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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

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Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#221

Post by timr »

luckylion wrote: post #145
orky56 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're not doing either. I worked there, on the systems in question.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#222

Post by dntrkv »

yalogin wrote: post #66

Wait Yelp has 6000 employees? They haven’t changed their site in a decade! What percentage of that is engineering? Seriously, I thought they have maybe 1000 at best.

Have you (and anyone else posting this same exact comment on any article that mentions employee count) ever worked at a large company? Once things operate at a large enough scale, it requires dedicated teams to focus on very specific parts of the application.

Take SEO for example, it's not just putting H1 and title tags on every page. You most likely have dedicated services that are generating millions of sitemaps, daily. You probably have separate infrastructure dedicated to serving the crawlers so that you can optimize the content and aren't serving your users and bots from the same pool of resources. You have analytics dedicated to monitoring the crawlers and running tests / adjustments as you see results. You likely have services that generate the SEO data for every page (meta tags, titles, canonical links, headings, etc). And in addition to this you have AB testing, legacy systems, and technical debt to deal with.

My point is, it's easy to brush these things off as unnecessary and large company waste (and some of it might be) but to say things like "It's just a CRUD app, why do they need a 1000 engineers. I could do it with 10" is ignoring the vast complexity involved in running at scale.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#223

Post by gabagool »

carlineng wrote: post #83
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 is a public company, and their SEC filings will give you insight into where they spend money. In 2019, over half of their expenses were Sales and Marketing, so we can infer that many of the 6000 employees are likely in roles dedicated to Sales and Marketing. http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001345016/360caaf2...

Even more precisely, 3844 of 5950 Yelp employees on Dec 31, 2019 were members of the sales force. That's 64%.

Page 5: "Our sales force consisted of 3,844 employees as of December 31, 2019..."

Page 12: "As of December 31, 2019, we had 5,950 employees globally."

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#224

Post by ed »

spankalee wrote: post #188
coffeemug wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you're missing the key part of GP: > These projects might be pointless on a small app, but in a large business might be worth millions to the company. With enough traffic and revenue, you'll get a positive return on hiring a bunch of engineers to optimize things that wouldn't be worth it for smaller sites. With enough engineers you'll get a positive return on hiring engineers to make engineering more efficien…

> With enough traffic and revenue, you'll get a positive return on hiring a bunch of engineers to optimize things that wouldn't be worth it for smaller sites. With enough engineers you'll get a positive return on hiring engineers to make engineering more efficient.

Very insightful! As a corollary, you should not staff up until there is something to optimize.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#225

Post by smallgovt »

james-skemp wrote: post #210
pgsbathhouse2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

Louis Rossmann has a Mac repair store in New York and, when I was subscribed to him, had posted numerous videos about his experiences with Yelp. One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso

To summarize: Yelp account exec shared another business owner's stats with Louis. Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp and the account exec got fired. The fired account exec took it personally and got her friends to write negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page.

That's evidence that Yelp practices extortion?

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#226

Post by kaesar14 »

xienze wrote: post #37
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.

Maybe you missed the ~40% drop it sustained in about a month's time? That happened when it looked like the world was ending and 2 million people were supposed to die in the US. Now that things are looking better, the stock market is improving.

Why are things "looking better"?

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#227

Post by smallgovt »

save_ferris wrote: post #218
goatherders wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it differently: Yelp has built a platform that has a large audience. If you don't pay for certain things then you don't get visibility in their platform. Everyone from Google to Capterra does some version of the same thing. You can call it "shaking down" local businesses but no one is entitled to positive or even fair promotion on someone else's platform.

There are numerous accounts of businesses receiving calls from Yelp salespeople essentially telling them to buy an ad package or the negative reviews get prioritized. I agree that no one is entitled to positive promotion, but to argue that a massive platform that's established itself as the go-to place for consumer business reviews absolutely should be held to fair promotion. I can't believe that this an argument on…

> There are numerous accounts of businesses receiving calls from Yelp salespeople essentially telling them to buy an ad package or the negative reviews get prioritized.

Sure, there are numerous accounts (read:hearsay) but there's zero physical or hard evidence.

After all this press, don't you think there'd be at least one recorded phone conversation or email that showed up in the numerous lawsuits' discovery processes?

There is literally zero physical evidence corroborating Yelp account execs' extortive practices.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#228

Post by say-vagnes »

james-skemp wrote: post #210
pgsbathhouse2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

Louis Rossmann has a Mac repair store in New York and, when I was subscribed to him, had posted numerous videos about his experiences with Yelp. One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso

This actually convinced me that Yelp is probably unfairly being targeted. I had come into this thinking that they were in fact unethical.

However, this video very clearly shows a family who incorrectly blames the business owner for one of their members losing a job. Yelp fired them, as they should have.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#229

Post by rossdavidh »

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…

I worked in the semiconductor industry in the 90's, when it was going through many waves of layoffs and plant closings as the manufacturing went overseas. It is actually the right way to do things, to say to your employees "we're going to have a layoff soon, it will be about this many people, those laid off will get this severance package". Then, you announce it publicly, the same day you've announced it internally. People get a few days to let it sink in, which does suck, but if you have any kind of severance then you know that it's not like dying, and you get treated a little more like an adult.

Compare to the way things were done in the early 80's when the same industry was new at this, they did it as a "surprise" all at once, hustling people out the door and people don't have any time to exchange email addresses with coworkers, etc.

Of course, if you're not offering any severance package, then you have more of an incentive to do things the wrong way...

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#230

Post by xenospn »

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.

Oh if only it were that simple :) I don't think Airbnb's CTA will work for anyone but Airbnb.
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