Yahoo Lays Off 400 Employees In India | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Lays Off 400 Employees In India

techcrunch.com

169 pointssandeepeecs54 comments

Yahoo India was pretty bloated, with layer after layer of management with very high salaries and not much to do. Hard to blame anyone for the decision. There were some really good devs embedded in all that lard, hopefully they'll be fine. Five months severance is pretty generous by Indian standards. That said, even very good engineers don't have as many options here as those in SF have, and not as many job opportunities,so I'm sure there are quite a few people feeling desperate today.

(Fwiw, Ms Mayer has been honing this particular axe for a long time now. Rumors have been circulating inside Yahoo India for quite a while now about an impending massacre. The good guys mostly left some time ago.)

PS: I don't work at Yahoo, but I do live in Bangalore and know people who worked there. Fwiw,my friends are all fine,either moved out in time or relocated to the USA etc. fwiw.)

There aren't as many options anywhere for good engineers as SF. Surely in Bangalore the big firms like Infosys and Wipro are always hiring experienced engineers?

They pay peanuts

How much do product companies like Yahoo pay in India?

A bit more than twice the amount large consultancies pay. And these large consultancies recruit tens of thousands of employees every year, as opposed to product companies that have a total on a few thousand employees.

India is a very tough place to make a good wage even if heavily skilled. There's a lot of demand, sure. But there's an overload of supply.

Infosys and co are really body shoppers and working at such places isn't comparable to working at a product company. The pay, working conditions, project quality etc are (relatively) terrible.

The comment that there aren't many opportunities is wrong. If you're good and have been working at yahoo you'll find another job easily. But Infosys and Wipro are body shops, that's not a natural progress from working at Yahoo.

There were some really good devs embedded in all that lard, hopefully they'll be fine.

Almost all the comments posted below the original local blog post (which the TechCrunch post links to) are job offers, so I guess at least some of them will be fine.

you can say that about any company. any office. google headquarter is full of layers of management with little to do. etc.

the problem with this news is that yahoo, instead of evaluating those layers and managers, took the lazy aproach. then being close to revenue deadlines, made it look twice as lazy.

firing useless layers of management is good. laying off with BS excuses is not.

for example, they laid off people not working well on their instant messager in carsbard, as the article states. but instead of saying so, they called it office cuts, and made life hell for the few folks there working very well from there but not in the lazy team.

and the more random layoffs (as opposed to honest message that some team didnt work out) the good guys get scared and leave, causing more bad guy to be "laid off" in a vicious cycle

> you can say that about any company

Different companies have dramatically different amounts of management.

after they are over some 20k non-manual labor employees, its all in the median for my comment to apply

> its all in the median for my comment to apply

I don't know what this means.

I literally started my career there, spent six and half years and made a lot of friends (I had jobs before yblr) - if any of you worked there, I was the guy with the afro on roller blades.

Ten years ago, it was an amazing place to work - great people, good managers and a CEO who sat at the same table for lunch.

http://notmysock.org/blog/yblr/

I spent more time with those people than I did in college, in my high-school or any other job since or before. Some of those people today have gotten a card that says "Move to Sunnyvale or collect your severance".

I feel sad for them, because some of them would hold similar memories of a great office, want to keep contributing and feel some sort of great loss, simply from being told that they're not needed.

I don't really worry about them - they're awesome engineers who have been hiding their talents under a bushel for years.

All of them would have a new job by new year, would burn their severance on a nice vacation during their break and not worry about their life - it's just that the temporary but irreplaceable sense of loss, that I can feel as I got off the phone.

Most of this means nothing - just that this place where we all met and grew up to be engineers, is no longer there.

Like when your childhood home gets torn apart to make a skyscraper (or worse, a parking lot).

It is known that yahoo has identity problems compared to Google/facebook ...etc. If you are a loyal employee, who believes in turnaround and stay till the end, this type of decisions can be painful. He/she may/may not get a chance to US and due to other family reasons may not be willing to relocate.

Loyalty, it seems, does not have any value in modern organizations. Traditionally, in India, job/career is viewed differently than in America. Job indicates some sort of stability to life and these sort of decisions, can crash those views. There are some who misused that stability and there are many who utilized that stability properly and create value to life,society.

I read in news the statements of visiting American CEO's that they understand India,localize their operations ...etc. My suggestion is, in addition to understanding "customer/consumer" aspect of Indians, please understand the other aspects such as society,priorities, values, relative importance ...etc too. If that is the case, organizations will be careful during hiring, making sustainable business models avoiding knee-jerk policies.

All due respect, but if US companies look at US employees as expendable cost units and not as people, what makes you think they'd have any care for employees in a location they initially came to in order to reduce the cost of hiring US employees? The increase-profits-at-any-cost model hurts the US directly as well.

There isn't a huge cultural difference between India and the US here. Many, if not most people would love a long-term reliable career with a company they could care about and would care about them and their/their family's well being. The only reason we have a new culture of adversarial relationships between employers and employees in the US now is because of the loss of loyalty on the company side.

India is, maybe, just next up to feel the pain of what happens when money is placed above all else - including human suffering.

>>Traditionally, in India, job/career is viewed differently than in America. Job indicates some sort of stability to life and these sort of decisions, can crash those views. There are some who misused that stability and there are many who utilized that stability properly and create value to life,society.

This was traditionally the case in the U.S. as well, it is a lamentable situation.

My friend and a few more in Yahoo were looking for a job switch for quite some time as there were talks of layoff in the last few months. He got a job a few days back. And he is getting the severance package. I talked with him a few minutes back. He is actually feeling great.

and this is why doing dumb layoffs instead of constant performance review does not help any company.

everyone good is always ready to jump, anda eventually jump, layoff or not.

Sources tell me that they are asking 90% of their staff at Bangalore to relocate to CA instead of laying off them. Not ideal, but better than being laid off.

Wouldn't that be impractical or impossible from a visa standpoint? That seems like a lot of H1Bs in 1 year for a single company.

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

They might use L1's which AFAIK aren't capped.

Almost certainly. Yahoo most likely has a blanket L1: http://www.murthy.com/worker/l-1-visas-statuses/l-1-blanket/

L1 visas are terrible. You cannot change employers on an L1 Visa.

Years before you can change to H1B the next year in US, but lotteries made all these all changed.

They are better than H1 visas, because your spouse can work. Other benefits: no cap, faster path to green card.

Path to Green Card is long and arduous if its a L1B which is most likely going to be the case

Yes, although H1Bs aren't a great either. Most people I know who were on an L1 got their company to sponsor an H1 visa after a year or two and then change jobs a few years down the switch.

Relocating 2000 people with H1B?

InfoSys and other bodyshoppers do much more than that every year :-). Yahoo'll probably use L1 s though. With some help from the Immigration folks (which Yahoo has the clout to arrange if they wanted), this should be easy enough.

And thanks to them people who work for smaller companies without blanket setups get screwed over

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8421474 (modders, no need to mod)

Wouldn't that be an offer to apply internally for any open positions rather than a mass move? Meaning 95% of them will find nothing.

It would make no sense to lay off 1000s of people only to encourage them to move somewhere where you have to pay them more money.

Just curious, not mad or anything, can anybody let me know why this is being downvoted? I didn't claim that it was factual or anything, just what I heard. What HN etiquette did I break? :)

It's a small-ish "bug" in HN, IMO: there are times when you think something is wrong, and want to downvote it, but ideally would put it at 0, and no lower, because you can tell that it's probably an honest mistake, rather than an attempt to deceive or spread false information.

So people probably think you're wrong.

I wouldn't worry about it. There's nothing wrong with your post and haven't broken etiquette as far as I can tell :-).

I guess in that case they wouldn't have to pay severance, because formally it is not a layoff.

This may not be true. The post has been deleted by the actual source.

Has this been confirmed yet? TC is hardly a reliable source of news.

All the best to the people affected with this decision. We have some interesting problems and are always open for talented people to join us - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8396376

Does HN adds some weightage for domains, same news from original source(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8420579) can't be find on 1st four pages?

It was on the front page, but I (and probably others) flagged it because it looked untrustworthy. And indeed it appears to be pretty far off on the numbers.

That said, what makes it on HN is largely a function of luck.

Is it possible to ask someone to just keep Techcrunch off the front page? They're running BS stories like this all the time.

Humans Need Not Apply http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-automation-today-is-lik...

To Yahoo! India devs, if you got laid off and need help in finding your next gig, please feel free to reach out: I am on archit@cleartax.in

A lot of startups in India are hiring and I would be happy to make intros if you are looking.

Yahoo India is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_centre_%28business%29

Now the number affected got reduced to 400 employees.

The number now is 400. Anyways its a good time for developers in India and I am sure they won't waste much time finding new jobs.

Did the Romanians know it ahead of time?

Wow, I didn't see this coming.

the numbers are deceptive, TC is reporting 400, Nextbigwhat is reporting 2000

You forgot to capitalize I in India.

edit: The edited title is way better. Thank you!

Nope. They are actually laying off most of the folks. Very few and the top guys are getting an offer to relocate to other offices, not specifically the US. Btw, posting a job requirement now wouldn't be opportunistic rite? :D

is Yahoo! ever in the news for something positive?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com