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Yelp Employee Posts Open Letter About Cost Of Living And Low Wages, Gets Fired (modernreaders.com)
whoever57 writes: Talia Jane was employed by Yelp in San Francisco but after posting in an open letter to Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, that her after tax income of $8.15 was insufficient to provide basic necessities like heating, food, etc., she discovered that she had been fired. How did she discover? Her work email stopped working. Even her boss did not know what had happened. Stoppelman denies having a hand in her firing, making the claim "(There are) two sides to every HR story so Twitter army please put down the pitchforks," replying to the criticism. He didn't personally turn off her email, perhaps he did not even make the decision to fire her, but as the person who ultimately sets the culture and policies of the company, his claim to not be directly responsible is unconvincing.
I truly hope none of us here will express amazement that someone who criticized their employer, and blamed them for what are essentially her own poor life choices, got fired.
This is how the real world works, jr. You are not owed, or entitled, to shit.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This has been covered elsewhere, and never with so much horseshit bias. No editorialization should be needed for news, which is why no one likes Bennet Hasslehoff either.
Didn't we reject this nonsense about the time Glenn Beck refused to deny raping and murdering that girl?
And I am sure it had nothing to do with her getting alcohol delivered to her while at work or bragging about making sexual jokes to the companies twitter account. It's either quite a coincidence or she knew she was in trouble and wrote the letter to try and make the company look worse.
Why is anyone making barely above minimum wage trying to live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. without even getting a roommate to split the rent? Also, the low temperature doesn't get below freezing so there's no need to ever run a heater. Yes, that means you'll probably want an additional heavy blanket to sleep under, but you're not going to die.
This is a known medical condition :SMACSS
Social Media Assisted Career Suicide Syndrome.
Researchers are still searching for a cure!
Even if it's not in the employment agreement, California is an at-will state. You can be fired for not sounding cheerful enough when you greet your CEO in the elevator, if he so desires and is that petty.
Imagine all the people...
Thanks for that scoop /. !!
Sent from my ENIAC
What a crock. Sure you don't work for Yelp's HR department?
Here's the post in question.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Talia Jane was actually fired 4 years ago, but they forgot to stop her paychecks and email. They just "fixed the glitch".
Her red Swingline was also confiscated.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
You can be fired for not sounding cheerful enough when you greet your CEO in the elevator, if he so desires and is that petty.
*cough* Steve Jobs *cough*
I wish we were responding to her actual letter, rather than your portrayal of her letter, and your spin on the situation.
I'm going to respond to her letter, rather than to you.
===
Starting wages for her position at Yelp are nearly $10/hour over minimum wage. Assuming she worked a full 40 hour week, she was making a minimum of $35,360/year.
That yields, given California and federal tax rates:
$680.00 = Weekly Gross Pay
$086.59 = Federal Withholding
$042.16 = Social Security
$009.86 = Medicare
$017.79 = California
$006.12 = SDI
$517.48 = Net Pay
$26,908.96/year gross income
Accept her "80% goes for rent" number as fact. That yields:
$21527.168 / year
= $1793.93 / month
This is a quite high rent, and implies she's living alone, with no roommates. We'll get back to that.
$5,381.79 = non-rent disposable income/year
$448.48 / month
$103.49/week
This is low, but it's livable. She does not qualify for SNAP (food stamps), even after income deductions: she is not below 200% of the federal poverty level. In other words: 30% of people live on less than that.
Let's revisit the rent.
A ForRent.com search (not the best site, but representative) shows 6 apartments in Emeryville -- a nice area, near Berkeley, but across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, for less than $800/month. All of them near public transportation; 2 of them have pools.
That's without taking a roommate. So she could have halved her monthly rent, if she was willing to live somewhere *not actually in San Francisco*.
That's another $993.93/month in her pocket... ...which covers everything she complains about in her letter, plus adds some spending money. She'd have more if she split the rent on a more expensive apartment with a roommate.
= $229.36/week
+ $103.49/week
= $332.85/week
I'm not feeling very sympathetic right now.”
I would have found a way to supplement my income. I see people selling Yelp 'reputation management' services all the time, being an inside /(wo)?man/ on that would be profitable indeed.
In my contract it is forbidden that i discuss my salary with anybody, especially in public in connection with my employer.
A better written response, with link to the letter
Here: https://medium.com/@StefWillia...
I refuse to link the letter in question directly. It's crap.
A lot of people (sock puppets?) seem to be making this the story of a brat who can't make good choices, but I see it as the story of how a young American worker's enthusiasm and determination got her ground into hamburger. It's a warning to other young would-be Yelp workers to steer clear lest they suffer too. That's the only way these soulless corporations will ever feel the sting and be forced to raise wages.
Let's emphasize that Yelp is PAYING this insultingly low wage in such an expensive city.
There are plenty of technical jobs in Silicon Valley that start off at $10 per hour — and plenty of people who take those jobs. Employers aren't going to raise their pay rates until they have difficulty finding people to fill those positions. For the kind of I.T. support work that I do, recruiters are offering $35 to $40 per hour to find people to work in southern Silicon Valley — San Jose, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale — because young hipsters can't commute more than 30 minutes away from San Francisco.
as a small business owner i can tell you all yelp is a disgusting piece of shit, worse than facebook, all they want is money for basically not removing you from any and all search results, they have no interest in helping consumers find what theyre looking for.
Please be very careful when trying to "fix" moderation on Slashdot. This is one of the features that work reasonably well, compared to other sites. There's always room for improvement, but there are dozens of more rewarding fixes and changes than the moderation system.
This site is already a technological anachronism; we stay for the comments and the discussion. If that breaks down because of half-assed fixes to the moderation system, it's good night.
Just my 2 cents.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
I agree completely: people should think clearly about cost of living and desired standard of living relative to salaries when choosing where to work. Then, when corporations can't hire the workers they want at the salary they are offering, they will increase their salary offers. Talia's problem is that she obviously didn't do that.
You are not guaranteed your life or property either. You only get to keep your life, because I feel like to is to my advantage not to kill you. As you have made laws that guarantee I will starve and freeze on the street, because my skills are not useful anymore at this very moment, I have no incentive to obey any of the laws anymore. So I might just as well kill you, take your stuff and live few days longer.
So while people are not guaranteed food, shelter and healthcare, it is in my best interest to convince them there is a reasonable chance they might survive, otherwise my own life is not very safe now, is it? It does not matter what laws there are. If the society is severely unfair for 80% of the participants, you will either have apartheid or you won't have a lawful society.
So suck it and don't kill and starve people with your stupid attitude. Golden Rule, remember? If you want to live, that is.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I'm just saying it's what WILL happen.
Indeed, history teach us that people revolt when they do not have enough to eat. But on the other hand, I cannot think about a democratic system been thrown away this way.
Therefore we are stuck with this alternative: either convince people to vote for someone that will fix the problem, or convince people the system is not democratic (which may be the case or not: what matters is how it is perceived) and they should revolt.
This is very true. I understand why in the 90s, companies chose to be there - 80% of the world's VCs were there, and so that was where companies got started. Plus if you were a semiconductor or software company, usually the people you needed would be more likely found in the Santa Clara Valley than anywhere else.
After leaving the Bay Area and returning there on a visit after 10 years, I just couldn't recognize the place. Most of the tech companies that could be seen from the Bayshore Freeway in the 90s and even early 2000s were gone. The Microcenter near the AMC Theater in Santa Clara, which could be seen from the same freeway, had been replaced by a Walmart. Unlike previously, where the big offices used to be that of various tech companies, like the Intels, the Suns and so on, now it was mainly the consulting companies - KPMG, Accenture, et al.
I know that a whole bunch of the geek crowd w/ goatees love loitering in San Francisco to be in 'The City', but still, this fetish of basing their companies there totally escapes me. Particularly a company like Yelp, that could easily have set up shop anywhere else in the country.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to have some money in the bank
If you're going to San Francisco
You're going to meet some large expenses there
For those who come to San Francisco
Payin' the rent will be a worry there
In the streets of San Francisco
Young people, grey showing in their hair
All across the nation
Come see that abberation
People in trouble
There's a whole generation
With really no explanation
People in trouble
People in trouble
For those who come to San Francisco
Payin' the rent will be a worry there
In the streets of San Francisco
Young people, grey showing in their hair
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
TIL why they're called Yelp. It's the noise they like their employees to make.
... that she got fired from Yelp for posting an unflattering review?
"Lady Murderface" is the name she used to share the post on Twitter. The name probably colored my initial perception of the post, because it doesn't actually seem creepy on a second read.
That's kinda what I meant by professional context though... I don't mean she shouldn't have taken her complaint public; the public forum is definitely the place for it. But I wish she had focused more narrowly on the professional issue.
Instead she takes the reader through four paragraphs of autobiographical detail. We learn about her relationship with her dad and about her old living situation and how she won't get a promotion for at least a year. It all feels kinda self-indulgent, until she drops her bomb in paragraph five: Yelp employees are going hungry and some of them are homeless. Holy shit, why did she wait five paragraphs to say that???
From peoples' comments, I suspect most readers aren't getting past her autobiographical opening. People are dismissing her as self-indulgent and unprofessional after reading a few paragraphs... by the time she reveals that Yelp has a real problem, she's already lost half her audience.
I live in the southern US. I am amazed at the cost of living in big cities. I pay around $1000/month mortgage on my 3000+ square foot home on almost 4 acres of land. I can't even imagine paying that for something smaller than my laundry room.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling