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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] pyrrhotech|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jhulla|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tryitnow|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sinzone|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cpprototypes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkeroack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Riod|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jthol|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob2|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cplease|10 years ago|reply
I could definitely see a decline in engineer salary, which could be significant in certain markets. But who knows.
[+] [-] kuschku|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] barnabee|10 years ago|reply
It's a poor business founded on poor assumptions
A strange game.. the only way to win is not to play...
[+] [-] neelborooah|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swingbridge|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mathattack|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] floppydisk|10 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] mcv|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blahblah3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nashashmi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sciencesama|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bnchrch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawhizkid|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jameslk|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Angostura|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kin|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sundarurfriend|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshhart|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] suprgeek|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Pxtl|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amyjess|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] robin_reala|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63/kw/dele...
[+] [-] corin_|10 years ago|reply
So, either way they keep acting shittily, at least this way other companies might learn a lesson not to.
[+] [-] turbohz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jonathanehrlich|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Inthenameofmine|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swingbridge|10 years ago|reply
In that sense LinkedIn is mostly a wasteland.
[+] [-] mjmsmith|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeax|10 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] HelloNurse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jldugger|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] aridiculous|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] umanwizard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngrilly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|10 years ago|reply
- 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...
[+] [-] dudul|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mythz|10 years ago|reply