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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

#301

Post by dandare »

free2rhyme214 wrote: post #156

In the past 10 years with Yahoo I - deleted Yahoo Weather after they put huge ads and briefly used Flickr. In the past 10 years with Google I - use Gmail, Google Drive, Google docs, Google sheets, Search, Google Maps, Chrome, Waze and YouTube on a daily basis. I've also bought Chromecast and occasionally use Hangouts & Wallet. I'm excited about a lot of their Google X projects. The 15% job cut is because Marissa Maye…

All the mentioned Google services are being paid for by Google Search, a luxury that Yahoo never had.

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

#302

Post by 1024core »

ec109685 wrote: post #279
1024core wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where she was scurrying to come up with the broad product strategy. You don't need a "broad product strategy" to do your job well. Unfortunately, many products coming out of Yahoo are shitty; and this should be fixed regardless of who's on top. Whatever you're working on, make sure it's first-class. Just read this and weep: Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo's SVP for communications products, says: “I just try to ship products t…

That was a quote taken out of context: https://mobile.twitter.com/bonforte/status/67209555273820979...

How many people will go out of their way and search Twitter for clarifications? I read the quote, and rolled my eyes. The journalist should be ashamed to take such a quote out of context.

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

#303

Post by skuhn »

username223 wrote: post #298
skuhn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 operatio…

Thanks for the link. $50/yr is overpriced for IMAP hosting, but it's good to know that they at least offer the service.

The maddening thing is that they used to offer Mail Plus for $20/yr, and it was eliminated in favor of providing those features to all users (good idea). So this new paid plan is much more expensive and offers much less value.

It also seems kind of hard to believe that Yahoo makes $50/yr off of ads per user. They certainly are not pulling that in across the hundreds of millions of mail accounts they claim to have. Since Yahoo is getting the money up front and without the work and risk of selling ads, I would actually expect it to be priced at a discount versus what Yahoo would see from ad revenue.

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

#304

Post by throwawayyawa »

eru wrote: post #274
throwawayyawa wrote: post #123

Earlier 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 do know programming, and I enjoy it very much.

But I work in a financial department where it's an alien concept, and as such, unauditable and dangerous. I barely get opportunities to put it in action these days.

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

#305

Post by throwawayyawa »

eru wrote: post #274
throwawayyawa wrote: post #123

Earlier 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.

By the way, today I had a meeting with an IT coordinator in a sister-company. He knows everything about SAP. However, he had no clue as to what "Python" is.

I work with dinosaurs apparently.

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

#306

Post by henrikschroder »

anotherhacker wrote: post #300
discardorama wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at Yahoo when Carol Bartz came in and did exactly that. And guess what? Morale plummeted. "The beatings will continue until the morale improves" .... ever heard of that?

Do you have a reference to that? I can't find any evidence that Carlo Bartz engaged in any retraining of employees. Again, I'm not suggesting cost cutting. I'm suggesting a move from frivolous expenses, to those which help make the employees more successful. As I commented before, Deming was all about training employees over firing them. https://www.deming.org/theman/theories/fourteenpoints

Perks in SV companies are absolutely not frivolous expenses! They are a necessary expense to attract and keep the right talent, in competition with other SV companies that also offer generous perks. If you cut it, morale plummets and you will lose a lot of good employees.

The link you posted contains great tips for assembly-line factories filled with replaceable hourly workers. SV is.. not that.

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

#307

Post by henrikschroder »

anotherhacker wrote: post #299
henrikschroder wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the "best and brightest" at a company are interested in the company investing in them at the expense of the dead weight. They are also not very interested in training, because they don't need it. They want to work on cutting-edge projects. "Training" is something that the poor performers are going to flock to, because it benefits them. Which is the polar opposite of what the top performers want.

I believe your distorting my original point, pouring your own prejudices into what I said, or I didn't explain myself very well. (Probably the last one) Instead, I'll just point you to Deming's work on management. He transformed Japan's post war economy into the powerhouse it is today. He's also responsible for the much of the transformation here in the USA during the 1980'ss & 90's. Long story short: it's the goal o…

I think you explained yourself very well, you said that the company should cut perks and put the money into re-training employees to avoid layoffs.

Cutting perks will gut the company morale.

Re-training on the job is already available at most SV companies of this size. You want it, you get it.

The original article that called out the lavish party was explicitly doing so to paint Marissa as a CEO that spends frivolously, and the author wanted her to move that money from employees to the investors instead.

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

#308

Post by brongondwana »

skuhn wrote: post #286
username223 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 operatio…

Or you could pay us $40/year for your email: https://www.fastmail.com/signup/personal.html and be buying from a team which is just focused on email.

(and yes, we back up everyone's email)

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

#309

Post by jpetso »

tomp wrote: post #189
jpetso wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is some value in providing jobs to 10,000 people (currently more, soon a little less) even if there's no extra profit for shareholders on top of that. Maybe these kinds of companies should just be given to employees for free and run as a co-op instead of getting shut down.

> I think there is some value in providing jobs to 10,000 people Sure there is, but it's not the purpose of companies to provide that, but should be done by the society (government) if the society decides there's value in that.

> Sure there is, but it's not the purpose of companies to provide that, but should be done by the society (government) if the society decides there's value in that.

I like how this contrasts really nicely with a different view, where the ideal state of society is small government that leaves everything to the market, often mentioned in the same breath with keeping taxes as low as possible.

I think the whole basic income thing is interesting, but unless/until that's implemented, a society that mainly relies on companies to power and own the country should also demand from companies to ensure that people are doing well.

Anyway that's going off-topic, my initial point was only that the default move for companies without sizeable profits or losses doesn't have to be to wind them down. I care less whether you call the result a charity, a non-profit or something done by the government.

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

#310

Post by skuhn »

brongondwana wrote: post #308
skuhn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 operatio…

Or you could pay us $40/year for your email: https://www.fastmail.com/signup/personal.html and be buying from a team which is just focused on email. (and yes, we back up everyone's email)

Agreed. I wish e-mail (and many other services) wasn't a "free" offering from diversified players. I think pure play businesses who gasp charge enough to make a living and a profit based solely on their product's direct value are very appealing.
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