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I know this is a very tired topic, but does anyone have any good blog posts or articles about "what exactly is it that you all do?" Yelp having 6000 employees. I'm not surprised, I'm not mad. I just want to understand.
Off topic: Can anyone explain why the dow jones is going up? The dow was LOWER Jan 1st 2019. I feel we are worse off than Jan 1st 2019.
Everybody realizes it should adjust to some new value to reflect the new reality. But nobody knows what that value is. So nobody is sure if the market has adjusted too far or not enough.
So any time any new information comes in, people grasp at straws trying to make sense of the situation (and/or decide they have to act despite very limited information), and the market goes up and down.
It doesn't just move smoothly in one direction and then gradually come to a stop once it finally reaches the new "correct"(-ish) value. It jerks back and forth as it gets there. So even when down is the inevitable direction, it's going to have a few ups mixed in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yelp's engineering isn't likely much more than ~150 people (I worked there ~2 years ago, maybe has grown since then but honestly, given their revenue situation even then, likely not by much). The mix there is just like most companies; you've got dedicated teams for each of their apps (which includes Android, iOS, web, business-facing, etc), you've got API teams, back office teams working on moving data around and bus…
I think your 150 estimate is very low— we had 80 eng when I left, nine years ago.
Engineering was mostly based in SF but with satellite offices in London and Hamburg. It looks like they were expanding in a large way into a Toronto office too.
Infrastructure was around a fifth of that total but included verticals like search and machine learning infrastructure.
Yelp turned off their last datacentre in early 2018 (IIRC) - and is entirely on AWS.
Off topic: Can anyone explain why the dow jones is going up? The dow was LOWER Jan 1st 2019. I feel we are worse off than Jan 1st 2019.
Good riddance to an exploitative business.
I guess even the 21st century mafia isn't immune to an economic downturn.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yelp's engineering isn't likely much more than ~150 people (I worked there ~2 years ago, maybe has grown since then but honestly, given their revenue situation even then, likely not by much). The mix there is just like most companies; you've got dedicated teams for each of their apps (which includes Android, iOS, web, business-facing, etc), you've got API teams, back office teams working on moving data around and bus…
Even 150 blows my mind. Years ago I worked for one of the top 10 EHR software makers (at the time - maybe even now, I haven't looked) and we had 1/3 the number of engineers on that system.
As an example: a retail transaction database. Or a calendar booking system. That should be really simple, right? Just record who ordered what, when they received it, who sold it, etc. Who reserved the room, who to send invites out to, simple?
No, it turns out that you have to also take into account people whose orders got delayed by the human-based shipment system, people who got coupons and they expired/want to extend the coupon, people who returned the merchandise and never got any confirmation that it was received back. Or what if someone modifies the meeting location after people accepted -- does a minor change to the meeting description trigger a re-invite or update, or not? Can meeting rooms be held by more than one person at a time? Or what if you want to tie it to the email marketing system that wasn't properly integrated or planned to be integrated -- that's another couple of engineers who have the thankless task of maintaining ETLs that constantly break whenever a change comes along.
Or in the case of Yelp, I'm sure there's small teams who are responsible for the mundane tasks of how to keep track of when a business closes, or reopens, or temporarily shut down due to virus situation -- how are the entries for those businesses supposed to be updated? We never had a field for "closed by mandatory government order" -- that's gonna take a refactor of xyz to implement, etc. etc. We have users who review things, and then those users someday die/go idle/get banned. What happens to the ranking of their reviews? It goes on and on.
(and usually, the people who take the time to think about these things in advance set themselves up for much less pain, and far fewer people needed to fix it, later)
A company like yelp making 1 billion revenue per year, I'd except they could have their employees back, for at least a couple months, maybe furlough them with 80% of their salaries...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yelp's engineering isn't likely much more than ~150 people (I worked there ~2 years ago, maybe has grown since then but honestly, given their revenue situation even then, likely not by much). The mix there is just like most companies; you've got dedicated teams for each of their apps (which includes Android, iOS, web, business-facing, etc), you've got API teams, back office teams working on moving data around and bus…
Even 150 blows my mind. Years ago I worked for one of the top 10 EHR software makers (at the time - maybe even now, I haven't looked) and we had 1/3 the number of engineers on that system.
I know this is a very tired topic, but does anyone have any good blog posts or articles about "what exactly is it that you all do?" Yelp having 6000 employees. I'm not surprised, I'm not mad. I just want to understand.
An example might be complying with food and alcohol law in a single region, which you would never see unless you lived there. Another example might be a complete experimentally gated refactor that shaves 1 second off loading time. A lot of effort would go into simply making sure the change can be turned off, and verifying with unit tests, which takes time and effort.
These projects might be pointless on a small app, but in a large business might be worth millions to the company.
Another aspect is your changes often have to be approved by a lot of people, which is not the case on small projects. Your projects are also analyzed by data scientists, to make sure they're not harming the business - and if they are, your work might be thrown out, which contributes to even less visible change to outsiders.
All of these in concert slow things down, and necessitate staff.