241–250 of 317 posts
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.
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…
Check the incentives. For corporate managers, your salary is generally proportional to the number of people you manage. Who cares if your 1000-person org doesn't accomplish anything, you're a big shot now. On a sports team, coaches are rewarded for championships. There is no room for waste, and underperforming people get cut.
Most sports teams rosters are restricted by league rules. However coaching staffs are not, and they have grown tremendously in recent years, as have college athletic department staffs. When someone actually does take a hard look, these staffs seem exceptionally bloated and wasteful.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2006-10-31-06103101...
When Vince Lombardi began coaching the Green Bay Packers in 1959, he had four assistants. This year, Denver Broncos coach Mike Shanahan has 21.
http://www.espn.com/espn/page2/story/_/page/easterbrook%2F10...
Ohio State lists 458 people in its athletic department. There are 192 faculty members in Ohio State's English department, with a support staff of about 50.
https://www.newsobserver.com/sports/college/acc/article16325...
One assistant coach is called the recruiting coordinator, but he’s backed by a Director of Player Personnel, an Assistant Director of Player Personnel, a Coordinator of On-Campus Recruiting and a Recruiting Assistant. There are three video coordinators.
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…
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.
An old EHR system from years ago does none of those things, doesn't do engineering heavy things like live updates with thousands of A/B/C/D tests running simultaneously with multiple clients for multiple operating systems and so on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To summarize: - A Yelp account exec inappropriately shared another business's profile stats with Louis. - Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp, and Yelp decided to fire the account exec. - The fired account exec blamed Louis for getting fired and subsequently got her friends to write negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page. That's not evidence that Yelp practices extortion.
Louis also found negative reviews from people who didn't live in his community and who were also friends with the Yelp salespeople who attempted to solicit business from Louis, which is so egregious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY
Basically, Louis got the rep fired, and the rep went haywire. This doesn't suggest Yelp has extortive sales practices. If anything, Yelp made the right decision to fire this sales rep who breached privacy protocol.
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.
It begins innocuously enough. It takes just one or two mid-level manager empire-builders to join the company. Thanks to the funding, the product and business want growth at all cost which means everything needs to be built and launched yesterday. The engineering-managers say well sure, I need 100 engineers. And so the game begins; the early empire-builders get promoted to dizzy heights.
It doesn't take much time for others to take notice that they need to build an empire to get promoted and every mid-level manager is hiring like there's no tomorrow. In no time you have an incredibly bloated org. In this environment not building an empire is not an option; teams with fewer than 10 members don't get new-shiny projects and are brutally sidelined.
[1] I've been on both sides. The start-up I was working in got acquired by a behemoth that had skilled empire-builders. My team got massacred. In my next gig I had learned my lessons so hired like crazy and in no time had 40 engineers reporting (direct/indirectly) to me 15 of whom had any real work to do. The rest were building random CRUD apps. In the end, realized that empire-building is not for me; I enjoy running a small tight knight team producing high throughput and impactful work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Louis also found negative reviews from people who didn't live in his community and who were also friends with the Yelp salespeople who attempted to solicit business from Louis, which is so egregious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY
I acknowledged that in my previous comment. All the fake reviews were written by friends of the fired sales rep. Basically, Louis got the rep fired, and the rep went haywire. This doesn't suggest Yelp has extortive sales practices. If anything, Yelp made the right decision to fire this sales rep who breached privacy protocol.
When hundreds of small business owners make accusations against one company like this, and people like Louis being tangible evidence forward, a full investigation of these practices is warranted, which hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge.
This smells like a toxic sales culture that enables people to take advantage of small businesses as long as they don’t get caught. Many small business owners probably don’t have the energy or ability to do the research that Louis did, but his findings were pretty shocking.
How many more small business owners need to take time away from revenue generating activity to discover this kind of coordination before you’re satisfied that there’s a real issue here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check the incentives. For corporate managers, your salary is generally proportional to the number of people you manage. Who cares if your 1000-person org doesn't accomplish anything, you're a big shot now. On a sports team, coaches are rewarded for championships. There is no room for waste, and underperforming people get cut.
>> no room for waste Most sports teams rosters are restricted by league rules. However coaching staffs are not, and they have grown tremendously in recent years, as have college athletic department staffs. When someone actually does take a hard look, these staffs seem exceptionally bloated and wasteful. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2006-10-31-06103101... When Vince Lombardi began coaching the Green Bay Pa…
2019 Denver Broncos had 23 assistants, 24 total coaching staff including the head coach.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I acknowledged that in my previous comment. All the fake reviews were written by friends of the fired sales rep. Basically, Louis got the rep fired, and the rep went haywire. This doesn't suggest Yelp has extortive sales practices. If anything, Yelp made the right decision to fire this sales rep who breached privacy protocol.
You’ve moved the goalposts here though. You first argued how none of these small business owners brought forward evidence and therefore this isn’t a real scandal, and then you concede that this is a legitimate example but Yelp handled it correctly by firing the rep. When hundreds of small business owners make accusations against one company like this, and people like Louis being tangible evidence forward, a full inve…
I never moved the goalpost. My claim has always been that there is zero physical evidence of Yelp extorting small businesses.
The posted video is not evidence of Yelp extorting business. It's an example of a fired Yelp employee blaming a business owner for getting fired, and taking it out on the business owner's Yelp page. That is not extortion on behalf of Yelp.
> When hundreds of small business owners make accusations against one company like this, and people like Louis being tangible evidence forward, a full investigation of these practices is warranted, which hasn’t happened yet, to my knowledge.
There have been countless lawsuits filed against Yelp for extortion. All of them have been dismissed -- not settled; dismissed. Google is your friend.
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, d…