Yelp basically replaced the Yellow pages and Zagat with a bit of the BBB thrown in for good measure. Its model is to sell listing services to businesses. I am guessing it is a sales heavy org.
Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
281–290 of 317 posts
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#282Earlier 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?
I mean you're literally contributing to HN for free right now. Same thing, different motivation, different company benefiting from your free contribution.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#283Earlier 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.
I mean you could go work for them? McDonalds is highly optimized fast food but they have a quality issue. Breakfast and chicken nuggets are about the only thing they do well. Walmart is getting better with e-commerce and online groceries. I think that’s the future. If in were Bezos, I’d be worried about Walmart. Target needs to step up their game too especially around grocery delivery and pickup.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).…
>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.
The logic is sound, you have a point. But I think it doesn't play out this way in reality. Maybe it's like this for your current company, but is that the general trend?
I know that during the dot com bubble bursting many years ago what you said was not the case. Could be different now but do you have any other supporting evidence?
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#285I 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.
Clearly they were doing nothing useful, because despite them being laid off, I can still open my Yelp app right now and browse around just fine. Most office jobs are "adult daycare", even in tech (blasphemy, I know).
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#286Earlier 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…
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…
> Why that is the case in every business, I haven't been able to figure out. I suspect it's because when businesses reach that size, the efficient market effects become greatly overstated in the short term, so these businesses naturally acquire a lot of fat.
i think it's more likely that no business will know in advance who those 100 employees that create value are. It might even be that the combination of those 100 creates value beyond the sum of them individually (lets say, they are in one team).
There are also mundane work - fixing bugs or upgrading libraries, as well as keeping up the infrastructure running.
And then there's the middle management - that comes from the mis-trust that upper management generally have for the "grunts", and this happens all the way thru the organization.
> private equity exists...
and if you look at those companies that did this - very few of them becomes the next big thing. Very few of them actually innovate. Very few of them, even survive.
Private equity is really about taking risks with a failing business, e.g. buying it really cheap, and cut the fat and ride out the storm for hopefully a better future. I dont think any private equity will buy a company that isn't failing in some ways, and try to "make it better".
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#287I 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 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…
The real answer is that it's a publicly traded "tech" company that has to maintain a charade of growth. They can either give their profits back to shareholders (violating the growth charade) or they can hire more people and hope they figure out how to create actual growth.
Corona spoke up and pointed out the Emperor had no clothes.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#288While 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.
The Yellow Pages used to do the same thing before the internet. There is always money in being a monopoly of something. The problem for Yelp (and really, most other platform companies) is they are beholden to G, the mother of all monopolies, who can cut off their gravy train at a moment's notice.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#289Earlier 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…
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…
[deleted]
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#290I 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.
Does anyone have the role breakdown of those let go/furloughed? e.g. marketing, dev, design, sales, etc.