this is sad , same with IBM last week , i guess we employees should think more about what kind how loyal can we be to companies that can do this to us i a blink of an eye.
All the best for the ex-yahoo and ex-IBM
Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
281–290 of 315 posts
Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, throwaway with a "fake" job (with quotations because usually 25% of the time I am busy). It is incredibly frustrating to me, because I consider myself a creative and capable individual, who is just fresh off graduation. However, I have a micromanaging, closed-minded rude boss (company lingo: "Leader"), who I prefer to avoid at all costs. At the same time, he seems completely aloof and uninterested in my career go…
If you are smart enough to enjoy reading Hacker News, you might be smart enough to learn programming. Decent programmers are still very much in demand, no matter what nation-wide crisis you are talking about.
I hope you're right, I want you to be right. But honestly, I can't see it. A lot of what we do essentially lives on credit.
We're like real estate. We're in demand as long as there is a buyer. Essentially, buyers will cease.
We're not doctors, cops nor lawyers, the world won't cease without us. Hell, even civil workers in governments although less salary, have better safety than we do. I can't shake the feeling that essentially we'll realise that all these companies we work for don't really "exist" as they're just the imagination of someones account balance. At some point its gotta run dry.
Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, by most people's standards, which is why the piece is working, it creates envy in a lot of people. Same with the "free food" spiel. But Yahoo is competing for Silicon Valley software engineers, and perks are very common, so if you don't have free food, free snacks, office parties, events, and other benefits, you'll have to pay your employees a lot more. Perks are incredibly cheap for the company, because people…
I see your point, but to be honest I'd probably pay not to have to attend Christmas parties at many places I've worked at. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling like this. Point being I don't know that this is really much of a perk......
Me to i only worked at one place(subsidiary of Elsevier) that did the mega party thing.
I didn't go to the first two and only attended after that to make nice with teh boss.
Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#284Earlier 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.
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...
Culture and momentum are real and important parts of workforce morale. Killing them off, will actually send the wrong message to employees.
I've been at companies who followed the above and ended first an annual 4th of July party, then scaled back the Christmas holiday party, then started cutting semi-regular, informal, socialization activities over lunches and what not.
There was nothing more damaging to morale at that firm than killing the few times a year we got to have a bit of fun on the company's dime. We worked hard so the CEO could buy another house, and the reward was "no bonuses, no parties this year." I watched the life drain out of that place.
Killing employee morale activities costing millions won't save jobs lost by spending billions or implementing anti-employee policies.
Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#285I 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…
> They still do have 400 million email users, and email users are loathe to change, so that business is probably safe for a while.
I'm one of them, and Yahoo makes precisely zero dollars from me -- they've been a free IMAP server for almost 20 years. It will be a huge PITA when they die and I have to tell a bunch of people to update their address books. I wish there were a way for me to pay them a few bucks to host my mail, because other options like running my own mail server and "sharing" everything I say with Google are not so good.
Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#286I 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…
> They still do have 400 million email users, and email users are loathe to change, so that business is probably safe for a while. I'm one of them, and Yahoo makes precisely zero dollars from me -- they've been a free IMAP server for almost 20 years. It will be a huge PITA when they die and I have to tell a bunch of people to update their address books. I wish there were a way for me to pay them a few bucks to host m…
You could pay them $50 a year for your e-mail: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN15967.html
Doesn't seem worth it to me, but it isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. If it makes you feel better about paying them, at least circa 2012, only users on paid mail farms had their mail data backed up. Everyone else's mail was not ever backed up (although each farm has a dedicated Netapp Filer which provides operational redundancy).
Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are smart enough to enjoy reading Hacker News, you might be smart enough to learn programming. Decent programmers are still very much in demand, no matter what nation-wide crisis you are talking about.
I hope you're right, I want you to be right. But honestly, I can't see it. A lot of what we do essentially lives on credit. We're like real estate. We're in demand as long as there is a buyer. Essentially, buyers will cease. We're not doctors, cops nor lawyers, the world won't cease without us. Hell, even civil workers in governments although less salary, have better safety than we do. I can't shake the feeling that…
My employer has just made `most valuable company'. I am not too concerned. They make a pretty dime, too.
Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it wasn't a big deal for you but it was perceived negatively overall and it hurt Yahoo's reputation (or whatever remnants of that remained at that point in time). If only 200 people were affected then it wasn't worth the backlash it created and wasn't a smart move. Anyone who was impacted by it, e.g. wasn't able to go pick up his kids or stay home for a plumber to come fix his sink, wouldn't be happy and his un…
The reason was to get rid of dead weight that was "working from home", but effectively just lifting a paycheck for doing nothing. It did in no way impact productive employees who needed an occasional flexible schedule. But that's not something you can tell the press, so it was spun as it was spun, and that's what people remember.
In actuality it just tightened the existing restrictions on remote workers to the very upper echelon of ICs. It didn't really impact occasional work-from-home people much as long as they flew under the radar, but it did impact the sort of people who lived in the middle of Idaho. Everyone was required to relocate to within 100 miles of a Yahoo office and commute in most days, unless they were truly irreplaceable and their VP went to bat. Oh and imagine relocating to be near an office that was subsequently closed.
It was a stupid policy decision, it damaged the Yahoo's public reputation due to their incompetent PR (nothing new there) and it has cost Yahoo a considerable number of excellent (but not truly irreplaceable) employees.
In conjunction with the drive to re-centralize teams back in Sunnyvale (after other drives to de-centralize to less competitive markets to hire better people), this cost Yahoo a lot of their network engineering team, among other groups. LinkedIn, Apple, and other companies have reaped the benefits of Yahoo's short-sightedness.
Whenever a company has to resort to cleaning house to rid itself of dead weight -- either by "banning" remote workers, mass layoffs, or whatever else -- the real story is that they simply don't know who is doing good work and who is not. If they knew, that, then the non-workers would already have been separated from the company.
Either the managers are not suited for their roles or not empowered to perform the duties of their roles or terrified of political nonsense like losing headcount and reqs and being demoted. Yahoo has consistently failed to properly measure employee performance, either taking a lackadaisical approach to performance or using pseudo-scientific nonsense like bell curves. As a result, there has always been a lot of dead weight -- inside the offices is no exception. They're currently being sued for their firing practices, and the suit suggests that the performance measuring system is wielded punitively for political purposes. I don't find this at all hard to believe.
There is no easy fix to a poor work culture, and I don't think Yahoo really has ever had the stomach for the hard fixes. The culture is too poisonous and it has persisted too long. It doesn't matter now though, Yahoo won't be around in its current form for too much longer.
Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#289Earlier 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…
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Re: Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
#290Earlier 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…
It seems that you're saying something that is impossible to disprove: that no one could have fixed Yahoo. I'm skeptical, but I guess we will never know.
What I do know is that at the time of her hire, on these very boards, people were singing her praises for the most part. Because the Valley protects its own.
Steve Jobs isn't the benchmark here. Maybe it was an impossible task to right the Yahoo ship, but what exactly did she do that was positive or innovative...at all?