171–180 of 317 posts
What is the biggest source of revenue for Yelp? What part of Yelp's revenue is Empyr or other card-linked offers?
They call businesses to sell promotion packages, and those that don't buy get hammered with bad reviews. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp-accuse...
Good riddance to an exploitative business.
Please explain.
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Sales and account management are easier to hire and fire. That said I bet some engineers were let go. If you're not directly client facing or related to e-commerce, you're not essential right now.
But aren't sales and account management precisely the people who are client-facing or related to e-commerce?
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.
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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.
The choice is to build an emergency fund, just like you would do for yourself, so you can pay your rent, your bills if an accident in your life happens. Yet, financial crashes happens quite regurlarly but companies expect the gouvernment (citizens) to pay the rescue bill. And I'm not going to cry for the execs taking a 20-30% pay cut.
This isn't just some "rainy day" to save for. This is unprecedented, and it's only necessary because the government did not take steps to contain the outbreak sooner.
Money given to companies after this is not a bailout in the 2008 sense. It should be viewed as compensation for damages caused by the government's bungled response to the virus.
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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.
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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…
That's a really charitable explanation and I think it explains some percentage of labor, but not nearly all of it (not even the majority of it, IMO). Yes, there is more going on behind the scenes in every company than you'd ever know about. But I think the majority of labor follows the pareto principle-- there are maybe 100 employees in every company of, say, 1000 people that do nearly all the work, and 900 employees…
I'm not personally a fan of it, but I get why it works this way. The financial loss if you break something adds up in an excruciating fashion on a per hour basis.
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.
More generally, it's kind of amazing that any company with 178 million unique "customers" only has a few thousand people working there. I know this is the norm nowadays due to the power of computers and the Internet, but I imagine how many people would have been employed to perform the same tasks fifty years ago and suspect it would have been three orders of magnitude higher (and completely uneconomical to do).
Progress is a pretty impressive thing.
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 know you're not saying this, but I'd caution anyone against saying things like "'s product is just a glorified ". It's very hard for people not working directly on a product to truly understand its complexity and everything that goes into it.
EDIT: here's where I read that https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/