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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.
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.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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 ;)
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.