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

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

#621

Post by joshhart » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

alanh wrote: post #433

joshhart wrote: post #424

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 b…

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 th…

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.

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

#622

Post by infinite8s » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

cplease wrote: post #493

czep wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 of…

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

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

#623

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

cplease wrote: post #493

czep wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 of…

[deleted]

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

#624

Post by sail » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 6:46 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #608

jhulla wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mar…

"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. Righ…

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

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

#625

Post by floppydisk » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 6:50 PM UTC

morenoh149 wrote: post #616

floppydisk wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#626

Post by steven2012 » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 7:02 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #601

steven2012 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#627

Post by wolframarnold » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 7:09 PM UTC

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.

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

#628

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #608

jhulla wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mar…

"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. Righ…

[deleted]

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

#629

Post by angelbob » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 7:53 PM UTC

joshhart wrote: post #618

angelbob wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#630

Post by hiram112 » Sat, Feb 06, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #617

pfarnsworth wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.