
'Deep' layoffs expected at Yahoo - bdking
http://www.itworld.com/software/255822/deep-layoffs-expected-yahoo
======
samstave
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?

~~~
sriramk
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.

~~~
samstave
>...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?

~~~
chollida1
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.

~~~
samstave
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.

------
cpeterso
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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/arts/television/yahoo-starts-its-
first-season-of-scripted-comedy-programming.html)

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

------
yumraj
How deep? Will it include the board members :)

~~~
javajosh
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.

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

------
neovive
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.

------
janesvilleseo
"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

------
GR8K
original article: [http://allthingsd.com/20120305/yahoos-new-ceo-preps-major-
re...](http://allthingsd.com/20120305/yahoos-new-ceo-preps-major-
restructuring-including-significant-layoffs/)

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

------
wavephorm
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?

~~~
pyre
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.

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

~~~
cpeterso
Flickr could probably run Flickr better by themselves, too.

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

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

