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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

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Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#81

Post by hckr_news »

Xcelerate wrote: post #48
ransom1538 wrote: post #4

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.

Totally out of my field here, but is it possible the stock market doesn’t actually track the economy anymore? Stocks don’t pay dividends that often nowadays; it doesn’t seem to be so much an investment as a guess about where other people think the price is going to go. I mean, what does Bitcoin track, or the price of art? It almost seems arbitrary.

Kai Ryssdal often states "the market is not the economy"

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#82

Post by wdb »

With all these lays off it’s going harder to find a job and companies probably try to force pay cuts for the roles they are hiring because of it. Bad time to be jobless; sadly I am in this situation:(

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#83

Post by carlineng »

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.

Yelp is a public company, and their SEC filings will give you insight into where they spend money. In 2019, over half of their expenses were Sales and Marketing, so we can infer that many of the 6000 employees are likely in roles dedicated to Sales and Marketing.

http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001345016/360caaf2...

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#84

Post by scurvy »

jrockway wrote: post #76
duggable wrote: post #59

> 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…

The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc. with probably-incorrect information about the layoffs. So PR wants to be out ahead of that. The real world doesn't have atomic transactions, so you have to pick between that scenario and one where some people are worried about their job for a few hours.

Or back in the day, post on f*ckedcompany. Though pud wouldn't bring that site back now. Back then it was because of irrational exuberance. Now, people are losing their jobs because of pandemic.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#85

Post by bhupy »

ajross wrote: post #80
bhupy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now the immediate job losses are all in the service sector and small employers, and those jobs are basically invisible to your typical trader bro. Most of this activity is driven by robotic trades by institutional investors. It's largely quantitative. Whether the quantitative priors are accurate, is debatable.

I don't buy that. Objective quantitative analysis based on models that don't know about the pandemic should be pricing in a disastrous 30% unemployment, and clearly the market is not. I'm not in the industry, but I have to believe the quants are doing what all of us are: they're throwing out the models, rewriting stuff where possible, but basically just guessing like the rest of us. And that process is a victim of th…

> Objective quantitative analysis based on models that don't know about the pandemic should be pricing in a disastrous 30% unemployment, and clearly the market is not.

That's not necessarily true. First of all, 30% unemployment, while a big scary unprecedented number, represents the expected outcome of the official policy of all governments (Federal & State) , which is forced unemployment. The CARES stimulus includes a $600/week unemployment insurance _on top of_ the existing state UI. In every state, the unemployment benefit is actually higher than the median wage [1]. Businesses know this, and proactively lay off / furlough their employees so that they may collect this benefit, with the intention of having them be first-in-line for re-hiring once this all passes. The other half of the CARES stimulus includes forgivable loans to businesses with the hope that those loans can keep businesses afloat so that they may be in a position to re-hire once this all passes. Put simply, because half the stimulus is in the form of direct insurance payments to people, and unemployment is the means of receiving that, you will see high unemployment numbers. Not only is this expected, it is intended.

All this being said, it's still not certain that many of these businesses will be able to survive even with the loans/stimulus, nobody knows for sure. The market doesn't price in the scary 30% unemployment number, it prices in the expectation that this number will fall back to usual levels by next year.

The grandparent comment asked why the Dow increased today, and it's because the Fed announced $2.3T in new small-business loans, which slightly increases the percentage of businesses that may be able to weather this storm.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/AifRmdD

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#86

Post by takinola »

ransom1538 wrote: post #4

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.

Company announces bad news and then the stock price goes UP. WTF?

This often seems counter-intuitive but is pretty simple to understand if you keep in mind that markets are always forward looking. For instance, if Company A typically makes $1m in profits each year, you can ascribe a value to it. However, if at some point, you suspect that their profit is going to drop 80%, you are going to devalue their stock accordingly. However, if the company announces that their profit "only" dropped by 60%, you have likely undervalued them (since you thought it would be worse) and it makes sense for you to increase their price.

So to get back to your initial question, the answer is the market thinks, right now, that things will not be as bad as they initially assessed.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#88

Post by calvinbhai »

ransom1538 wrote: post #4

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.

Well, Russia and Saudi Arabia have agreed to cut oil production. OPEC+ may follow soon. Hence the markets going super green.

Most the bottom hunters are only following the Covid news. Oil prices are adding to the stock market swings big time.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#89

Post by xienze »

mattkrause wrote: post #79
xienze wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss this around a week ago [0]? Birx said ~200K deaths if we did everything "perfectly." We were well into the lockdown at that point. 0: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dr-deborah-birx-predict...

FWIW, she said "almost perfectly" and "up to 200,000 deaths." The revised model predicts up to ~127k deaths, which is certainly less, but not egregiously so (here: https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america ) If you kept the model exactly the same , you'd nevertheless get tighter and tighter estimates (i.e., reduced uncertainty and a lower upper bound) as more data comes in. This is just how statistics w…

> FWIW, she said "almost perfectly"

Has anyone seriously suggested that the US’s measures are being carried out anywhere near “almost perfectly”? Quite the opposite, there’s been lots of concerns voiced that people aren’t taking this seriously.

> The revised model predicts up to ~127k deaths, which is certainly less, but not egregiously so

It’s a nearly 40% reduction!

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#90

Post by vkou »

ransom1538 wrote: post #4

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.

The printing presses are printing trillions of dollars. Some of that is going out in what are essentially hand-outs (Which is fine), some of it is going out to buy equities (Which drives the prices up, and is absolutely disgusting), and some of it is going out in the form of loans to dead businesses which will have to be repaid (Which props up the market in the short term, but will turn the economy into a debt-servicing zombie over the next decade).

Trump is desperate to not let the markets drop as part of his legacy, and the fed is doing everything in their power to not let the markets drop... Regardless of the long-term consequences. This is, of course, purely a coincidence.

That's why you can have 16 million unemployed in two weeks, another two months of shutdown on the horizon, nobody buying anything, everyone sitting at home, landlords not getting paid, and yet have the market partying like it's 999.

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