Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 315 posts

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#31

Post by blisterpeanuts »

I guess this proves that banning work-from-home didn't solve their problems.

Yahoo was the internet destination back in the 90s and into the 2000s until Google started to eat their lunch in search and email.

In my opinion, Yahoo's strength was its diversity; it was a one-stop shop for everything internet. You could register domain names, set up web pages, sell items, conduct email, instant messaging, etc. all within the yahoo.com domain. Gradually, it seems that other, nimbler competitors have gradually chipped away at Yahoo's lead until it seems they don't do anything particularly well compared to the competition. Too bad.

They still do have 400 million email users, and email users are loathe to change, so that business is probably safe for a while. But with nothing new to offer, and many good offerings sinking or gone, Yahoo is becoming a low price acquisition target. Sad to watch; at one time it was the iconic Internet business, in the Fortune 500, that could seemingly do nothing wrong.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#33

Post by jonknee »

minimaxir wrote: post #7
jonknee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it just changed, but there is an article and not a link to the WSJ. You can also use this to read the WSJ article: https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo%27s+Marissa+Mayer+to+U...

Nope. They closed that workaround. The article was indeed changed; edited OP.

Interesting, it still works for me but I have an extension that automatically sends a Google referrer to all WSJ.com request. Not sure why that would behave differently, but it does.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#34

Post by colmvp »

jedberg wrote: post #5

I feel bad for the 15%, but this was necessary. They are severely over-hired. I've gone over there a few times to talk to folks and it's clear that they have a lot of people that are basically making work for themselves because no one has any work for them that actually helps the business.

I'm not saying it's totally Mayer's fault, but there are numerous stories reported in the media in 2015 where high level execs were basically in limbo in late 2014/early 2015 where she was scurrying to come up with the broad product strategy. This caused so much animosity and frustration, leads opted to leave the company for other positions. So your anecdote doesn't surprise me at all. If leads felt disempowered to make decisions or if there is a lack of company vision, how could they distribute work to their teams?

I was in a startup where I basically sat without clear product to work on for a month, and I quit within a three months because it was a complete waste of my time and creative potential.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#36

Post by a3n »

pgz wrote: post #11
ProAm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one has any work for them that actually helps the business. What is their business now? Having no work is a leadership problem. If there really is no work then layoffs are a must, but the company is floundering around with no real direction....

This, IMHO, is the crucial point: what exactly is Yahoo's business? As an outside watcher I have no clue (I am also stupid). Hopefully people working there have better insight than myself.

I've never paid much attention to Yahoo!. It might be that cheesy logo just made me discount their seriousness when they started. Like when the print Wired was first out, they had different text colors and fonts, sometimes in the same paragraph.

I think Yahoo's business has been to be the internet, but they never noticed that other companies and services took that all away from them piece by piece. Now they're just a stock.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#37

Post by swang »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Article primarily references information from the WSJ article, but WSJ now has a super-paywall and the "web" trick no longer works.

I believe you have to delete all your WSJ cookies, then load from Google.

edit: hmm guess not. is this allowed by google?

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#38

Post by a2tech »

enjo wrote: post #25
jobu wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They keep calling themselves a "media company", but they've done such a terrible job at delivery (of media and vision) that it wouldn't surprise me if most people working there don't even know what the company is about. Recently I tried watching Yahoo's Other Space ( https://screen.yahoo.com/other-space/ ), but gave up after a few episodes - even though I enjoyed what I was able to watch. From what I could tell, the…

I love the show Community. I watched like three episodes of the new season and stopped. The weekly release model is just dumb. They made it nearly impossible to watch via Chromecast as well. At some point I lost interest in getting past their obstacles and just stopped watching. Yahoo reminds me of Apple in the mid 90's. Even good ideas are just terribly executed. They hired the wrong leader to try and fix their prob…

I watched the entire season of Community on Yahoo TV on my AppleTV. I never saw a single ad-either before/during/after the video, or in the app itself. They spent a ton of money to get Community and that awful Goop thing from Gwyneth Paltrow but there was no attempt to monetize it as far as I could see. Quite the head scratcher.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#39

Post by ChuckMcM »

jedberg wrote: post #5

I feel bad for the 15%, but this was necessary. They are severely over-hired. I've gone over there a few times to talk to folks and it's clear that they have a lot of people that are basically making work for themselves because no one has any work for them that actually helps the business.

This is one of those things that folks learn over time. I've met masters of the "busy people" who, with no direction whatsoever from above have full meeting schedules, generating reports and presentations and white papers and generally "working hard" but it is all just running on a treadmill as far as I can tell. They are exercising their "execution" habits while waiting for something to actually do. It sort of amazed me when I recognized it for what it was.

Interestingly they seem to hold there jobs while people who just stop doing anything with no direction often don't hold their jobs. So it is presumably a suvival trait.

One of the more interesting things my manager at Sun told me was that the difference between a leader and a worker, was that a leader was a going somewhere and a worker was helping them get there. So if you want to be a leader you need to have some place you are trying to go. It gets you into trouble though, when there is only enough energy to follow one or two paths, it puts you on the short list for removal if your path isn't one of them.

Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

#40

Post by mdm_ »

pgz wrote: post #11
ProAm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one has any work for them that actually helps the business. What is their business now? Having no work is a leadership problem. If there really is no work then layoffs are a must, but the company is floundering around with no real direction....

This, IMHO, is the crucial point: what exactly is Yahoo's business? As an outside watcher I have no clue (I am also stupid). Hopefully people working there have better insight than myself.

Sports. Depending on who you ask, they're the first[1] or second[2] most popular sports website in the world.

[1] http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/sports-websites

[2] http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/Sports

Post reply on HN