Every advertising business reliant on brick and mortar or real estate is going to be decimated.
Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
271–280 of 317 posts
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is a better question. Why not do this? If you got fired, you don't really own the company anything anymore.
> Why not do this? Because what do you get out of it? They don't pay you for a tip. Why do free work for a media conglomerate, even if you didn't care about the ethics?
> Because what do you get out of it?
Because they felt like it?
I can definitely see how someone might think that it is cool to cause a news story.
> Why do free work
You are overestimating the amount of "work" that would go into something like this. I do stuff all the time, just because I felt like it.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#273Earlier 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.
Bullshit Jobs is a good book about this exact topic. Managers hire people so they feel like they have someone to manage.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably can't "hire them back later". People who you've fired might have an aversion to working with you in the future, or simply be occupied with other work when you want them back. If you mean ripping out entire teams and replacing them with outsiders, that also has costs.
There's also reputation issues with a "hire them back later" attitude. Engineers are likely to become skeptical of recruiters from companies with a policy like that, and then you start struggling to hire anyone.
That reference was about sales employees, not engineers. I think most people realize that in larger companies the sales team and the engineering team are managed very differently, with the employees having very different expectations about the stability of their position.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineers are easy to fire, but incredibly hard (and expensive) to hire, especially if you become known as the company that'll fire people immediately in a crisis. There's a fine line between saving money now and spending it later, and I'm sure Yelp - just like every other company out there - is trying to figure out where does that line lay.
I don't think engineers have this as a specific trait. Every worker in any occupation has the attitude you describe above. The thing that truly influences "hard to hire" is supply and demand. With the influx of bootcamps Software engineering supply has increased and with COVID-19 decreasing demand Engineers may no longer have the luxury of picking and choosing like they used to. I'm an engineer btw. Just viewing the…
I am an engineer too. I've helped hire engineers at two pretty big companies before and have done all the hiring for my current company.
While the supply has increased, the number of senior engineers hasn't grown at the same pace. I know of companies who've fired even their senior engineers, but they've been hit particularly hard by this crisis (think 'business model is literally rendered invalid' level of affected). Most people who think they'll be able to weather at least the next six months will be reluctant to fire more experienced engineers, because they know how hard it was to hire them to begin with.
While some of the options might be gone, chances are people who get laid off or are still in the market will look for companies with better chances of surviving this (think Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.), so the pool of experienced talent might actually be reduced for startups.
In other words: people with 5 years of industry experience are playing in a completely different arena than more junior engineers, who are unfortunately in a more precarious situation.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineers are easy to fire, but incredibly hard (and expensive) to hire, especially if you become known as the company that'll fire people immediately in a crisis. There's a fine line between saving money now and spending it later, and I'm sure Yelp - just like every other company out there - is trying to figure out where does that line lay.
Were engineers incredibly hard and expensive to hire immediately after the dotcom bust or the 2008 financial crisis?
That's actually a good data point I'd like to have. Unfortunately I wasn't in Silicon Valley at the time, but at least where I was, it didn't affect my opportunities of finding a job at all.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#277While 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.
I’m not sure if they do this as I’m not willing to pay to find out. But when their salesperson called me I had a discussion with them about how the first review that shows up, the one that’s a thumbnail when my business appears on other listings, is from 2012 and pertains to the business before I bought it and changed management. Not just that but it’s clearly a vengeful review written by a crazy person. I told them that I have no interest in making my profile more visible if that is what Yelp considers a quality review. (As usual, all of the decent reviews are “hidden”.) My good reviews were unsolicited.
If Yelp is in trouble, maybe their quality should get another look.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#278For reference, according to Google Yelp's employee in 2020 is 6,030 before layoff. So 1/3 of the workforce is laid off or furloughed.
what is furluoghed?
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#279For reference, according to Google Yelp's employee in 2020 is 6,030 before layoff. So 1/3 of the workforce is laid off or furloughed.
what is furluoghed?
It means something more specific in government job parlance I believe, but essentially you are still employed but not getting paid your salary and you don’t work. Usually (and most importantly) it means that your benefits like health insurance continue as well.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't mean to be flippant or unnecessarily mean, but my anecdotal experience is that many EHR systems are pretty widely derided by healthcare providers (i.e. end-users). Maybe it's not a good thing that only 50 engineers were working on that system.
The primary focus of most US EHRs is for billing.