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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

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Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#311
post #286

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…

> 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…

Companies doing well generally aren't for sale at a reasonable price anyway, so yeah, private equity by nature buys failing firms and tries to turn them around. That's the goal of the business.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" h…

> There's no objective measure of severity

While it varies with health care rationing, think CFR is still a useful measure of disease severity and allows us to situate COVID vs. the flu. Knowing the real CFR depends right now on how we calculate the denominator. Burry had analysis that 4% of the undiagnosed asymptomatic Danish population had COVID-19 per blood donation data, which suggests the CFR is 80x less severe than official figures in Denmark.

Anecdotally the disease entered countries weeks, arguably months before any cases were officially announced, making it likely that the denominator is an order of magnitude greater than official stats, and thus CFR an order of mag less severe.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yelp would _never_ do that. Far too moral.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I found the book to go more in depth to the article. What didn't you like about the book?

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#315
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not like that. You just wouldn't work/be paid for one week of the month, for example.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#317
Former Employee here : The company is in a fucked up shape and the management team just saw this opportunity to trim the organisation into the right shape and grabbed it. There are a lot of sales people and you can totally call Yelp a fuckedup org that's overrun by sales people rather than by actually making a product.

Engineering management is a dumb cult here.

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