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Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

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Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#41

Post by kzhahou »

notacoward wrote: post #10
Esau wrote: post #9

Don't worry people; I am sure the CEO will be okay.

Yeah, all the "wealth creators" at the top will do fine. It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Their fault for not cultivating the right connections.

I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets. I wonder if HN doesn't see a problem with founders because they all hope to be a billionaire founder themselves one day, but they don't personally relate to hired or big-company CEOs.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#42

Post by nullrouted »

hwestbrook wrote: post #15

I wonder if 10% is enough of a cut to make the business viable again, or if this is just pandering to the market. Seems likely that someone picked this number out of the air to make a statement.

Time to buy magic 8 ball stock as Yahoo is certainly increasing demand.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#43

Post by backtoyoujim »

w1ntermute wrote: post #12
Esau wrote: post #9

Don't worry people; I am sure the CEO will be okay.

Mayer will be walking away with a $158M golden parachute[0], and will undoubtedly have another nice executive position lined up in no time. It's amazing how much respect she's garnered in the tech community. From all the public info on her, she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optim…

My guess is that she will run for office, next.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#44

Post by PakG1 »

kzhahou wrote: post #41
notacoward wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, all the "wealth creators" at the top will do fine. It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Their fault for not cultivating the right connections.

I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets. I wonder if HN doesn't see a problem with founders because they all hope to be a billionaire founder themselves one day, but they don't personally relate to hired or big-company CEOs.

I think HN has grown large enough that there appears to be several competing hiveminds. I remember once commenting about people using their free time to contribute to open source and a ton of people sarcastically asked where they could find it. Then on another thread the next day, I saw ton of people extolling the benefits of contributing to open source in your free time. HN's all grown up to have multiple personalities.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#46

Post by prostoalex »

voltagex_ wrote: post #13
gcb0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

second? how quaint... every single CEO did that. some every year. mayer did her's in small installments to not show up in the media. but still got the same cut at the end. i think it's some textbook the board have

There has to be a better way to run a company... this kind of thing from so many companies world wide cannot be good for society as a whole.

Why? It's a network of Web sites with fairly generic functionality, like a content publishing system (frontpage, news, sports, tech, health), a search engine querying Bing API, Web-based email and a few other projects.

If you were building such a project from scratch, would you just not get anything off the ground without hiring 12,500 full-timers first? Most likely you would.

There are several structural inefficiencies to Yahoo!, most of them rely on 1990 processes in areas such as ad sales (which are still strongly salespeople-driven, try to buy a premium ad with your credit card, for example), low investment in automation and tooling, low amount of shared code across the Web properties (no common UI element library, for example, just guidelines), and structure that lends itself to hiring as many product managers as possible to coordinate all those inefficiencies across various products.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#47

Post by vincentbarr »

Alupis wrote: post #23
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. Haha... I'm happy you believe this. No sarcasm; it just made me wish that I still did. In this world, merit is judged by more than ability. Motive, if not aimed perfectly, is a burden that will decrease your chances, not increase them. Background is so important. My family was totally broken, like one hundred pe…

There are many counter examples to your anecdote. Larry Ellison comes to mind, but there are others (in fact, most of our most successful people come from very broken backgrounds). It's what you do with that drive/anger/passion/frustration/motivation/defiance that counts. It takes a lot of risk, and guts to strike out and create jobs - and more often than not it doesn't work out... but that's all part of the game. It…

Another person that is a counter-example and outlier: Franklin Story Musgrave.

A modern-day polymath, he was a NASA astronaut, Disney Imagineer, and physician among other things. He holds six academic degrees.

He, too, had an extremely troubled upbringing.[1]

In his own words, "I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide."

[1] http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/mus0int-1]

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#48

Post by tamana »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #32
voltagex_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Yahoo should have been split into smaller companies sooner. With better management, Flickr could have been Instagram.

I've been preparing to try to make an offer for Flickr in the event it goes up for sale (separate from the rest of the web business), organizing it as a benefit corp to be a long term business not to be put up for sale. It shouldn't be an Instagram. Its not a social network. Its a photo site that helps you organize/keep your photos, as well as share them (there's a difference). Just bidding my time, ear to the ground…

Why? There are many great photography hosting services. Flickr is only special because Yahoo makes it free as a marketing gesture

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#49

Post by tamana »

eru wrote: post #14
voltagex_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be a better way to run a company... this kind of thing from so many companies world wide cannot be good for society as a whole.

Why? Releasing the workforce from an unproductive company is exactly what society needs. The opposite is zombie companies.

Unproductive is not the same as unprofitable.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#50

Post by wsc981 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20
Alupis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Well... what do you expect? You're either the job creator or the job filler. If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. > Their fault for not cultivating the right connections. And yes, knowing the right people is part of that game. And yes, sometimes the job creators must d…

If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. Haha... I'm happy you believe this. No sarcasm; it just made me wish that I still did. In this world, merit is judged by more than ability. Motive, if not aimed perfectly, is a burden that will decrease your chances, not increase them. Background is so important. My family was totally broken, like one hundred pe…

  There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven.
If you're a software developer, at least you could be a job creator for yourself. And perhaps for many developers this is more enjoyable than managing other people, since most job creators are more busy managing or finding customers than actually creating fun stuff like software.
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