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."

Comments

Re:Yahoo currently

[entotre]

What do they even do?

Since they reject $45 billion takover bids, they must have a plan.

Re:Yahoo currently

[rpjs]

They own Flickr. That's about the only product they own which is leader in its field though.

Exclamation point

[reset_button]

Looks like Yahoo! also fired their exclamation point? If only...

Re:Exclamation point

[sakasune]

Yeah they replaced the exclamation point with ellipsis and now they're just "Yahoo..."

Re:Exclamation point

[MadKeithV]

By 2012, they will be renamed to "Ya...Who?"

Re:Exclamation point

[mmmmbeer]

He went to work for H. H. Gregg.

Re:Exclamation point

[initialE]

They replaced the "Y" with Hard Gay Razor Ramon a while ago, but I guess he got tired of the job.

What sorts of jobs were these?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[chemicaldave]

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?

It's easy to dismiss those who don't have a direct impact in developing a project. You've obviously never worked with a good project manager. A good PM is vital to a development team when they do the right thing. And I wouldn't dismiss marketing people either. They might be loathed, but marketing works.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[Anonymous Coward]

a good project manager does a few very important things

1 keeps managment to "tap on the glass" distance
2 provides FOOD when needed
3 prevents the cats from killing each other
4 makes sure the proper shinies are ready as needed

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[kiwimate]

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?

Spoken like a true naively arrogant 16 year old.

Next time you have to do an upgrade on a live service that is used by millions of people, tell us how it goes without a project manager to define the work breakdown structure, a business analyst to capture functional requirements and produce a traceability matrix, someone to hand hold your valuable clients (you know, the ones who pay the wages?) during the transition...all those other positions that "suck resources away", in your elegant words.

There are good project managers and poor PMs. There are good BAs and poor BAs. It's one thing to chuck up a small web site with a couple of developers; it's quite another to do this in the real world, where if things go wrong you lose millions of dollars, good will, reputation, and customers.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[am 2k]

You've obviously never worked with a good project manager.

GP's statement being so popular says a lot about what kind of person usually works in such a position. In the end, it's not about what a project manager should do, it's what he/she actually does.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully a bunch of arrogant programmers who think they are the only vital workers in a company.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[evanism]

Poor Kiwimate. An MBA? Accountant/CPA? God forbid, a BA?

Curse those 16 YO's my friend, they will own you and be paying you within 10 years. I guarantee it.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[pympdaddyc]

Not that we should be arguing with an AC, but I've found a good PM or BA to be essential in productive dev teams, noticeably absent in bad dev environments, and it's hard to replace a good one.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[drolli]

The funny thing is: Project leader/Manager is a fucking hard Job, if done right.

a) balance the team internally: Stressful because balancing means stepping on somebodies toes.

b) meet the deadline: stressful because driving the team is stepping on sombodies toes. missing the deadline despite of that mean that management steps on the own toes.

c) Organize the transition between projects: either involves working twice as much for some time or being seen as a failure.

Lets be realistic. Nobody wants to do that Job, if not for money or power.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[elrous0]

When is the last decade anyone said "Old Spice" as anything but a punchline for a joke before marketing people came up with those new commercials? I'm not saying market always works (not by a longshot) or is even always neccessary. But the idea that market *never* works, or even helps, is just fucking stupid. It's the kind of self-aggrandizing shit that programmers mumble about amongst themselves when they're just CONVINCED that they're product is so good that it doesn't *need* promotion.

Go have a look sometime at the string of dead companies with superior products who got ran over by companies with better marketing. Ask THEM if marketing doesn't matter at all.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[BVis]

They might be loathed, but marketing works.

Then let them work with half as many employees as they need, like every other division in every company in America these days.

Corporate profits are way up, yet there's no jobs. People are being forced to do the work of two or three, lest they be fired into an (artificially) terrible job market.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[BVis]

I don't think anyone is saying marketing doesn't matter at all. I think people are saying that those who work in Marketing need a dose of reality, as well as a 50% reduction in headcount. That way the people who do Real Work (tm) can have more resources, while the (still important) work of Marketing still gets done; they'll just have to "work smarter", like everyone else. Why should they get treated differently?

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[fishbowl]

>The funny thing is: Project leader/Manager is a fucking hard Job, if done right.

It becomes even harder when there are hundreds of them, in layers, "managing projects" as though they are fiefdoms.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[BVis]

Marketers without anything to market are useless. Programmers without marketing still produce important work, they'll just have to get the word out by reputation instead of glossy print. Is it harder to succeed without good marketing? Sure. It's just that it's *impossible* to succeed if you don't have something to sell.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[DarkOx]

well its been my experience as time wares on that PMs, and BAs are getting farther and farther removed from the technical side. I have been in the industry about 10 years and when I started most of the BAs and PMs had at one time been programmers or admins themselves. They may have been doing the business side functions for awhile and might not have been educated in the latest technologies. They might have been COBOL programmers when we were using C++ and Java for instance, or former VAX guys while we were running Linux and Windows on x86, but they still understood how computers work, and how we work.

They performed the useful paper work functions and you know *managed* things pretty effectively. I agree with you that anyone who does not see the value of a GOOD project manager on a big project has not ever worked on one or has only experienced bad PMs. Lots of communication is needed on these collaborative efforts and that is where the best PMs spend most of the their time making sure the right people have the right information and expectations.

These former coders and admins turned PMs are great at this because they know how to talk to everyone they have learned the business side and they remember they types of questions developers and admins are going to need answered. They facilitate. Lately though there are more and more pure PMs, I will call them. They have never done the technical work and they think their role is entirely about setting schedules and arranging meetings. They don't understand the questions I am asking any better than business unit manager would unless I take the time to explain everything and deal with them the same was I would have to deal with the business unit manager. Sooner or later the pM decides hey I might as well just talk to the business myself and go to all the meetings, and they start setting that up, and at that point they are adding very little value.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[ak3ldama]

That coincided with Old Spice coming out with a whole bunch of products, besides stuff that old men wear. There has to be a lot more to the story than just Marketing. Hell, they probably were taken over by a new company that utilized the name's power to push out their new products. But other than that... An old man walked into a bar reeking of old spice and asked for an old fashioned.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[elrous0]

An old man walked into a bar reeking of old spice and asked for an old fashioned.

The bartender handed him a mirror.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[grasshoppa]

Maybe such a thing as a "Good" project manager exists, but I have yet to meet them. The best managers of a project have been the technical leads who's asses and reputations are on the line, not someone who's title is project manager.

It's been my experience that those with the title of project manager are there to act as an interface between management ( who doesn't like dealing with the techs directly ) and the techs themselves. This barrier in communication does more to complicate projects than it does to streamline them.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[drolli]

To many layers are always bad. be it when wrapping stuff in programming to distribute the responsibility between the different abstractions or when managing.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[Mongoose Disciple]

I'm sorry that you have not worked with, and apparently were not yourself, a truly good project manager. They are worth their weight in gold.

An awful lot of them are nearly useless, though, I'll give you that. I'll also give you that people making the promotion or hiring decisions rarely can tell the difference. Often whether a project is managed well or poorly is not clear until some time later.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[grumpyman]

Mod parent up and grandparent down. Grandparent believes that running a business only requires people who do actual 'work'. Try run an org like yahoo with 14100 programmers, designers, admins, techies...etc. Grandparent is the type of people that believes he and his buddy can write a SaaS application, throw it on the web and believes that it will sell itself.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[dlgeek]

At my very first internship, I was at a small startup which was growing pretty fast. My mentor had been running my (very small, ~4 person) team because no one else was there to do so. However, he was one of the most senior engineers in the company and that took up a huge part of the day. A couple months into the internship, an experienced industry guy was brought on to run the team. My mentor's productivity soared because his meeting load plummeted, as did his load of "extra work". The manager was also spearheading a new project in it's early phases, and was doing all sorts of things like chasing vendors, managing business relationships, doing cost/benefit analysis papers, etc, etc. It was extremely helpful and nothing that I as an engineer would want to do.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[penguin_dance]

Don't you mean..."Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other jobs I can't do so it doesn't affect me?"

Fixed that for you...

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[sconeu]

Corporate profits are way up, yet there's no jobs. People are being forced to do the work of two or three

The second sentence explains the first.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[flabordec]

And there is also the very vague definition of "producing something of value". Programmers can create something of great value, but they can also create a buggy, slow, lazily coded program that will cost an insane amount of money to maintain and, eventually cost the company more than just cancelling the project in the first place. The same thing can probably be said of most positions in a company.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[tophermeyer]

Products do not just sell themselves. From the perspective of actually producing a working product, sure Marketing types aren't going to help with that. From the perspective of selling a product (highlighting its strengths, downplaying its weaknesses, and convincing a potential customer that they need the product ) marketing types are essential.

Real developers might be the ones actually stringing code together to make the computers do fancy things, but there won't be any way to get paid without someone out there selling the product.

Obviously I don't know the kind of work that you do. And it certainly seems like you've had some experiences that has soured your perspective of non-production type jobs. But let me ask you, do you think a business staffed solely by developers doing nothing by direct development will survive? That organizational and marketing junk is critical. It may not be the core product, but it is integral in exchanging that core product for money.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[Darth]

Programmers without marketing still produce important work,

Programmers without marketing produce work which languishes in obscurity until the company goes bankrupt. For people to become aware that your software exists, someone needs to let them know. That someone is doing marketing, even if it's the programmers themselves pimping their work on blogs or slashdot. Someone is doing marketing.

they'll just have to get the word out by reputation instead of glossy print.

What reputation? Awesomesoft and their new Awesomizer application have no reputation until people discover that Awesomizer really is awesome and buy it in droves. Then their new Fabulosity Engine can be sold on the reputation they built. Until they've built that reputation, how do they get people to buy Awesomizer without someone advertising its existence?

It's just that it's *impossible* to succeed if you don't have something to sell.

Well.....that's not true across the board. The financial industry proved you can succeed for a long time without something to sell.

Seriously though, marketing is a support structure for the company, like IT. And like IT, the company could survive without that department, but it'd be a miserable pain in the ass and make everything harder for everyone.

The real problem is that groups like IT are viewed as cost centers because the costs of the department are tangible and the benefits tend to be abstract, so they don't get as much respect from upper management as they should.
Marketing produces exposure which drives sales. Generating correlations between good marketing projects and increases in revenue are fairly easy, so upper management views them as profit drivers and they get disproportionate credit.

Marketing is valuable, but not moreso than the rest of the support infrastructure of a company.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[tophermeyer]

Specialization of labor FTW!

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[Tanks*Guns]

I do agree that in the "real world" we absolutely need good PM's and good BA's, especially when you have to deal with larger scales, industrial or financial amongst others. Where I work I happen to manage (yes, I am one of those in "management") both PM's and BA's, and also manage a good chunk of developers, dba's, network folks, systems management and other tech-folk. My PM's and BA's are handpicked for their effectiveness and their ability to "get it" and translate the tech-speak to business-speak and vice versa, and not get railroaded by the business side wanting my techs to "do it quicker and cheaper at all costs" or my techs wanting to pull wool over the business side eyes; I view them as my cops yet they have the respect of both sides.

The issue becomes when you as a company start feeling that in order to be more competitive, you can solve the issue just by increasing the number of PM's and BA's which in turn will invariably generate more work, yet your tech base is left either with the same numbers or is reduced to make room for those new inbound PM's and BA's.

That’s where comments like our esteemed colleague “kiwimate” come from IMO, and while I don’t condone the arrogance in that statement, I do understand how frustrating it is to see these “ill-defined” positions overwhelm the rest.

If you manage these positions actively and effectively, you CAN live in harmony. When you get complacent and start thinking that power points and spreadsheets alone will solve your problems, then you’ll have a room full of “kiwimates” holding pitch forks and torches and your ability to be an effective manager is toast. My $.02

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

PMs are like PR, except on a micro level.

A good one will stay behind the scenes, make YOU look good while their bosses are watching in on whatever trickery you're doing.

Re:What sorts of jobs were these?

[tehcyder]

I can't believe the moronic lack of basic business knowledge shown on slashdot.

If a company could cut 100% of its administrative staff, it would fucking do it tomorrow. In reality, even a small company needs someone to do bookkeeping, answer phone queries, deal with tax and other authorities, ensure compliance with health and safety laws, order coffee and take minutes at meetings, etc. etc. etc..

The same goes for what you call "marketing" and "project management" - do you really think companies just decide to employ people with no real purpose, and pay them for the fun of it?

Re:does 4% really balance the books

[Registered Coward v2]

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?

Re:Yahoo currently

[angiasaa]

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.

Re:does 4% really balance the books

[Aladrin]

Maybe he's one of those people that thinks people should be laid off individually for being dead weight, instead of cutting 4% across the board and hoping to get the dead weight. With such a sloppy cut, you're bound to lose quite a few really good people, too.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Yvanhoe]

The world is big. From what I have seen, Yahoo is as used as Google in Japan and Korea. I suspect that as irrelevant as it may appear in US, it might still be strong in some places.

Re:Beer is good.

[arielCo]

Well, it's not like they're going to jump under a bus after having one beer. It's more like a token of sympathy which, along with supportive messages can go a long way in the other direction.

Re:Yahoo currently

[petermgreen]

There is also yahoo answers which seems to be one of the bigger sites of it's type.

Re:Yahoo currently

[oodaloop]

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

Hiring?

[wjousts]

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.

Great idea! I'm sure Yahoo laid-off all their best people first.

Re:Hiring?

[chemicaldave]

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.

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.

Re:Hiring?

[Jimmy King]

I've also seen many good employees let go because the choice in who was laid off was based primarily on salary and cost savings to the company rather than skill. It also kind of makes you want to punch people in the throat when you're one of the people who was kept during those lay offs, although I guess knowing that you're the underpaid guy who management may or may not see as any good beats being the unpaid guy in the end.

Re:Hiring?

[XLazarusX]

Some companies do lay off their best people. A company gets too big, and the person cutting heads is completely disconnected from the people they're cutting, so they have no idea what the person contributes, just what their salary is.

At my former company, only the most junior people with very low salaries are still there. They no longer innovate, and can barely maintain existing systems. Apparently it looks good to shareholders in the short-term when they cut expenses.

Re:Hiring?

[chemicaldave]

If conditions were that bad, I wouldn't rule out leaving and working for one of the other companies. Sure, that doesn't help your character, but if the interest is already there...

Re:Hiring?

[bberens]

Generally speaking the people who are left behind to pick up the pieces have a harder time than the people who were laid off. The unemployed mourn and then move on. The people left behind take years to get over the stress of extra work and the depression caused by wondering if you're next.

Re:Hiring?

[bberens]

In my experience it generally comes down as "Your department must lose X headcount or X salary." and then relatively lower level management makes the final decision. I'm sure there's exceptions but if the CEO/board is making low level personnel decisions then you've got bigger problems at your company.

Re:Hiring?

[Xest]

I was going to ask this too, I don't want to sound overly harsh, but why prioritise recruitment of what are quite possibly the bottom 4% of people from a company that's plummeted to about half it's previous worth in just a few years?

Wouldn't you be just as likely to find good talent by recruiting in general and hence possibly tempting over the ones who didn't get laid off and are hence possibly more capable rather than specifically targetting these folk who did?

Is this a recruitment drive based on sentiment rather than logic, or is there some non-obvious logic behind trying to recruit these specific folks?

Re:Hiring?

[BVis]

I think it's pretty obvious. The unemployed are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to things like negotiating salary. If you're hiring someone that's employed, IN GENERAL (not always) you have to meet or beat their current salary. If you're hiring someone without a current job, anything looks better than unemployment benefits, so you can pay them less than you would have to otherwise. Makes business sense, even if it is soulless and cruel. (I find that a lot of things that make 'business sense' are that way.)

Re:Hiring?

[fishbowl]

>And I'm sure Yahoo doesn't hire just anybody off the street.

I don't know about the actual hiring, but they sure did try to recruit the world pretty aggressively.

Re:Hiring?

[wjousts]

It makes sense if all (other) things are equal which, of course, it never is. The person who is currently employed might cost you more (because you have to tempt them away from their current employer with better pay / benefits) but they might be a more talented and useful worker which is why their current employer is holding on to them.

Re:Hiring?

[wjousts]

First, all companies make a few bad hiring decisions. Just because you managed to slip your way past a Yahoo interview doesn't mean you're any good. Secondly, if you need to cut 4% of your workforce, you start with the least productive 4%.

There is an exception to this which is when a company decides they are no longer going to work on X and they lay-off everybody who was working on that. In that case very talented people who are very good at X may get laid-off because the company's not doing X anymore. Of course, the very best people the company will try to find another place for.

Re:Hiring?

[wjousts]

That would be more in line with what I've seen. A department head is told their budget must be cut by $X, so they should look at who they can do without.

Re:Hiring?

[Idbar]

I always have this dream, where the first one to be laid-off, is the one that came up with the idea of laying-off.

Re:Hiring?

[Asic Eng]

There is always this perception that being laid-off later somehow means you are better. Personally I've even profited from that perception once. The truth is though that companies operate typically in a very short-sighted manner. Working on a vital project is a much better protection against layoffs than personal skill. Even worse - sometimes a company starts a challenging project, pulls in the best people from everywhere to work on it, and then runs out of cash and lays them off.

Also having specialized in-company knowledge is a good way to stay employed - particularly knowing how to maintain badly-coded dinosaur applications. And of course: connections - low performers who are friends with influential people in the company will find a way to stick around. Because their skills are low they know staying is their best bet and they'll put in a lot of effort to do so.

Qualified people with an up-to-date skill set will be less concerned about hanging on to the job. They know they'll find something somewhere else and might even volunteer because the severance package makes it a rather good deal. Last round of layoffs in my company, some engineers took the package (around a year's salary worth) and found a job after a few months. Can be a pretty good move if you are not too worried about the risk.

Re:Hiring?

[migglelon]

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.

Great idea! I'm sure Yahoo laid-off all their best people first.

You must have been born yesterday.

Merit has nothing to do with it. It's all about politics. You can bet they got rid of plenty of top quality talent and kept a lot of dead wood.

Re:Hiring?

[tophermeyer]

Yeah, I've seen that as well. The injustice there is somewhat limited, because if the department head is in tune with what each individual is contributing they will be focusing on how to hit the budget goal while limiting the loss of capable staff. They are free to cut the people who are overpaid for what they produce.

Re:Hiring?

[wjousts]

Also having specialized in-company knowledge is a good way to stay employed - particularly knowing how to maintain badly-coded dinosaur applications.

Pro Tip: Be the one to create the badly-coded dinosaur in the first place and you can cruise all the way to retirement telling junior coders that they just aren't smart enough to appreciate your genius design!

Re:Hiring?

[Asic Eng]

That's really not such a great idea - companies come and go, and the dinosaur ties your fortunes to that one company. Better stay out of company-specific crap and keep your skill-set up to date.

No free beer

[murcon]

I've been laid off five times in my career; never got free beer for my troubles.

Re:does 4% really balance the books

[gmuslera]

Maybe if that 4% If is the upper one, the one that took bad choices in the past

Re:Yahoo currently

[airfoobar]

Yahoo redirects searches to Google in the countries you mention. The company is a shell of its former self, after it was (I'm sure you'll agree, rather stupidly) reduced from a technology company into a web portal. Now the only way for them to keep showing their shareholders an increase in profits is by selling assets and dismissing employees, which is exactly what is happening. Its sad to see what's become of a once major internet company -- when their employees are kicked out and get picked up by Tucows (they still exist??), you know their glory days are long gone.

Re:does 4% really balance the books

[arkane1234]

Your right, thank god they laid off 600 instead...
After all, since they are laying off 600 people, and it's 4%, that would mean the workforce was 15,000. That being said,a s of Sept, 2010 they reported 13,900 employees.

Since the average individual is making 40-50K yearly (we'll leave benefits and other HR stuff out for simplicity), that's a savings of $24,000,000-$30,000,000 yearly. While it may not look like much on paper, since the company's net income available is $1,000,000,000 ($1B), that's about 3%.

It's not as if they are in the negative, they are just cooling the masses since Sept 30th was their Q3 data release.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Exotabe]

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.

Re:Beer is good.

[arkane1234]

Where'd you read that, the "Nation of Islam" website?

Re:Yahoo currently

[karnal]

But it only truly answers the question "How is babby formed?"

Re:Yahoo currently

[vlm]

Is Yahoo even relevant with anything anymore? They shut down their own search, they shut down geocities, no one really uses portal sites anymore and they don't make any hardware or provide services. The only thing I can think of is email, which is also is far away from popularity of gmail and hotmail. What do they even do?

Oh, they have a dying instant messenger (unless its already gone away?), a web based group system (can't be too hard to run) and at least used to have a decent photo sharing site.

I figure they have enough work to keep about 100 actual front line productive employees busy, and maybe 150 back office fluff, figure they should have about 250 full time seats. Depends how effective they are at outsourcing and contracting... Is the guy whom scrubs the toilets a yahoo employee or a contracted cleaning agency employee, etc. I have worked at multiple companies about that size that did things of similar complexity and scope.

The problem is if 4% of their workforce is 100 people, thats about 2500 employees.... So about 90% have to go.

Re:does 4% really balance the books

[vlm]

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.

yahoo = radioshack

[Charliemopps]

Yahoo is like RadioShack, they've been in business forever, dumped everything that was cool about their service years ago and it's a marvel how they stay open despite having nothing that anyone really wants anymore.

Re:yahoo = radioshack

[macraig]

Yahoo still has a services contract with AT&T (formerly SBC, formerly Pacific Telesis, formerly Pacific Bell *sigh*), presumably, which is probably responsible for 90% of its income these days.

Besides the big name appeal what's the attraction?

[l0ungeb0y]

Been seeing these ads myself on Craigslist and really don't understand it. The place is a cube farm, and while I know there's some knowledgeable people there, I highly doubt the braintrust in this layoff has any real appeal. Also, I know for a fact that they OVER HIRED from 2004 - 2007 because I was getting up to 5 calls a day from on-site and 3rd party recruiters for Yahoo, to the point that I wrote them a letter asking them to place me on whatever list they had for non-interested parties. That request actually did seem to work since the calls ceased. But it was common knowledge that they were hiring pretty much any warm body they could get their hands on.

If anything, I'd probably steer clear of these laid-off workers since I'm pretty sure it's a separation of the wheat from the chaff. With the sort of hiring practices they engage in, picking up a bunch of sub-par workers is all but assured and it's only wise to jettison them when you no longer have a need for extra warm bodies or need to make room for new candidates to take their place

Sorry, whats Yahoo? I havent used them in 10 years

[evanism]

Yahoo? they still exist? I remember them in 1996 and they were big, but I assume they went broke/bust/irrelevant/trivial/unneeded in 1990.

Seriously, these guys should have dies 5 years ago.

In related news

[elrous0]

Pabst Blue Ribbon is offering free beer to anyone still working at AltaVista.

Re:In related news

[bangzilla]

AltaVista is offering free searches to anyone still working at Pabst.....

Re:In related news

[Billly Gates]

All 7 of us are happy

Re:In related news

[TheL0ser]

Pabst Blue Ribbon is offering free beer to anyone still working at AltaVista.

Isn't there something in the constitution about cruel and unusual punishment? I think this would hit the "piling it on" clause.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Seumas]

I haven't used Yahoo! in this century. The only thing Yahoo! seems to do is clutter my google searches with "Yahoo! Answers" results, where the stupidest people humanity has to offer ask questions like (and these are actual questions from the site):

ok im kinda worryed here since my g/f got pregnant and all she isnt been havein her period do u think the baby is drinkin the blood??? she 6 month pregnant

and

I have been with my boyfriend for 6 months now,he's my absolute everything.But last week he got told he has bad 'Skin Cancer',When he told me i was heartbroken.Should i tell him that we should end it ? or should we stay together?:( x

They have news, using the same AP news wire that every newspaper and website on the planet has. They have webmail, which every other site offers. They have stupid flash games, like every other site on the planet. They have IM (which must have a whole ten or twelve users, at this point). And, mostly, they just have a super cluttered shitty design filled with constant ads. The only thing they are contributing to the world is making the internet seriously fucking stupider, by way of their search-poisoning "Yahoo! Answers" bullshit.

Re:does 4% really balance the books

[jellomizer]

It depends.
Smart Companies only lay off workers who are doing job that they really don't need anymore. So dropping a non-core or poor growth business unit, or where technology has replaced their usefulness.

Stupid Companies do blind layoffs being that it takes 150% more money to hire each employee. So if they are laying off people only to rehire those positions they are actually spending more then keeping the employee.

So for these people they may be part of a business unit or department that isn't needed as much anymore. So you remove the people as well close the buildings and the other resources as well.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Seumas]

By "sites of its type", I presume you mean "search engine poisoning spam".

Re:Besides the big name appeal what's the attracti

[Billly Gates]

That is a big generalization.

The fact of the matter is people like myself used Yahoo exclusively a decade ago before switching to Google. Yahoo lost revenue for internet ads to Google as well and is no longer profitable in most operations in the US. Laying off employees in the non profitable areas only makes sense. It does not make them bad employees. If anything it shows management to be the bad decision makers where the productivity employees are let go to pay for their directors and executives mistakes.

Also Yahoo planned on entering new markets and hired like crazy before Icahn came in with a hostile takeover and decided to raid and sell its assets. These employers were probably hired to help Yahoo enter these new areas before the buyout and then the sellout of its assets to satisfy Wall Street. They were no longer needed.

People being laid off is sad whether they were talented or not. Just because someone hires does not make them incompetent in the hiring process.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Anonymous Coward]

No, yahoo mail has 55% market share in the US. That's over 3x gmail (15%). Yahoo sports is the biggest sports site on the net (bigger then fox sports), yahoo owns flickr, yahoo answers is a solid product. In terms of user minutes, they are also #3 on the internet (37.5 million user minutes), after facebook (41 million) and google (40 million). So yeah, they are still very relevent ;)

Re:Yahoo currently

[Viewsonic]

I was expecting Yahoo to basically be a small team of server nerds and not much else. How is 800 people 4% of the company?

What does a search engine do with close to 20,000 people?

Re:does 4% really balance the books

[LizardKing]

Hit finance.yahoo.com for YHOO and they list over thirteen thousand employees (can't possibly be correct? what could they all be doing?)

The figure was something like 14,300 employees before the layoff, so that sounds about right. The reason for the high head count is that there is no effective project management, a sprawling codebase and (amongst the US programmers) no awareness or understanding of coding for multiple locales.

Re:Sorry, whats Yahoo? I havent used them in 10 ye

[Billly Gates]

*My wife uses Yahoo news and YahooIM still. It is what she is used to. The search engine was crap which was how Google came in and killed it with a lite no nense search while Yahoo spiced it up making it a portal and internet destination for all users.

Yahoo exists for its news, mail, and answers, and it generates revenue by directing its uses to MSN Bing and ads to its pages. That part is still popular but it is a shadow of itself since Google and then Icahn came in and gutted the company.

Re:does 4% really balance the books

[Billly Gates]

Many companies lay off big slowly so the media never takes notice. HP is a classic example of 200 here 300 there and after 17 months you get 6k laid off. The employee morale never recovers nor does the productivity lost associated with it. The executives do not see this and care more about image.

My guess is the 400 is the start of a monthly lay off cycle that could last for a year or so. Unfortunately it hit the news so the cat is out of the bag.

Re:Am I the only one who read...

[evanism]

ahhh, Yahoo WAS a blowjob, it didn't give them out! (weeellllll, they DID do a LOT of "free")

Duh?

[DarthVain]

Management isn't about to fire themselves...

Think of parasites slowing killing its host.

OK maybe I am just having a bad day.

Re:Yahoo currently

[larry bagina]

yahoo chat used to be a great way to get some ass. Of course, that was before the spam bots took over. I guess it's a great way to talk to spam bots now.

Re:Yahoo currently

[redemtionboy]

Yahoo is the ebay of Japan. Yahoo auctions is huge there.

Re:Thanks Jerry Yang!

[elrous0]

But...he got to stick it to the man! That's got to be worth something...right?

Re:Yahoo currently

[tayhimself]

My thoughts exactly. To be honest, until the recent update flickr was at risk of losing the leadership as well. It hadn't been updated in 3 years, but now it has all ajaxy goodness. All the non-techie people I know that like photography still prefer flickr.

Just ONE?

[macraig]

One San Francisco brewery is offering a free beer to people from Yahoo who show their termination letters.

Just ONE free beer? What happens when that initial buzz wears off and his wallet is still empty? Poor bastard.

Merry Christmas!!

[happy_place]

Just in time for the Holidays!! Ah. Brings back memories!

Re:Yahoo currently

[IronWilliamCash]

If this is all true, people on slashdot are greatly underestimating Yahoo.

Re:Yahoo currently

[oodaloop]

Ah, didn't know that. That's even worse.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Amorymeltzer]

The problem is if 4% of their workforce is 100 people, thats about 2500 employees.... So about 90% have to go.

Well, the article said 600, which would have given them 15,000 employees.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Sebilrazen]

Yeah, nobody uses portal sites like Facebook, nobody.

Re:Beer is good.

[BVis]

"Other terrorist groups"? Seriously?

People still need to be told that not every Muslim is a terrorist? Really? Even W got that one right.

christmas layoffs again?

[e3m4n]

what's with these corporate assholes that always choose the one time of the year that everyone has the highest financial burden to start downsizing/firing/laying people off? Why can't they make these decisions in April? or August?

Re:christmas layoffs again?

[Asic Eng]

Because they are genuinely that short-sighted. Q4 is shorter, so income drops. That's well-known, but financial circles are really so stupid that this is seen as bad news. Companies react by somehow trying to cut costs, no matter how dearly they'll end up paying for that cost-cutting in Q1. This goes from the typical "no pencil buying" to reducing business trips (resulting in wasted work and slower time to market). In one particular case my company delayed tapeout of a chip. Making masks for a chip is expensive, so moving that into next quarter makes a big difference on the balance sheet. Also cost us a month in time to market and a few million dollars in income. Looked better in Q4, though.

Re:christmas layoffs again?

[DerekLyons]

what's with these corporate assholes that always choose the one time of the year that everyone has the highest financial burden to start downsizing/firing/laying people off? Why can't they make these decisions in April? or August?

Because, with the tax year ending in a couple of weeks, it keeps the books neat. And frankly, if this is your highest financial burden time of the year, that's your own choice.

Re:christmas layoffs again?

[Shadow99_1]

Could be worse, my last company let me go on my birthday... Try to get happy about that... Total waste of party...

Re:christmas layoffs again?

[Your.Master]

It's burdensome not just because of going on vacation or buying shit for your family, but also because nobody is hiring in the holiday season, because everybody else is going on their vacations.

Re:Yahoo currently

[slashtivus]

Their chat client is king in Asia. I have no idea how they make money on that though. I have gmail for personal/friends, but still use my yahoo mail for my business and spam accounts. The community games section seems popular too, again I have no idea how that makes money.

I think the problem

[Sycraft-fu]

Is that many people haven't dealt with proper project managers, as in a manager who's job it is to oversee a protect and make everything work. They've dealt with "Project Managers" people who's title is PM and who believe they can attach themselves to any project, no matter how little they know about it, and "manage" it effectively.

Any project has a manager just because of how it works. Even a one man project, in that case the one guy manages it. For large projects, it is so complex that you need people who do nothing but deal with the management, the logistics, that kind of thing. A project manager, or in some industries a producer. A person who's focus is big picture, making sure everything is working and working to correct problems when they happen. That is valuable. However those people are generally people who are managers of that particular kind of thing. Someone who manages a large programming project effectively is likely just a manager of programmers, and probably has some understanding of how programming works.

However the people who identify themselves as "Project Managers" who find their role in life is just to manage random projects? Worthless normally. I've dealt with a few indirectly, and have friends who spoken, at great length, about them. They are people who attach themselves to projects in a company. They aren't someone in the normal structure of command, they just kind of slip in. Because of this, they've no real knowledge on any of the things they are doing. They don't understand the project. As such they tend to do useless shit like demand meetings with the developers to "See what you have," even when development is in the stage there is nothing running, or they ask useless questions like "How much time could you save if we skip the testing phase?" or "Let's not worry about what's possible right now." (really, I was in the room for that one). They just regurgitate stuff they learned from a book or a course, presuming it works for anything.

That seems to be the problem to me. A case of project management is useful but Project Managers are worthless. In my observation, "professional" Project Managers are a role the useless types work themselves in to. They don't have the skills to get themselves an actual management sort of job, they don't have the skills to really do anything, so they get themselves in the nebulous "I can manage any project even if I understand fuck-all about the technology, process, employees, and so on," position. That's where the dislike comes from I think.

I don't worry when I hear a project has a manager, that just tells me that people have bothered to think about who is in charge, who makes the decisions, who needs to make things run smooth. I worry when a project gets itself a "Project Manager" to "help things out." Someone who had no real involvement and doesn't have a clear position in teh chain of command.

Disappointed user...

[grumpyman]

I've been using yahoo as primary email for a long time, shortly not long after it's rolled out (mid/late 90s? after mail.com 'promises' of free email and then backtrack the decision). It's been ubiquitous and very good for a long time. Last few years it's be acting up a lot a with unexplainable downtime and errors, and especially this email upgrade is just bad. The new interface and whatnot are simply unintuitive and not up to par with many bugs (e.g. after a few click you always see junk mailbox instead of the inbox). I really hope somebody like MS pick it up and I can migrate once and for all...

Re:Yahoo currently

[Mongoose Disciple]

Are they all in San Francisco? When I did the math, I decided that I would need about a $300K pre-tax salary to approximate my standard of living there. I have never understood how people make it on less.

A lot are in the Bay Area if not specifically SF itself, yeah. They used to have a pretty big campus further down the peninsula near San Jose; I don't know if that's still the case or not.

Mostly, they survive by renting and not buying, and sometimes by having roommates. Other than housing it really is not that expensive to live there. You also need less money (and living space) if you're youngish and single as many tech workers in the area are.

Re:Yahoo currently

[BenoitRen]

They shut down their own search

Which is quite a shame. It offered me another place with cached pages, and their video search engine was the best.

Nowadays it doesn't matter if you use Yahoo! Search or Bing; they use the same backend.

Portal?

[theamarand]

Yahoo is a bit weak in the search engine area, but as someone mentioned earlier, they do own Flickr. When signing-in, I've noticed that Yahoo is trying to capture the "portal" status it once had. The campaign talks about having all your stuff in one place, but what it seems like is having all of your passwords stored in a central location, which to me is just a bad idea. Yahoo's not as likely to get hacked as, say, Lifehacker's site - but do I really want to access my bank through Yahoo? Not likely. I use Google for searching and Yahoo because of Flickr - but that's it. When people send me e-mail to my Yahoo account, I summarily ignore it. There have been people who have spoken to me months later saying "hey, did you ever get my e-mail?" It's funny. Then I give them my real e-mail address, and we're good.

I lost faith in Yahoo when they locked down their web-based e-mail service into this Ajax-y, Flash-y garbage. When will companies learn I want to browse using my browser? Also, you can't POP/IMAP your e-mail without paying, and who wants to pay for e-mail when I can have it free elsewhere?

For what I do, Yahoo just isn't relevant for much of anything anymore. The secret to making an award-winning portal site is to create content that people will come back to and visit every day. Heck, Slashdot with achievements has far more pull for me daily than Yahoo's messy cluttered flashy home-page.

Re:Besides the big name appeal what's the attracti

[l0ungeb0y]

It's 4% of their worldwide staff, and as I stated, they were definitely over-hiring. That is, hiring just for the sake of it, to deny those employees to their competitors and to add to their braintrust. Statistically, you just can't retain them all.

I'm not saying they are terrible workers, just that having consulted scores of dotComs in the SV area, I know for a fact that yahoo was on a warm body hunt and that these are likely to be the lower echelon of those warm bodies.

Anyway, my post wasn't to disparage these workers but to question the overwhelming eagerness of other employers to hire them. I'd look past the Yahoo name on their resume and look to what they did, how they contributed, what they can contribute and what skills they have, just as with any other candidate.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Idbar]

Yet, I'm wondering what would be of the people asking these questions if Yahoo weren't there. I just hope they get their answers, because that's the average person the world is heading towards. And for sure, sometimes ignorance is not bliss.

Re:Yahoo currently

[glodime]

What do they even do?

omg.yahoo.com = ad sales

Alibaba - China investments

[newviewmedia.com]

Yahoo owns 39% of Alibaba which is said by some to be worth around $11B. This is a significant stake of the online market in China and includes stakes in Taobao and Alipay which helps to props up Yahoo share price. Yahoo portal on its own is on life support.

Re:Yahoo currently

[Insightfill]

No, yahoo mail has 55% market share in the US.

Is that actual mail volume or number of accounts? Yahoo is the default email provider for AT&T DSL accounts, so that might skew things. How many people use their ISP-provided email accounts?

Re:Yahoo currently

[davester666]

Unfortunately, it's just a plan to screw over their shareholders.

Yahoo!'s hiring!

[mitchplanck]

http://careers.yahoo.com

Re:Yahoo currently

[sootman]

Their email is either #1 or #2. If it's no longer #1, it was up until recently. They've branched out a lot and acquired a lot. Like Google, they were smart enough to realize they aren't in the "search engine" business, they are in the "get people to come to sites we run" business.

Re:Yahoo currently

[hairyfeet]

Actually you couldn't be more wrong. While geeks don't use portal sites I've found a good 90%+ of the PCs coming into my shop for repair have Yahoo portal as their home page. This goes for the average Joes, the old folks, the housewives, pretty much everyone who is NOT a geek, and they outnumber us by about 10,000 to 1.

I asked my GF why she insisted on having Yahoo portal set on her Firefox profile on my PC in the hope of gaining some insight, and here is what she said "It gives me a central place to start my day. I can see what is going on in the world, check my email, see what the weather is like, and I don't have it go anywhere but that one page. Its nice!". Watching her and customers use PCs I can also report they nearly always use the search at the top of the Yahoo page as a "jumping off point" which means MSFT must be getting ad views and data mining like nobody's business.

So I'd say you can't be more wrong. Yahoo has figured out what ordinary folks like and are simply sticking to it. This means they need less employees because they aren't trying to spin out in 40 directions like Google is. Instead they are sticking to the few things that are getting the most use and tossing the rest. Same as I've noticed for the non geeks the Yahoo Mail is more popular than Gmail, because like me they prefer the folders style over the chat style of Gmail.

Free, as in beer....

[Demerara]

One San Francisco brewery is offering a free beer to people from Yahoo who show their termination letters.

I see a huge business opportunity there - www.yahooterminationletters.com

Re:Yahoo currently

[DerekLyons]

Is Yahoo even relevant with anything anymore? They shut down their own search, they shut down geocities, no one really uses portal sites anymore and they don't make any hardware or provide services. The only thing I can think of is email, which is also is far away from popularity of gmail and hotmail.

Yeah, they're far away from the popularity of Gmail's 15% of the market with Yahoo Mail's 55%. Yahoo also owns one of the biggest and busiest photo storage and sharing service on the 'net - Flickr. Their fantasy sports leagues are among the busiest and biggest, and their real life sports pages the most trafficked on the 'net. From what I see around the 'net Yahoo Groups outruns Google Groups a hundred to none. (No, that's not a typo.) Not to mention their individual games (Scrabble and the like), Yahoo Answers, etc... etc...
 
Even though Google is popular among the Slashdot/techie crowd - that's a pretty narrow demographic. The reality is that people *do* still use portal sites (having a single login is very convienent). The reality is that outside of search, most of Google's offerings are a struggling second or a distant third (with MSN and Yahoo filling the top two).
 
If Google ever obtains an attention span and an actual plan (more than 'throw stuff out there and hope it sticks')... They might all might change, but not before. Google's biggest roadblock in actual dominance of the 'net is largely itself. They've spent so much time being cool, they've failed to realize that to most people functionality is more important than trendiness and bling.
 
Yahoo's strategy over the last decade has largely been to offer solid service to the masses rather than flash to their investors. By and large, it's been working.

Re:Yahoo currently

[DerekLyons]

Its sad to see what's become of a once major internet company -- when their employees are kicked out and get picked up by Tucows (they still exist??), you know their glory days are long gone.

Let's wait and see if a significant number of employees are actually picked up. This smells more of publicity stunt that's gone viral - so everyone is getting on the bandwagon.
 
Or, less charitably, hoping to pick up a distressed former Yahoo employee or two at fire sale prices. If they actually were competitive in their hiring... they wouldn't need to advertise for former Yahoo employees.

Free beer?

[tenco]

Let's tag this "after work party".

Re:Yahoo currently

[tehcyder]

If this is all true, people on slashdot are greatly underestimating Yahoo.

Yahoo is now perceived by geeks/slashdot posters as uncool, like Microsoft and Sony. This has no correlation with how they are doing in the real business world.

Re:Yahoo currently

[tehcyder]

So about 90% have to go.

I'd do some sort of sanity check on that figure if I were you. Do you really think any company can carry that much dead weight? That out of every $100 payroll cost $90 is just waste?