Off topic: Can anyone explain why the dow jones is going up? The dow was LOWER Jan 1st 2019. I feel we are worse off than Jan 1st 2019.
Investors expect the FED to save them (Quantitative Easing 3.0, buy ETFs or stocks directly).
Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
61–70 of 317 posts
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sales and account management are easier to hire and fire. That said I bet some engineers were let go. If you're not directly client facing or related to e-commerce, you're not essential right now.
Realistically I would say a lot of engineers are easy to fire. You only need a certain amount of engineers to do maintenance.
I think they mean easy to fire in the sense of "easy to go through the process of firing and deallocating tasks/knowledge/etc.", not "easy to justify firing."
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yelp's engineering isn't likely much more than ~150 people (I worked there ~2 years ago, maybe has grown since then but honestly, given their revenue situation even then, likely not by much). The mix there is just like most companies; you've got dedicated teams for each of their apps (which includes Android, iOS, web, business-facing, etc), you've got API teams, back office teams working on moving data around and bus…
I think your 150 estimate is very low— we had 80 eng when I left, nine years ago.
You may be right. I never counted nor directly asked, that was just the number I overheard. It felt right; afaik, all of the engineering happened in SF, except one remote office in (IIRC) Germany. I know there were a few companies they had acquired (Eat24 and SeatMe) which remained somewhat isolated from the primary Yelp engineering teams (with their own floors of the building and everything), definitely possible the numbers I heard were not counting them.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#64> Today we will let 1,000 of our colleagues go and furlough approximately 1,100 more, while reducing hours for others. Your department leaders will be in touch this morning to discuss how this affects you individually, and letters with more details and FAQs will follow this afternoon. Honest question - is it normal to announce layoffs publicly before telling the affected employees? I guess I can understand it from a…
Most of the time this is coordinated - that there were group calls to personally announce the layoffs and who was staying.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anyone can "explain" it, they should go get filthy rich. But we can speculate in a semi-educated way. I think my best speculation is that the economy's fall factored in uncertainty about how bad this really is. The sell-off was based on worst case scenarios (given such high uncertainty). Now that uncertainty is going down as we understand it all better, have more data, have plans in place, the economy is recoverin…
Maybe. Personally, I think the median investor, especially the median short term investor, tends to be more optimistic than the rational market hypothesis would argue. Information availability isn't symmetric, and the news sources favored by these people tend to paint rosier pictures of the recovery than seem likely. I mean, one very straightforward interpretation of the headline of this linked article is that Yelp w…
I agree. For example, we have just started to see only some of the second-order effects, as a huge number of people missed their April rent payments, and mortgage default rates started to shoot upwards. Consumer spending is similarly tanking; people can't buy the newest iPhones when they don't have jobs.
I think Q1 numbers will start to shake people out of their optimism. We'll see.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#66Wait Yelp has 6000 employees? They haven’t changed their site in a decade! What percentage of that is engineering? Seriously, I thought they have maybe 1000 at best.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The model that was down revised already took into account the interventions
Got an article? CNN is saying almost exactly the opposite: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/politics/deborah-birx-social-... Birx continued, "is how important behavioral change is, and how amazing Americans are at adapting to and following through on these behavioral changes." "That's what's changing the rate of new cases, and that's what will change the rate of mortality going forward," she said.
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
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#68I 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.
It has a very large extortion department.
This is exactly why I'm having a hard time mustering sympathy for the layoffs. If anything, they will use this as a stepping stone to a more ethical career choice. I do still feel for them on a human level though.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sales and account management are easier to hire and fire. That said I bet some engineers were let go. If you're not directly client facing or related to e-commerce, you're not essential right now.
But aren't sales and account management precisely the people who are client-facing or related to e-commerce?
Yes but they're the easiest to ramp up and wind down. Certain segments of the economy as devastated right now. Would not want to be a flight attendant, but airplane engine mechanics are probably still in demand as cargo flights replace passenger traffic (since we're ordering everything online now).
Logically, that would extend to people whose job revolves around signing up restaurants to marketing portals. The restaurants that have an online business are already there. Those that don't have an online business are already closed.
Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
#70Off topic: Can anyone explain why the dow jones is going up? The dow was LOWER Jan 1st 2019. I feel we are worse off than Jan 1st 2019.
If anyone can "explain" it, they should go get filthy rich. But we can speculate in a semi-educated way. I think my best speculation is that the economy's fall factored in uncertainty about how bad this really is. The sell-off was based on worst case scenarios (given such high uncertainty). Now that uncertainty is going down as we understand it all better, have more data, have plans in place, the economy is recoverin…
> Now that uncertainty is going down
Spot price does nothing to measure uncertainty. Volatility is still very high which means, by definition, we are in an uncertain market.
A much better explanation for the dow rising is the opposite of what you propose: we don't really know how this will impact things so it's very hard to price all of this in. Investors already known that unemployment claims this week would be awful so that information is already priced in, but we're still really waiting on information about how all of these impacts will impact businesses as a whole.