Laying off George
zeldman.com
zeldman.com
Its like throwing out the projector because they figure that now that they have the image on the wall, who needs it?
I sense a hard lesson about to be learned. Good luck in your next endevour, George.
You just made my day. Thank you.
"I'll just get straight to the point. You've been affected by the layoffs."
I guess it shouldn't surprise me that a middle manager would call a weasly euphemism getting "straight to the point".
Incidentally, I agree with the commenters here who've pointed out that the cancellation of the project and layoff itself hardly seem unreasonable or tragic. It's the corporate culture I'm commenting on. If this vignette is indicative, Yahoo is in worse shape than I thought.
I find it hard to talk about "the nature" of a company the size of Yahoo - this is more the "weasliness" of some HR employee which didn't get corrected by the structure of the company. Of course, it doesn't say anything about the many brilliant employees that had nothing to do with the layoffs.
I don't. I noticed years ago that organizations have distinct characters that seem mostly to trace back to their originators. Sometimes the connection is so strong that it almost seems the company itself has a personality. It's true the effect may weaken as companies get big (bureaucracy is depressingly uniform), and we're talking about patterns not laws (lots of room for individual variation), but what's striking is how noticeable the effect is despite those caveats.
That said, my uninformed reaction is to consider this a good move. The last thing Yahoo needs is another project with no clear business model, regardless how cool. This is the kind of work that should be funded by massive donations like wikipedia. If it's going to be supported by a company, it shouldn't be one on life support.
I can see this got downmodded into oblivion, yet I don't think it's so far from the mark. I noticed some cognitive dissonance in myself while reading the original post under the assumption that George was a he. It dissipated when I figured out she's a she. Such a clear little "experiment" doesn't come along very often so I think it's worth paying attention to.
And there's something else I don't get. Why are they not trying to outsource projects that they do not consider to be core? Why are they not asking people like George to enter into some other kind of contractual relationship with them that would allow the continuation of a good project? Someone as well connected as George might be able to find additional funding for Flickr Commons from other sources.
Personally I think it was a good site until Yahoo! took it over. Now it feels a bit like that local friendly coffee shop you'd been using for years that suddenly became a Starbucks. I'm sure there's room for an innovative competitor there.
I think the lay-offs are really hard for the people involved however you do them. I think Yahoo could have done better by not keeping people hanging for 3 months.
That said has it occurred to people that it was Flickr Commons rather than George that was seen as an unnecessary cost. Commons is awesome, but it doesn't seem to be something that is going to make money for Flickr/Yahoo.
In terms of the way that George was laid off, how do you lay off someone thousands of miles away? Is there a good way? I doubt it. The script seems insensitive but Yahoo has easily enough revenue to make it an easy target for HR based lawsuits. The script is there to protect the company from people that might exploit a more human process.
There has been a bunch of bad press today about our layoffs it really feels sucky to people, and I get that. I know other people who left and I know Yahoo has given them an amazing package. Since then they have been talking to a lot of companies about a range of roles. I think a lot of those people may come out with a couple of extra months pay because they were laid off. It won't remove the struggle and emotional stress that losing you job has but I hope it somewhat soothes the pain.
I personally find it upsetting that people keep attacking the company for doing what was in the best interests of it's shareholders. I struggle to think of people I know at Yahoo that aren't smart and working hard to make good products.
Maybe not every decision that has been made has been perfect, and maybe there is a more bureaucracy than I'd like but every commentator is a genius in hindsight. I, like Michael Arrington, know that Hitler probably shouldn't have invaded Russia in Winter and that maybe we should have bought Google when we had the chance.
I guess what I'm saying is I expected HN to be a place where people look a little deeper and think a little bit more. I wish you'd do that for us before you continue to throw your stones.
It's true no matter whether you work for a small company or large company--if you do something that's valuable to someone, you won't go hungry.
http://george08.blogspot.com/2008/12/not-quite-what-i-had-in...
My comment: Congratulations to the affected. A website that does little besides arranging "img" elements is fundamentally lame. I was hit in the 2001 blowout, and it was probably the best thing that could have happened. Find something good.....
That isn't an accurate description of what flickr does. The kinds of problems they work on are a lot more complicated than arranging images.
One of the most ubiquitous inventions I've seen develop in my lifetime is luggage on wheels. The technology is trivial (it's a combination of two simple things that have existed for centuries) but somehow it didn't get invented until the late '80s/early '90s. Now you wouldn't buy a suitcase without it, and it makes travel infinitely more pleasant.
This does require being able to travel quite light though - most of my trips are 1 week or less at a conference so I only take clothes, laptop and assorted chargers.
Flickr may be a cool technology but in a business sense it's an also-ran.
Regarding the reference, Jeffrey Zeldman is widely and well respected. The reference is notable because it provides context into how ridiculous the situation is.
Frankly, I don't even like it. Whose aesthetic ideal is responsible for the decision to show pictures at a size other than the maximum (up to a practical limit)? Show me the full-sized picture. Just seems obvious.
What exactly does this have:
http://flickr.com/photos/mongol/515509897/in/photostream/
That this doesn't:
http://flickr.com/photos/mongol/515509897/sizes/o/in/photost...
(Obviously, you could put the various widgets next to and below the above picture with plenty of space to spare.)
It's really easy for technophiles to say "Oh, I could build that in a week", and usually they can. The problem is, nobody will use it. Building a community is really fricking hard - it's the sort of task where everyone says "Oh, I can do that" up until they actually try it and then find out that there's a lot of subtlety to it they've completely missed.
Same goes for Reddit, and Twitter. Those are two other sites that are cloneable in a weekend, but nobody will use your clone.
The combination of the news feed and tagging people in photos (and having them show up in the news feed!) is facebooks secret sauce
Two upmods. Hmm. At least two other people think your question a good one. Okay. (EDIT: Three now)
Well, websites are closely associated with many of the topics in computer science. There are, for instance, programming languages, algorithms, data structures, etc, involved in producing a website, no matter the actual content of the website. Likewise, many computer science professors have classes with names like "Software Engineering" which have large-scale projects similar to real-life projects.
Hope I cleared up the confusion.
PS. This is US.
Other countries especially france have different rules.
Most companies will offer you some sort of severance - or at least won't ask for their signing bonus/relocation/etc back, but that's out of goodwill, not legal obligation.