Does anyone have the role percentage breakdown of those let go/furloughed? e.g. marketing, dev, design, sales, etc.
Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
291–300 of 317 posts
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are you eligible for unemployment or do you have to accept $0 income for the unforeseeable future?
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#293Earlier 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.
This is objectively incorrect. There were many countries that took a far more aggressive stance against the coronavirus and as a result have been able to better deal with it and the economic impacts.
The fact that people are repeating this lie is mind boggling and deserve to be called out because we literally saw this coming. We had months to prepare when we saw other countries dealing with the problem and did nothing.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#294I 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.
> "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'm sure the Owner of Botto Bistro [1] is having a proper side-splitting laugh right about now hearing this news given all he [2] has gone through.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#295Earlier 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…
It's not just approvals from managers, sometimes you need approval from a group of peer engineers just to create new routes in an (internal) API, or to launch a new cron job that will upload an Excel spreadsheet in marketing once a day with data from Google Forms. Also, UX wants to see the final result on their screen before they approve your build, so before deploy you have to push into a test cluster, but there are…
Right here. Everyone read the above, this answers the question of why so many?
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on the "secretive abuse mgmt team"?
Because of the value in subverting abuse systems such as Yelp ratings or Google SEO, these teams usually are handled differently with an entirely different threat model - which is why they may be referred to as "secretive".
What do the threat models usually look like?
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#297I 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.
Same as in any other large company: empire building and pfiefdom staffing. That is what people do. I find it curious how this is allowed to be completely, completely absent in the standard narrative on private business, and yet so ridiculously obvious to anyone that has ever worked in one.
There is this canon dogma about 'market efficiency keeping things lean and fit', which is so obviously false and disproven by every single Corp out there, and yet is allowed to stand. Curious.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#298Earlier 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.
Bullshit Jobs is a good book about this exact topic. Managers hire people so they feel like they have someone to manage.
Read the original article, it makes good points. I bought the book going on that and found it to be unreadable waffle.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#299Earlier 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…
Just like the stock market having bubbles, businesses don't get efficient except during a downturn.
They don't get efficient during a downturn. They might shrink but cuts for the most part will fall on those that lost the political jousting regardless of actual contributions to the top or bottom line.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Been following the guy from the Big Short, Michael Burry, who has been going deep in the data and models, and trying to raise awareness. He tweeted today how Fauci and the mainstream media glossed over how the models already took into account the interventions: https://twitter.com/michaeljburry/status/1248244146571116545
I can't find anything concrete there, but "already took into account" is a bit weaselly. There had to be tons of uncertainty in a) how well people comply with the guidelines and b) how effective that compliance is. It certainly doesn't seem crazy to me more data would lead to revised values for those factors. They could be more effective than originally expected. It could also just narrow the prediction interval--I'd…
Yes, it seems it could either be "measures are more effective than thought" or "disease is not as severe as thought", or both.
Fwiw Michael Burry, someone who has earned the right to be listened to in the face of collective thinking, is strongly arguing for the "disease is not as severe as thought".