I get endorsed for all kinds of things by connections. And when I go to look at the page, I get a square with four contacts, and a suggestion to endorse each one of them for some specific listed skill. A quick click will have me endorse them, or a convenient "Endorse all 4" one-click button.

So what I end up doing is to just idly click that button for a minute or two, endorsing dozens and dozens of people for all kinds of skills they may or may not possess — I certainly don't reflect on each one long enough to know if they do.

Does that former colleague of mine really know statistical machine learning? Um, maybe. A childhood friend may or may not in fact know Node.js today, so I happily endorse them just in case (I do know they have this cool shoulder-popping trick, but I can't seem to add that). Somebody claims to know "V&V"; I don't even know what that means. Good thing they claim to know, so endorsement it is.