I did that 10 years ago when they got hacked[1], later recruiters from two FAANG companies even found me without it (The first found me on Github, and another through a referral) and I worked for a couple of years at both companies.
Like you, I'd thought I had a good run without it.
More recently, I noticed that some of the people who were way junior to me earlier in my career, are way ahead of me because they were strategically switching jobs every 1-2 years. After speaking to some of them, the common factor turned out to be LinkedIn, and I begrudgingly rejoined it in January.
I'm also one of those people who jumps between companies every 1-2 years (not as a contractor but actual employee) and it's meant about a 15% increase in salary every year, vs 4% that my ex-colleagues usually get for their "loyalty".
I do very actively maintain my linkedin page, but honestly I got all of my jobs by personally reaching out to companies where I want to work (through their own website).
As such, I wonder if this is correlation vs causation: people are really eager to advance their career might want to keep all options open, including linkedin, regardless of whether it has actually helped them in their career so far.
The one nice thing about LinkedIn is the Easy Apply feature. You can quickly shotgun apply to a bunch of companies and then get on with your day without filling in all the same stuff, and it even tells you if the company looked at your application. I still manually fill in a lot of regular applications, but LinkedIn definitely saves a lot of time.
Would be interesting to know, whether they purely optimize for the money and jumped ship at every opportunity, or they somehow managed to make recruiters pay attention to their profile and actually read and understand anything on the profile. And if so, how they managed to make recruiters do that.
I think it's just a matter of better odds with better discoverability. Also, every jump almost always entails a monotonic improvement in pay and likely also the title. And the tech job market seems to have been quite buyoant in the past couple of years.
Every time you update your LinkedIn page, recruiters throw themselves at you, matching your profile to whatever search keywords they have configured. Some of them turn out to be clueless, some of them turn out to have bad opportunities available, but some of them turn out to be surprisingly savvy and have access to good jobs.
I just recently got a new job that I think it's pretty good, and I didn't have to submit a single "blind" application. All of my interviews came through recruiters via Linkedin.
It's a relatively low effort way to have a steady flow of opportunities, one of which might turn out to be good once in a while.
Like you, I'd thought I had a good run without it.
More recently, I noticed that some of the people who were way junior to me earlier in my career, are way ahead of me because they were strategically switching jobs every 1-2 years. After speaking to some of them, the common factor turned out to be LinkedIn, and I begrudgingly rejoined it in January.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_LinkedIn_hack