Yahoos Freaking Out Over 20% Layoff Rumors | Hacker News Reader

Yahoos Freaking Out Over 20% Layoff Rumors

techcrunch.com

27 pointsbretthellman28 comments

“Yahoo! is always evaluating expenses to align with the company’s financial goals. However, a 20% reduction in Yahoo’s workforce across the board is misleading and inaccurate.”

Yeah, I'm sure some divisions will lay off 21% and some 19%, so there!

Responding to rumors with statements like the above is worse than refusing to respond at all.

I'd say that techcrunch may have just saved a few hundred people their jobs.

>Carol: "Shit, TC is onto us. reduce it to ~17.9% and find me the person who leaked this info OFF WITH THEIR HEADS"

I'd say that techcrunch may have just saved a few hundred people their jobs.

Doubtful. If they're going to lay people off they'll just stagger the "changes" by a few months.

"managers have been asked to begin to make the tough decisions on who stays and who goes" -- As a former Y!, my suggestion, get rid of the managers keep the doers.

As a current Yahoo! I agree with you.

If this is true you'd want to hope Carol Bartz takes some kind of pay cut, how do you defend cost cutting layoffs when your CEO is one of the highest paid?

I know it's popular to rag on CEO's for being overpaid, but that's the business of Yahoo and their Board. If their investments aren't sound the market will decide their fate.

Depends on the CEO, some full deserve the large pay packets they get for the value they bring. I certainly don't think all big company CEO's are overpaid, just in this specific case.

"the market will decide their fate."

It seems the market determines the fate of the rank-and-file workers much quicker - quarterly layoffs - than it does for the CEOs, who often keep collecting large and increasing annual pay. Yes, 3-4 years of battling 'tough market conditions' may lead a board to get rid of a CEO, but they'll have pocketed millions during a decline, whereas the declining period is often marked by layoffs of people who were implementing the dumb decisions made by the CEO and board members.

So, true, the 'market' will decide, but the CEOs don't really feel the impact of the market's decisions quite as much as most workers do.

I don't know much of Bartz's particular situation or pay structure, so I can't comment on her.

Is anyone else tired of Techcrunch always sounding the death knoll for Yahoo? I don't think they've had anything positive to say about Yahoo for years.

One could also wonder why only Yahoo's negative press gets voted up on HN.

Not true, Yahoo's release of S4 was voted up tons just last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870029

That's a good point. I should have said mostly negative press.

The story isn't really about yahoo, though. Yahoo is not in the title or the url, isn't prominently displayed on the page, and only mentioned in a few comments. I didn't even realize it was from yahoo until I read your comment and I saw the story when it was originally posted. Checking searchyc, the only s4 story that became really popular was the only one that didn't mention yahoo in the title.

In a way its a good thing. Everyone thinks Yahoo! has a lot of potential, it is just that they aren't living up to it. Better to be on that side than not having any potential to live up to.

To any Yahoo employees out there, we're hiring at gdgt. http://gdgt.com/jobs

Adding context:

AOL's Techcrunch claims that AOL's competitor Yahoo is performing poorly and may lay off people.

(as an aside, TC's amazing ability at tanking Yahoo's stock price makes buying Techcrunch a really smart move by AOL)

there have been rumors of an AOL & Yahoo merger lately. i wonder if this confirms that rumor. it seems AOL and Yahoo have a lot in common in terms of tech assets and also in terms of the users having a similar "mindset".

Honest question; what valuable/useful services does Yahoo still offer?

I haven't logged into Yahoo mail in more than 2 years.

I do see that finance.yahoo is still a good site -- but hardly an entire business.

They dont have core technology in search any longer, right?

Ill have to look into what S4 is... ok that looks interesting. Is it competing with such things as DataSift? -- well its OSS - so not a revenue stream for them, yet...

I am seriously trying to understand how they would rebuild a business. Serious pivot is needed it would seem?

136 Million unique visitors[1]. Even if its not completely accurate, its still a very, very large number.

I know plenty of people who use Yahoo as their homepage, for email and for search -- even if it isn't powered by Yahoo anymore, it still gets plenty of uses.

1. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/yahoo.com/

I really like Flickr still. I worry about what will happen to it longterm.

Delicious, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News…

They actually have great fantasy sports offerings.

Unless GMail has overtaken it very recently, Yahoo Mail is still second only to Hotmail in terms of user base. The last I saw, both were ahead of GMail by a fairly large margin.

I use Flickr, Delicious, YUI and Yahoo! Pipes. YQL also looked interesting, but I've never used it.

I actually think that YQL is an awesome tool that has alt of value to developers. I actually scrape a hacker news feed to my personal site with YQL.

I look at the Yahoo site and think, "14k employees to make that happen?!"

Surely a few decently complex Perl scripts could replace a large swath of them! (said with tongue somewhat in cheek)

Wait until you see the google site!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com