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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."
They own Flickr. That's about the only product they own which is leader in its field though.
Looks like Yahoo! also fired their exclamation point? If only...
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.
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?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
There is also yahoo answers which seems to be one of the bigger sites of it's type.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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
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.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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 ;)
Yahoo is the ebay of Japan. Yahoo auctions is huge there.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.