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Yahoo Lays Off 600; Free Beers and Jobs Flow
CWmike writes "Yahoo confirmed on Tuesday that it has laid off 600 people, following news reports often based on Twitter messages from employees who had been let go. The layoffs amount to about 4 percent of the company's global workforce, Yahoo said. The company said affected workers are receiving severance packages and outplacement services. Laid-off workers may find some comfort on Twitter, where they are receiving an outpouring of goodwill. One San Francisco brewery is offering a free beer to people from Yahoo who show their termination letters. People with companies including Aprendi Learning, Tucows.com, DirecTV, Combine Couture, OMGPOP.com, and Uptake.com all posted Twitter messages expressing interest in hiring former Yahoo employees. The site Quora is hosting a thread for companies in the San Francisco area interested in hiring laid-off Yahoo workers. So far, there are 14 posts about jobs with companies including Yammer, Mozilla, and Cloudera."
What do they even do?
Since they reject $45 billion takover bids, they must have a plan.
What sorts of jobs were lost?
Were these people programmers, graphics designers, server administrators, network administrators, network technicians and others who actually produce something of value?
Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other ill-defined positions that usually just suck resources away from those getting real work done?
Since the 1970s, there has been a disappointing trend in American corporate culture whereby those who actually do productive work get laid off, while those who fluff around in meetings coming up with "strategy" or putting together "action plans" end up remaining employed the longest. Eventually the company goes under, since it is not actually producing anything of value. I sure hope Yahoo! hasn't gotten sucked into this horrible situation.
Good question.. I think Yahoo! relies more on its IM services than on anything else. They once used to be the big heavy kid on the IT See-Saw. But today, they're mostly chat and a kind of convenient webhost to some small-businesses.
It's sad, but that's how digital lives are lived and that's how it's played out for them.
Geekism is your _only_ God!
Pipes is pretty cool. One of those things they bought up and sort of forgot about. Not earth shattering or worth 44billion, but pretty cool.
pipes.yahoo.com
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Great idea! I'm sure Yahoo laid-off all their best people first.
And I'm sure Yahoo doesn't hire just anybody off the street. It takes someone skilled to get hired at a big tech company like Yahoo. Obviously these offers are indicative of others' confidence.
One of those things they bought up and sort of forgot about.
Pipes wasn't an acquired product, it was built in-house at the now-defunct Yahoo! Brickhouse.
in a company the size of yahoo, i can't imagine that laying off 400 will really bring them to profitability.
If you assume an all in cost (not just salary) of $100k/employee; that's an annual saving of $40mil. It may not balance the books but it is a start. Anybody know YAHOO's cash flow last year?
Hit finance.yahoo.com for YHOO and they list over thirteen thousand employees (can't possibly be correct? what could they all be doing?) and lists an annual revenue of $6B although I can't imagine where that came from... all from banner advertising? And miraculously they are currently profitable?
Compared to GOOG they have about half the employees yet only a quarter the revenue.
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