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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."
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.
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.
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 ;)