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Yahoo Lays Off 600; Free Beers and Jobs Flow

Posted by kdawson on from the yodeling-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.

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."

8 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. What sorts of jobs were these? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:What sorts of jobs were these? by chemicaldave · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:What sorts of jobs were these? by kiwimate · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:Yahoo currently by Yvanhoe · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:Yahoo currently by petermgreen · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  4. Re:Yahoo currently by oodaloop · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  5. Re:Yahoo currently by Exotabe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Yahoo currently by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 ;)