I brought this up a year ago in June 2012, but Linkedin finally only just got around to fixing this simple problem after a year.

Thing is, Linkedin did not even have the common courtesy to inform me, following up in one of my several support tickets where I repeatedly raised the question. I figured it out by myself, by doing a periodic check, about this irritation. This is just an indicator of how truly clueless whomever at Linkedin was responsible, and how disconnected their support and development teams are.

Lessons Learned

Here’s what I observed -

  • Linkedin support is trained to respond with the same platitudes. I got the same exact phrasing multiple times, in email responses from them. They care enough to listlessly copy-paste, which any half-intelligent beast could emulate! So since the problem I flagged was said to have been escalated to development several times, I conclude it actually wasn’t. Because there’s no way this took a year to fix.
  • When confronted with anger, Linkedin support says “we’ll do our best to keep you posted” and then, surprise-surprise, they don’t. This reinforces the lesson that they’re clueless.
  • It’s arrogant of Linkedin development, to use a designator like “inside the 23 wards of Tokyo” or “outside the 23 wards of Tokyo” about a geography for which they haven’t a clue, and then get it exactly wrong. An example of unchecked engineering overcomplicating matters. Just take the designator out, if you cannot get it right!
  • Linkedin support could only offer up half-baked duct-tape-and-spit workarounds, such as changing my zipcode to one that is working, and then, the little gremlins would make some change where even that would fail. So, if I accepted this “fix” I would have to chase it up every so often, to check if it is still working. This was exacerbated by the fact that they’d never follow up, despite saying they would.

This all recently came to a head, when I paid for a job posting about a month ago, and it of course picked up our incorrect address. I was told there was “no way” to change the mistaken address since I had entered it that way when I created the job posting! They did offer a credit, but I just wanted this problem fixed, so I persisted.

It was ironic that Linkedin support also then told me to fix my postal code, even though they had told me to set it incorrectly to resolve the problem in the first place. In other words, they did not even look at past tickets, nor were they aware of the issue.

Well, the positive is now it works like it should always have, and I can stop thinking about it. Thanks for wasting my time over the last year, Linkedin.