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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

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Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#261

Post by goatherders »

Skunkleton wrote: post #204
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.

Ok, well then I suppose that you agree that I am free to spread false rumors about you, as long as I do it on a platform that is privately owned?

Who said anything about false rumors?

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#262

Post by draw_down »

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.

I think if someone gets laid off from their job they should feel free to tell whoever they want about that. Don't you think so?

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#263

Post by TulliusCicero »

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…

> So you need more engineers because you hired more middle managers?

Companies often implement more process for good reason.

The antithesis of old Facebook's Move Fast And Break Things is to have policies that ensure good security, stability, accessibility, privacy, internationalization, meeting legal requirements, etc. and that usually means processes to ensure that eager engineers and product managers actually meet those policies, instead of rushing to launch.

It's easy to scoff at process when you're a small company or startup whose mistakes will go largely unnoticed unless you suddenly go viral. If you're a Big Tech Company, accidentally messing up security or privacy somewhat means getting a front page article on The Verge detailing your crimes.

Working at Google now, there's plenty of process involves in developing and launching a thing, but I can't really say any of the pieces are without merit.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#264

Post by sjs7007 »

ianceicys wrote: post #154
madamelic wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 scho…

> 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.

Jesus, what company was that? And how about libraries included... Will this lawyer now also need to go through that?

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#265

Post by zaroth »

twblalock wrote: post #175
flr03 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really expect companies to plan for the government ordering the majority of economic activity to halt for an undefined length of time. 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 fo…

> This is unprecedented, and it's only necessary because the government did not take steps to contain the outbreak sooner.

The whole world is shut down over COVID. Even with borders closed as much as possible it has spread. There is no intervention by the US government that could have been done in January that would mean the country would be open for business today.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#266

Post by siruncledrew »

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…

Wouldn't the people who prepared that announcement work at Yelp in Marketing/PR? Or at least have had to approve something before it was announced? So some employees must have had some knowledge. Maybe they knew they were not going to be laid off/furloughed.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#267

Post by twblalock »

CydeWeys wrote: post #256
twblalock wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really expect companies to plan for the government ordering the majority of economic activity to halt for an undefined length of time. 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 fo…

I'm not defending the US's response at all, but pretty much every country has shut down over this. It's not clear how that could have been prevented. Yes, it would have prevented a lot of deaths, but the total shutdown seems to have been inevitable everywhere.

Look at South Korea and Singapore and Taiwan as examples of countries that applied testing early and haven't needed to tell everyone to shelter in place. They have seen some economic disruption, but nothing like the what the US and the EU are experiencing.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#268

Post by mbesto »

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.

The problem is that no modern tech company I know actually measures the ROI of this (positive or negative) so it's completely unrealistic to determine the IRR on it. In other words, there might be a scenario where it actually is more profitable NOT to do it.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#269

Post by xienze »

kaesar14 wrote: post #226
xienze wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Going from 2M possible deaths to about 60K in the US is what most would consider an improvement.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#270

Post by twblalock »

zaroth wrote: post #265
twblalock wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really expect companies to plan for the government ordering the majority of economic activity to halt for an undefined length of time. 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 fo…

> This is unprecedented, and it's only necessary because the government did not take steps to contain the outbreak sooner. The whole world is shut down over COVID. Even with borders closed as much as possible it has spread. There is no intervention by the US government that could have been done in January that would mean the country would be open for business today.

> There is no intervention by the US government that could have been done in January that would mean the country would be open for business today.

Sure there was. Other countries did it. The US and the EU were caught unprepared but several countries in Asia did the right thing, probably because they had previous experience with SARS.

A total societal lockdown is not the only viable response to a disease like COVID-19. It might be the only viable late-stage response, but early testing, tracing, and quarantining has worked in other countries and it could have worked here if our government had been on the ball.

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