Interestingly they seem to hold there jobs while people who just stop doing anything with no direction often don't hold their jobs. So it is presumably a suvival trait.
One of the more interesting things my manager at Sun told me was that the difference between a leader and a worker, was that a leader was a going somewhere and a worker was helping them get there. So if you want to be a leader you need to have some place you are trying to go. It gets you into trouble though, when there is only enough energy to follow one or two paths, it puts you on the short list for removal if your path isn't one of them.
Unfortunately, people lose their minds when some company announces layoffs, like some purposeful social harm is being done, yet somehow when a company is having massive hiring no one really questions how much of that is valid or sustainable. People become like you describe; they master the do nothing job via office cult cargoism. It must be exhausting to have a 'fake' job like this and knowing damn well that if you lose this job you may have nowhere to go.
I think 100 years from now our great grandkids will be living in an automation utopia and look at our daily work lives as something just a harrowing as any story from Kafka. There's a lot of craziness we let slide because we've convinced ourselves total employment is one of the main moral goals of a capitalistic society. Its probably not sustainable in later stages capitalism.
In my lifetime I expect to see GMI deployments in various nations as automation keeps eating the world. I have yet to be convinced that the status quo can be maintained and the cracks on the facade are already showing. Later stages capitalism is a totally different beast than early stages. This is all new ground.
Not too long ago this sounded like crazy sci-fi talk to me, but now that I'm in a partial management position I've been involved with hirings/firings and all sorts of staffing and productivity issues, this has shown me that employment in general is something of an illusion. I'd say 80% of the work/value done here is by 30 or 40% of the staff, maybe 20% if we're being really tough. A lot of hiring, if not most, is vanity hiring by VP's who want more people under them for status and budget reasons. This isn't some rational engine at work here. Its its own kind of bubble and as we saw in the 2008 mortgage crisis, it gets deflated pretty easily when money stops coming in. (5% to 10% unemployment in 12 months 2008-2009).
It is incredibly frustrating to me, because I consider myself a creative and capable individual, who is just fresh off graduation. However, I have a micromanaging, closed-minded rude boss (company lingo: "Leader"), who I prefer to avoid at all costs. At the same time, he seems completely aloof and uninterested in my career goals, which explains why I have nothing to do most of the time.
This is further led to absurdity because I'm in a Trainee position, someone who is paid a better than everyone else at their level of responsibility and gone through extra training with hopes they will ascend to management. I get no training either.
I've been looking for another job for over a year and cannot get anything else because of lack of experience and a nation-wide political+economical crisis.
Decent programmers are still very much in demand, no matter what nation-wide crisis you are talking about.
We're not doctors, cops nor lawyers, the world won't cease without us. Hell, even civil workers in governments although less salary, have better safety than we do. I can't shake the feeling that essentially we'll realise that all these companies we work for don't really "exist" as they're just the imagination of someones account balance. At some point its gotta run dry.
But I work in a financial department where it's an alien concept, and as such, unauditable and dangerous. I barely get opportunities to put it in action these days.
Unauditable is a fun accusation: you probably use spreadsheets---and they are notorious for being write-only.
You can form a longer term plan to leave that industry and join the tech-industry.
I work with dinosaurs apparently.
I once did an internship at the SAP mothership. They have good food.
Makes sense. But are aren't we seeing such inefficient companies crumble ? Everything is so monopolistic?
On the one hand it's harder to find better jobs as the present job is already kind of nice. On the other hand there's the uncertainty of where everything is going with regards to your long term future at the company and your career.
You can't bring up the fact that the team is bloated because you're basically telling them that you should be fired.
A very awkward position to be in.
What is their business now? Having no work is a leadership problem. If there really is no work then layoffs are a must, but the company is floundering around with no real direction....
As an outside watcher I have no clue (I am also stupid). Hopefully people working there have better insight than myself.
http://static.tumblr.com/7drgjla/386nnw4n9/yahoo_inc._2014_a...
"We generate revenue principally from search and display advertising on Yahoo Properties and Affiliate sites, with the majority of our revenue coming from advertising on Yahoo Properties. Our margins on revenue from advertising on Yahoo Properties are higher than our margins on revenue from advertising on Affiliate sites as we pay TAC to our Affiliates. Additionally, we generate revenue from other sources including listings-based services, facilitating commercial transactions, royalties, and consumer and business fee-based services."
Matt Levine did quite a long writeup about this a while back: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-17/how-can-yah...
Taking an uncharitable view, Yahoo!'s core business actually has negative value -- and the current round of layoffs is a direct result of Wall Street pressure to stop subsidizing said core business and preserve the value of the Ali Baba stock.
I imagine the natural duopoly of tech is at work here. Google/Bing is pretty much it for web searching in the US, with no room for whatever engine Yahoo is borrowing this week. Gmail (gmail.com, google business apps, etc)/MS(Outlook/Hotmail, Azure, Exchange 365) for mail, etc. Not sure where Yahoo even fits anymore.
That last trade price times number of outstanding shares -- market cap -- is the only common basis for overall valuation of publicly traded firms (that is, the only basis that is guaranteed, by definition, to be available for every publicly traded firms) does not mean it is a particularly accurate and meaningful measure of the overall value in any useful sense.
If you assume zero discount of the Alibaba stake due to taxes or other uncertainty, then Yahoo has zero or negative value.
However, there is >0% chance that the Alibaba stake will be taxed or that Yahoo leadership will sell and spend the money instead if returning it to the shareholders.
The more accurate statement is that the uncertainty a "core" business brings outweighs the value of said business. Part of that uncertainty is the tax treatment issue of BABA shares, the other part is a vote of (or lack of) confidence in Yahoo leadership.
Yahoo itself has plenty of value. Probably not 10B, but probably more than 1B.
Recently I tried watching Yahoo's Other Space (https://screen.yahoo.com/other-space/), but gave up after a few episodes - even though I enjoyed what I was able to watch. From what I could tell, the show wasn't available through the Yahoo Screen mobile app. (Which brings another question, WTF is the point of that app?!) The website lets you watch streaming video, but the site is impossible to use from mobile, and it would randomly crash every iOS browser I tried (Safari, Chrome, Firefox). When I tried watching from a desktop the video stream would occasionally freeze, and the Ads would randomly reset the stream back to the beginning of the episode.
Yahoo reminds me of Apple in the mid 90's. Even good ideas are just terribly executed. They hired the wrong leader to try and fix their problems.
Keeping the C-levels employed?
I think Yahoo's business has been to be the internet, but they never noticed that other companies and services took that all away from them piece by piece. Now they're just a stock.
It sucks that this is locked into yahoo, but I'm sure it was the most convenient option at the time.
Oh man is that true, especially in the case of a supposed Internet ecosystem that's got issues with keeping properties up to date and coherent. Surely some of these properties have product managers that have not fallen asleep, and who are in tune with how to keep their products relevant, who have features they want to implement.
Being "overstaffed" in an environment full of poachers means your C-suite hasn't got a plan, or even remained connected with product management to make small-ball plans. They may find that renovating their slummy properties doesn't pay off. But this smells more like cleaning up the results of senior management lackadaisy than a purposeful trimming.
I was in a startup where I basically sat without clear product to work on for a month, and I quit within a three months because it was a complete waste of my time and creative potential.
You don't need a "broad product strategy" to do your job well. Unfortunately, many products coming out of Yahoo are shitty; and this should be fixed regardless of who's on top. Whatever you're working on, make sure it's first-class.
Just read this and weep: Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo's SVP for communications products, says: “I just try to ship products that I’m not ashamed of" Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/business/dealbook/yahoos-b...
1. Layoffs where an entire industry is downsizing, and not everyone who was laid off will be able to find jobs in the same industry. I have immense sympathy for these folks - in many cases it is difficult if not impossible to get back to the same salary level.
2. Layoffs where one company couldn't make it, but the industry as a whole is extremely dynamic and growing by leaps and bounds. This is Yahoo's case. While it's always hard when "somebody moves your cheese", it shouldn't really be hard for those laid off to find new jobs. Plus, the writing was clearly on the wall for a long time, so it shouldn't be totally unexpected. As someone who has been in a similar situation, if anything I saw many people looking to be laid off because they would rather have a sizable severance than go down on a sinking ship.
So you're right, a bunch of inefficiencies exist by design, a bunch of them due to the company's age (and to Yahoo!'s credit, their contemporaries like HotBot or Lycos or Excite are gone completely) and need to build certain stuff in-house, and a bunch of it created internally to guarantee job security in some departments.
They've outsourced search and on the Web/media front are doing things that Wordpress.com is doing at much better scale with fewer people, so yeah, there's potential for improvement there.
And quite a lot of display advertising.