
Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100 - rpncreator
https://blog.yelp.com/2020/04/planning-for-yelps-future
======
Waterluvian
I know this is a very tired topic, but does anyone have any good blog posts or
articles about "what exactly is it that you all do?" Yelp having 6000
employees. I'm not surprised, I'm not mad. I just want to understand.

~~~
013a
Yelp's engineering isn't likely much more than ~150 people (I worked there ~2
years ago, maybe has grown since then but honestly, given their revenue
situation even then, likely not by much). The mix there is just like most
companies; you've got dedicated teams for each of their apps (which includes
Android, iOS, web, business-facing, etc), you've got API teams, back office
teams working on moving data around and business analytics, a very secretive
abuse management team, IT, etc. Yelp also, given their age, wasn't (at some
point) running their primary workloads in the cloud; they had (have?) a colo
DC in San Francisco that hosted a ton of stuff, so there were people dedicated
to that hardware. There was some movement to get rid of this as I remember.

Surprisingly, or hopefully not, the vast majority of the company is more
directly revenue generating; sales and customer acquisition. Its spread very
globally; at least as of a few years ago, the SF HQ didn't house any sales
people, though I think they had an office in Oakland which did.

Point being, I always got the impression that their engineering team was very
"right sized" given their revenue and product scope.

~~~
throwaway55554
Even 150 blows my mind. Years ago I worked for one of the top 10 EHR software
makers (at the time - maybe even now, I haven't looked) and we had 1/3 the
number of engineers on that system.

~~~
wgerard
I don't mean to be flippant or unnecessarily mean, but my anecdotal experience
is that many EHR systems are pretty widely derided by healthcare providers
(i.e. end-users).

Maybe it's not a good thing that only 50 engineers were working on that
system.

~~~
throwaway55554
Doesn't matter to me, I'm not in that industry any more. But yes, they're a
mess. But, honestly, I don't know you would make it less of a mess. People
just need to accept that some systems are complicated and the more you try and
make it less complicated the further from that goal you get.

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duggable
> Today we will let 1,000 of our colleagues go and furlough approximately
> 1,100 more, while reducing hours for others. Your department leaders will be
> in touch this morning to discuss how this affects you individually, and
> letters with more details and FAQs will follow this afternoon.

Honest question - is it normal to announce layoffs publicly before telling the
affected employees? I guess I can understand it from a PR perspective, but it
must be awful to read that and sit around waiting to find out if you're
affected.

~~~
jrockway
The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York
Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc. with probably-incorrect information about
the layoffs. So PR wants to be out ahead of that. The real world doesn't have
atomic transactions, so you have to pick between that scenario and one where
some people are worried about their job for a few hours.

~~~
chrisseaton
> The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York
> Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc

Why do people do this? What do they get out of it? They don't pay for tip-offs
do they? Seems unethical anyway.

~~~
stale2002
Here is a better question. Why _not_ do this?

If you got fired, you don't really own the company anything anymore.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Why not do this?

Because what do you get out of it? They don't pay you for a tip. Why do free
work for a media conglomerate, even if you didn't care about the ethics?

~~~
stale2002
> Because what do you get out of it?

Because they felt like it?

I can definitely see how someone might think that it is cool to cause a news
story.

> Why do free work

You are overestimating the amount of "work" that would go into something like
this. I do stuff all the time, just because I felt like it.

------
xiaolingxiao
For reference, according to Google Yelp's employee in 2020 is 6,030 before
layoff. So 1/3 of the workforce is laid off or furloughed.

~~~
dbancajas
what is furluoghed?

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
It means something more specific in government job parlance I believe, but
essentially you are still employed but not getting paid your salary and you
don’t work. Usually (and most importantly) it means that your benefits like
health insurance continue as well.

~~~
sizzle
Are you eligible for unemployment or do you have to accept $0 income for the
unforeseeable future?

~~~
winrid
It's not like that. You just wouldn't work/be paid for one week of the month,
for example.

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flr03
A company like yelp making 1 billion revenue per year, I'd except they could
have their employees back, for at least a couple months, maybe furlough them
with 80% of their salaries...

~~~
jiveturkey
and take a huge earnings hit? WHY? when you can just let people go. it's a
company with shitty business ethics, so why would you even suggest that they
do right by their employees?

~~~
twunde
Look layoffs are always shitty, and Yelp in many ways is not an ethical
company. However if you read the actual post, the leadership is at least
trying. The CEO is taking no pay, execs are taking pay cuts. They've cancelled
projects. My guess is that their revenue has tanked to near 0 and that since
many of their clients are closing, possibly for good they're expecting
significantly lower revenue for the next 2 years.

~~~
CydeWeys
Yup. I don't like Yelp, but in this situation the choice isn't between layoffs
and no layoffs, it's between layoffs and bankruptcy. And in bankruptcy you'd
see massive layoffs anyway.

There's not really even a choice here.

~~~
flr03
The choice is to build an emergency fund, just like you would do for yourself,
so you can pay your rent, your bills if an accident in your life happens. Yet,
financial crashes happens quite regurlarly but companies expect the
gouvernment (citizens) to pay the rescue bill. And I'm not going to cry for
the execs taking a 20-30% pay cut.

~~~
twblalock
I don't really expect companies to plan for the government ordering the
majority of economic activity to halt for an undefined length of time.

This isn't just some "rainy day" to save for. This is unprecedented, and it's
only necessary because the government did not take steps to contain the
outbreak sooner.

Money given to companies after this is not a bailout in the 2008 sense. It
should be viewed as compensation for damages caused by the government's
bungled response to the virus.

~~~
zaroth
> _This is unprecedented, and it 's only necessary because the government did
> not take steps to contain the outbreak sooner._

The whole world is shut down over COVID. Even with borders closed as much as
possible it has spread. There is no intervention by the US government that
could have been done in January that would mean the country would be open for
business today.

~~~
twblalock
> There is no intervention by the US government that could have been done in
> January that would mean the country would be open for business today.

Sure there was. Other countries did it. The US and the EU were caught
unprepared but several countries in Asia did the right thing, probably because
they had previous experience with SARS.

A total societal lockdown is not the only viable response to a disease like
COVID-19. It might be the only viable _late-stage_ response, but early
testing, tracing, and quarantining has worked in other countries and it could
have worked here if our government had been on the ball.

------
rchaud
While job losses will pile further misery on the economy, I hope that means
there are now fewer ad sales people trying to shake down local businesses so
that they offer Yelp protection money to keep their ratings positive.

Companies like this always start with a noble purpose, before the pressure to
monetize causes them to ruin what was once a valuable service.

~~~
pgsbathhouse2
This is not a thing. No one at Yelp does this. There is literally zero
evidence that Yelp does this.

~~~
sevencolors
Ok, just keep pretending it isn't happening. But the owners of thousands of
small cafes & restaurants would bend your ear for hours with bullshit they
have to deal with.

~~~
pgsbathhouse2
Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

~~~
james-skemp
Louis Rossmann has a Mac repair store in New York and, when I was subscribed
to him, had posted numerous videos about his experiences with Yelp.

One example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso)

~~~
smallgovt
To summarize: Yelp account exec shared another business owner's stats with
Louis. Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp and the account exec got
fired. The fired account exec took it personally and got her friends to write
negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page.

That's evidence that Yelp practices extortion?

------
hunter-2
Someone I work with from another company just messaged me that they are being
furloughed for a couple of months. I wonder how many of these furloughs are
going to end up in layoffs.

~~~
RandallBrown
It'll depend a lot on how long the pandemic lasts.

I know a few friends that work for a major retail company that have been
furloughed. Those will definitely turn to layoffs if this keeps going too much
longer.

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wdb
With all these lays off it’s going harder to find a job and companies probably
try to force pay cuts for the roles they are hiring because of it. Bad time to
be jobless; sadly I am in this situation:(

------
23B1
Good riddance to an exploitative business.

~~~
stri8ed
Please explain.

~~~
orky56
Yelp is accused of predatory practices on business owners including pushing
them to sign up for a paid subscription to hide negative reviews on their Yelp
page. Otherwise, you are vulnerable to their algorithm which hides/shows
reviews that are often less than favorable. Yelp reviews are now overtaking
business' own pages on Google searches leaving businesses with less option to
control, let alone, curate their brand's messaging.

~~~
dntrkv
Is there any evidence of this actually happening?

~~~
starpilot
Numerous credible reports from business owners, and numerous denials from
Yelp. I don't really know who to believe.

~~~
smallgovt
I would hardly call them credible reports. It's easy to see how business
owners could draw false inferences when they receive a Yelp sales call and
coincidentally get a negative review shortly after.

Honestly, I thought this was long since debunked. There is no physical
evidence of Yelp sales execs extorting small businesses.

------
yalogin
Wait Yelp has 6000 employees? They haven’t changed their site in a decade!
What percentage of that is engineering? Seriously, I thought they have maybe
1000 at best.

~~~
dntrkv
Have you (and anyone else posting this same exact comment on any article that
mentions employee count) ever worked at a large company? Once things operate
at a large enough scale, it requires dedicated teams to focus on very specific
parts of the application.

Take SEO for example, it's not just putting H1 and title tags on every page.
You most likely have dedicated services that are generating millions of
sitemaps, daily. You probably have separate infrastructure dedicated to
serving the crawlers so that you can optimize the content and aren't serving
your users and bots from the same pool of resources. You have analytics
dedicated to monitoring the crawlers and running tests / adjustments as you
see results. You likely have services that generate the SEO data for every
page (meta tags, titles, canonical links, headings, etc). And in addition to
this you have AB testing, legacy systems, and technical debt to deal with.

My point is, it's easy to brush these things off as unnecessary and large
company waste (and some of it might be) but to say things like "It's just a
CRUD app, why do they need a 1000 engineers. I could do it with 10" is
ignoring the vast complexity involved in running at scale.

~~~
aprdm
meanwhile I am sure other companies running an app that is comparable to yelp
scale do so with much fewer engineers. Whatsapp comes to mind as an obvious
example.

------
mcny
What is the biggest source of revenue for Yelp? What part of Yelp's revenue is
Empyr or other card-linked offers?

~~~
23B1
They call businesses to sell promotion packages, and those that don't buy get
hammered with bad reviews.

[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp-
accuse...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp-accused-of-
hiding-positive-reviews-for-non-advertiser)

~~~
ViViDboarder
If you’re so inclined, you can look up your local Denny’s for proof of the
opposite. They are a big time advertiser with pretty poor reviews on average.

------
tengbretson
I guess even the 21st century mafia isn't immune to an economic downturn.

~~~
milquetoastaf
Nor is the actual Mafia immune [https://nypost.com/2020/03/29/how-coronavirus-
cripples-the-n...](https://nypost.com/2020/03/29/how-coronavirus-cripples-the-
new-york-mafia/)

------
sjg007
Yelp basically replaced the Yellow pages and Zagat with a bit of the BBB
thrown in for good measure. Its model is to sell listing services to
businesses. I am guessing it is a sales heavy org.

------
caseyf7
How bad will their data be after this crisis? If 30% of restaurants/bars don't
survive, updating their data is going to be a challenge.

~~~
dickjocke
I feel like that is the least of their problems

------
sizzle
Does anyone have the role percentage breakdown of those let go/furloughed?
e.g. marketing, dev, design, sales, etc.

------
12xo
Every advertising business reliant on brick and mortar or real estate is going
to be decimated.

------
cheriot
Does anyone know which departments/roles saw cuts?

~~~
sevencolors
Hopefully most of their scummy sales department

------
ransom1538
Off topic: Can anyone explain why the dow jones is going up? The dow was
_LOWER_ Jan 1st 2019. I feel we are worse off than Jan 1st 2019.

~~~
Waterluvian
If anyone can "explain" it, they should go get filthy rich. But we can
speculate in a semi-educated way. I think my best speculation is that the
economy's fall factored in uncertainty about how bad this really is. The sell-
off was based on worst case scenarios (given such high uncertainty).

Now that uncertainty is going down as we understand it all better, have more
data, have plans in place, the economy is recovering to a more accurate, "this
is actually what this whole ordeal will cost us"

~~~
ajross
Maybe. Personally, I think the median investor, especially the median short
term investor, tends to be more optimistic than the rational market hypothesis
would argue. Information availability isn't symmetric, and the news sources
favored by these people tend to paint rosier pictures of the recovery than
seem likely.

I mean, one very straightforward interpretation of the headline of this linked
article is that Yelp will be seeing a 30-40% shortfall in revenue for the
medium term future (i.e. long enough to make the firing and hiring process
worthwhile). At its worst, the market was guessing at a 38% drop in valuation,
and it's now recovered significantly from that.

My guess, and no I'm not buying puts to test it, is that we're going to see
another series of shocks to the market when the revenue numbers start being
reported and the big employers start running out of money and shutting things
down.

Right now the immediate job losses are all in the service sector and small
employers, and those jobs are basically invisible to your typical trader bro.

~~~
bhupy
> Right now the immediate job losses are all in the service sector and small
> employers, and those jobs are basically invisible to your typical trader
> bro.

Most of this activity is driven by robotic trades by institutional investors.
It's largely quantitative. Whether the quantitative priors are accurate, is
debatable.

~~~
ajross
I don't buy that. Objective quantitative analysis based on models that don't
know about the pandemic _should_ be pricing in a disastrous 30% unemployment,
and clearly the market is not.

I'm not in the industry, but I have to believe the quants are doing what all
of us are: they're throwing out the models, rewriting stuff where possible,
but basically just guessing like the rest of us. And that process is a victim
of their own subjectivity. And this is not just a demographic well-positioned
to have a good, objective understanding of epidemiology.

Basically that's just a long winded way to say: wall street isn't looking at
this correctly and is going to be surprised when quarterly results don't show
the recovery they're expecting.

~~~
bhupy
> Objective quantitative analysis based on models that don't know about the
> pandemic should be pricing in a disastrous 30% unemployment, and clearly the
> market is not.

That's not necessarily true. First of all, 30% unemployment, while a big scary
unprecedented number, represents the expected outcome of the official policy
of all governments (Federal & State) , which is forced unemployment. The CARES
stimulus includes a $600/week unemployment insurance _on top of_ the existing
state UI. In every state, the unemployment benefit is actually higher than the
median wage [1]. Businesses know this, and proactively lay off / furlough
their employees so that they may collect this benefit, with the intention of
having them be first-in-line for re-hiring once this all passes. The other
half of the CARES stimulus includes forgivable loans to businesses with the
hope that those loans can keep businesses afloat so that they may be in a
position to re-hire once this all passes. Put simply, because half the
stimulus is in the form of direct insurance payments to people, and
unemployment is the means of receiving that, you will see high unemployment
numbers. Not only is this expected, it is intended.

All this being said, it's still not certain that many of these businesses will
be able to survive even with the loans/stimulus, nobody knows for sure. The
market doesn't price in the scary 30% unemployment number, it prices in the
expectation that this number will fall back to usual levels by next year.

The grandparent comment asked why the Dow increased today, and it's because
the Fed announced $2.3T in new small-business loans, which slightly increases
the percentage of businesses that may be able to weather this storm.

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/AifRmdD](https://imgur.com/a/AifRmdD)

------
abinaya_remote
Remote Leaf[1] founder here, I would like to offer Yelp employees who lost
their jobs a free month of membership, that might help you land a remote job.
We hand-pick thousands of remote jobs from tons of job boards and only sends
the ones that apply to you. Just ping me on Twitter[2] and send me an email to
avail this :)

[1] - [https://twitter.com/remoteleaf](https://twitter.com/remoteleaf)

[2] - [https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl](https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl)

------
Ascetik
Can't say this is really a bad thing, Yelp has had blackmail and predatory
business practices a long time and should be shutdown on that alone. It's
amazing to me they haven't been sued into oblivion yet.

------
diogenescynic
122 points in 2 hours and already on 3rd page or results. Why are we hiding
layoff news?

