I find a combination of attending meetups, having a personal website, and contributing to StackOverflow to be much more effective than LinkedIn. There's less spam, because the people and jobs are much more interesting.
Your mileage may vary, but as a WASPish male mid-level dev based in London, this is true for me. I can appreciate that people outside that circle may get more value from LinkedIn.
I have an (admittedly not very active) account on SO (1400 karma), but over the years I've only received one job offer via SO.
LinkedIn on the other hand gets me maybe one offer per month on average.
I also have a blog at http://henrikwarne.com/ but I have never received any job offers via it.
I go to very few meet-ups, but the ones I've been to have never generated any offers. So in my experience, LinkedIn wins hands down in that respect (I'm in Stockholm, Sweden).
Exactly. I have had a few cold interview offers through StackOverflow, even fewer from my website. But after meeting people at events, they check my website, and in some cases this leads to further discussion. The 'spam-vs-interesting' ratio of those discussions is much better compared to what I used to get when I had a LinkedIn account.
Your mileage may vary, but as a WASPish male mid-level dev based in London, this is true for me. I can appreciate that people outside that circle may get more value from LinkedIn.