Yahoo Reduces Staff By 4 Percent; Hands Out Pink Slips To Over 500 Employees | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Reduces Staff By 4 Percent; Hands Out Pink Slips To Over 500 Employees

techcrunch.com

27 pointsanswerly22 comments

For any ex-yahoos out there, there's a topic on Quora for startups looking to hire those recently laid off.

http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Recruiting/Which-startups-c...

Good luck out there!

Interested in application security, but want to keep doing full-time dev? I've got a fun, hard project. Full time, US remotes peachy.

I need Python devs for contract work on Pinboard, if anyone is interested. Experience working on Delicious will not be held against you, unless you did UI design...

Right before Christmas, CLASSY.

Don't worry. The corporate officers who made this decision will be okay.

(I wonder how many have lost their jobs in this country just to the upper echelon can enrich themselves.)

Any ex Yahoo'ers from SF Bay Area interested in joining us to work on http://cloudHQ.net?

Is it wise to offer jobs to those who have been laid off?

Logic dictates that people most likely to be laid off are those who perform the worst hence, probabilistically, it's not the best worker pool to target.

In a logical company. Yahoo's proven itself to be a not terribly logical company. In their 2009 round of layoffs, they seemed to axe their best performing but highest paid employees - those are exactly the ones that an ambitious startup would want to target.

It usually doesn't work that way, especially when 500 employees constitutes only 4 percent of the workforce. That's a lot of employees to target. A layoff is the result of a company's financial situation, which can fluctuate through no fault of the affected employees; if an engineer is assigned to a faltering project and taht project gets the axe, then it is not necessarily an indictment of his job performance.

Even if those that get cut are cut because they aren't "top performers", that doesn't mean they aren't useful or good developers. You have to be good to get into Yahoo et al in the first place, and if there's a lot of competition in the job market, you may be able to get super-excellent candidates into jobs until the market looks up, at which time your employees that are merely good are not so precious.

I need to renew my Flickr Pro account in a couple weeks, but it looks like the writing is on the wall for the service. Who are the primary competitors to Flickr out there?

edit: to clarify, I'm an amateur photographer with a DSLR and some big glass (you can check out my stuff on Flickr via the link on my profile page if you're curious). I need to be able to store full-sized images, organize my stuff into sets, geotag, and, ideally, store RAW images on the server, too.

Some social stuff like what Flickr does would be great, too.

I thought FaceBook was #1 and Picasa was #3. Imgur also seems to be increasing a lot in popularity.

http://smugmug.com/ is a popular alternative to flickr.

> it looks like the writing is on the wall for the service

What leads you to say that? The article doesn't mention Flickr at all.

A few things. First, an ex-Yahoo and friend of mine described the Flickr product group as a 'skeleton crew' to me all the way back in Summer 2009. I can't imagine the situation has improved subsequently.

Second, The self-referential link in the article does mention Flickr: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/14/yahoo-employees/. And so does a link in 'yahoo-employees' to an article from two weeks ago further suggests Flickr people getting cut: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/30/yahoo-layoffs/

As an ex-Yahoo I think it very unlikely that anything would happen to Flickr. Flickr is still one of the very-largest social networks:

http://mashable.com/2010/12/12/youtube-buzzed-social-network...

(It's not #2; Zeta's methodology is very odd. But in volume it's still top 5)

It's also Yahoo's only successful play in the social space to date (unless you count delicious). They would never axe it.

I also don't know who told you they were a skeleton crew; they were hiring until quite recently.

that's a relief. i'm glad what i heard is wrong.

Any ex Yahoo'ers out there who happen to be in NC - or who might want to move to NC - gimme a shout... maybe we could work on some interesting stuff together. Contact info in profile.

Any ex-yahoo ui designers email me at jgalvin@dragonrecruiting.com

Got a job for you starting now 50/hr-6 month contract

Was this across the board for all departments in Yahoo, or was it more focused in engineering?

Former Yahoo employee here, does anyone know what properties and staff type are in this latest round? I've already heard of a Flickr engineer.

what doesnt kill you only makes you stronger... Anyone wants to work on some exciting projects..?

I think you need more Karma and more time on the account before you will receive quality applicants from your comment. YMMV

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