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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

blog.yelp.com

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Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#91

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.

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…

You're missing the most important factor - the trillions of dollars being injected into the market, and into various companies by the Fed, with no due diligence as to whether or not they will be spent well.

When there's so much stupid money being pumped into the system, why would the fundamentals, like unemployment, lack of consumer demand, gdp contraction, expected dividends, etc, etc, matter?

We could all be out of work, trading bottlecaps for packets of ramen for the next year, but as long as the fed keeps printing a million dollars for every 3 unemployment claims, the markets will be soaring.

(I should point out that because the USD is a world reserve currency, and has very large amounts of it in circulation, this won't even result in hyperinflation.)

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#93
post #44

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'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…

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.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#94

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.

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.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#95

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.

"Anymore"... It never really did. The two are correlated somewhat, but there has always been a great variance within that correlation, and it is no different now.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#96
post #66

Wait 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.

They have a cold calling sales staff mostly comprised of interns or new grads. They call up restaurants and try to up sell them on some package, I don’t know the details. They aren’t paid well.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#97

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.

Sales reps without a clue, product marketing juniors (glorified blog post re-writers), partner channel manager (like an smtp server between companies but with less reliability), crm data cleansing specialists (all needed because of the former), etc

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#99
post #44

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'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 you're way off. I interviewed with them last year and the number I got from them was close to 850 engineers globally.

Re: Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100

#100
post #44

Earlier 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…

Can you elaborate on the "secretive abuse mgmt team"?

Abuse management is usually secretive because if you publish the "rules of non-abusive behavior", you end up with a bunch of behavior that complies with the official rules while still being abusive.
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