Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 317 posts

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#141

Post by chrisseaton »

jrockway wrote: post #76
duggable wrote: post #59

> Today we will let 1,000 of our colleagues go and furlough approximately 1,100 more, while reducing hours for others. Your department leaders will be in touch this morning to discuss how this affects you individually, and letters with more details and FAQs will follow this afternoon. Honest question - is it normal to announce layoffs publicly before telling the affected employees? I guess I can understand it from a…

The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc. with probably-incorrect information about the layoffs. So PR wants to be out ahead of that. The real world doesn't have atomic transactions, so you have to pick between that scenario and one where some people are worried about their job for a few hours.

> The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc

Why do people do this? What do they get out of it? They don't pay for tip-offs do they? Seems unethical anyway.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#142

Post by hyperpape »

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.

This isn't specific to Yelp, but here's a general essay on the subject: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#143

Post by neltnerb »

madamelic wrote: post #138
deminature wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enginee…

I think you need as many approvals as your risk tolerance allows for... they're not pointless. If they are pointless then sure, get rid of them. But I don't know how you'd guess that number without deep knowledge of the business.

It is sometimes better to go slower than you could and be more confident that the product is acceptable. Approvals can but don't necessarily help with that.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#144

Post by RandallBrown »

hunter-2 wrote: post #3

Someone I work with from another company just messaged me that they are being furloughed for a couple of months. I wonder how many of these furloughs are going to end up in layoffs.

It'll depend a lot on how long the pandemic lasts.

I know a few friends that work for a major retail company that have been furloughed. Those will definitely turn to layoffs if this keeps going too much longer.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#145

Post by luckylion »

orky56 wrote: post #121
stri8ed wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain.

Yelp is accused of predatory practices on business owners including pushing them to sign up for a paid subscription to hide negative reviews on their Yelp page. Otherwise, you are vulnerable to their algorithm which hides/shows reviews that are often less than favorable. Yelp reviews are now overtaking business' own pages on Google searches leaving businesses with less option to control, let alone, curate their brand…

They're not just hiding negative reviews if you pay, they are hiding legitimate positive reviews if you don't. It's simply the online equivalent of the mob asking for protection money.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#147

Post by altonzheng »

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…

According to LinkedIn, Yelp has 8964 employees with top 2 being: 1. Sales (3799) 2. Engineering (1035)

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#148

Post by dickjocke »

Scoundreller wrote: post #131
xenospn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a great point I always struggle with coming up with UIs for side projects, but really everything I come up with will always look cheap compared to the efforts of 13 experts.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#149

Post by throw_this_one »

Xcelerate wrote: post #48
ransom1538 wrote: post #4

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.

Totally out of my field here, but is it possible the stock market doesn’t actually track the economy anymore? Stocks don’t pay dividends that often nowadays; it doesn’t seem to be so much an investment as a guess about where other people think the price is going to go. I mean, what does Bitcoin track, or the price of art? It almost seems arbitrary.

Since big companies can raise capital with really low interest rates... isn't the stock market basically a big Casino game? Name of the game is to guess what everybody else is gonna do and come out ahead. Most are just investing for a return. Seems pointless.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#150

Post by Loughla »

chrisseaton wrote: post #141
jrockway wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc. with probably-incorrect information about the layoffs. So PR wants to be out ahead of that. The real world doesn't have atomic transactions, so you have to pick between that scenario and one where some people are worried about their job for a few hours.

> The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc Why do people do this? What do they get out of it? They don't pay for tip-offs do they? Seems unethical anyway.

Revenge? Spite? A feeling of importance and control in a situation completely out of their control? Shits and giggles?

Not sure angry human beings are the most rational actors in most cases.

Post reply on HN