'Deep' layoffs expected at Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

'Deep' layoffs expected at Yahoo

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I am amazed that anyone still works there.

Are facebook and google continually inundated with Yahoo ex-pat applications?

Anyone at Yahoo on HN that could provide a day-in-the-life?

Or anyone from Yahoo have any stories of trying to find work elsewhere?

Green card process can keep some people at Yahoo from moving on.

Yup, if you're in the H1B queue for a green card, you have to restart the whole process if you switch employers. Been there, done that, not cool.

H1B aka indentured servitude.

I have friends going through that, it sucks.

I left Yahoo three weeks ago to do my own thing. There are lots of talented people at Yahoo - there are not too many companies which deal with the kind of scale and tech Yahoo does and a lot of people like that. Some of them have been there for over a decade. What is happening to the company is very sad.

>...there are not too many companies which deal with the kind of scale and tech Yahoo does and a lot of people like that"

Google, Facebook, Apple - all here in the bay area, all massive scale. Are yahooligans not flocking to these giants?

Well moving jobs, even for the most talented employees can be difficult for a number of reasons.

1) inertia, there is alot to be said for working at the same place for 10 years, you know the people, systems, and processes. By this time you might be 35 and married with a few kids. Often you don't know if you have the energy to go do it all over again.

2) fear of failure. If you've been somewhere and grown into a role as the go to person it can be a big blow to the ego to tell your friends you're going to go interview at google or facebook, only to be rejected.

3) moving sideways or taking a step backward. Just because you became a senior developer level 5 at yahoo doesn't mean you'd be able to do the same role at google or facebook. You may have to settle for a smaller role or even a pay cut to join those companies.

Grandparent post only mentioned 3 companies out of literally thousands in the valley, 1 of which only has a couple thousand employees and is privately held. "Not too many" companies operate at Yahoo scale is a true statement still.

I would also add to the parent post that many Yahoo employees are financially successful, having been through earlier stages. They aren't fresh grads looking for salary bumps or the target demographic to cash in on an IPO (since they already went through one, or have greatly profited from options since being hired at Yahoo).

That being said, most of the 'good' people I know of (key word being know of) have left Yahoo for the other big internet companies or startups. They also seem to have hired a lot of 'media' type people in the recent past, not necessarily tech people.

All the points you make are negative. I.e. they all point to reasons, fear based, which a Yahoo employee would be staying. That sucks.

Sure, Yahoo is scale - but isn't it in 95% maintenance mode? What innovation is Yahoo doing. I am not aware of any initiatives like at Google and Facebook where they are doing something along the lines of the open computing, or their own hardware dev for datacenter infrastructure advancement. I could be completely misinformed.

I am, however, of the opinion that we are just watching Yahoo on life support. A zombie company with vital signs (users) but no cognitive ability (growth, innovation, new products etc).

I am not trying to denigrate Yahoo -- I just have seen nothing that gives me any confidence what-so-ever that I should care about them as a company.

I don't know how much cash they have - but I have said this in the past here on HN - if there was anyone with any brains in the Yahoo C-Suite, they would be taking their wads of cash and backing every startup in the valley in a YC manner with the same goal of owning 5-10% of the future.

They should be widely investing in the market and then leveraging their "massive scale" infrastructure, datacenter expertise etc to hosting and supporting all these companies.

There is lot of opportunity that Yahoo is simply too complacent to take advantage of.

Yahoo could be a game changer if they stopped trying to think of themselves as a portal or even search site (I don't think they believe at all they are a search portal given their fealty to Bing) and start realizing that they are an infrastructure asset with ~2 billion in cash and over a decade of valley domain expertise in high volume traffic. (They had 2B in both 2003 and in 2009 as far as I can find)

Invest/buy/acquire like mad and get a good % of the action in the valley. Get NEW users on that infrastructure which appears to be rotting.

I remember you. You were trying to convince me to take the offer from Yahoo. Seems like things have changed for you as well.

Interesting timing:

Yahoo, the Internet search engine turned news and multimedia portal, will unveil its first season of scripted comedy programming on Monday.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/arts/television/yahoo-sta...

I think the comedy that goes on at the rest of Yahoo is quite unscripted.

How deep? Will it include the board members :)

Very funny. When you hear the words “deep cut,” you envision starting at the top and cutting deep into the heart. But no, in business, “deep cuts” means starting sideways at the bottom and cutting straight across, leaving the top unmarked.

I also think this is an insightful comment. Very insightful. Yahoo! has a cadre of absolutely brilliant people working for it: it would be better to ditch the board entirely, and reform into a reverse-Y-combinator: take 5000 people and create 1000 startups with 5 ppl each.

Wow, actually this is a really good idea.

Could this be a move to make themselves more attractive for a M&A perhaps?

I wonder what will happen to the technology research team at YUI. I really learned a lot from the YUI Theater and the many amazing JavaScript presentations from Douglas Crockford.

"Yahoo, of course, has had stagnant revenue and share price for several years now as it has been eclipsed by Google and Facebook as a favorite destination for online advertisers."

We manage PPC for a lot of companies and we would love to spend more money on Yahoo, but they don't have enough traffic. We are maxing out on Yahoo, but Google has way more eyeballs

original article: http://allthingsd.com/20120305/yahoos-new-ceo-preps-major-re...

I hope Yahoo Games will still be around because that's the only Yahoo service that I use nowadays

How in the world do they have 14,000 employees? I just checked the Yahoo.com site right now, yup still looks the same as it did in 1998 except now it's nicely formatted for an 800px wide monitor. What are all these people doing all day long?

Yahoo owns a bunch of things like Flickr (and previously Delicious). Though IIRC, I thought that they already cut a bunch of staff from these other projects.

I bet half the people on HN could run Flickr better by themselves.

Flickr could probably run Flickr better by themselves, too.

hmm I guess FB is not paying up on Patent fees huh..

They should've become MS's bitches when they had a chance.

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