people (except you, Fred), so let me know why you want to connect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m posting because I gave a lecture on ray & path tracing last Monday, and at the end gave a little career advice, at the request of the people running the class. One thing I ranted about was getting LinkedIn invites without any explanation. I did say to the audience, students, that they could ask […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5211"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5373,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5211\/revisions\/5373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}