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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

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Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#131

Post by Scoundreller »

xenospn wrote: post #94
TulliusCicero wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most consumer technology products are much more complicated under the hood than they appear to be to regular consumers. Even most programmers -- who are well aware of the hidden complexity of the products they themselves work on -- usually seem to believe that this must not hold true for the products of other companies. For every feature you're aware of on a random consumer tech product or service, there are probably…

I read somewhere (can't remember where) that Airbnb had a dedicated team of 13 engineers and designers working on the welcome email alone. Getting the CTA "just right" resulted in a huge difference in conversions.

And the nice thing is that’s all public.

So if you’re designing your own CTA, just copy Wal-Mart’s or Amazon’s or Airbnb’s and voila.

In a way, I wish I got to work at Wal-Mart or McDonalds just to get a 1st-Hand view of their processes. Would beat any “LEAN” course.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#132

Post by tmpz22 »

riese4thewin wrote: post #78
013a wrote: post #44

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…

Can you elaborate on the "secretive abuse mgmt team"?

Because of the value in subverting abuse systems such as Yelp ratings or Google SEO, these teams usually are handled differently with an entirely different threat model - which is why they may be referred to as "secretive".

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#133

Post by tuckernoia »

013a wrote: post #44
Waterluvian wrote: post #5

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.

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 2 years ago we had WAY more than 150 engineers.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#135

Post by twunde »

jiveturkey wrote: post #118
flr03 wrote: post #42

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...

and take a huge earnings hit? WHY? when you can just let people go. it's a company with shitty business ethics, so why would you even suggest that they do right by their employees?

Look layoffs are always shitty, and Yelp in many ways is not an ethical company. However if you read the actual post, the leadership is at least trying. The CEO is taking no pay, execs are taking pay cuts. They've cancelled projects. My guess is that their revenue has tanked to near 0 and that since many of their clients are closing, possibly for good they're expecting significantly lower revenue for the next 2 years.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#136

Post by manquer »

mattkrause wrote: post #107
xienze wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW, she said "almost perfectly" Has anyone seriously suggested that the US’s measures are being carried out anywhere near “almost perfectly”? Quite the opposite, there’s been lots of concerns voiced that people aren’t taking this seriously. > The revised model predicts up to ~127k deaths, which is certainly less, but not egregiously so It’s a nearly 40% reduction!

1) Are the policy implications of potentially killing off all of (say) Salt Lake City much different from destroying New Haven? I would argue no, not really. 2) Biological data is often a nightmare to work with. Estimates about behavior too. Getting something within an order of magnitude is often not too shabby. 3) Errors ('up to') are sensitive. Here's a toy example. Suppose you think two numbers are each around 5,…

Any decent statistical model like this should include a confidence interval , if biological is so difficult then the CI would have reflected that . This just seems poor science to me

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#137

Post by bduerst »

Waterluvian wrote: post #5

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.

Global companies employ regional sales and marketing people, since those are typically the most effective workers in those roles. Once you start layering on countries, there are also administrative roles that get added.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#138

Post by madamelic »

deminature wrote: post #120
Waterluvian wrote: post #5

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.

I wondered this before joining a large tech company. As it turns out, a lot of engineering is done on experimentation to optimize the product. Only a small portion of users might see the experiment, and many don't succeed. 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…

>Another aspect is your changes often have to be approved by a lot of people, which is not the case on small projects.

So you need more engineers because you hired more middle managers?

That's a little absurd in my opinion but I am likely wrong in this assumption.

It just seems like the reaction to "We have lots of approvals" should be figuring out how to reduce the amount of approvals needed, not hiring more engineers to increase velocity.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#139

Post by asnyder »

flr03 wrote: post #42

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...

That would be nice, but most companies most likely prioritize profit for shareholders and rather lay you off/furlough and let government / unemployment / rescue bills pick up the cost.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#140

Post by mattkrause »

manquer wrote: post #136
mattkrause wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Are the policy implications of potentially killing off all of (say) Salt Lake City much different from destroying New Haven? I would argue no, not really. 2) Biological data is often a nightmare to work with. Estimates about behavior too. Getting something within an order of magnitude is often not too shabby. 3) Errors ('up to') are sensitive. Here's a toy example. Suppose you think two numbers are each around 5,…

Any decent statistical model like this should include a confidence interval , if biological is so difficult then the CI would have reflected that . This just seems poor science to me

The 200k/127k people are harping about IS THE CONFIDENCE INTERVAL (well, the upper half of it, hence "up to").

That's half of my point--you'd expect the confidence interval to narrow with more data, regardless of what's going on. On top of that, you've got model error and non-stationarity (e.g., better care is discovered, driving the mortality rate down), which can't be reflected in the confidence interval.

Here's one of the modelling paper. The discussion of uncertainty starts on page 4: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.27.20043752v...

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