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Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

reuters.com

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

#231

Post by prostoalex »

oldmanjay wrote: post #91
shostack wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it is popular to hate on the finance industry and management and all, but...honest question here...was there really a better solution? Not trying to discount the human element as it absolutely sucks that many people will lose their jobs. But reallocating that capital that was tied up in Yahoo and clearly not doing any good there seems like an overall smart move if it couldn't be saved. What would a better alte…

I'm not sure what definition of "better" would apply but I'm certain there is a non-zero number of people who would prefer to see yahoo slowly die while paying the last of its money out to workers.

Those people should probably join a co-op or a non-profit organization then, for-profit publicly-traded corporations are not really set up for that with shareholders buying shares and firing boards and hiring new management and what not.

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

#232

Post by prostoalex »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #151
huac wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

companies are for shareholders, not workers

Have you never heard of a corporate charter? Shareholders are a component of a company, but not the reason a company exists.

Sure, so what does Yahoo's corporate by-laws or S-1 say?

The problem is that they already sold shares on the premise of being a for-profit entity extracting values to their shareholders.

They could have become an employee-owned co-op or a non-profit entity like Wikimedia or Craigslist, but at some point they chose not to.

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

#233

Post by cballard »

vacri wrote: post #219
cballard wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company Christmas party = another night that I can't spend with my girlfriend, lifting or climbing at the gym, reading, working on open source... and anything else that isn't hanging out with increasingly intoxicated people.

One night a year is onerous? For an event that it seems your coworkers enjoy?

We spent, I'd say, over $1500 for our party at a company of 15.

Yes, I would prefer a $100 bonus. The amount might decrease to the point that it's useless at larger companies due to economies of scale...

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

#234

Post by prostoalex »

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.

It's a company founded in 1994. A bunch of technologies available today (code management, deployment tools, content management, internal tooling) were not available back in the days, on a bunch of other things (ad serving, support for mobile) the industry has moved forward, but Yahoo! hasn't.

So you're right, a bunch of inefficiencies exist by design, a bunch of them due to the company's age (and to Yahoo!'s credit, their contemporaries like HotBot or Lycos or Excite are gone completely) and need to build certain stuff in-house, and a bunch of it created internally to guarantee job security in some departments.

They've outsourced search and on the Web/media front are doing things that Wordpress.com is doing at much better scale with fewer people, so yeah, there's potential for improvement there.

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

#235

Post by thrownaway2424 »

jzwinck wrote: post #63
juraj24 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts are similar - they dont have one united vision about who they are, but they do have several successful internet properties - finance, sport, tumblr, flickr and more. It seems clear now that marissa is not capable to completely transform the company, but by doing incremental optimalization they can do just fine over time.

Flickr was incredibly successful at one point, but it has been slowly dying for years. I used to pay for Pro features there but one day they emailed saying that free accounts were now good enough. So revenue must be reduced since then. And what replaced it is a bunch of porn collectors. Ten years ago there was a community of photographers there. Now the only "likes" I get are on a couple pictures that happen to have…

This thread has hundreds of comments and only two people mentioned Flickr. I guess that tells you how much currency it has.

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

#236

Post by free2rhyme214 »

Riod wrote: post #194
free2rhyme214 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work at Yahoo but I believe the answer is management.

How so? As in they just never hired the best people/created processes that resulted in innovation?

Hiring is part of it but it's also about systematically launching products to create your own ecosystem.

Yahoo's never really built an ecosystem like Google and when you couple that with low performing acquisitions you get job cuts.

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

#237

Post by cballard »

henrikschroder wrote: post #224
cballard wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough with the free snacks and parties. You know what I want as a perk? The company turns off at 5pm. That's it, no more work, go home, no exceptions. Company email shuts down, no access on your smartphone until 9am. Now that's a perk. I'll buy my own junk food[0], and I'll go to parties with my friends, not my coworkers. [0] or, well, I won't - another problem with the perks, I want to snack on carrots and skim gre…

> You know what I want as a perk? The company turns off at 5pm. That's not in the interest of most companies, so you'll have to start your own if that is what you want. > I'll go to parties with my friends The holiday party is completely optional. Most employees didn't go. > I want to snack on carrots and skim greek yogurt Our snack fridges are full of that, there's more healthy snacks than unhealthy around.

> That's not in the interest of most companies, so you'll have to start your own if that is what you want.

It's in the interest of companies to have happy employees. Following respectful working hours is one of the ways to do that. Doesn't have to be 9-5, if 10-6, 11-7, etc. is more of your thing.

I don't care about free food, I care about work/life balance. Office parties and free food type perks, which are just intended to keep you at the office longer, worsen my work/life balance.

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

#238

Post by brianwawok »

henrikschroder wrote: post #180
anotherhacker wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lavish parties send the wrong message to employees. If I were CEO I'd say: "No more parties. We're going to use the to retrain employees (instead of firing them) and avoid layoffs." Mayer is turing out to be a terrible CEO. This article describes the various multi-million dollar parties. http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blows...

That's not how it works. That's a terrible suggestion. If you cut perks, your best and brightest will leave much quicker, the elves leave middle earth. And then your company is essentially screwed, because you'll lose all of your key personnel. And you won't save very much money. This is the way of the bean-counters who know nothing of human motivation and morale. $1000 per employee is less than a percentage of their…

I don't think decimate is the correct term for cutting the lower 10‰ :). A true decimation would be 10% at random to inspire fear in all.

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

#239

Post by phamilton »

eitally wrote: post #153
henrikschroder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, if you've ever worked at a large company in SV, you should know that the "lavish parties" thing was a completely envy-driven red herring. If you do the math you realize that the holiday party cost a few hundred bucks per attending employee. Compared to other large SV companies - that are not under fire in the press - this was a cheap holiday party.

I dunno. Can you show examples of more lavish holiday parties? For one, there aren't that many SV companies of similar size. Secondly, a lot of the ones of similar size aren't WWW/software companies, and they have a lot slimmer margins anyway.

Tubemogul threw a ridiculous party in 2014. My neighbor was the event planner. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost per employee was way higher than Yahoo's.

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

#240

Post by lisper »

tptacek wrote: post #210
lisper wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo's problems have absolutely nothing to do with Mayer having a "nursery" put into her office. Of course they don't. That's not the point. Putting a nursery in her office was not a boneheaded blunder because the cost of the nursery (or her salary) made the difference between the company succeeding and not. It was a boneheaded blunder because at the same time she put the nursery in her office she also rescinded a…

Are you looking for someone to argue that Marissa Mayer was Steve Jobs? I'm the wrong person for that. I'm saying something simple. You claim that Mayer had 4.6B of cash flow to play with turn around Apple. My response is simply (a) no she didn't, and (b) to the extent she had real revenue to work with, it was an encumbrance : she was tasked with turning around a company for which 30% of its income was people routing…

> She's boxed in.

Certainly turning Yahoo around was never going to be easy. And it can be difficult to distinguish between "impossible" and merely "hard." We cannot possibly settle that question here and so there's no point in getting deeper into those weeds.

I will point out this though: I'm choosing to give Marissa and the Yahoo board the benefit of the doubt and assume that they disagreed with you, that they all thought it was possible. I'm also giving them the benefit of the doubt in assuming that they weren't necessarily wrong. Because the alternative is to believe either that 1) they are all idiots for thinking it was possible or 2) that they hired Marissa knowing full well that she was going to fail no matter what she did, and she accepted the offer and pocketed the $36M for her first six months on the job knowing full well that she was going to fail no matter what she did. That seems to me to be a much more damning accusation than anything I've said or implied. That they undertook a clearly impossible task is not actually a defense for a CEO who accepted an eight-figure salary IMHO.

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