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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

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Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#301

Post by tonyedgecombe »

xenospn wrote: post #94
TulliusCicero wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most consumer technology products are much more complicated under the hood than they appear to be to regular consumers. Even most programmers -- who are well aware of the hidden complexity of the products they themselves work on -- usually seem to believe that this must not hold true for the products of other companies. For every feature you're aware of on a random consumer tech product or service, there are probably…

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.

The question is could they have achieved the same with two people.

When I was contracting I was always surprised how outwardly similar businesses could have vastly different IT functions. Sometimes an order of magnitude larger for no apparent gain.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#302

Post by dmode »

Waterluvian wrote: post #5

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.

I don’t get why this question gets repeatedly upvoted in HN. I just responded to a similar question on Airbnb in another post. Do people not work for large corporations here ? Yelp’s business model is to sell ads to local businesses. And ads don’t sell themselves. For that you need to hire army of inside and outbound sales folks in every region, geo, market. This also means there is a whole account management team who is managing relationships with the thousands of advertisers. And then there is an ad tech team that is integrating these ads, but also reconciling payments and payouts in multiple currencies. I wouldn’t be surprised if majority of Yelp’s employees are in sales, sales ops, ad ops, and advertisement side of the business

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#303

Post by james-skemp »

james-skemp wrote: post #210
pgsbathhouse2 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

Louis Rossmann has a Mac repair store in New York and, when I was subscribed to him, had posted numerous videos about his experiences with Yelp. One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso

Just pointing out what I had heard when I was subscribed to someone who had experiences with Yelp. Honestly, I found his latest video on the subject, after searching for 'yelp extortion,' which doesn't appear to be the best one to start with.

https://youtu.be/BHEbVh3Yhrw?t=442 may be better, as he talks with two of the people behind the movie Billion Dollar Bully. (I didn't re-watch it completely, as I don't want to get myself wrapped back up in his world.)

As it notes in https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/billion-dollar-bully-do... and the above, if Yelp's culture means that employees are getting away with it, and sharing that, and tend to work with people who aren't web-savvy, there's certainly the opportunity for certain individuals within the company to give the company a bad name.

For-profit businesses, especially ones that want everyone to use them, generally don't like to talk about the fact that some part of why they exist is for the money and/or they have stakeholders that want to see a return on their investment.

It's also possible that Yelp has since gotten better, and they're still fighting off the old perspectives. Not OP so not sure where their evidence came from.

(I personally rarely use Yelp, don't have an account, and prefer the reviews built into Google Maps since that's my navigation app of choice. I didn't know about issues with Yelp until I was subscribed about the above, and after unsubscribing numerous months ago haven't heard anything else about Yelp until now.)

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#305

Post by abinaya_remote »

Remote Leaf[1] founder here, I would like to offer Yelp employees who lost their jobs a free month of membership, that might help you land a remote job. We hand-pick thousands of remote jobs from tons of job boards and only sends the ones that apply to you. Just ping me on Twitter[2] and send me an email to avail this :)

[1] - https://twitter.com/remoteleaf

[2] - https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#306

Post by crimsonalucard »

dguaraglia wrote: post #276
aianus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was born and raised in silicon valley. It was pretty bad across the board. Tons of good programmers got killed including ones that were really solid.

Mind you the situation is different now so what you say could be right in a certain way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21318704

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#307

Post by mattkrause »

not_a_moth wrote: post #300
mattkrause wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

You might also be interested in this thread from Andy Slavitt, who ran CMS during the Obama administration.

https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1248362891201392640

He makes the point that a) the new model has some optimistic assumptions, like no interstate travel and b) due to the exponential growth, a small uncertainty in R0 leads to wildly variable outcomes.

I guess I am uneasy with the "disease is not as severe" hypothesis because it's essentially unknowable. There's no objective measure of severity: it depends on knowing how to treat/prevent the disease and whether the necessary resources are available to do so.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#308

Post by throwaway55554 »

wgerard wrote: post #215
throwaway55554 wrote: post #93

Earlier 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.

Doesn't matter to me, I'm not in that industry any more. But yes, they're a mess. But, honestly, I don't know you would make it less of a mess. People just need to accept that some systems are complicated and the more you try and make it less complicated the further from that goal you get.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#309

Post by mlrtime »

Waterluvian wrote: post #5

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.

I wonder how many engineering hours they use to strip the mobile web version of features to force you into their app. That is one reason I'll never install their app and won't miss them when they're gone.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#310

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

askafriend wrote: post #259
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sure sounds like potential defamation.

Ha good luck suing for defamation for every random tweet and internet comment from a bunch of random nobodies. That's neither possible nor sustainable.

Oh you're right I guess this situation would only really apply to large identifiable entities, like maybe tech corporations that selectively surface and moderate reviews.
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