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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

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Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#151

Post by deminature »

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…

The approvals usually come from other engineers. It stems from having to modify highly-sensitive code which usually has an owner you need to work with to get an approval.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#152

Post by CydeWeys »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #45
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.

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…

Don't forget the multiplier on how many more internal systems a company has vs its external ones. It's not uncommon at all to see thousands of engineers at a large company working on internal-only systems, covering the full gamut of every need of a large corporation. Hell, even just the facilities management systems for the office spaces are complicated.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#153

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #100
riese4thewin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Abuse management is usually secretive because if you publish the "rules of non-abusive behavior", you end up with a bunch of behavior that complies with the official rules while still being abusive.

[deleted]

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#154

Post by ianceicys »

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…

You're not hiring more middle managers because you want too, no large companies have to promote engineers to senior engineering managers to handle the complexities of approvals required by compliance such as SOC2,SOC3,ISO27001,FedRAMP, GDPR, etc.

I've worked at companies were every line of code has to be reviewed and approved by a lawyer. Yes a lawyer (usually a former engineer that the company paid to go to law school) is reviewing some dumb little javascript or python script for license and legal compliance.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#155

Post by dasil003 »

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.

What happens is that when a pure software company is a startup it is severely constrained in what it can execute on. As it gains traction, it receives funding and revenue that allows it to invest in more people to get more done. In the beginning the marginal ROI of each hire is high, but as they grow it slowly decreases and may become dominated by communication overhead if proper structure isn't added. But as long as growth is on pace, they will keep hiring to stay ahead of the curve and squeeze as many gains as possible. When VC money is at play, management will be pressured to grow at all cost, and worry less about the downside because the investors are looking for the grand slam. There's never any shortage of internal stakeholders who will have ideas of where to put heads to good use.

In short: they have 6000 because that's what leadership thought they could afford. Obviously a 10-year bull market leading up to the current lockdown situation puts them in a rough spot.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#156

Post by CydeWeys »

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.

Usually it's more people who get laid off start talking about it on Twitter, then the news media get wind of it and start talking with the laid off employees, and find some willing to describe in detail exactly what went down, send along a screenshot of the announcement email, etc.

If I got laid off I'd talk about it on Twitter too. That's a natural reaction for many people. You want to commiserate with others in the same situation and share useful unemployment and job-finding resources. Hell, a big layoff gets its own hashtag.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#157

Post by CydeWeys »

twunde wrote: post #135
jiveturkey wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup. I don't like Yelp, but in this situation the choice isn't between layoffs and no layoffs, it's between layoffs and bankruptcy. And in bankruptcy you'd see massive layoffs anyway.

There's not really even a choice here.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#158

Post by heavenlyblue »

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.

If I had a week to think how to design a good button, I would design a good button.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#159

Post by rchaud »

While job losses will pile further misery on the economy, I hope that means there are now fewer ad sales people trying to shake down local businesses so that they offer Yelp protection money to keep their ratings positive.

Companies like this always start with a noble purpose, before the pressure to monetize causes them to ruin what was once a valuable service.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#160

Post by saluki »

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 agree, working on small teams and on bootstrapped apps it's just hard to imagine 1000 engineers or even 100 engineers working on a web application.
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