LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value

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1,012 pointsdanso635 comments

A lot of people hating on LNKD here, but this isn't really company-specific. This is a macro shift. LNKD being down by 40% by only guiding down 8% below estimates is a big warning of how the market is about to treat all bloated growth stocks. In 2013, if they reported the same results, the stock would have been flat or slightly down. It's a major shift in investor sentiment.

Bubble bursts always start in the public markets. Next, VC-backed "unicorns" with ludicrous multiples will soon find themselves unable to raise cash at even half their previous valuations. Then those companies will have to tighten their spending which means layoffs and smaller revenue growth which is a vicious cycle towards even lower valuations, bankruptcies and ultimately a much worse job market for tech workers.

I'm expecting a 30-40% decline in S&P 500, 30% decline in bay area real estate values, 30% of bay area "well-funded" startups going bust, and 25% reduction in market rate pay for software engineers over the next 2 years. Hopefully that will turn out to be a gloomy forecast, but it's best to prepare for the worst.

It’s probably even a too optimistic forecast.

The readjustment of the market to reality is going to be a big issue, especially when one looks at just how many companies are operating at huge losses. Most people already know that it can’t continue like this.

The good thing is, real estate values will decrease like the pay, so people can rent at cheaper rates in the bay areas.

The bad thing is, those who have bought a house are f~~~~~d.

We’ll probably see a lot of tech giants like Twitter (no income? really?) tumble, and others take a small hit (like Google).

Except the last time the markets dropped, real estate prices went up.

If there is a problem, the Fed will drop interest rates, maybe even go negative, and that will cause bond rates and conceivably mortgage rates to drop as well.

The Fed wants inflation, and most importantly home price inflation. They will do whatever it takes to stop deflation, they've already said this. Bernanke said he would drop bags of money out of helicopters, obviously an exaggeration, but basically this is how critical the Fed views the fight against deflation.

That works until it doesn't, see Japan.

what about japan

I'm assuming this was an offhand remark, but if you are looking for a serious answer: the Japanese Govt. has been trying a similar thing for over a decade to kick the economy into growth and has failed rather spectacularly and persistently in doing this.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_%28Japan%29

> If there is a problem, the Fed will drop interest rates, maybe even go negative, and that will cause bond rates and conceivably mortgage rates to drop as well.

The Fed has very little room to drop interest rates and won't do so to prop up the NASDAQ while the economy continues to grow and add jobs.

It's not to prop up the Nasdaq. In the doomsday scenario referred to above, housing prices dropping 30%, salaries went down 25%, etc. This is unacceptable to the Fed and they will do whatever it takes to counter this, including dropping as much money as possible.

And they can go negative interest rates which would be crazy, but it's happened before, and currently going on in Japan.

The Fed is all out of bullets, except for NIRP. And yes, it would (will) be crazy, but only slightly more so than 7 years of ZIRP.

Outside of a few areas home prices are not absurd. The Fed doesn't care if studios in SF fall to under $2k a month. Same for Valley salaries.

It seems like home prices are pretty high historically in a lot of places, not just a few.

They've bubbled up again not only in SF, but also in most every single area with job growth - SoCal, the whole I95 megalopolis, Denver, SE Florida, Dallas and Austin, Minneapolis, and the Pacific Northwest.

In fact, only parts in the rust belt, South, and Midwest remain affordable, based on historic standards. Unfortunately, the majority of job growth is not in these areas.

I do not see how homes can retain their value when Boomers begin dying and down sizing, as they own the majority of wealth in real estate and the next generation is loaded in debt already and not forming large households at the historic rate.

"The Fed" is not all one thing, and the majority of the members don't behave as if they want inflation. They want bank balance sheet stability.

The "helicopter" thing is a metaphor, not to be taken internally. The is a related action to be taken but it's not nearly as exciting as helicopters :)

I hope very much that you are correct, but I'm kinda droopy about the prospects, frankly.

>The good thing is, real estate values will decrease like the pay, so people can rent at cheaper rates in the bay areas. The bad thing is, those who have bought a house are f~~~~~d.

This needs to happen. We need to see housing as more a consumption item than an investment item. The more people see it as an investment, the more the NIMBY policies we see to increase home values to levels which price young and low earners out of the market.

> We’ll probably see a lot of tech giants like Twitter (no income? really?) tumble, and others take a small hit (like Google).

What do you mean by no income? Twitter makes billions in revenue...

The relationship valuation/income is vastly off with twitter, and I’m not sure how long the investors are going to wait.

I don't see TWTR dying. They make too much money. What I do see is a major correction in their head count.

I could see them operating with 100-200 employees.

I am getting giddy at the opportunity to making dumb stupid money again. It will be like 2008 with 30% returns per month. Oh how I miss those days!

I'm curious, what do you mean?

he means he shorts the stock market... although it can be difficult to get the borrow when everything is tanking.

I took it as waiting for the bottom and investing his cash, and seeing a big upswing. The real trick is starting at the bottom.

Yeah, that's what I wasn't sure about. Shorting is fine but it's also difficult to time right. And yeah guessing when it's the actual bottom is also not that self evident (at least for me).

So I'm kind of curious to hear any anecdotes from users here profiting in 2008...

Timing is very difficult, I've been told over and over again. I personally think it's easier to time the top rather than the bottom. The reason: the fall is always preceded by lots and lots of people forecasting doom and gloom. I got out of Sun Microsystems stock (and some others) at the end of 1999 for that reason. Sold at $150+. Months later it was at $5. Now, I'm no prognosticator. I was looking to buy a house in the future and knew I needed to convert to cash at some point. So, I was sort of hyper aware of what was going on and at the end of 1999 I just couldn't take it anymore.

I'd love to hear how people timed the upswing from 2008.

Got in close to the bottom with the QQQ in 2009. Chickened out and thought we'd reached a top in 2013 and cashed out. Was sitting in cash for 2 years.

Now I believe we're going down. I'm shorting through options to get some bigger action. 3x from SQQQ not good enough- so buying 6-12 month puts on Cloud companies and QQQ. Didn't get in it at the top - started at about 10% below the top.

I never invested in direct stocks until 2008. Markets were going up just before the crash and a investing friend suggested why not buy stocks. But my demat account got delayed and when i received it markets were going down hard. I ended up investing very small amount. But i got nearly 4 times the return(I did wait few years)

By investing in the entire market continuously, and squeezing every spare penny to invest even more when there's blood on the streets.

You don't have to time anything right or pick any winners with this strategy, because you'll invest all the way down and all the way back up. You might not have made money from Jan 1 2008 through Dec 31 2008, but that money would have made a killing subsequently.

Of course if you were out of work in 2008 that is easier said than done.

OTOH If you try to make a killing by shorting, there's an infinite number of ways to end up broke by getting the timing wrong. If you bet everything on picking bottom, you can miss the boat or miss the bottom. Not nearly as risky as shorting, but certainly not as reliable as staying the course.

Do both

Is it bad when I'm thinking of selling some bitcoin in order to take advantage of a volatile stock?

Yes.

Why? Bitcoin is at least as volatile as the most volatile stocks.

Should I have added some sort of sarcasm tag to my comment? It was a joke :).

It was a joke mostly because Bitcoin is legitimately innovative and Linkedin is yet-another-social-media-platform-except-for-Serious-Business. No one gripes about investing in stocks even though they (they being one of the biggest companies) can obviously tank 50% in one year. However, every post even remotely related to cryptocurrency will have, guaranteed, a comment or 10 about how "No one will ever invest in this because it is too volatile." It's just an observation of mine.

> 30% returns per month

Care to share how you did that?

You will always hear stories like this. And they are true, but what you dont hear about are all the people who were not lucky enough to time the market and how much they lost.

Well said.

Salaries tend to be sticky. A more likely outcome is the bottom ~25% of engineers being laid off or moved to contract status.

Sticky for people already employed, perhaps, but probably not for new hires, I'd guess.

Also, anecdotally, in 2008 some of those fired were expensive new hires. "The bottom 25%" might be defined as those fired but otherwise I don't think there is a definition of "bottom" those who get fired all fit. Say, if a project or a department is terminated, often everyone is let go, instead of trying to keep "the best" and replacing "worse" people elsewhere with them, etc.

Even more likely - hiring comes to a screeching halt. That's what brings the rental market down. There are a lot of new apartments being added to the market and bam, oversupply of rental units if the hiring slows down or stops.

Just clarifying, are you speaking of SF, or the US more generally...?

It's likely to spread throughout the country.

That is highly overestimating the amount of tech jobs in the rest of the country. For SF, yes, I agree.

For the bay area, I think compensation drop will be far worse. The base salary of bay area companies has never been that impressive. Even the big tech companies like Google and Facebook, base salary is not much more than other regions. The impressive compensation numbers are always because of bonus+RSU. These will probably be massively reduced or even eliminated completely if the tech downturn gets bad enough.

Tech employees making $200k+ are the only ones who can afford a $4k per month apartment in SF. If salaries drop then rent drops. I don't see this being a bad thing.

Two engineers with average compensation could split at apartment at that price, and many do. So do married couples with dual incomes.

You may be missing the point. Say most tech engineers double up (as if they aren’t often doing this already). Guess what? You just significantly reduced demand for high-rent apartments

Yeah, at the cost of increased volatility. If two engineers, each with a 10% chance of losing their job in the next 2 years, do this then they both are much more likely (19% chance) to face uncertainty in that time.

They're all young. They don't think like that.

Renters will increase the price knowing full well that people will double up. Also if the renters are ruthless they would directly tell you to have more people packed in an apartment to pay their price and if people are helpless they would have to cough up or find some other job in another state where you can live decently with lesser pay. Also a lot of shitty apartments will increase their rents which puts more pressure. This I feel is simple price discovery at work. This is why it is better for the company to spread itself in different places rather than hole up in a single place and pay very salaries which are not sustainable. I really don't understand start ups which are supposed to be tight on cash sitting on one of the costliest real estate and expect to be profitable.

> If salaries drop then rent drops. I don't see this being a bad thing.

Maybe I'm being irrational, but I suspect that the drops won't be proportional and the housing isse in SF will just get worse.

Probably not, because people don't ask. In 2008 when I was living in NYC, I asked and received 10-15% year over year decreases in rent (3 years). Long time NYers thought I was crazy to even ask. Incredulous I got it. And this was in Manhattan, doorman building, a few blocks from Lehman Bros.

So yeah ask. And be prepared to move. If you aren't prepared to move, you're not ready to save.

Just that simple folks.

Just curious, what do you mean, be prepared to move? Did you tell the landlord, "I will move if you don't give me a 10% decrease in rent"? I'm finding it hard to believe that in a market like NYC where the rents are sky high generally increasing, you could get such a discount.

It also depends on the kind of property taxes prevalent in the states. e.g. in California, property taxes are set at the time of purchase, while in Texas they are reassessed every year. So, my landlord (in Texas) basically increases the rent to cover for the increase in property taxes.

2008 is the keyword here. Lehman B going bankrupt. Fear.

> I'm finding it hard to believe that in a market like NYC where the rents are sky high generally increasing, you could get such a discount.

I was able to do the same thing when re-signing the lease for my NYC (East Village) apartment in June 2009. My roommates and I drafted a letter requesting a 10% reduction, citing decreased rents 1) in the neighborhood and 2) in the rest of the city - specifically in the financial district where "luxury" buildings were giving away multiple months of free rent as a signing bonus - and the management company accepted it without a word.

Yes exactly. Its not a negotiation if you wont walk. Car dealer won't change price? Walk and buy a different car. If you are too in love to walk you already lost the negotiation.

I think that that threat is more dependent on how fast they can fill the apartments. If the apartment ends up on the market for 2 months... well 10% decrease is the better option isn't it?

Tenant protection laws in NYC are very tenant-friendly, to a degree where someone who is sufficiently motivated and knows the system can effectively live in an apartment rent-free for up to a year at a time, if not longer.

Landlords are scared to death of deadbeat tenants like this, it costs a lot of legal fees to get rid of them, and they're freeloading while you're walking through the necessary legal processes.

Every time the apartment goes onto the market they're rolling the dice again - so the value of an existing pleasant tenant is substantial vs. the risk of a tenant of unknown quality.

Which isn't to say you can just get your rent slashed whenever you want, but it's part of the negotiation, and coupled with a recession it can be a powerful argument.

I'm a landlord in New York and I've been a tenant in NYC and this just isn't true.

Vast majority of rentals in NYC if you asked the super for a discount in rent you'd be requested not to let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Depends if you are talking about private small landlords or corporate institutional (ie, Related). The former has totally different motivations and needs. I haven't received rent reductions but I have fought off rent increases in strong markets.

only works if prices are plateauing or dropping in your market

I didn't literally say I will move. I was more coy and diplomatic about it. I just said the market is different, rents are coming down in the neighborhood, it's a great location and apartment and I'd really like to stay here but economic good sense tells me it's reasonable to request lower rent right now, and I think $x is reasonable.

We moved into a new apartment in NYC in the summer of 2009. The previous tenant had a two-year lease at $4500 (struck in July '07). Our rent was $2800.

In the rental market a big driver of the landlord decision cycle is needing, at a minimum, to have a reputable tenant and to cover the cost of carry of the asset (mortgage, etc). In many cases if their cost of carry is met (and that's often a low bar....many landlords in both NYC and SF own their apartments outright, or are paying tiny monthlies on a refinanced mortgage that was originated in the 90's), then the priority is getting a reputable tenant who won't destroy the place or create drama.

If the above paragraph is confusing, basically what I am trying to say is that a landlord often prefers, for example, $3000/month from a tenant who they think is 98% likely to be an "easy tenant" to $3500/month from one who they think is 80% likely to be the same. In other words, there's a market premium on reliable tenants, especially in places like SF that have aggressive tenant-protection laws which make landlords even more antsy.

As layoffs start happening (as they did in the nine months before we signed our lease back in '09) landlords of reliably-paying, drama-free tenants start getting antsy about keeping their current tenant or finding a suitable replacement.

As such, what drives prices in markets like NY/SF isn't just supply-demand equilibrium; there's also a significant behavioral economics angle aspect to it as well, as landlords are willing to pay a premium for peace of mind.

Therefore, I would expect a significant drop in SF rents if layoffs start coming.

This times 100. A bad tenant can cost you tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention peace of mind. I once had one who lied about owning my property to have a 60 year old tree cut down. It was a nightmare (it turned out he had sued his previous landlord in a bogus sexual harrassment and basically extorted a hundred grand from an elderly woman).

I would much rather have someone who pays less, but is financially and mentally stable. So yeah, rents will drop pretty fast once the market softens.

SF in particular is a unique market because you have one population that is hell bent on staying here, and another that is primarily here for work opportunities. The latter population will clear out pretty quick once the work starts to dry up.

They even made a movie about it: Pacific Heights.

It is a supply-demand equilibrium, it's just that tenants aren't fungible. Even Homo Economicus would pay a premium for a more reliable tenant.

Eh, you exaggerate. Me and my girlfriend make about $160k together and we can afford[1] a $3.5k apartment in SF.

If we made $200k+ each, or if even just one of us did, $4k wouldn't even be worth thinking about.

[1] by "afford" I mean that there is money left at the end of the month.

You're spending 50% of your monthly post tax income on rent. That's not what I would call affordable.

Closer to 45% really. But it's still cheaper than paying less rent and owning a car. Not having any dependents is also pretty handy in keeping money piling around instead of spending it.

We also save a lot (and are healthier and save time) by cooking at home instead of going out to eat.

So, really, we get to both live in downtown SF, and travel pretty much whenever we feel like it.

What's your reason for living in SF and still traveling frequently? Access to work in SF?

I ask because I'm a remote worker for an SF startup, home base in a low cost of living area, but I travel frequently as well (but the home was purchased somewhere where the house is paid in full already and the monthly upkeep is ~$500/month).

Access to work is about the same as remote with social network in SF.

Two reasons why I choose to stay here: 1) building said network so I can go back to proper nomading easier, and 2) access to the startup lottery; nobody gives shares/options to remote workers and/or independent consultants/freelancers

Lottery is a nice potential upside with next to zero downside as an engineer

> nobody gives shares/options to remote workers

I received equity as part of my remote worker compensation (my entire team is remote though).

So then they have $3.5k left after rent each month, while living in the middle of one of the most popular cities in the country.

Meanwhile, the average American couple would have less than $3.5k before paying, regardless of what their rent is.

Right. I guess it depends on what your other expenses you have. For example, $2k out of that extra $3.5k would got to student loans for me. So spending $3.5k on rent just doesn't work. If you don't have student loans or any major debts sucking up your income then I envy you.

I'm pretty fortunate in that not only do I not have any debt, but my fuck you fund has enough for several months of full living/lifestyle costs. If I move back to my home country, then I have enough for two years.

Just curious, did you fund your FU fund living in the current place?

Yes.

You're crazy if you think spending 12-24% of your gross income isn't "even ... worth thinking about", even as hyperbole.

What is special about 12%? Are you saying that someone is spending excessively on housing if their rent is $500/mo and they are making $4k/mo gross income?

This is a huge misconception: tech is actually a small percentage of SF employment, especially at the high end. Those $4k+ rents are being paid by bankers and lawyers. It's still called the "Financial District" for a reason. The finance sector laughs at our $200k salaries. They are the ones inflating the rental market because a few k per month is a rounding error.

Ahem.

I know a thing about tech, lawyers, and banking. You're talking about misconceptions about tech while feeding misconceptions about law and banking.

In reality, most people in all three industries don't make $200K salaries. A big chunk (but by no means all) of Bay-area FANG engineers, New York bankers and Biglaw lawyers get this type of remuneration. Should be said too that most (not all) of these are pulling off insane, crazy-making hours as well.

If you think lawyers are rolling in it you have not been paying attention to what's happened to the profession over the past decade. Simply anachronistic. If you're going to generalize, it's a much better time to be an engineer than a lawyer in 2016.

All three of these professions have massive disparities in remuneration.

He said that (most of) the 4k rents are paid by bankers and lawyers. He did not say that most bankers and lawyers pay 4k rent.

I doubt there are more lawyers than engineers paying $4K rent in SF. But whatevs.

For all this talk about how engineers "might" get laid off, this completely ignores the massive contraction of the legal market that has already happened.

Outside of a few specific areas of law, and a few high powered law firms, lawyers don't make that much money.

My ex, a nationally renowned family lawyer in literally the richest area of the country doesn't make more money than i do (and she runs her own firm, so it's not like she is being kept down by partners).

Yeah the comment about lawyers and bankers making more than engineers is straight out of 1995. Outside of highly specialized degrees in medicine there really isn't any other jobs out there paying a white collar wage ($100K +).

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/highest-paying.htm

(F)acebook,(A)pple,(N)etflix,(G)oogle? 200k is also fairly easily attainable by NYC engineers.

The parent poster was suggesting that compensation would drop, but not necessarily salary. In other words, the $200k engineer might be making $120k in salary and $80k in other forms of deferred pay. That $80k will be gone in this example, but the $120k will remain. People pay rent out of their actual cash income, not out of unvested stock options.

Stop scaring the kiddos with your ghost stories. At least let them enjoy their weekend.

The problem is shrinking global liquidity. Losses in the Chinese financial system and in the global energy sector are forcing governments, central banks and sovereign wealth funds to sell assets around the world. These are some of the biggest asset managers in the world.

It is unclear to me how this will end. When the mortgage market melted down and destroyed the balance sheets of banks, the Federal Reserve liquified their illiquid assets using QE. For better or worse, QE restarted the jammed shut credit engine.

At the moment, outside of wholly energy dependent countries (Middle East, Latin America, Nigeria, etc.), there does not appear to me a 2008-like financial system shutdown.

Coming back to tech. IMHO, big tech companies with inflated multiples (as benchmarked against the FCF generating engines at GOOG and AAPL) now have a target on their backs. Unicorns that aren't cashflow positive are going to learn how to negotiate down rounds. Real estate values are sticky and will hold up longer than people think. Engineer salaries are not going to drop a whole lot. The number of people employed might.

In terms of property, I wonder how much is being sold to foreign investors. This article came up recently about London

http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2016/02/04/opinion-is-th...

I give it more credence than the usual "property market correction incoming" because certain fundamentals have actually changed, oil is dirt cheap, China as you say is volatile having blown multiple bubbles and now dealing with the consequences.

Perhaps those who previously bought for investment purposes may need to liquidate?

Hard to know, because High end London property is pretty weird. It's basically a piggy bank, a tax dodge, a money laundering vehicle and a fashion accoutrement all tied up in one dirt cheap currency.

London is a weird spot for property. I see it as more inline with the gold market. A "safe" investment for people who need to invest. That makes your last point more likely if anything I'm saying is true, but what happens when in London is unlikely to reflect the properly market in general, which is based somehat on fundamentals.

http://abc7news.com/realestate/chinas-elite-buy-bay-area-pro... http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/How-do-... http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...

and so on

> At the moment, outside of wholly energy dependent countries (Middle East, Latin America, Nigeria, etc.), there does not appear to me a 2008-like financial system shutdown.

There's nothing stopping central banks from creating more liquidity through progressive rounds of QE, each of them buying in because they know their country will suffer in the short run if they do not follow suit. Of course this will lead to deflation and another recession in the long run with many losing faith in monetary policy/central banks altogether, but we're not quite there yet. We've still got another couple of years before we hit that phase.

I think at this point we're more likely to see NIRP than QE.

QE leads to deflation?

Could you explain how you see QE leading to deflation, when it's an explicitly inflationary policy?

Sure. QE pushes money into the supply side (banks) which goes primarily into rent seeking activities such as equity markets and real estate due to a lack of aggregate demand.

This allows the economy to stay afloat as those with assets enjoy increases in nominal wealth as long as more and more liquidity is injected into the system.

But it hurts the economy in the long run by distorting market signals (wage, unemployment, asset prices) that would take a major correction if the market was allowed to match supply and demand in these respective markets efficiently.

Short summary: QE hurts aggregate demand in the long run through the misdirection of resources and the creation of rent seeking asset bubbles. Weak aggregate demand leads to deflation, regardless of how much liquidity we have on the bank side.

So, shorter summary: QE doesn't work.

It works perfectly well in the short run, but it makes things worse in the long run, possibly necessitating (non-nuclear) war to boost aggregate demand through government spend (fiscal policy) and a reduction in the supply of excess labor.

QE works well. It's just limited in how much impact it can have because it's monetary policy. Fiscal policy is the other half of the equation and one that is much more politically charged. Bernanke did what he could with the tools at his disposal at a time when government was seized with deep partisanship. That's now coming home to roost as liquidity is removed from the system. Luckily, or appropriately, it's happening as unemployment is low and there is finally some upward wage pressure. You only have to look at many countries in Europe to understand what the US would have looked like had we not had the monetary firehose, with all of its imperfections, opened.

Which countries in Europe would that be?

> The number of people employed might.

It will.

> Engineer salaries are not going to drop a whole lot.

Basic economics say that will follow.

None of these events are isolated. They're interconnected and cascade. Everyone will be affected, even those who are flipping burgers in the Bay Area.

> Everyone will be affected, even those who are flipping burgers in the Bay Area.

hey sure there is a bubble there, but last time I checked BA wasn't caput mundi yet. Plenty non inflated startups do exist, even if not specifically there.

Where the whole economy is sustained by VC money, well, there's gonna hit the hardest. But doesn't seem that the whole IT world is following that model.

That doesn't matter in the short term. Once the inflated startups tank, everything will take a dive. Remember 2000?

Maybe not. Seems like many here are too young. I'm only in my early 30s and am already feeling deja vu. Life is strange.

I recall sending my resume to over 50-60 companies for junior web dev work @ $15/hr after college and only getting two answers back. It was pretty brutal.

When the dot.com economy crashed, Google and Apple weren't producing billions in quarterly profits. Facebook didn't even exist. Today, the local economy is a very different thing. There's a new layer of massive and massively profitable companies that are not relying on venture money to keep their doors open. Meanwhile, a number of truly fundamental breakthroughs in AI, A/VR, genetics (CRISPR), transportation, and energy are happening simultaneously. Any one of them could trigger another tech boom, especially when corporate balance sheets have ludicrous amounts of liquidity. All five at once indicates a world-historical event in the making (think Second Industrial Revolution).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution

Accordingly, there's no reason to be investing in fluff like file sharing, app-based bike delivery, or "valuable" services like Shazam when there's real work to be done. In other words, the VC correction unfolding now is exactly that, a correction (long overdue, to my mind, and an unambiguously healthy thing). It will hurt a lot of overextended people to be sure, and unprofitable companies with dubious valuations that are laying people off now are wise to get ahead of the crunch.

As the squeeze tightens, salaries will even out, the balance of power will shift to employers, traffic may improve (slightly), and rents may even stop climbing. But 20-30% declines in the overall housing market? Dream on. Prices here are a function of a massive shortage, off-the-charts desirability, and deeply-rooted peculiarities in the tax code (Prop. 13), not Florida-style speculation. All of these factors are far more impervious to temporary downturns in the employment market.

Having lived through the dot.com crash, I can certainly hear echoes, but deja vu it isn't. The world is now a very different place.

Actually, basic economics says that wages tend to be sticky.

And as a result, unemployment higher.

/Average wages/. On a macro scale.

That's not the same situation. Of course you're going to see the $150-200k premium for engineers fall once startups, funding, and jobs disappear. It's already happening in the form of cutting RSUs and bonus packages.

And it has happened before. Why is it so hard to understand this?

Because most people here weren't around for 1999-2001.

Agreed. But I'm still a little surprised by this. I would expect anyone at least 30 yro to have /some/ recollection of what happened, if not a good understanding. Or to have the curiosity to find out what did. I'm 31 myself, but knew what was happening with the bubble during highschool (thanks pud and F'd company).

Maybe the typical age on HN is 21? :)

Young people are just smarter, apparently. Sit back and enjoy the show.

Yup. Most guys here are in their 20s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734

Oh, I was around.

Regardless, I was stating that your dismissal of "basic economics" was wrong. It's not basic economics, there's a lot that goes into the equation. Wages might go down. Wages might not go down by a ton. They might drop like a rock. It all depends on a number of factors, but blithely dismissing people with some nonesense about econ 101 is not being intellectually honest.

You're still talking macro 101. I'm not talking about nationwide unemployment figures here.

The key is that wages for /engineers/ will fall if funding and jobs disappear in the tech sector. Today's wages for engineers are high and will be unsustainable when things go bust.

How much they will fall is anyone's guess. But the reasoning behind why they will fall is very straightforward.

Wages probably will fall but it's probably also more complex than that.

Your extremely talented engineers who build things at scale and understand the fundementals, who are basically a safe per of hands, are still going to be in deep demand. Profitiable companies that work at scale are still going to have real problems and are unlikely to turn around and tell their engineers that they're going to be getting significantly less money, as those engineers are already in their own market and these companies will still want to compete for them.

The startups filled with architecture astronauts who spend most of their time overdesigning, learning new tools, and basically doing anything that isn't meeting user needs, delivering the product or tackling some tough engineering problem, then you're likely going to see a drop because they're not really worth it in the first place.

Most management can't tell the difference between the two.

True, but you're assuming they won't be part of the same cull.

Culls occur from the bottom up. Engineers, then management.

This strikes me as a bit of a fantasy. Very few people can recognize, and even fewer value, a "safe pair of hands". Let's not also forget this industry's rampant ageism, which even in good times sidelines experience in favor of hipness. I have no idea why you think this will magically change just because times are tough.

I'm not sure the industry suffers from ageism in the way most people here think it does. The start-up community hiring cocky 24 year old team leads who refuse to heed advice from their seniors definitely aren't going to be hiring the older guy, sure.

However, remove the funding and force these companies to actually compete on merit and only those who are actually capable of delivering will still exist. At that point, hopefully, we'll see a rise of new leaders who actally value excellence.

The point is, we can only afford to value hipness over experience in bubbles and it looks like this one's about to burst. Of course, I'm not from the future, so I could be wrong.

I disagree completely. I think there are really two markets for dev jobs: the startup economy which is over-inflated but also exists in a smaller high COL location, and everyone else which had lower COL and wages to begin with and likely won't see much of a drop in wages due to the fact that their company needs those services to function efficiently.

You can argue that the drop in employment in startup land may see some movement outside the bay area and into boring lower paid dev jobs, but I doubt that it will be more than a small blip.

TL;DR: If you're at a start up the good times might be over. If you're not, don't expect much change (maybe less likely to see a pay rise). If you're just coming out of Uni and into the job market, you may see interesting times.

"Real estate values are sticky and will hold up longer than people think."

This may be true in the general case, but there is a more relevant (IMO) general case here, and that is: demand outstripping supply causes prices to ramp up steeply ... but if that condition wavers at all they will drop.

That is to say, if there is even a single marginal house for sale in the SFBA that can't clear, the whole market drops. Right now that doesn't exist. All (normal, conforming) homes in SF are clearing. If that changes - if there are even one or two marginal houses left unsold - the price plummets.

Can you say a bit more about this? How does a quantity of one affect supply so much?

What do you mean by "clear"? Is that a synonym for "sell"?

If a house does not sell at a certain price, typically the owner can lower the sale price.

The biggest risk is actually China devaluing the yuan. They are reporting their forex reserves on Sunday. If the yuan gets devalued this year this means China starts to export deflation. One or 10 stocks losing 50% in value is not a big deal. The Fed needing to cut rates in the face of slowing growth would be an issue.

Both energy and China are the big risks. It'll be interesting to see how much of their foreign reserves were used up in January.

To some extent, it is easier for the Chinese to defend the on-shore yuan market (CNY) through capital controls. It is harder to defend in the off-shore yuan market (CNH). Great discussion from a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008872

I personally have tremendous admiration and respect for managers of the Chinese economy and I think betting against the Chinese government is just a money-losing, dumb idea.

IMHO, the big threat continues to be oil. Cheap dollar funding has pumped up global supply to well past demand. This is crushing the economies of oil-exporting nations through currency devaluation. Ruble, CAD$, Nigerian Naira, Krone, Bolivar, etc. have gotten crushed.

Developed Market banks and investors have poured a lot of money in emerging markets in the past decade. Some of that investment is going to be lost.

It is an open question whether we are working up to an event that is similar to the 1997 Asian financial crisis, 1998 Russian default, the 2012 European debt crisis, the 2008 Global financial crisis, or something milder, or something much worse.

This is going to be the most interesting question. China worked pretty hard to get the Yuan in the reserve currency basket, and they worked even harder to reassure the world after they pulled the devaluing stunt in August. From the WP article: "But the Chinese central bank argued on Tuesday that its goals were more mundane than spurring exports and growth. Rather, the bank said that the change was a one-time event to allow it to set exchange rates in line with free market practices. And in their initial responses, many analysts agreed."

If they do it again then they lose all credibility with the rest of the world. And how the world responded would change China's trajectory.

So its interesting to see what they do.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/11/china...

Ironically getting that reserve currency status could be biting them in the ass in the short term. You need to have fairly free currency flows as part of the deal. Which means its tricky for them to impose capital controls now.

Every made in China product I've bought has been cheaper and/or much more capable than the one it replaces. Haven't they been exporting deflation this whole time?

And by expecting, you mean investing accordingly?

Hopefully that will turn out to be a gloomy forecast, but it's best to prepare for the worst.

Actually, it's not. Being right at the wrong time is arguably the worst kind of "wrong" you can be. It doesn't pay to be the only sane guy in the asylum.

As a wise economist once said, the market has ability to stay irrational longer than your ability to stay solvent.

thats fuked up can some one do something ? should it be stopped or should it be fueled ?

> 30% decline in bay area real estate values.

that won't happen. During the 2008 big burst everywhere in USA was felling apart but in SF real-estate was just down 5%-10%.

SF can't expand easily since it's water 3/4 all around. Demand still high and supply very low.

That won't change dramatically, with or without a collapse in the public market.

Exactly. Property values might not continue to grow at such a high rate but they aren't going to decrease by 30%. That's ludicrous.

It just happened! Not more than 7-8 years ago!

It happened in many, many markets across the US and the world.

We just saw it happen!

How quickly people forget :)

That was part of a massive, global housing bubble popping. A better point of reference is the dot.com crash (the worst of which was a local event) and the worst you saw, at least in decent areas, were valuations that stopped climbing.

> SF can't expand easily since it's water 3/4 all around. Demand still high and supply very low.

That might easily change.

If average salaries go down, people won't be able to afford pay rent they once used to. There will be less people living on their own and more people sharing with others. This will create oversupply of rental properties which means rent prices will go down.

If rent prices go down, property prices will go down too as property investors won't be able to justify holding a relatively expensive property yielding low rental returns. So they might as well put the property on the market creating more supply of properties for sale. Thus bursting the bubble.

SF is heavily relying on the high-tech, high salary population to sustain its high market value. So SF is always at risk of having market breakdown. But because giants like Google and Facebook have offices in SF, or near SF, as long as that population remain, SF market will survive, no matter what. If SF only relies on startup, SF will doom. Startup population, however, is dragging the price higher, so high that even the workers from the giant tech feel wallet drain, and that's really bad, because Google wouldn't pay everyone $200,000 annually, and even if Google does, only a handful of companies can, thus the market will bloat with a huge economic gap.

I'll get hammered for this, but I just wonder if we will be talking about Google, and Facebook ten years from right now?

I know both have diversified, and Google has become best friends with the Obama administration.

I just wonder if they will be relevant? These tech companies main reason for living is advertising, and their algorithms.

I look back, and Apple had a physical product. Other than Apple, exactly what companies will be here in a decade?

Actually, I don't think I would buy another new Apple product for myself. I still buy them as presents. It's a nice gift. For myself, I will still buy used while their is a surplus of parts.

I went into my Corte Madera Apple Store on 2-1-16. There's no cash registers. A few printers are attached under the counters for receipts. It's ambience was that of a operating room. I walked out, with a $39.00 iPad mini case. I said to myself, "Is this my last visit?" The case was not the quality I expected from Apple either.

Please don't beat me up. I won't even be back. Just thinking out loud. My prediction of future events have a poor track record.

Advertisement is relevant. http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=KO produces nothing of intrinsic value, yet it is valued at $185B. Why? Because they've built and maintained a very valuable brand, via advertisement. The day CocaCola is headed for bankruptcy is the day I start worrying about Google and Facebook.

Market cap is not the same thing as book value, and the book value of the Coca Cola brand is less than $80 billion.

Google is up with Apple and Coca Cola as most valuable brands, but Facebook is not even top 10.

I think you might be right. I remember about 10 years ago having a discussion with a coworker. He was bemoaning the fact that Microsoft was so far entrenched that nobody would ever be able to challenge them. Back then Microsoft looked like Google does today. Nobody stays on top forever.

but Microsoft is still in top in terms of market share on desktop, and they have started to put a dent into the prosumer tablet market, and they compete well in the gaming market. I'd say they are still "on top"

Microsoft is long past "nobody would ever be able to challenge them." Maybe on desktop, provided you exclude the server market.

You didn't used to have to exclude the server market. They owned that too. Then Linux challenged them and won.

In fact, they used to own all PCs. Then Apple challenged them for laptops and won.

Microsoft isn't doing badly, but it's not an unchallengeable juggernaut any more.

And Google won't be forever either.

I agree with @monkeywork, i think Microsoft is now in better than what it was in 2003/4, At the time when i worked there we knew Linux was a challenge, MSSQL, AD, Exhcange all had still competition(sun one Ldap, domino mail/workflow) and was fighting hard in fact i would say Domino with it's workflow was in better position. With Azure, SQL Always on, .net and solid Windows server i expect Microsoft to be around for long atleast another 1o to 12 years in dominant position in enterprise segment.

Google and Facebook are completely different animals. They both make money through advertising[1], but the use cases are different. Even their algorithms have different implications. In Google's case for example, their search is like an ever improving AI, increasingly hard to overtake. And assuming search is going to continue to be a need, it may become increasingly hard for a competitor to overcome them. I do understand nothing lasts forever, but only thing is I don't see it coming yet.

Sibling comment, compares Goog with MS 10 years back. My humble submission is several people saw it coming even then. I remember reading a book called 'The Search', and also having some discussions with friends, where we felt that Google will overtake MS. But there is no such thing in the horizon, which challenges Google. And people tried - Blekko was noteworthy. DDG is also liked by hackers, but it remains to be seen in the long term.

Now talking about FB's algos (or AI). Its purely anecdotal, but till I was using FB, I found it highly irritating. Imagine if your email was trying to guess which email you like to read, rather than simple time sorted one (and brief categorization, which gmail does).

[1] This analogy of comparing Google to advertising company has become a bit tiring now as well. I think, thats their current way of making money, we should judge them by what their intrinsic value is - Search/self-driving cars/Youtube/etc. As the means may change (micro-payments via Bitcoin/etc who knows?)

The Google <-> Microsoft analogy is especially relevant with Google becoming the owner of the operating system of the world's most dominant computing platform. The resemblance of Microsoft of the nineties is uncanny; commoditized hardware made by a plethora of companies at razor-thin margins and Google sitting on top of all of them collecting the profits. Funny enough, both of those operating systems were arguably ripped off from Apple. History does rhyme.

Only Google is a lot more diversified than MS was back then, since Android isn't even their main business.

Ownership means something different when you charge for it, however.

SF and Texas is where the fugitive capital from the mortgage meltdown was running to. It's not about demand; it's about how many high rollers go bust.

There are areas that do not follow Bay Area realestate economics.

I have watched Bay Area realestate for too many years. I do agree the decline will be at least 30%. I think it will be more like 40%, but who knows.

That said certain areas (Rich areas--Pacific heights, etc.) of San Francisco do not follow the trends. Marin county, with the exception of Novato, do not follow the trends.

Rich areas are "tightly held," they usually don't have mortgages and the owners are wealthy enough to not need to sell at a loss in downturns. These are the safest areas but don't get the huge appreciation in the upswings

During the 2001-2002 bust, bay area rents fell 50% in marginal neighborhoods. In desirable neighborhoods, rents fell maybe 10%. Prices to buy came down, but not nearly as much. In marginal areas 20%, in desirable neighborhoods, maybe 1%. Small houses and fixer-uppers in the 10/10/10 school districts (ie, Palo Alto) kept going up. One reason is that construction prices fell 30%, so there was allot of tears downs and renovation happening.

Very true. In 2001, landlords of rent-controlled apartments wouldn't even pause the rent increases in the best neighborhoods.

what happened to the Small houses and fixer-uppers in the 9/8/8 school districts?

What's the meaning of 10/10/10 or 9/8/8?

schools

ele/mid/hs

http://www.greatschools.org

"During the 2001-2002 bust, bay area rents fell 50% in marginal neighborhoods. In desirable neighborhoods, rents fell maybe 10%. Prices to buy came down, but not nearly as much. In marginal areas 20%, in desirable neighborhoods, maybe 1%. Small houses and fixer-uppers in the 10/10/10 school districts (ie, Palo Alto) kept going up. One reason is that construction prices fell 30%, so there was allot of tears downs and renovation happening. "

It was a bit more complicated than that ...

You are correct that rents/prices fell much more in marginal areas, but "marginal" can mean a lot of things. Very expensive, 3-4 million dollar homes are also marginal (or at least, they were at the time) and those fell a lot. There just wasn't a healthy demand for 4 million dollar homes in SF and Marin during that period, and those prices dropped a lot.

So, yes - mid-range (mid-range for SF) houses in desirable areas did not fall a lot ... but just like houses in undesirable areas dropped a lot, so did a lot of other marginal properties - namely, very expensive ones.

San Francisco had 35% decline from peak in the years following the 2007 bust, across all market segments. Less 'prime' fell first and hardest. But decline was comprehensive.

http://us.spindices.com/indices/real-estate/sp-case-shiller-...

There are many macro risks that can be applied, and people here are right to highlight the bigger issues but LinkedIn's troubles are of their own making.

It's a poor business founded on poor assumptions

A strange game.. the only way to win is not to play...

When you are trading at a P:E ratio of 50 you are expecting some phenomenal growth and at LinkedIn's size that growth is pretty hard to get. Scaling it back to 25 seems pretty damned reasonable honestly.

Gloomy, but likely correct. A lot of these current valuation numbers just don't make sense.

The implied growth rates in many tech stocks is unrealistically high.

The Bay Area's long-term employment prospects simply cannot support current home values or rental rates.

Once public and private equity valuations drop a lot of software development projects are going to get cut and with them the jobs of many software engineers. Engineers who keep their jobs probably won't experience pay cuts, but new hires are going to be expected to take much lower pay packages.

Why? Because the talent is going to be available at lower pay rates. So why pay more?

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There's a lot of irrationality in the tech business now and it's crowding out the rational participants. There needs to be a weeding out process. It is good that it has begun.

Remember to think long-term. Technology and the Bay Area are here to stay. Let's get the creative destruction process over with as quickly and painlessly as possible so that we can get on with making real innovations.

So what if you're one of those new hires (or hope to be one)?

I'd say keep polishing your resume. If you dropped out of school, look for a school with low tuition that isn't University of Phoenix but finish your degree. Stay on your toes: work your way through to graduation, get internships each September (as much as you can).

And though the retire-as-a-millionaire thing might have vanished, you'll land on your feet.

Build your own product now that generates revenue and profit. Make your own job.

What will you eat, old newspaper clippings? If we could all do this, VCs would not exist in the first place.

>The Bay Area's long-term employment prospects simply cannot support current home values or rental rates.

Why not? What are you basing this on?

He's reasonably and appropriately worried about both the shaky unicorns and the seed funding bubble, neither of which seems terribly sustainable.

There are other games in town, but those two games were seriously inflating salaries here.

Common sense? Median rents are $5500 a month. No one can afford that. A city can't exist if people can't live there.

You say no one can afford it, but all the apartments are rented out.

Sure, but that class of people can't do all the things required to run the city (food service, child care, etc). Those people have been priced out and are moving elsewhere. The city suffers; it becomes difficult to sustain the current pattern.

Except none of the doomsday predictions have come true. There are still of services like food service, child care, etc.

I mean other cities are like this too. Chicago is a very cheap big city. But how many server workers live in Gold Coast or River North? The difference is I guess cheap housing is closer compared to SF?

Don't forget that the median rent is determined by the very small slice of rentals that are changing hands.

I'd love to know what the median rent across all rentals is in SF! ~70% are rent controlled. I'd guess the median rent is maybe half? Around $2000? Just a guess.

Bay Area's real estate is actually pretty cheap, considering how much economical output the area has and how desirable the location has been historically.

Look at Vancouver, Hongkong, Shanghai, Moscow, Tokyo, all have waaaaay lower average household income than San Francisco Bay Area, yet wil much more expensive realestate price.

Living in British Columbia, I had always assumed Bay Area real estate would be astronomical. I found it surprising to see single family detached homes in the Bay Area for $300,000. That's entirely reasonable considering the potential incomes.

Which part of the bay area? Those homes are probably > 1.5 hr commutes for most jobs.

How long ago did you see that? And where?

The median price for a single-family home in the Bay Area is $841,560 as of Summer 2015.

As an engineer working at a "well-funded" startup, how can I prepare for the worst?

be good at programming?

Hahah.

Being good at programming is useful, but planning what happens if random changes in the business screw you is still useful.

I've been a software engineer for going on 20 years now. Have a plan, just in case, even if you're good at programming (I am.)

Not necessary, still less sufficient.

Have 6-12 months in an emergency fund and be prepared to move out of SF if you'll burn through all of that fund.

Diversify. Put money in things that are uncorrelated with tech money. Keep your CV up to date and work on transferrable skills - e.g. see if you can get your job title changed to one that implies some level of management responsibility.

Don't sign a new lease or buy a house or a new car.

You really don't know what you're talking about. LNKD was not in S&P 500, "only" 8% off consensus earnings is not a small number, P/E multiples are nowhere what they were in 2000, there's been relatively little IPO activity. It's a different world. It may be a tough market but there's no basis for (most of) the numbers you are throwing around.

I could definitely see a decline in engineer salary, which could be significant in certain markets. But who knows.

The current tech bubble has some fundamental differences to the last one. Specifically, while some of the pain will hit public markets the vast majority of people left holding bags of burning crap this time around are the VC firms and other private investors. The SF Bay region is going to have an implosion but the impact on the broader stock market and US economy will be quite limited.

In short, if you just bought a big chunk of San Francisco real estate on the basis that you pay it off in a few years when you cash out the options in your hyped up tech startup... well good luck with that.

A lot of that private money/VC funds are institutional money chasing alternative asset class returns.

The markets have been pricing in a higher risk of recession in the past few months. Financials have been hit very hard which is one signal of this

Man, you can say that again. I bought some Netflix stock last year, because they seemed to be doing a lot of things right. It's been a roller coaster, and the last couple of weeks have been a steep drop.

I think what we're seeing is institutional money moving around. Mutual funds, pension plans, and other such entities need to retain a certain ROI to ensure their primary objectives get completed--i.e. making pension payments every month. We need to look at the downturn on the public markets in the context of the public markets and who is doing the selling. If institutions are selling across the board, that's going to depress everything. A lot of it depends on the valuation model and how the companies generate revenue. The problem with tech companies, especially ones that aren't "essential" is that in an economic contraction the value they provide is negligible. If LinkedIn disappeared tomorrow, the job market would go on much like it always has. The only people who would have a more difficult job are recruiters and even then platforms like ZipRecruiter and Indeed.com make it possible for them to do their jobs. On the other hand, if FB / Google disappears tomorrow, there'd be a gaping hole in the internet. The primary social media platform vanishes, all the cat pictures disappear, and we go back to mailing(!!!) grandma pictures of the kids. Similarly, if Google dies, a lot of people's concepts of search go with it. Google has become a verb. Ergo, I think investors know this and move the money accordingly. In boom times, people are flush with cash and can spend it on "non-essential" goods and services. When contractions start, things that aren't essential begin getting reprioritized and the company revenues start falling - and investors will move their money to places more likely to survive an extended downturn.

With regards to VCs and Unicorn investing, we really only saw institutional money get serious about investing in tech startups after 07/08 when the markets shifted and traditional asset classes didn't return as much as they used to. It's easy to look at startups, see the ones that survive and their high ROI and think it's a great place to invest without seeing all the other ones that morph into lifestyle businesses and don't go anywhere or flame out. Throwing near limitless amounts of institutional money into a very noisy market leads to the rise of cheap capital and the ability for anyone to get funding regardless of the extent of their business plan. I think we will see a retraction of available capital which will lead to an increase in bootstrapping and an increase in vetting by serious VCs who need to improve the hit/miss ratio since capital will be tighter.

I need to drum up more capital to invest. Best time to buy and hold is in a major downswing. You get durable assets for cheap!

what are some durable assets? I was just planning on buying index funds

I usually go funds as well. However, if there are individual stocks that are getting hammered not because they're doing poorly but because the overall market sentiment is pushing people to sell, I'll grab those too. I.E. The Apple Bounce from a couple years ago where people would see off right before a major product announcement from Apple and artificially suppress the price. Buy it on the push down and when everyone buys back in because they think $NEW_PRODUCT_IS_AWESOME, you get the delta gain.

I tend to look for things that are strong on fundamentals and get murdered because of market sentiment and not because of business performance.

I don't dispute your gloom, but I challenge your %s.

- "Well Funded Startups" have a >1 correlation to the overall stock market. (Market moves 10%, they move higher than 10%) So if we see a several year 30-40% decline in the S&P, this will cause more than 30% of the "well-funded" startups to go bust. Anyone who can't switch to cash flow positive would have a high likelihood of going under.

- Real Estate values tend to move slower than stock market prices. (People can ride the market out, and just not sell the house) It would take a very sustained market hit to cut real estate by 30%. Also, much of the money fleeing China is coming to the Bay Area. (This isn't to say that it couldn't happen, but you'd need to see 5+ years of a depressed stock market) The reason it tanked so much in 2008 was that the bubble was in the financing mechanism.

- I think if you count equity, the market rate pay for engineers would get hit worse. Options that on-paper are worth 500K can quickly go to zero in a down round. Other variable comp will get hit too. Not sure about base salaries. Even in an enormous down market, most of the world will still be short engineers. In 2001 the folks who got crushed were the Marketing majors posing as Web Engineers.

You didn't mention my big hope though... A 30-50% reduction in Bay Area commute times! :-)

One bright side to a crash - it is better to start a company where good talent is plentiful and cash is scarce, than the other way around.

Honestly I am feeling a bit of joy watching LinkedIn take a hit. Not because I think their product is terrible but because of the endless spam emails I keep receiving from them, despite how many times I click unsubscribe.

This worked of me:

http://lifehacker.com/unsubscribe-from-all-linkedin-emails-w...

Not sure if this is still valid.

If is. There are very granular controls to control which emails you get and then, separately, how often, including "No emails". Looks like I did all that a year or so ago, since I only get a message now and then for new connect request. Now those are random strangers maybe 30% of the time, but I do want the notifications.

I've noticed quite a lot of LinkedIn e-mail is actually spam and phishing attempts. We are blocking about 5 mails per day per employee that aren't real.

So much this. I revel in every bad result for LinkedIn, because they've built a wasteland of growth hacking dark patterns and practically demand I participate in it.

I have literally several hundred request from random people to become a contact. Linkedin (years ago) lost what it had which originally attracted me to the service. That was some kind of real and exclusive way to have contacts that you either knew or you felt would be beneficial in some way.

The biggest joke is the entire concept they have of using a connection to connect you to someone else who they know. Which of course depends on the definition of "know" which with linkedin means literally nothing.

They have also made it over time exceptionally hard to deny a connection request. It used to be in the e-mail notification, then it wasn't and on the profile page, now it seems to only be in the event/notification drop down from your home page.

Eh? Just ignore them. No need to actively deny anything. My attitude; it's just LinkedIn. Accept everyone, you never know when someone will be useful in finding you a job, which is all I use LinkedIn for. Turn off all email notifications and just add to spam any you do get. I get emails from recruiters all the time and they're in my spam folder too. I'll take them out/search spam when I next need a new job.

They used to give guidance about what 'know' meant and I still adhere to the 'I will only link with you if I have properly worked with you' line. The fact that few other people do have devalued its use.

At some point, LinkedIn changed its mind and decided that you should connect to anyone you're barely acquainted with and/or have exchanged an email with. They're actively encouraging forming these "devalued" links. They even use shady practices like borderline forgery of invitations.

Yes. And I think was a terrible decision.

But.. how do they know who you've emailed? I don't get how LinkedIn knows this from Gmail

In gmail, everyone you've ever emailed is in automatically added your address book. LinkedIn provides an easy (maybe too easy) way to upload your address book to LinkedIn.

Your "too easy" is my "deceptive dark pattern".

> LinkedIn changed its mind and decided that you should connect to anyone you're barely acquainted with

This was all in the interest of keeping the numbers going up which is obvious. And that's fine if that is your business model. But the business model here seems to be showing growth for the sake of wall street as opposed to growing the business in a meaningful manner.

Linkedin does serve a purpose it allows people to humble brag which is helpful even if they aren't looking for a job and don't need the connections because, say they own a business (and I don't mean a startup but it could be that as well). It's become an acceptable way to show where you went to school, what you have done in the past, and where you work or what you are the owner of. There really aren't that many other ways you can do that w/o appearing to be actually bragging and trying to impress someone (meaning it's not the same as having a personal website or even pointing people to a link "about me" page on your business website or a wikipedia page.

What's amazing is that they apparently don't want to filter the bogus requests as opposed to merely the requests that are from legitimate people (not bots) and simply trying to build what appears to be a network.

> But the business model here seems to be showing growth for the sake of wall street as opposed to growing the business in a meaningful manner.

Welcome to the world. Version 2.0. Codename: pointless.

This about sums it up

To be fair, there is evidence that weaker ties can be highly valuable in job search: http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/weak_ties.htm

For this reason, I'm somewhat lenient in adding LinkedIn connections, as long as I at least have some idea who the people are. Unfortunately, many connection requests are from people I've never met before.

I remember the point in time when joining Facebook required a .edu email address.

My how things have changed.

At Linkedin you are the product. Don't ever think otherwise. They are mercenaries about building up the social graph because it is how they build up the data they need to sell to the job spammers. The biggest "secret" of LI is that you get a score based on the "quality" of the people you are linked to. Know lots of ivy leaguers and fancy MBAs? You get a +10 bonus. Rockstar talent with no high rated buddies to link to? -10 for you.

Or how about the phony "people you may know". They suggested I may know my 4 year old Niece because somebody uploaded the email address created for her into their system. She definitely doesn't have a LinkedIn account, but they portray a profile-photoless "shadow profile" as-if she does.

> because somebody uploaded the email address

You mean they scrapped it from your email account because you clicked on one of their links in your email.

That happens to me too. But you know who is a thousand times worse than Linkedin when it comes to these things? Facebook.

At this point, I honest /just/ /don't/ /know/ how to stop getting emails from them. In my entire life I've only had a facebook account for a few hours (created one out of necessity a few years ago -- closed it after just a few hours of use at that time). And I still get emails. I've clicked unsubscribed probably fifty times by now, but I still keep getting emails. I just don't know how to stop it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I cheer for blackhats taking shots at Facebook, I'd love to see the behemoth shot down. They don't respect me or my time, I don't respect them.

How do they keep getting around your spam filters? Blocking the domain has worked well for me.

It would probably be pretty trivial to set up a filter or two to automatically delete those emails. Or maybe just leave your account open (though it sounds like you would refuse to do this on principle). I never receive emails from Facebook.

I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"

> I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails.

It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...

I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.

I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...)

It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top)

> I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...)

It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.

I don't get any emails from Facebook. Have you not set up the account the way you like it? Do you still have stock wallpaper, ringtones etc on your devices? I find out about events in Facebook at the right time; when I'm using Facebook.

Did you miss the point where the poster said "had a FB account for a couple of hours"? I assume this means they deleted their account.

Exactly. If it's 5 minutes per 1 billion customers, 5 billion minutes wasted. That's 9512 years. 135 lives.

I can think of many things waste more of my time than having to delete promotional emails here and there. I get that it's annoying, but let's have some perspective...

Where are you getting that 1b number from? Most of Facebook's active users are presumably not receiving these emails or not being particularly enraged by them, since they like using Facebook.

This calculus doesn't make much sense. Multiply any enormous number of people by a few minutes and you'll get hundreds of lives equivalent time.

That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."

I don't see the fallacy in it. It's just pointing out that a little time wasting at scale actually has a big impact.

The point is that everything at scale as an impact that looks big when aggregated... if you don't actually look at the scale.

135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).

If you're one of the 135 people's lives they've wasted... you might take it a bit more personally. :D

But that's his point: Facebook's emails are not wasting anybody's entire life. The 135 number is an aggregate.

Sure, and he's trying to downplay it.

They're wasting 135 people's entire lives worth of time. Every single day. :(

It's not a fallacy. We really could solve those big problems. It's better than thinking about the huge problem and your tiny ego. It puts things in perspective. Facebook really wastes the equivalent of 135 lives. That's the reverse operation. It takes the relatively trivial 5 minutes from your life and puts it in global perspective. When you're that big and you annoy people in a systematic way you deserve this characterization.

> 1 billion customers...135 lives

That's close to the proportional death rate from air travel accidents (3.6 billion passengers/year, around 500 deaths).

Facebook takes---in Fermi numbers---about as many lives as plane crashes.

Facebook is not wasting emails on 1 billion people. Honestly I'm an active user and dont get a single email. It's a few clicks to turn off all email notifications. If you're not a user then you should get nothing unless someone else is trying to invite you, which is the fault of that person, not the service.

Why the hyperbole?

Anything from a Facebook domain hitting my mail server is bounces them back to Facebook's abuse and postmaster addresses. I know categorically that it is abuse, because I am the sole user of my mail server and do not now and have never had a Facebook account, and have repeatedly asked them in various ways to stop spamming me.

Useless, of course. But just because they ignore internet norms of decent behavior doesn't mean I will.

That seems like it would make it harder for Facebook's abuse team to deal with actual abuse reports.

Thereby resulting in facebook being a worse software for the average user due to their abuse of this one user. Win win for someone who doesn't like facebook.

I am making an actual abuse report.

I am pretty sure a Facebook dev has already set up a rule on the abuse inbox to delete any emails coming from your domain.

You'd probably have more luck marking them as spam in your client. If you're using a webmail service of any note, you're helping to train the filters used by others, and as a bonus, your own profile means you're less likely to get them in the inbox in the future.

Also, if you're in the USA, you should report those messages to the FTC.

If you try to unsubscribe from an email list and your request is not honored, file a complaint with the FTC. via https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam

You appear to have missed the part about this being my own mail server.

And I don't need any more luck; my initial problem is solved (I no longer see spam from Facebook, and I am taking steps to ensure they are aware of their problem, in case they weren't).

The problem was worth the time I spent on the config; it is manifestly a waste for me to involve the FTC, since I don't have to worry about Facebook's spam anymore and am willing to eat the tiny amount of bandwidth involved.

For what it's worth I have a Facebook account and have all the email notification settings off and can't remember seeing an email from Facebook in over a year.

I noticed that when I stopped checking my Facebook account, Facebook started sending me FOMO messages ("Hey! You have messages! People are saying things! Please come look!")

I noticed them doing that as well, and did what I usually do with companies that get too chatty: First, turn off the notifications, unsubscribe, etc. Then, if they ignore my preferences or keep adding new categories of notification that are enabled by default, I add a client-side rule to throw away everything they send. This way they get to keep thinking that I receive their spam, and I don't have to see it, which is a win-win (though a sad loss for email in general as an obsessively reliable communication system).

This worked out fine for Facebook: I visit their webpage when I want to know what's going on over there, and they never send me email.

Yes, but it also stops sending you normal e-mail notifications, which is IMHO only annoying because I prefer to use my e-mail client to read messages, invites, etc.

Facebook's email messages used to be pretty useful; they used to contain the actual content of posts. That means if you also turn off remote images, you can actually read Facebook posts without Facebook having realized that you've read it. I've always done this for privacy, until they stopped putting the actual post in their emails.

Hell, I haven't received an email from Facebook since about 2009, I think?

I fell for this a couple of times. They grabbed my friends email and created a fake profile for her.

When I clicked connect, I thought I would invite her to my network, but it ended up with an invite to LinkedIn to her email.

That is an invite to your network.

The difference is that you were not aware of how interested in LinkedIn the contact was, and you were not aware you were ALSO inviting her to join LinkedIn

The difference is that sending a request to someone within the social network to form a connection in that social network is different than sending an invite to someone's separate social network (email), which encourages them to join a whole new social network are two separate actions, and to represent one while doing the other is a bait-and-switch. This is a problem because they have separate social and cultural expectations, so you may feel comfortable doing one and not the other.

If you read the button it's not an CTA to connect with her but a CTA to invite her to LinkedIn. She would then get an email basically saying "Uncle Uptown would like you to join LinkedIn!"

Agree it's scummy and they are mixed in with actual folks on LinkedIn but they are not creating shadow profiles.

This is on mobile. It shows her name, her email address, and a circular button with a human silhouette and a plus symbol on it. All in a section titled "People you may know". The implication is absolutely that she is a user of the site.

IIRC there was one very subtle difference on mobile to differentiate users vs. non-users, but it was something easily overlooked. On desktop it's slightly more obvious, but still misleading IMO.

The fact that they intermingle "add this person to my network" with "invite this person to LinkedIn" on that page drives me insane.

I accidentally sent my friends a bunch of annoying messages to their school email addresses as I sat there clicking and asking myself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?". Really we are but LinkedIn creates these shadow profiles for each of their email addresses.

Especially since they seem to never go away and you can invite repeatedly, like once a quarter when you scroll through asking yourself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?"

When I signed up, I made the mistake of giving LinkedIn access to my Gmail address book. Somehow this meant they actually had access to a list of every person I had ever e-mailed, even if only once.

So ever since then, LinkedIn has been trying to trick me into sending invites to people I've never met who I've briefly inquired about sharing an apartment with, various administrators at the schools I attended, and women who I went on some dates with back in 2009. Having an interface that's designed to funnel me into an inauthentic and embarrassing social gesture means I have to keep a state of anxious vigilance whenever I use it.

Hopefully you've learned something important about not giving your login credentials for any service, to another service. ;)

[And yeah, I'm aware of people doing this for other services too, eg financial account management. Expecting they'll become further anecdotes later one... :(]

Keep an eye on mobile apps that steal your address book.

I signed up with an email alias specifically created for LinkedIn, and it still managed to associate my Facebook friends as possible connections. What the frick.

I see newer social networks that are taking the LinkedIn playbook and making it even worse.

As a recovering academic, I find myself getting incredibly scummy e-mails from ResearchGate which actually purport to be from people I have done research with, putting their name as the sender, without that person even taking any action to send the e-mails. It's a spamming/phishing tactic that for some reason hasn't gotten them banned from the major e-mail services.

How do I know that the person named in the e-mail is not choosing to send these e-mails? Someone I once did research with passed away last year, sadly. He started supposedly sending me ResearchGate invitations six months after he died.

ResearchGate seemed nice for a week. It showed every time a paper quoted one of mine, so it was a small confidence boost to know my older stuff is being read.

Then they sent an e-mail with pictures of me, and said "are any of these people you?" Apparently RG thinks I need a photo so bad, it tried to search for one on the internet, and asked for confirmation.

It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is creepy.

A friend of mine died almost a decade ago before linkedin became a thing and I see those occasionally. Someone must have done the same for him.

Linkedin also wanted to connect me with my dead grandfather a few weeks after he died. I'm pretty sure he never had an account there. Felt a bit weird to have that email pop up suddenly.

LinkedIn's "shadow profiles" are absolutely horrific.

I deleted my LinkedIn account over five years ago, and hunted down every "no, really delete" option I could find on the site and in their emails. It didn't work. LinkedIn will still happily let users and recruiters find my old ghost profile and try to connect with it. I have quite a number of former co-workers who think they have a contact channel with me in LinkedIn even though it would never reach me. LinkedIn isn't just a nuisance, it's actively poisonous and dangerous.

I'll be doing all my future job hunting on StackOverflow Careers, thanks.

I scraped my 'people you may know' page over 30 days to make sure LinkedIn removed 2000 of my 'stolen contacts' from it. Once they did, 99% of them never appeared again. http://009co.com/?p=9

My Mom asked me if I was recently on LinkedIn. Apparently they emailed her after I made some new connections.

I turned off all email notifications and despise the fact that they email my contacts about my activity.

Just curious - why did you give them your contacts? I've been on it for years and have never uploaded a single contact. I've just manually connected with people I know. Whenever a service asks for my contacts, I know it's because they want to spam them.

They have some tricks on how things are placed on your personal page so you accidentally import your contacts. I've almost done so a few times.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Don't you have to give them your gmail password or some other Google auth? That doesn't seem easy to do accidentally.

Yes they need your password but they mix things in the UI making things close to each other, things pop in and out. Its basically a big trap trying to fish as much as they can from you. I don't even install their phone app knowing they will get access to my contacts.

Many people are literally tricked into uploading their contacts. Example with screenshots.[1] The UI/UX practice is called "dark patterns".

On a monthly basis, I get LinkedIn "invites" from friends who simply didn't understand LinkedIn's hostile and deceptive user interface. They think they're just importing their contacts to conveniently++ find existing profiles but in reality, they're unwittingly giving permission to LinkenIn to spam their address book to recruit new members.

You may be good at defensive web surfing to keep your contacts private but most others are not.

Btw, there was a previous discussion from Feb 2014 about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7276032

[1]https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...

++ (understandably because they don't want to manually retype each contact name into Linkedin. Ain't nobody got time for that.)

Nice link! I'm glad I haven't signed up yet. But then again, I don't use gmail either so importing the address book would be considerably more difficult.

I wonder if you can prevent them from stealing the address book if you install their Android app?

If people have my contacts details that's not really a problem for me. A friend once said he wasn't going to get a gmail account because he didn't want Google knowing all his contacts but Google already had them because they all had gmail accounts. The value of keeping other people's email addresses secret is overrated. Spam is a fraction of the problem it was 10 years ago and there's always filters.

The "spam" we're talking about here is from LinkedIn itself. That is, you give them your contacts, and it will spam them to sign up too.

If gmail started emailing your friends because you used gmail, that would be a good reason to not use gmail.

I'm not saying gmail (google) spam people; i'm saying that not using gmail because you don't want google to know your contacts is silly. it doesn't matter if google knows that you, for instance, are in my contact list. they're not going to spam you. i'm not going to not use linkedin because i'm concerned you're going to get an email from them; that's your problem, and not really a problem at that. You just mark as spam and move on. It's hard to imagine a single person has even decided to not share their contact list with an app or service because they're concerned one of their contacts might get contacted by them.

> It's hard to imagine a single person has even decided to not share their contact list with an app or service because they're concerned one of their contacts might get contacted by them.

You seem to be a little out of touch here. There are several examples of people withholding their contacts list from services like LinkedIn right here in this thread. It's not hard to imagine at all -- just read the posts.

In fact, right above your post that you responded to, the hn user vitd wrote, "why did you give them your contacts? I've been on it for years and have never uploaded a single contact."

Lastly, you're trivializing the situation by suggesting that recipients just mark it as spam and move on. The issue is that LinkedIn deliberately crafted the emails with header "FROM: YOU" and your photo in the message body to make it look like you explicitly sent the email inviting them to join. It's clever social engineering so that the recipients harvested from your contacts list do not treat it as spam. Some recipients know the disguised nature of LinkedIn spam and know you didn't actually send it but many do not (especially older executives). In those cases, they think that you are one of those clueless flakes that signs people up for multi-level-marketing vitamins and vacation timeshares. People genuinely got embarrassed by LinkedIn's spam practices.

Enough people were angry about spam being sent behind their back that they sued LinkedIn: http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-settles-class-action...

I tried the android app, bam - all my contacts are now in "do you know", I thought it would be "click to upload contacts". mistake!

The app came pre-installed on my sony xperia phone. Wasn't even given any reasonable warning about it.

Email from my 88 year old Father:

"I am on linkined now. What do I do?"

I always dread computer related questions from family, but this one is easy - just send the link to close the account.

I think this is actually dangerous for any older and/or not web saavy person. It's a point of entry for identity theft the reason I don't even want my mother to do online banking actually. I can't police her desktop to my liking and I am afraid that somehow someway her having online access could result in countless problems.

also the "your Lynda trial is about to end! sign up now!" emails they keep sending

Some parts of their product ARE terrible, like their search. It almost never works. I sometimes have to go to Google to find someone on LinkedIn.

I find doing anything on linkedin via mobile to be the worst experience.

I am pretty surprised that in SV, they have one of the worst performing mobile experiences. It is always super slow, lags, unclicks, takes me back to an entirely previous page when hitting back, as opposed to the screen I was looking at before I read that profile... etc...

I also couldn't be happier watching linkedin fall. I recently deleted my account because of all the spam and creepy things linkedin does and they still send me emails!

I created my account so they would stop sending me so many invite emails. At least with an account I have some control over what they send me :(

At our company we kept getting emails from them on email addresses that are only used to send data to our service. This was starting to become a problem, so we called them up and asked them to block that domain. They said no. Eventually they said they'd blacklist the email addresses individually. Our response was "OK so we're going to send about 20,000 email addresses for you to blacklist, and probably about 1,000 more every 2 months or so". They blacklisted our domain.

LinkedIn is the only mainstream service I've completely shitcanned in a Gmail filter.

Agreed. In the end I deleted my account and haven't looked back. It gave me no value and just pissed me off.

Am I the only one not getting LinkedIn email?

I have an account, turned off all email-based notifications, and stop by every half-year or so to see what's in my inbox. It's usually full of messages, but I never get any emails from them.

Am I just lucky? What's up?

Same here. I get an email when someone asks to connect but nothing else, and I get that because I want it. They have pretty explicit settings. Just checked and "Introductions and InMail" are only thing enabled. You can also adjust frequency for individual types of messages so you get batch updates.

LinkedIn is generally crappy at what is supposed to be its primary purposes, and they do shady UX stuff. But they have very granular controls for email and push notifications.

I get zero spam to the email I have a LinkedIn account on. I get a shit ton to my gmail, no matter how often I click unsubscribe, send to spam and whatever else.

So both your experience and the grandparent's are possible - they respect you, once you've signed up.

Interesting. That could explain the disparity of experiences being discussed here. I have all my emails in LinkedIn to be discoverable by colleagues, so that means LinkedIn also knows they are specifically me and I'm signed up.

You're not lucky. People are just lazy and like to complain rather than spend the 2 minutes to update their email settings.

The emails are bad, but I also think their product is terrible.

This is true. The newsfeed has turned into meme and inspirational quote sharing. I am unfollowing individual people now (just like FB, yay!)

It really is a poor product for what it looked like it might become.

I am completely happy with this. LinkedIn is showing off as a site to facilitate businesses while indeed is a service for recruiters. Some examples, posting original stuff to groups with thousands of members and not receiving a single comment or click to some link. Very basic bugs in their mobile offering that makes you think nobody cares about developing a good one or it was developed by a freelancer on vacation. The worst is not innovating (yes, like Tinder!) to match businesses: if after years all they have to offer is sending an In-Mail or contact someone through a middleman we are lost.

And... I can't forget the fake invitations I receive every week with fake photos that I detect searching on Google images by an image.

For me, this is the most surprising missed opportunity:

"posting original stuff to groups with thousands of members and not receiving a single comment or click to some link"

LinkedIn had the chance to build some amazing forums. LinkedIn should be the place that you think about when you want to have a conversation about business. They clearly have the traffic. They could have done something amazing with their groups and discussions. They have wasted all of their chances.

Every time they touch Groups, they make them that much worse.

They made a big (incomplete) UI overhaul which managed to make them less easy to use, and half the time fails to load posts (every 1-2 posts as you scroll down is loaded via script, fails a surprising amount of the time, or simply refuses to fire!).

I'm at a total loss as to why they hate Groups so much. Not enough page loads / ad impressions? We run a few groups - ranging from 10L to 90K in size, some of which are quite active. But discussions tend to engage ~.001% of users.

From my perspective, discussion groups at linkedIn fails to deliver because 99% of posts in the groups are shameless self-promotion. Posters and group creators are not seeking knowledge or discussion, but wish to promote their own new product, company. The same goes for nearly all posts on linkedin: the site is treated as an advertising channel by all involved.

I ended up deleting my LinkedIn account with hundreds of connections and recreating it with an email I use for spam. I haven't worried about linkedin emails since. Another recommendation I have: when you go on the job hunt, create an email just for that job hunt. Once you get the job, throw that email away. Next time you get a job, make a new email address. Your recruiter spam will stop.

My parents are always very sad and disappointed when I turn down a recruiter phone call. "This is a headhunter for you, son!" Jobs have somehow become a commodity, so massively available that spammy behaviours appeared.

this... I've refused to ever sign up for LinkedIn despite many peers asking me why not and acting like I should be on there.. I've thought their spam tactics were dispicable and harassing. I've unsubscribed but still get emails trying to get me to sign up. No one "has" to use LinkedIn or any other software for that matter...

One of my biggest technological accomplishments and one of my biggest improvements in quality of life is when I finally managed (after 2 years of regular attempts) to delete my LinkedIn account and halt all emails.

You should not.

If anything, this will cause them to send even more emails!

I'm afraid this will result in even more spammy emails.

Die, Linkedin, die!

Their product IS terrible. Remember they actually charge users for this unlike other networks that monetize purely from advertising. LinkedIn can and should be far better but it's incredibly how bad it really is.

LinkedIn is the king of "dark patterns" UI - every part of their website is optimized to trick you into doing something you have no intention of doing.

Absolutely. Every time I log on, I feel like I'm going to accidentally email my entire contact list.

I did that one time! I changed my title on my profile. It emailed everyone I know sayin I got a promotion :-(

That JUST happened to me.

No, auntie, I'm not celebrating my promotion tonight, but thanks for the congratulations.

I wonder if that's why the manager of a Grease Monkey endorsed me for parallel algorithms... I see bogus endorsements so often.

My mom has endorsed me for literally every tech under the sun without knowing what any of it means.

I've been endorsed by very close friends, who absolutely know what the endorsements are for, for things that I don't actually have any experience in. There's no way they could have been doing the endorsement intentionally.

If they are "very close friends" why dont you just ask them if it was intentional?

Because initiating a conversation with a friend about LinkedIn is more respect and mindshare than this service deserves.

I think endorsements mean two things usually:

1.) Your good at gaming the system. In college, it wasn't unusual to see entire classes sit down, connect, and endorse for everything you had "skills" added for. Bam, hundred of endorsements.

2.) Your connected with people who are a combo of being a bit clueless and want to be nice. It prompts you to endorse people all the time. Like my sibling comment's anecdote, you often get endorsed for random things from random people who have no clue what the skill is, but want to be nice.

Regarding 1, it also want uncommon to hear advisers in my college giving students advice to the effect of, "You remember that 'Hello World!' code you wrote on MIPS? Now you can put x86 assembly language programming on your resume!" I just ignore lists of skills regardless of location.

And the sad thing about it is that (i) they have so much mindshare they don't need to do that shit any more, and (ii) it probably makes the average person that would consider subscribing to an online networking tool less likely to consider buying LinkedIn Premium...

Doesn't seem like there's much value in linkedin premium for non-recruiters and the recruiters certainly aren't complaining about spammy practices.

linkedin's product choices make more sense when you consider that recruiters are their only customers

Tech recruiter here.

It blows my mind that linkedin exists. I believe its Zero to One that talks about how Reid realized rather than try to replace recruiters he made a tool to help them do their job.

Non recruiter/sales people use it as some type on online resume and look at how great I am page while recruiters get access to everyone they could ever want.

LinkedIn does have some non-recruiter customers, though. Like everyone else in the game, has also realized they could make a few bucks off the supply side.

Having trouble getting a job? Just pay us $20/month and more people will see your res... er, profile! Too bad visibility is not the solution those people need. Just one that is trivially implemented and easy to sell.

Well put.

I figured this out quite a few years ago. The first time they spammed me, I signed in and turned off anything that said they would send me email. The next time they spammed I deleted my account and black-holed the email address I used to sign up with them. I gather things continued to go downhill from there (e.g. spamming all your contacts).

I can't understand why people would continue to use a web site from such an obviously dishonest company.

And I absolutely hate that they track which profiles you view and then display that information in the side bar under "people who viewed this profile also viewed". Unless you're looking at high profile person with millions of views, the "also viewed" list becomes a list of friends and not people in the same field or similar job profiles. If I ever have to click on a LinkedIn link, I always go into incognito mode.

Most of my linkedIn activity is on incognito mode

I created a dummy linkedin profile exactly because of this. I kept getting notifications that an ex from 5 years ago was constantly looking at my profile.

Linkedin is so scammy.

Case and point - having to use this script to unsubscribe from all the emails ...

https://gist.github.com/chengyin/7021086

Lots of angry sentiment towards this company here. I understand it doesn't necessarily bring this demographic as much value since most here are probably happily employed and don't need it. There's plenty of others who count on a service like LinkedIn, which doesn't have a good comparison (e.g. Twitter to Facebook).

Personally, I've found value in it from the potential clients I've received (I'm a contractor) and the ability to look up just about anyone I may need to do business with. I use it professionally to get an overview of others like I use Wikipedia to get an overview of a topic.

I do know they have room to improve. I've been using the service since 2006 and have seen all manner of their silly practices. But as a well-known, professional network with a large userbase, I have yet to find a rivaling alternative.

The angry sentiment isn't because people don't see potential value. It's because they do see the value - and how the company keeps spoiling what could be a good user experience.

I agree with this. I have received a ton of value from linkedin, but the UX - particularly on mobile (including their crappy apps) is frustrating.

Would the situation have turned out differently if users gave LinkedIn money in recognition of the referrals LinkedIn facilitated?

People like to hate linkedIn for being exploitative, while happily advancing their careers/businesses without paying LinkedIn for building the network infrastructure.

My speculation is that without any comparable competitors, there's nothing to force LinkedIn to change the negative aspects of their service. If there were two competing services, we would see users gravitating towards the service they prefer and the other service desperately trying to correct itself. For example, when Yahoo introduced suggested searches, Google noticed and picked up the feature too. Alternatively, when IE6 was king, they let it stagnate and look at what happened.

So from that standpoint, I hope that LinkedIn doesn't fail, but rather a competing service nurtures an environment where LinkedIn has to compete. Then hopefully we can see improvements towards what users really want.

The reason a LinkedIn competitor hasn't emerged is the same reason a viable Facebook competitor hasn't emerged: at this point the network effects are too strong, and it's extremely difficult to beat incumbents because of that.

Besides, think about how much flak some HN submissions get for being "just another social network." I think the whole social network market has fully saturated and there will be additional difficulty in convincing people there is room for more social networks (aside from certain niche differentiators such as centralized vs distributed, which 99% of users don't care about).

> The reason a LinkedIn competitor hasn't emerged is the same reason a viable Facebook competitor hasn't emerged: at this point the network effects are too strong, and it's extremely difficult to beat incumbents because of that.

I'd say LinkedIn actually has stronger network effects than Facebook, or other consumer social networks. Consumer social networks are used more casually, so it's easier to get users to sign up than it would be for a professional social network, where users tend to adopt a more conservative mindset. And we've seen several consumer social networks rise in the post-Facebook era - Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

The only social network I can reliably guess that someone is on, regardless of job type, is, alas, LinkedIn.

My friend who is a biologist doesn't have a Twitter since nobody in her field uses it, but she has a LinkedIn.

My software developer friends have Twitter, so that's my go-to... but then it's a mishmash of business and personal. Or sometimes only personal, so it feels weird to talk business over it. So then... email, since soft devs - rightfully so - dislike LinkedIn.

I don't know the solution, but it's clear one should be built. Does LinkedIn have an easy "export my social graph" option to at least jump start w competitor?

There's an export contacts feature, which was restored after removing it resulted in a user backlash (http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/25/linkedin-brings-back-tool-...). But if a competitor tried to create a one-click feature for programatically exporting contacts from LinkedIn and importing them into their own database, they would probably get banned. And for the vast majority of users, explaining how to export/import a CSV manually is not viable.

It gets you five columns - name/title/company/email/location.

Unlike the old export feature, it's also frequently missing your latest connections (30-60 days worth, I think).

There are very strong competitors in the German and French speaking worlds.

> There's nothing to force LinkedIn to change the negative aspects of their service

Yeah there is: a $10 billion drop in their stock valuation.

It's unlikely that the drop in the company's value has that much to do with their silly practices.

You said exactly what I had surmised. I don't use LinkedIn, and don't even really get spammed by it...but it's the one service that I don't use that I completely believe has a viable and valuable product. That it is facing such uncertainty is just baffling to me.

Same. LinkedIn has helped me find 2 fantastic jobs now (and leads to many other potential ones). Granted, it was through one recruiter of the many that spammed my inbox. But still, that clutter stays on LinkedIn and I only deal with it when I need it.

In another use case I've also used LinkedIn to find service providers. Instead of relying on word of mouth I can vet someone from their work history, endorsements, and recommendations.

So yeah, they have bad practices, but they're not all bad. I do have to say that what they do provide of value is easily replicable and this is probably a great opportunity for anyone who wants to start something.

The potential usefulness of LinkedIn only adds to the disappointment and resentment. It is sometimes useful. It could be good. Why does it have to be so intrusive and underhanded that I won't let the app on my phone?

It does have a lot of value. My partner found some awesome contractors by doing searches on LinkedIn for the relevant keywords (it helped that they were unknown technologies with less than a dozen profiles listing them)

I too (as a freelancer) find quite a bit of value out of LinkedIn, but that's orthogonal to the fact that they are a scummy company with even lower ethical standards than Facebook. That they don't have a rivaling alternative to provide competition only adds to the tragedy.

You try their ProFinder yet? I've been messing with it a bit, still too early to make a call on it.

LinkedIn lucked out and rode the network effect to its current size. Note that the only thing you like about it is its network effect, which is more a question of timing than open competition at this point.

If other websites like Facebook, Yelp, Google, etc. dumped so much crap on the user while offering so little the internet would be almost unusable. LinkedIn should rot, I'd love to see it, because then everyone would migrate to a better alternative.

This is Stockholm syndrome writ large.

>but as a well-known, professional network with a large userbase, I have yet to find a rivaling alternative.

That's their only advantage, that they are big and almost everyone is already there but it always feels to me like they are some sort of myspace waiting for their a Facebook to come and do it right.

Hi everyone,

I'm Joshua Hartman, the lead engineer for all of LinkedIn's consumer products. Thanks for all the passionate feedback here and we really appreciate it. I just wanted to say that we've been hard at work trying to improve the clarity of our products over the last year and this is something that we will continue to focus on going forward. Many of you have spoken of high volumes of emails. In 2015 LinkedIn built a piece of infrastructure called the "Air Traffic Controller" to make sure our communications are relevant. This infrastructure enabled us to cut the volume of email we sent by 50% and reduce customer complaints by 40% in 2015 - http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/11/10/sending-less-email-is-ju.... We know we have a lot more work to do for LinkedIn to work really well for the tech industry, and we have heard you and will keep refining the experience.

Thanks! - Josh Hartman

Hi Josh,

Glad to hear about the reductions in email.

Regarding your statement "We've been hard at work trying to improve the clarity of our products over the last year" — this just doesn’t ring true, as it seems to imply that lack of clarity has been an accidental shortcoming, when it is very plainly intentional confusion (hence why everyone is calling it "dark UX"). So when you are talking about trying to improve the clarity, do you mean to say that there is an internal struggle for the soul of linkedin? Engineering vs. suits, or something along those lines?

Hi alanh, my personal opinion on this is that since Jeff Weiner assumed dual CEO and Chief Product Officer roles the company has done a much better job using both qualitative experience in conjunction with quantitative metrics when making decisions rather than making a decision only on numbers.

Here's another idea - don't give me a push notification anytime someone in my network has an update.

That's for their actual customers, the recruiters. Recruiters want to know when somebody updates because that's usually a sign they're about to start looking. It's a big deal.

Sucks for you, but you're the product, not the customer.

I have a question! I'm a student and have noticed 5 or so profiles that connect with 20+ of my classmates/friends with impressive but beleivable titles at well known companies (Human resources at IBM) [1] and generic job histories. The names only exist on linkedin. Its obvious they are either just scraping profiles or something more nefarious. What are you doing to stop the creation of these fake profiles? Why are my friends so dumb?

[1] Fake profile examples, with 20+ in common connections: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonia-bargo-04b09829 https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-bertoli-48909829

Due to boredom I did more research. Reverse image searched the profile pic, found it on a yelp profile writing fake 5 star reviews and one of those fake sites that 'let employers fight over you.'

Some people approve every request because LinkedIn incentivizes users to have 500+ connections. And your friends are possibly dumb, but almost certainly ignorant of social media data vacuuming/social engineering techniques such as this.

It's not the clarity of the products, its the quality that needs work. There are still basic things that need work including broken UI and random bugs encountered everyday. I have a basic company/employee connection support issue outstanding for weeks now. Surely for a product that users actually pay for, the end result should be far better than this?

Really? Where?

You still use dark patterns all over the place. Misdirection to get users importing contacts, burying opt-outs (try figuring out how to disable InMail), removing features from free accounts.

Oh, the irony. AMA comments on HN by employees of companies in the news are usually very well received. We naturally give a chance and the benefit of doubt. LinkedIn may have especially pissed off developers since we have so many headhunters after us with high margins. It looks like a MS person logging in a Linux forum under the era of Steve Ballmer.

You are quite cynical. And Ballmer was still better for the general public than the masters of evil patterns Gates and Gates v2 "Satya".

You're a brave man, posting this here. Not least because if LinkedIn continues to add clearly-intentional dark patterns, people here are likely to remember you said it.

So: I hope that's the optimistic sign it might be ;-)

Hm. You brag on your own LinkedIn profile about several interesting things: "Increased the number of invites generated from "people you may know" recommendations by 50%", "Intelligent blending of ads into the feed - able to increase sponsored content revenue by 50% without harming engagement".

So okay, you're already very familiar with LinkedIn's misleading dark patterns. You are, for instance, making ads look like real content in order to get people to mistakenly trust them more.

This makes your claim that you're hard at work "trying to improve the clarity of our products" mean something different than I had expected.

Hi angelbob, the specific work you referenced was algorithmic in nature. Simply put, users that are less likely to interact with ads will see fewer on their feeds. I hope you will agree with me that it is a better experience.

Good. I hope that's all "intelligent blending" means. Too often, that's a euphemism for "making ads look like more non-ads" to fool the user, with "progress" measured in metrics like how often they get clicked on -- which is, by any reasonable measure, a dark pattern.

And LinkedIn certainly does that kind of thing (example: sponsored posts on the front page inserted between posts from people I know, formatted identically, differentiated only by a medium-gray-over-white "Sponsored.")

But glad to hear that in this case you just mean showing fewer ads to those who don't click on them.

This is a really shitty thing to ask but have you cleared this text with your general counsel?

All those celebrating this event - don't.

If you think these guys were using shady and scummy tactics before to spam you and steal your contacts, what do you think they are going to do when their share price sinks? Suddenly reform and stop the borderline-illegal stuff?

LinkedIn will get even more aggressive at monetization. So expect even more of:

1) Random clicks that let you "invite" everyone in your address book

2) Incessant daily nag e-mails - "Complete your profile"

3) Blatant Man-in-the-Middle attacks for stuff you browse on your mobile

4) Data harvesting and selling even more stuff about you

5) etc, etc, etc

If ever there was a market ready to be "disrupted" this is it. Google could have done this with G+, Twitter can do this today with proper reorientation, Heck FB could wipe the floor with these jokers (WhatsApp could too).

> Google could have done this with G+, Twitter can do this today with proper reorientation, Heck FB could wipe the floor with these jokers (WhatsApp could too).

I keep waiting for any of those companies to pull their heads out of their butts and realize this.

Google's product strategy seems to be a random-walk, Twitter's platform is too far from LinkedIn's workflow to make it work, but Facebook? Facebook is the kind of company I'd thought would have figured this out.

https://work.fb.com/ ?

Work is for internal team use, I think, not for personal professional development. Users accounts won't persist across multiple jobs.

It depends on how strong your sense of schadenfreude is.

If you really, really want the scummy behavior to stop, and you just really get off on seeing them crash and burn, your best hope is that they'll fall so hard and so fast that their "even more aggressive at monetization" phase lasts less than a year until the bottom falls out and they get acquihired by Google or Facebook or someone, and then they turn the servers off as soon as the deal closes.

Of course, the worst case scenario is that instead of an acquihire, they get swallowed a private equity firm who auctions off all their data piecemeal to all kinds of nefarious parties...

I'n not in LinkedIn, so...

If they keep doing well then they're getting positive reinforcement that their shitty practises work.

So, either way they keep acting shittily, at least this way other companies might learn a lesson not to.

I say this every time LinkedIn comes up but there’s an easy way to fix this: delete your account[1]. If they keep on emailing you, unsubscribe. If they keep on emailing you, threaten to sue and you’ll be put on some sort of internal blacklist (worked for me). Job done.

[1] https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63/kw/dele...

I've been registered on LinkedIn for a long time and found it a fun an useful way to catch up on people moving around and advancing their careers, what used to be done at the occasional cocktail party or celebration could be done faster and quicker by scanning the changes. And that has helped me stay in professional touch with people with whom I might otherwise lose touch.

But that said, I've recognized their maniacal monetezation schemes with trepidation. Is is it really "valuable" to me to see the names of everyone who has looked at my profile? Is it $5/month valuable? No. Is it valuable to LinkedIn that people who don't know me can find me there? Apparently the recruiters think it is. So the place where I feel LinkedIn is suffering is that it makes it painful to stay on the site as one of the 'targets'. And that is getting them into trouble. Because if the only people there are recruiters and nobody else, it won't have any value to the recruiters either.

All of that points to some serious strategic myopia at the top. They need to take their top leadership into a room for a weekend and get on the same page about how to run that business, MySpace is the canonical example of getting the calculus wrong.

I paid for premium for about 4 months while job searching. Being able to deep-dive into some companies and directly contact people helped me get my current job. It was definitely a helpful tool as a job-searcher.

Now that I have a stable job, it has no value and I ended my premium account.

Serious question - what convinced you to sign up for the premium in the first place?

Job-seekers get like, 5 InMails and 3 useless search filters, plus some vanity fluff that does nothing (who viewed your profile).

5 InMails may be worth the price in some cases, but I've always felt the jobseeker service was somewhat predatory. That you found it worthwhile makes me curious - am I missing something?

He spent $20, and landed a job... seems like a tiny "gamble" that paid off. When you're unemployed, you get motivated to try different things... just like dating sites when you're single. :-)

I was brand new to the market, so had nearly zero connections. I followed the "Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters" system.

A couple replies: - Who viewed your profile was helpful. I'd send out a "cold call" email to someone, and if they clicked through to my linkedin profile then I knew they were interested. I'd then try to phone them as soon as they saw my profile. It's surprisingly effective. - The InMails were helpful. I preferred to actually call or email over inmail, but in some cases there was _no_ contact info for the person. In that case, InMail really was the only way to contact someone, and I did get 2 nice contacts out of it.

The thing you're missing is that the $5 a month enhanced profile isn't the main product they're selling. They sell recruiting products, sales products, and more that you just don't have visibility into because you're not a salesperson or a recruiter.

Just another reminder to never ever build your company for Wall street. In 2004, Netflix went from 40 to 2 in 6 months. Amazon from 89 to 5. There are entirely zero competitors to Linkedin right now (FB is nowwhere in the space). And while i agree the product has stagnated a bit - this in my view is another example of Wall Street's insanity. (and no, i don't own any shares :)

No sure I understand. Wall Street had certain expectations of LinkedIn's growth. That was reflected in the stock price.

I was incorrect. Q4 earnings were great, it was the fact that LinkedIn released 2016 guidance that was far below market expectations.

[LinkedIn released their earnings and they were way below expectations, so the stock took a massive hit.]

Does that seem unfair to you?

Imagine if I bought "stock" in your job. I monitored your performance and set expectations for your work. You fail to meet those expectations, so as the majority shareholder of your job, I have you fired and replaced with someone else. Or you underperform once and I use this threat every single review.

That's how Wall Street ruins good business.

I'm not sure I agree with your "bought stock in your job" example.

A better analogy would be: - your performance is great - your boss tells you that you'll get a promotion next year if you keep it up - your performance takes a turn for the worse - your boss tells you your performance is worse and lets you know that the promotion next isn't a sure thing

The stock market is a market that allows people to buy and sell stock at the price they see fit. The market should reflect all available information. I don't see any reason why LinkedIn's stock shouldn't plummet if suddenly their growth prospects went from "spectacular" to "so-so".

The analogy would likely be better if, rather than firing him, you docked his pay.

But it's an aggregation of sentiment, not just one person.

And if you feel that sentiment is wrong, there's your chance to make money! Start buying stock in that business at the low price the "fools" have set.

It's more like if I decide to pay you $300k because I'm pretty sure you'll do great work. If you then turn in a performance no better than a guy I pay $150k, then I'm going to go "oh shit, I was wrong and should pay you a lot less".

The stock market is all about expected future performance. Nobody forces companies to be publicly traded. If you don't want to deal with the expectations game then don't sell shares of your company to outside parties who generally don't care about your actual business.

Or, worse, you have a Really Damn Good Year, but I ding you at your performance review. Even though you were the best you've ever been, and better than your peers, you weren't quite as good as I was hoping you to be, so ... sorry, no raise this year.

On the other hand, you got the raise at the point where I started hoping you'd do great, even if you hadn't yet.

Maybe. It's really hard to set a fair baseline for a performance bonus; being given stock options struck at the current price is a very similar exercise.

Every publicly traded company is subject to the other side of the coin too: their stock price rises based on exceeding analysts' expectations. If you want to be publicly traded, then you have to deal with your performance relative to the public's expectation.

Has LinkedIn even had any positive EPS yet?

From what I can tell it has, but I'm not a financial expert.

It wasn't that the Q4 earnings weren't up to snuff, they were, they exceeded expectations. It's that LinkedIn lowered it's predictions for next year.

The job networking site said that revenue for first quarter of 2016 is expected to be $820 million and adjusted earnings per share will be 55 cents. For the full year, revenue is forecasted to be about $3.6 billion. Investors were discouraged by these numbers, because they were expecting $867 million in revenue for the current quarter and $3.9 billion for the full year.

By all metrics the business is doing great, but stock holders demand more growth and act irrationally over "sentiments". This is not reasonable or sustainable.

No. I think it's other way around. They were priced so high in the first place because they were expected to grow at a very high pace. They have mostly matching those until 15Q4 but the expectations for the next year are drastically lower so they get priced lower. What's so difficult to understand about it.

If you feel LNKD is cheap at this price, it's time for you to go make some money. Buy stock, calls.

Try to avoid concepts like "fair" and "unfair" when dealing with the market. I think this correction is an over-reaction to the guidance and the stock looks like a good buy to me right now.

The other way to look at it is that the shares were vastly overvalued to begin with, and the latest financial statement has caused investors to overvalue them by a bit less.

I still think the value is insane, but the insanity is in the opposite direction to you :)

In Europe, xing is actually more popular than linkedin. So there is serious competition.

I think that's country specific. I'm in Denmark and I never heard of Xing.

I think Xing is more of a german thing (it's a german company).

It's the same in Spain. I also think it's popular mainly in Germany.

UK here. Never heard of it.

The problem is that their business model is probably more sensitive to overall economic health than most. Premium services that are nice to have for recruiting might be some of the first things to get cut from customers' budgets in a downturn when they're not hiring as much. I suspect that investors are jittery about the economy overall and think LinkedIn might be in for a slow couple of years if the economy stagnates. They're repricing the stock to reflect a slower growth trajectory.

>Premium services that are nice to have for recruiting might be some of the first things to get cut from customers' budgets in a downturn when they're not hiring as much.

I agree.

The binge on linkedin spending can't increase dramatically forever it eventually will follow the macro trends.

Sounds like the bubble is bursting.

The established companies whose valuation was based on multiples of future growth are taking the hit, getting in line with more traditional multiples of current revenue.

Everyone is taking a hit right now, but especially companies priced on growth that have been unable to meet their numbers (LinkedIn just had a bad quarter and released lower guidance). It's a really bad time to not meet your numbers.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bubble%20burst&sort=byDate&pre...

What, only 50 pages of occurrences?

"apparently idioms exist"

Hm, would be fun to see a plot like Google's n-gram viewer of HN's use of the phrase "bubble burst" over time.

Instead of using an ignorant sarcasm, take a look at facts and formulate an argument:

http://etfdb.com/etfdb-category/technology-equities/

http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/18/there-are-now-229-unicorn-...

http://www.bloomberg.com/research/sectorandindustry/industri...

The fact is that LinkedIn isn't a "Unicorn" startup, which is kind of their point of the overuse of tech bubble.

The bubble has been bursting in the last few years (according to commenters) but the overall stocks/valuations were going up.

What we're seeing is a slow-mo burst. The outer balloon shell has given way and has left the inner water ball still, albeit briefly, intact. Only a matter of time before we all take a bath.

So, a bubble-bath, then?

And then they fall 40% in a single day. That's why it's called "bursting"

While I agree with you, I would say that bubble bursting is more synonymous with larger disasters like the housing crash in 08 or the Dotcom bust in 2000. In my opinion what's happening with overvalued companies is more of a market correction. To me it doesn't seem like people are in panic, people are just saying things along the lines of "well yeah, they were overvalued" and they move on.

Let's see what happens first. The 2008 crash was orderly too up until Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in Sept 2008:

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

Market topped in Oct 2007, and then there was a bunch of debate over whether we were or weren't in a recession through the first half of 2008. Bear Sterns went bust in March 2008, everybody was like "Well duh, they should have known it was coming", people thought it was the end of it, and the market recovered. AIG went bankrupt in Aug 2008, Lehman brothers in Sept 2008, and that's when everybody panicked. TARP passed in Q4 2008.

The dot-com bubble burst actually was pretty orderly - basically the starry-eyed buyers for tech stocks ran out, and companies couldn't get money on the public markets. Consequences were limited mostly to the people who had invested and the founders & employees of those companies. The road downward was actually more gradual than the road upward had been.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

I think what Kin is saying before in 2008 and dot-com there were fundamental reasons for a bubble to burst which had an navigate reprecussions on the economy(recession/increased unemployment).

dotcom - shell companies, with no revenue or profits. 2008 - excessive/unsustainable leverage both by corporations and individuals.

This time around multiple QE cycles resulted in decreased treasury and bond yeilds. People\funds with captial went to invest other assets classes e.g. equity markets seeking high yeilds and as a result increased the price multiples/valuations while the intrinic businesses valuation and growth remained the same.

Now people are starting to realize that multiples(what you pay for a company and what its actually worth) are too high and started taking money out of equity markets. While the fundamentals of the business has stayed the same.

Hence this bubble bursting or "significant price correction" wont have the same impact on mainstreet as the other two bubbles because the business are still sustainable but the prices weren't.

Prices are not proxy for revenue/profits/growth or value. So unless someone can give actual facts that the fundamentals of the underlying businesses are/will be impacted on a systematic basis I agree with kin.

That's like saying the housing crash would have never happened because real estate always has inherent value.

A bubble's a bubble. This isn't a simple "correction". When your stock's PE is above 1000x, it's a bubble. Overvaluation IS the definition of a bubble, not a lack of "fundamentals".

Amazon and Yahoo had revenue in 2000 and still crashed.

No bubble burst this time, it will be a sequence of large corrections. Too many small time investors willing to invest for low returns to crash like 2k.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bubble

It strikes me that you could have said the same thing back in 2012 when Zynga and Groupon were cratering.

Likelier, there isn't much of a bubble at all, and companies tend to be properly valued.

that would be good timing, I sold all my stocks a few months ago...

Have some perspective. It's been a 6 year bull market. This is hardly a correction let alone a crash. You might prove correct, but it's just a guess at this point.

But you would say the same of the period 2002-2008: A 6-year bull market followed by a... correction: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

Linkedin is a terrible company, I've always resisted making a profile there because I think that to support a company like that in name is to give them a free pass on their despicable behavior. No matter though, I still receive their spam on a daily basis, but that's nothing a filter rule can't take care of.

Some examples? I can't remember any big scandals...

The only one that I can remember was the email MITM "service".

Really? They just settled a lawsuit for $13 million for spam: http://time.com/4062519/linkedn-spam-settlement/

i almost wish they spammed me so i could get some free money. i don't get hardly any mail from them.

I don't get hardly any mail from them, either. It's several times a day "updating" me on my contacts, even after I have unsubscribed several times.

You could only get money if you managed to get your address book stolen and all your contacts spammed.

$10 is very little consolation for hundreds of people you know now thinking that you are, ehrm, not smart, for giving your address book to LinkedIn, or worse, thinking you're a spammer because each of your contacts got three annoying e-mails "from you" with no opt-out button.

If they had to pay even one dollar to each person they spammed, they'd probably be bankrupt.

Well, they had a security breach in 2012 that leaked 6.5 million unsalted password hashes:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/6-5-million-linkedin-passwo...

They have also been sued for stealing users' e-mail address books and spamming all their contacts with invites:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/23/linkedin-sued...

After quitting my full-time job and going independent(ish, for now) last year, I've sometimes regretted deleting my LinkedIn profile, as it's so commonly used for networking and searching for leads for job candidates.

But I agree with you that it's a terrible, and it's why I deleted my profile. I didn't even know how creepy/skeevy their business model is then, but what I did see was that their product is just BAD in so many ways, yet they survive only because they hold an unassailably dominant market position.

If you hold a monopoly position, then please, please at least make your product great. I'm looking at you, too, Craigslist. For example.

I've literally never experienced any negative repercussions from not having a LinkedIn account. I deleted it years ago and switched jobs twice since. In all of my applications or interviews, I just say that I dislike the way LinkedIn captures personal data and everyone understands and doesn't care. I also offer to share my Stack Overflow Careers page with them and they are perfectly happy with it, in fact some have even commented about how much more useful that is.

I really don't understand what value regular users are getting (let alone people paying for Premium). Part of me believes people will realize this and delete accounts en masse, but then I remember how status obsessed everyone is and I have my doubts. LinkedIn is sort of like Zynga for career status, so I suspect there is a lot of user psychology they can manipulate.

I object to calling out Craigslist on this basis. Sure I am a web developer and designer and can quickly eviscerate the usability of Craigslist just as anyone else here can.

However... Craigslist for all its fault is driven by an egalitarian vision. The ideology which prevents Craigslist from improving their UI and providing an API (or supporting scraping) is the same ideology which prevents them from taking massive investment, becoming beholden to investors, monetizing at any cost, and selling out the users in the process.

It's very easy to sit here and split that hair and so, "but no, I want them to just improve the UI, but also not sell out." It's very easy to create a laundry list of the way we wish others would behave, but it's also childish and unrealistic to expect the world to conform to our ideals, especially when we are distant and ignorant of the actual choices in front of the stakeholders.

Given the nature of what is going on in the Valley right now—eg. Twitter considered a failure because they only have 1/5th the userbase of Facebook, and nary a drop of ink spilled on its contribution to global conversation, all because we need to see how many dollars this thing can actually generate before we decide on whether its successful despite whatever world-changing qualities it may have—I think Craigslist is a wonderful company that more should take as an example.

You're right. My error. Thank you!

I have been seriously frustrated by the dominance of Craigslist re apt-hunting, but it's quite fair to note that, while I may object to their choices, it is obviously not greed that (primarily) motivates them/him. So it's definitely not right for me to group them with LinkedIn.

It's the exact same kind of criticism often leveled at tarsnap. Motivations matter, and in some cases they matter a lot.

LinkedIn is full of people trying to get people to pay attention to them... but the people they are trying to impress aren't really on LinkedIn (they have a profile but that's it... they don't use it as an actual social platform).

In that sense LinkedIn is mostly a wasteland.

Annoyingly, they removed the most useful bit (for me) several years ago in terms of getting work.

LinkedIn Answers was a bit crappy, but I used to spend quite a lot of time giving good detailed answers to people. That ended up with a few short consulting gigs that we quite fun "Could you come and sort this out for me".

They never built on LinkedIn Answers, let it stagnate and then killed it. It was much better than the stupid Groups system.

Really depends on the industry and position.

Mid-level executives in IT/Tech/Consulting globally are practically on LinkedIn, it is a giant job board. A self-updating and self-cleaning CV database and rolodex.

The biggest CRM system on earth. And it has gotten better recently, the product team has given up on moving into Twitter/Facebook crap features and is re-focusing on the job at hand.

If they'd add hierarchies and reporting structures, they'd be even more valuable (and dangerous). B2B sales people live in LinkedIn. HR ditto.

Yes, developers don't get the value - but it is not for you. Directors, VPs, MBAs,...more so.

To me it looks like a wasteland of recruiters. I used to think it was neat when some recruiter would contact me about a job, but now I realize they are just spamming everyone with (your framework here) listed in their skills. The over-saturation of recruiters, connections with everyone you even slightly know, and people endorsing you for skills they don't know you have has made it all meaningless.

If you were an outsider in need of a job, you'd appreciate the recruiter spam.

But I don't feel like any of it is authentic. Submitting my resume directly to the company would probably accomplish the same thing.

In some cases, that might even be true.

Now only if LinkedIn had made it recruiters' emails an opt-in.

Not really. I've been in that situation, and spammy recruiters are just looking at "Oh, he's got $buzzword in his profile, and $company needs $buzzword!" If $buzzword = bash, that's not really useful. It's used everywhere, and isn't really an exclusive skillset. They don't pay attention to company culture, pay, or even location.

Obviously YMMV, but IME, they pretty much just throw everything against the wall, to see what sticks.

Not when 90% of them aren't even local.

Not when they all for your resume, then turn you down because you only know Chef, not Chef, Puppet and Ansible.

My real estate agent endorsed me for OCaml.

Someone who didn't pay me for some outstanding invoices for contract php work in 2002 just endorsed me for iOS dev. I haven't spoken to him since 2002.

I miss the old days of LinkedIn, when they had a Stack Overflow-esque Q&A subsite, Groups were at the forefront of your feed, and it was the ideal forum to hold discussions with like-minded professionals (i.e. other developers).

Today it seems like it's an endless stream of garbage posts, many from recruiters (why did I connect with so many?), Groups is now relegated to the background, buried away. Every few months they roll out an updated UI that seems less intuitive. It all feels like a cheap imitation of Facebook, underwhelming and having little value.

(P.S. Someone asked if they ever found a job on LI, I did, not from a recruiter but a developer colleague. so there's still value there.)

The idea that LinkedIn has enough market value to be able to lose $10B of it makes me sad.

Yeah, I would like to see someone justify the market value of LinkedIn. They seem to be losing money, and they have over 9000 employees (doing what exactly?).

Umm, did you read the earnings report? They are hardly losing money.

That depends on your definition of "losing". Ignoring stock based compensation (almost 20% of revenue if properly accounted for using GAAP) helps to get the "adjusted" net income into positive territory.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/business/high-tech-fantasy...

I wish I could run my life while ignoring certain pesky costs!

I might be reading the wrong, but they seem to have been losing money the first three quarters of 2015: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:LNKD&fstype=ii

They would need to make a pretty good profit the last three month of 2015 to make up for it.

Again I might just not know how to read financial statements, but adding up all the "Net incomes" gives you around $108 million in lose.

They have posted a small loss ($8mn) in the fourth quarter. But if you ignore a number of costs you can easily convert a $166 million loss into a $373 million gain. See the last table in the press release:

http://investors.linkedin.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=95...

Many people in those xxx headcounts in large companies are in business development.

When I first joined LinkedIn I thought it was an amazing idea. But as I slowly used it overtime I noticed almost every single person I know accepts EVERY SINGLE request to connect and gives people skills that they never even had. What's the point of that?

I had countless managers who've literally never looked at my code then vouched on my LinkedIn profile that I was an expert in multiple technologies they wouldn't even recognize if it was sitting in front of them.

So we have a network which, granted, still has utility but it's loaded with spam, no way of really validating an identity, and everyone's connections have been distilled into people who have sent them invites and nothing more. It's such hit and miss trying to really network with people on there that I typically login once every 6 months or so just so I can clear out my inbox.

Now if they turned LinkedIn into a more verified network with capabilities to have more meaningful conversations and introductions I would be interested again. Right now it's just a shitty clone of Facebook with job ads and resumes.

Not super surprising. The majority of their revenue comes from recruiters, and I expect the majority of paying recruiters are in tech. So any downswing in tech will be substantially felt. Especially for a firm whose earnings are negative, losing growth is bound to be a problem.

On a related note, how much of Facebook's mobile revenue is for mobile apps? Should we expect a similar decline as the economy declines further?

I'm sympathetic to your post, except the last bit. Where do you see the [broad] economy declining, only sector I know declining is energy.

Energy always takes a massive hit when oil is low.

I'm not clear if we're in good or bad shape. Exporters are in trouble: strong dollar, failing overseas economies, etc. Declining S&P500, bonds prices rising, etc.

Market prices are still overvalued, as well =( http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/

IBM, Intel, HP, etc are all declining, as well as retailers like Wal-Mart. Obviously the jobs report is welcome news, so maybe I just have an overly pessimistic outlook.

The US is currently adding jobs and adding jobs in tech, their issue is probably competition (LinkedIn is not the only game in town).

Mobile revenue was 80% of Facebook's revenue in Q4 2015.

Update: after looking at their revenues they might also have some currency troubles, they have far more international revenue than I would have guessed (~38%).

What are better alternatives to LinkedIn? I'd be happy to abandon it.

What are the other games, I'd be interested in checking out a (viable) LinkedIn competitor.

The only other one I know of is XING.

A lot of LinkedIn hate, but no comment I've read acknowledges that LinkedIn (in some fields, and growing) has replaced the resume.

It's almost a universal format — there's a lot of value in that. I can just give someone this standard URL instead of creating some crazy word doc with weird indentations.

That's ridiculous. I have literally never applied for a job where I could just give a Linkedin link instead of using a resume or filling out a form.

Seriously? Where do you live, out of curiosity?

I live in Seattle.

My experience too with companies in SV and several other States. Even if they accept a URL they insist on a file upload too. As an interviewer I like LinkedIn's format. It's far easier to read and easy to click through to previous employer's, recommenders, etc. compared to a resume.

Except for the fact that people CANNOT see your resume if they are not paying users of LinkedIn and not connected to you or your contacts.

That's not true. There are settings in your profile that you can use to control exactly how much of your profile is visible to people not directly connected to you. e.g. My profile is entirely public (you still need to have a LinkedIn account in order to actually view it, but we don't need to have any degree of connectivity):

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rameshdharan

Sorry, but I've not made this up:

"Full profiles for 3rd-degree connections are available only to premium account holders."

Here is a screenshot: http://booleanblackbelt.com/2012/09/full-profiles-of-3rd-deg...

Yes, this was true for several years. As of January 2015, 3rd degree is visible again.

Though if you're willing to jump through some hoops, all profiles are visible.

I missed that. Thanks for the info. Do you have any link to some authoritative source about this change (I've been unable to find one)?

I'm not an expert, but LinkedIn doesn't seem that awful a company at $14 billion market cap, especially given the following:

- The have $3 billion in cash [0]

- They are cash-flow positive, and have a $3 billion run rate. (So taking the cash out of the picture, their market cap is less than 4x revenue)

- Many business people (high value customers) use them many times a day.

- May people pay for the service. (I've paid as both a job-seeker and hiring manager)

- They have a stranglehold on executive search, with enormous pricing power.

- They have done this on the back of a dated product, without much evolution. This isn't the negative that it sounds like. It highlights their market strength. (Bloomberg and Salesforce are similar examples)

While the lack of future growth may warrant a price drop, I think they're taking a lot of heat for the industry as a whole. If they deserve a 40% drop, many others deserve much worse.

[0] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ALNKD&ei=oIa2VuGwD4WK...

LinkedIn is turning into such a mess.

There is no etiquette. Recruiters just spam random people for connections. Users share stupid things that belongs on Facebook. Groups are almost unusable. I'm not even getting into all the dark patterns to crawl users' mailbox and contact list, deceiving "connect" links that actually invite a person who is not even on LinkedIn, etc.

I don't think I ever got a single job through LinkedIn.

Hoping to also receive 40% less spam from them too. LinkedIn's an ugly company who's primary business model is social engineering and active exploitation of their user base - sharing the bottom rung on the social ladder with recruiters (aka Customers) and their widespread indiscriminate spam and phishing attempts.

I'm going to endorse them for "Creating Value for Shareholders."

I'm not surprised. If LinkedIn disappears one day, will we miss it? I probably won't.

As far as I'm concerned, LinkedIn's only purpose is to lookup a contact's name and check his/her profile to learn a bit more before/after a first discussion. I'd venture thinking that this could easily be replaced by static web pages hosted anywhere, and some Google search.

Would you miss LinkedIn?

Edit: In the beginning, LinkedIn used to offer a fair deal to its users: you spend time filling your profile, in return we host your profile for free and for everyone to see (as your public and official resume on the web). But LinkedIn changed this policy a few years ago and, since then, only members close to you in terms of connection can see your profile. Others have to be paying members. In my opinion, it was the beginning of the end for LinkedIn.

Am I the only one that likes getting email from people who want to give me a job? I use a separate email and filter the messages out of my inbox. I go in there every week or so and see what's around. For recruiters I think are genuine and are working on cool projects I just politely say I'm not interest right now but feel free to reach out again later.

It's good to see there are people interested in my talents and want to give me money to use them. LinkedIn allows all of that communication to flow from one place.

I always respond to thoughtful recruiters. The ones who look into me a little bit and present a job that matches me in some way. They are always welcome and appreciated.

But I've never once gotten that from a recruiter that contacted me through LinkedIn. I'm surprised to hear you have. Recruiters from LinkedIn just spam everyone they can get a hold of and see what sticks.

Years ago after reading this I was so disgusted at LinkedIn I closed my account.

They have a pay for placement scheme with both employees and employers. They tell employers, "hey pay money and we'll give you top candidates", then serve candidates who have themselves paid for placement.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/ask-the-headhunter-...

I also deleted my account, they are the worst company that is almost required in todays job market. I'm protesting it haha.

"It projected full-year revenues at $3.6 billion to $3.65 billion, versus $3.9 billion expected."

Call me naive, but where has that $3.6 billion been going? I realize they just released a new app (which is pretty nice), but that seems like an incredible amount of money for a company whose main business is a cloud application.

First of all they have multiple apps, and they have a ton of products that a normal consumer-facing user just doesn't see. It sells to enterprise just as much as it advertises to causal users of the website.

Ask a recruiter or a sales driven org and they'll tell you that LinkedIn is invaluable for getting leads (through products tailored for this segment).

Here's an anecdote. My little company was spending roughly $10k per month on PPC directed at mental health pros. Seems perfect for LinkedIn right? We thought so too. So we ran, or attempted to run a bunch of adds regarding our HIPAA compliant software. Unfortunately, LinkedIn's automatic system doesn't allow all caps except for acronyms. In order to get the add past the automatic gatekeeper, I had to use the highly amateur looking 'hipaa' which is ridiculous when used with a professional, educated audience. Yet other acronyms such as IRS or IT or even AMA would work just fine.

I emailed support, posted on their forum and still no action. Not even a response until I posted a nasty recap in their public forum. The response: "email support, this isn't appropriate for a public forum."

While frustrated with the inability of a 'professional' social network to allow such a significant acronym (at least in the health world,) we persisted in advertising.

However they still seem to have a manual ad approval process. So my ads got stuck in approval purgatory time and time again -- often for days.

Then in an attempt to optimize cost given specific response rates, when I adjusted my bids, the exact same ad had to be approved again -- taking at minimum two days before the exact same ad would start running again. Change a keyword? Reapproval. Change scheduling? Reapproval.

With Facebook and Google, all of this stuff can be done in near real-time meaning we could adjust campaigns almost on the fly. While the FB and Google interfaces can be daunting, they don't hold a candle to the crap that LinkedIn calls ad service UX.

Needless to say, LinkedIn lost the entirety of our business, with Facebook gaining the majority. Facebook also resulted in a massive conversion rate: several percentage points different, which in the ad world, is massive.

I am one person and $10k per month isn't groundbreaking, however, it doesn't surprise me that Facebook posted record earnings last quarter and LinkedIn took a dive.

No matter what you guys think, I found my current job, which I really enjoy so far, through LinkedIn connection. It's still the most efficient professional social tool I've used to land a job in market.

Hey all, Steve Johnson here with LinkedIn. I’ve read through this thread and wanted to make myself available for anybody that wanted to discuss some of the product and design issues that have been raised. Please feel free to send me a message via LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/esjohnson) or respond in this thread and I’ll keep checking it. I look forward to the conversation, thanks much.

To all the people with LinkedIn accounts who are complaining about the spam and the dark patterns here's an idea: don't have a LinkedIn account. Simple.

I've never had one and never will. I've had a few contact requests but they go right in the bin. From the number of calls/spam emails my coworkers receive via LinkedIn it makes me wonder why people are on the site at all. Sure if you want crappy low quality job offers from lazy recruiters then its good, but otherwise...

LinkedIn posts suck, just now I see somebody posted about a job that a friend of mine could be interested in, I see no way to forward that or copy the link, went to the poster's profile to see if it's there and I can send his profile's link (not there), upon coming back the post doesn't show up anymore, Linkedin deletes posts from view "randomly" (other posts are still there).

It's a crummy product. My homepage is filled with useless crap like word puzzles and simple math equations, I'm inundated with with spam from recruiters, and I get daily connection requests from people I don't know without any explanation of why they want to reach out to me.

It could be a useful network that helps me address professional needs, but they seem to have no interest in building that.

Over the years I've been either a freelance IT consultant or the head of an IT consultancy. I never got a client from LinkedIn, no one that worked for me ever got a client from LinkedIn, and more broadly, no one I know has ever got a client from LinkedIn. I'm sure they have some purpose (public resume database?) that I'm not clear on, but their value from my perspective is 0.

I've never gotten a job from LinkedIn, though I'm connected to lots of people I know IRL and have loads of IRL recommendations. Most of what I see is generated by recruiters, even agency recruiters. I get loads of contact requests from recruiters looking for a "rockstar"/"10x"/"ninja", and I ignore all of them.

OTOH, I've gotten several jobs via Twitter. Anecdotal, but Twitter is a more powerful business-oriented social media service if you're looking for a job.

Wonder how this guy feels with 5% of his families investments being in LinkedIn http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/01/3-reasons-l...

About 40% poorer I reckon.

2% poorer?

In the context of all his wealth, yes. Most definitely 2% poorer.

Eh at 5% it's probably just most of the "high risk" section of his portfolio. Most people sort of treat that section like lottery tickets anyways.

Tableau down 50%.

HN Discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042482

Atlassian down 23%

LinkedIn, Tableau, Atlassian: is there something going on today?

It's earnings season.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earningsseason.asp

Good. Terrible website. Extremely over-valued.

"erasing $10B of company's value"

No, not at all. $10B of the company's valuation was erased, but the value did not change at all.

The best possible long read article on the subject of what's happening in the markets and from a global macro economic POV is here: http://seekingalpha.com/article/3860226-sell-stocks-risk-ass...

What we're seeing the the beginning of a massive deleveraging as excess debt gets worked out of the system. It's possible that asset classes of all kinds (including startup valuations, real estate, stocks etc.) are 30-50% above par value. We'll see...

At a 20 billion valuation that still seems quite high. I think to justify the valuation they would at some point need to generate $1.5-$2 billion in FCF and at the current growth rate that isn't happening.

"We are pleased to give you a free trial of Premium Job Seeker." Proceeds to ask credit card info.

LinkedIn has had a recent trend of forcing a search result to their login page. Maybe a new privacy setting that people switch on? Every time I come across that page I discard what I was searching for, and move on.

I can no longer remember what it was about LinkedIn that made me delete my account in the first place, maybe it's been long, but I've grown to strongly dislike the whole thing. As others have commented, perhaps they're running out of e-mail addresses to mine now.

Certainly a lot of hate for Linkedin here - curious, what would people like Linkedin to become? Or what would it take for a new service to be interesting? And given that people are unlikely to pay for a service like this means that advertising and recruiter services are likely the only sources of revenue - are you comfortable with that?

The opportunity I'm surprised Linkedin has not tackled is to create their own CRM system. I think they are the only company that can really challenge Salesforce.com. Imagine getting a CRM system and having everyone in already - a marketing/sales dream. I imagine they thought of this, but may have said it was beyond the pail as it may have driven users away. Interestingly, Hubspot's CRM was offered with data.

To me, the most interesting part of the announcement was highlighted here:

http://adage.com/article/digital/linkedin-shuts-ad-network-1...

They're shutting down their external ad network that they purchased when they bought Bizo. Having tried this product, I'm not surprised - it was a piece of sh*t.

What does this mean for Connectifier, the company LinkedIn acquired hours before markets closed yesterday (and before after-hours trading caused LNKD to slide 40%)?

Depends on the term of the merger agreement. But if the price was paid in stock and the exchange rate was fixed before today (which would be typical), then yes, they would have taken a big hit too.

Would have hedged it if they were smart.

As someone who previously worked for Connectifier, that's really unfortunate. Hopefully LNKD recovers...

I think that's spot on.

Real Estate: The core Bay Area cities, the pinnacle of which is San Francisco, have not seen substantial real estate slumps in either recession in recent memory (the dot com bust and the mortgage bubble). For outlying areas, like Antioch, the picture was pretty ugly, however. Location matters.

Tech jobs: As someone who joined the Bay Area tech workforce in February 2000, just a few months before the market peaked, my observation has been exactly what you describe: * employed people won't see their salaries drop much, they might even see slight increases * some perks will be cut * income from equity packages will be much lower * there will be some layoffs at established companies * some startups will go bust, others will see their valuation drop and fundraising will be a lot harder * there will be fewer tech people employed overall * new arrivals in the job market (eg new grads) will have a harder time and see substantially lower starting salaries compared to their peers just a year prior. Timing matters.

I like LinkedIn, it helps me get in contact with hiring managers and gives me a platform to say nice things about my colleagues.

I also prefer it to résumés for getting an idea of who I'm working with.

I don't like that it tries to trick me into doing things I don't want to do. I hate to think that people might be sent unsolicited email just because I decided to interact with it.

I honestly think that they should stop trying to be a social network, and instead: perfect the résumé; help people find talent without having to resort to shotgun InMails; discourage boasting in the unstructured parts of the profiles (Summary specifically).

I think that if they fire some people and chop off a few limbs, they could emerge a company that people actually respect.

Anecdotal, but I've gotten more legitimate job leads from my Twitter account than I have from my LinkedIn account. At least it's Engineering Managers or other Lead Engineers inviting me to interview on Twitter, I only see recruiters on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn reminds me of an online dating site. You're only on there long enough to get what you want. When you've finally gotten it you stop using it until you need to get it again.

How is that different from Amazon?

I can't say that I feel bad for such a sketchy company. Even after I deleted my LinkedIn account, they kept spamming on a daily basis. Then I just added the domain to the spam filter.

The story behind the collapse of LinkedIn is not yet public, here you go: https://goo.gl/EE5h6Y

request

I use a Chrome extension that removed the ability to see the news feed on facebook called News Feed Eradicator.

Since installing it I've saved a lot of time because I can still use Facebook messages and view groups that I am a part of but I don't get caught in the mindless scrolling trap.

I would pay for a similar extension for linkedin. I have to use linkedin for work but I find myself scrolling mindlessly way too often. Does anyone have the ability to put something like that together?

Just add the classes/ID's to your adblock filters (very easy with ublock origin since you can just click the element and view the tree to find the element to nuke).

Done that on all newspapers and youtube to block comments, they hardly ever add anything.

Yeah

! https://www.linkedin.com/ www.linkedin.com###ozfeed

does it for me (click the name at the top in uBlock Origin to open the dashboard, stick that line in 'My Filters')

Thank you!

You are a king among men.

I never put a lot of value in the data on LinkedIn.

Where else can I get "endorsements" for random technology keywords like SOA from people who cannot possibly know what SOA means?

I really want to see the code for how that works. My great aunt did not endorse me for python, because she has no clue what that is. I'm curious if they trick people into clicking that? or if they just purely make it up.

They send emails to your contacts/dig through your email list to find people you know and ask them to endorse you for xyz skills through one click. Your great aunt was probably thinking she did you a solid. Scummy by the company.

And they said I was a fool to short it a couple of weeks ago.

For me, LinkedIn jumped the shark when they started sending me birthday notifications for my contacts.

Explain to me how that belongs in a business network?

Every time I see something like this, I have to wonder -

Did anybody actually _lose_ anything? It's not like LinkedIn is more or less intrinsically valuable than it was yesterday. The only thing that's happened is that their baseball cards dropped in resale value.

Anybody who thinks a non-dividend non-voting stock is anything other than a baseball card is kidding themselves.

Employees whose compensation included stock units (if that's a thing at LinkedIn and I assume it is given the industry) certainly lost something.

If Google's stuck took a hit like that I'd be out a significant part of my compensation.

Is there any truth to the 'you can't lose something you never actually had' idea?

When LI's stock price dropped, it's not like somebody showed up and plundered the shareholders' bank accounts. It's never safe to treat stocks like money.

OPs analogy still holds in my opinion. Their compensation was baseball cards, and it's unfortunate for them that it crashed, but the value behind them was terribly abstract.

Hopefully, when they close the site, our personal data will not be given to the third party. Or... what was in that small script?

First Twitter, and now Linked In. I've called unicorns and specially those without business model a bubble.

What we are looking is a shift...

  -Happened from real state to oil
  -Oil to IT unicorns

Now the question is where is the money being transferred to? I'm still wondering how has Facebook done to avoid all this happening to them.

I don't interpret this shift as money being transferred anywhere, so much as a systematic de-leveraging of investments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleveraging

I'll go in for a few shares. Most adjusted analyst price targets are in the neighborhood of $180. Anyone else buy?

I can't believe they are worth even a tenth of current price - they have added no value to my career and for some time have just been annoying. It really started going backwards with the endorsements - there is no validation of the competency of the endorser to endorse you, so it is totally pointless.

I have always considered LinkedIn a spammer.

no value was destroyed. it didn't exist in the first place.

Well, since everyone's bearish on the markets, predicting widespread unemployment for all, doesn't this mean that people will be back on LNKD looking for jobs and such? This could only mean good things for LNKD no? Sounds pretty recession-proof to me.

"Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction." - Gil Amelio

Seems similar for Linkedin but I don't think they will be able to find a "Steve Jobs" kind of strategy.

Just a friendly hint for resident Smarty pants young things:

This is it. Competition in the field is (intellectually, conceptually, practically) ground level ho hum regardless of names/numbers. Be fearless. Think Uber for people.

('it' being the next google scale market).

If the trend continues, though, I'll get my flying car first.

A bunch of "well meaning" super wealthy, corrupt individuals can manipulate the world economy as a show of power to Presidential candidates they don't already have in their pocket but soon may...

I like conspiracy theories and I cannot lie...

bleepin' hell

LinkedIN's utility is really negligible now. It's become a constant stream of spammers trying to sell software engineering or recruiting services. Virtually everyone who is on LinkedIN is also on Facebook, twitter etc.

From the advertising standpoint, it seems to me that Facebook has a database of people's job titles which is almost as good as LinkedIn's, without requiring advertisers to pay a minimum $2.00 per click to reach them.

From our experience targeting job titles, LinkedIn is actually much more comprehensive than Facebook. ie targeting "Operations Directors at Company X". Facebook doesn't provide that level of granularity, and our audience sizes are much bigger on LinkedIn.

Interesting. Do you find $2+ cpcs justifiable? Can you really get a good ROI with that?

A 50k month reoccurring revenue from a lead sourced via a $2cpc is justifiable yeah

Makes you wonder how private social media company valuations are doing.

Well, can happen if you want thousands of unknown people that do not use a copy of your products, to decide what to do with share value.

Is it statistically a good idea be a public company?

Linkedin needs a really good competitor, this service can honestly be improved in every way. Not to mention user experience at profile level.

Seems to be a lot of hating on LinkedIn today. I think it's a great site to use for your business contacts. Way better than collecting business cards.

Hater News really really really realllllllllly hates LinkedIn, this is pretty light compared to normal 2 minutes' hate on LinkedIn posts.

I just don't understand why they don't manage to bring more value with the wealth of data they. It seems like there is so much they could do...

and the vultures are showing up looking for a carcass http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shareholder-alert-levi-kors...

This could be symbolic, given that LNKD's IPO was one of the first big events of the current boom. Opened at $119 I think.

Whether or not it's a correct assessment, I think it's crazy to suggest that the Facebook At Work announcement isn't a huge factor here.

But look: at the end of the day, LinkedIn is awful. It's a thinly veiled spam marketing scheme. So the fact that it lost $10B of value seems bizarre only because LinkedIn already seemed worthless.

I have also been off of Facebook for a couple of years now. Not sure what, if any, social networking platform to adopt.

What are your favorite parts of linkedin? what do you want them to be doing better that they are not?

anyone delete their linkedin? I just got sick of strangers adding me and messaging me but I also found out my ex-boss who I had a great deal of respect for unfriended me on linkedin and lets just say he needs to worry about another competitor SaaS soon.

Yes, I believe a hosted personal site is better, since it's also under my control. Anyone can search your name online and get that as a top hit.

You can delete LinkedIn, but if your profile was public, good luck getting all the data scrapers to remove your data as well.

LI having less value than a wild valuation is not a surprise to me. It is still overvalued.

LinkedIn never made sense to me with their premium model. It was a bold idea though.

Ouch, I just feel bad for my friends and all the others who work at Lynda.com.

+1 for not focusing on users

Also known as 1 $TWTR down.

So... good time to buy?

We all know Nasdaq has been a bit inflated...

I have always considered LinkedIn a spammer!

You know how people say, "No press is bad press." This is the counterexample. I feel really bad for everyone at LinkedIn today.

The whole market is inflated with VCs & wall street pricing models. Ultimately the public pays the price of all this.

That's roughly the market cap of Twitter. Let that sink in...

But, I like Twitter. I think LinkedIn has plenty of room to fall farther.

Along with dozens of other companies who's stock is down.

Who cares?

And nothing of value was lost.

Startup CEOs are getting pretty young these days, has your niece been hitting you up for a seed round?

I'm thinking an App that is Uber for Lemonade Stands, people in the neighborhood just press the "I'm thirsty" button and one of her "mixologists" nearby makes a lemonade and brings it by. She doesn't make the lemonade or sell it, she is all about connecting thirsty people to industrious people who are putting their otherwise unused lemons to work.

All about stockpiling money for the self-juicing lemon revolution!

Interesting...I'll be right back...applying to YCombinator.

Edit: looking for founders

This app and Uber face similar regulatory burdens.

> Startup CEOs are getting pretty young these days, has your niece been hitting you up for a seed round?

http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/is-10-too-old-to-be-in-tech...

Workers are already SO set in their ways by their 20s, which makes them difficult to manage.

It's much better to fund teams without driving licenses, so they'll stay more focused on coding. At least, until their parents pick them up.

I would be interested in seeing how this plays out, considering cops occasionally shut down lemonade stands for not having permits[1]. This was not an isolated incident[2].

1: http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/11/politics/lemonade-stand-shut-d...

2: http://www.lemonadefreedom.com/category/selling-lemonade-is-...

That's ok, the mixologists would be independent lemonade service providers using their own lemons.

As independent contractors, they would certainly be responsible for compliance with all lemonade regulation.

The legal work-around is giving the lemonade away, free...

Sitting on the counter nearby is a cup for voluntary "donations" which will go to a specified "cause"...I've seen multiple fundraisers that appear to be hacking local regulations in that way...

I'm unaware of any legal work-around regarding Health Department regulations...maybe a location with a low profile helps a bit...not necessarily a good business model...

I hear Jamba Juice is seriously lobbying against these "rogue juicers".

Nothing against the kids, but they need to play by the established rules; not undercut established juice franchisees who've invested considerable funds to purchase local franchise rights.

Well then the Govt ought to update their outdated rules. The kids are just meeting a market need and love choosing their hours and being solopreneurs.

First it was all the immigrants. Now it's the kids stealing our jobs.

Our kids have _always_ been stealing our jobs. Literally sending us off to retirement homes.

Completely unrelated: I saw a "mini" Jamba Juice in a 7-11 store the other day. It was just a slushie machine filled with their smoothies.

How much are you raising?

Brace yourselves, the redditors are coming.

Not to be that snarky asshole, but this sort of comment doesn't belong on HN.

And why is that?

Agreed. Hacker News is not Reddit. A joke is fine, but rather predictably, it has turned into a subtree with just jokes/puns.

Bahaha, nice.

I seem to have struck a nerve :-) For what its worth a while ago Uber had a story on their site about lemonade (https://newsroom.uber.com/uberstand-exposed/) which got me thinking at the time how that might actually work. And the idea sort of popped out. I take no credit for connecting Uber and Lemonade into a startup idea, only for their go to market plan :-)

Happy Friday everyone.

She may need to pivot into the Plated for Lemonade Stands. Just send the chef prepared ingredients (meyer lemon, rare plant sugar and The Timmy Brothers water) and a step by step recipe to make the lemonade at home. She could then sell services on top of that to have a local independent rep prepare the lemonade for you.

Dude, she hit me up on Angel List for a seed round for her new app, Lemonayder. The next waive of the web will be on demand Lemonaid delivery apps.

She won't last once a troll holding a lemon-related patent sues her in East Texas.

OMG!!! Why would you give away such a brilliant idea. Someone is goign to steal it.

You may be joking, but there is something here. There are plenty times when I would like to press a button and get my coffee delivered.

Since this subthread ended up going completely off-topic, we detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042708.

wow, it is literally crashing

Because of Facebook Work I think.

https://work.fb.com/

I don't think Facebook for work competes with LinkedIn's core business at all. It's a different product.

I think the threat's definitely there. Facebook wants to eat everyone's lunch, and they're basically knocking on doors in LinkedIn's neighborhood.

LinkedIn can be described at the 'Facebook for business', it doesn't feel like a stretch that faceboook might someday want to become the facebook for business.

What is the difference?

FB for Work looks like a competitor for Yammer i.e. an internal social network for companies offering internal communication with notes, status updates, etc...

FBWork is for internal company communication. Does it let you connect to others externally? Does anyone use LinkedIn for internal communications?

LinkedIn is primarily used to professional networking outside your company. Keeping in touch with ex-colleagues, recruiting, sharing industry-specific posts, etc.

Facebook at Work is aimed at internal networking, so communication among large teams, company news / communication, etc.

- The overlap is small for now, but the threat is serious.

- The growth is slowing down

- Every product attempts to expand until it has API. Those products which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Linked closed the API.

I wonder if the domain name for this wry old industry observer is for sale : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

It's still owned by the same guy. http://fuckedcompany.com

We need that site back.

Sure.

That's why $FB stock is -5% down.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=FB+Interactive#{"lineColo...

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