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Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
- dudul 11y agoAt this point, I feel bad for the other 85% who still work there...
- halis 11y agoI mean..it's Yahoo, who cares.
- minimaxir 11y agoArticle primarily references information from the WSJ article, but WSJ now has a super-paywall and the "web" trick no longer works.
- jedberg 11y agoThe same text as the WSJ article is reprinted here: http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/201602017502/yahoos-mayer-to-unveil-cost-cutting-plan.aspx http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/2016020...
- jonknee 11y agoMaybe it just changed, but there is an article and not a link to the WSJ. You can also use this to read the WSJ article: https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo%27s+Marissa+Mayer+to+Unveil+Cost-Cutting+Plan https://www.google.com/search?q=Yahoo%27s+Marissa+Mayer+to+U...
- swang 11y agoI believe you have to delete all your WSJ cookies, then load from Google. edit: hmm guess not. is this allowed by google?
- toephu2 11y agoI noticed this a few days ago, the came from google trick no longer works. Anyone have a workaround for this?
- leroy_masochist 11y agoThe "came from google" trick is still working for me when I use a private window in Google Chrome on OS X. Both versions latest available.
- tathastu 11y agoTry search from Google, then open resulting link in a private / incognito window.
- striking 11y agoAre you on mobile?
- minimaxir 11y agoThis also happens in the desktop.
- shostack 11y agoIs Google slapping them accordingly?
- romanhn 11y agoWSJ's paywall update - https://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-paywall-google/ https://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-paywall-g...
- jedberg 11y agoI feel bad for the 15%, but this was necessary. They are severely over-hired. I've gone over there a few times to talk to folks and it's clear that they have a lot of people that are basically making work for themselves because no one has any work for them that actually helps the business.
- ProAm 11y ago> no one has any work for them that actually helps the business. What is their business now? Having no work is a leadership problem. If there really is no work then layoffs are a must, but the company is floundering around with no real direction....
- pgz 11y agoThis, IMHO, is the crucial point: what exactly is Yahoo's business? As an outside watcher I have no clue (I am also stupid). Hopefully people working there have better insight than myself.
- xyzzy4 11y agoWell they get a lot of non-Asian revenue still so it comes from somewhere.
- zipwitch 11y ago> This, IMHO, is the crucial point: what exactly is Yahoo's business? Keeping the C-levels employed?
- jobu 11y agoThey keep calling themselves a "media company", but they've done such a terrible job at delivery (of media and vision) that it wouldn't surprise me if most people working there don't even know what the company is about. Recently I tried watching Yahoo's Other Space (https://screen.yahoo.com/other-space/ https://screen.yahoo.com/other-space/), but gave up after a few episodes - even though I enjoyed what I was able to watch. From what I could tell, the show wasn't available through the Yahoo Screen mobile app. (Which brings another question, WTF is the point of that app?!) The website lets you watch streaming video, but the site is impossible to use from mobile, and it would randomly crash every iOS browser I tried (Safari, Chrome, Firefox). When I tried watching from a desktop the video stream would occasionally freeze, and the Ads would randomly reset the stream back to the beginning of the episode.
- legohead 11y agoSo I guess she did mean something when she said, "No layoffs...this week" [1] Brutal. [1] http://nypost.com/2016/01/18/marissa-mayers-job-safety-joke-doesnt-sit-well-with-workers/ http://nypost.com/2016/01/18/marissa-mayers-job-safety-joke-...
- draw_down 11y agoJeez, that's so awful.
- jlarocco 11y agoUnbelievable. It sucks to be laid off, but they're better off in the long run to get away from a company with leadership like that.
- cpayne 11y ago(In over 20 years) I've been laid off 3 times. I know how much it sucks the first & second time, but once you see the warning signs there is no glory in hanging around. For me, being laid off (or resigning) is just another skill I got better at (like learning a new tech stack or framework). You are right, with leadership like that, the environment must be toxic...
- alwaysAttending 11y agolove it.
- emodendroket 11y agoYeah, haha. Really funny that all those people lost their jobs. Great stuff.
- newsignup 11y agoIt was a friday, so a joke!
- draw_down 11y ago
- gtirloni 11y agoI don't really get what these abbreviations and commas in the titles are all about. It saves 3 characters over "Yahoo to cut 15% of jobs and close several units". Maybe allow for more Twitter hashtags?
- yeukhon 11y agoI did a quick search just to see what other media is using. CNBC> Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units: WSJ reuters seems to have updated the title. Even though it said WSJ, WSJ has a different headline.
- Retric 11y agoThey might be trying to have unique headlines so it’s easier to trace companies that directly copy content.
- xyzzy4 11y agoDoesn't Yahoo go on hiring sprees all the time?
- yeukhon 11y agoAlmost every major tech company is always hiring. But the process of ACTUALLY HIRING is a different story. Some company does it quick, even if there's a layoff. Some company takes forever to complete interview and paper work even if there is no layoff. And then there are companies doing layoff and new hiring goes through strict budget reviews. It depends. Furthermore, you can close a whole useless business project and you decide to invest in another project so you need to hire people. It's quite interesting that in the latter case some company prefers to fire everyone and hire back some of them. I have seen that before.
- random42 11y ago> It's quite interesting that in the latter case some company prefers to fire everyone and hire back some of them. I have seen that before. I wonder why they'd do it, instead of an internal transfer. Any idea why?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoKeeps labor from getting too comfortable.
- frozenport 11y agoLower pay.
- accountatwork 11y agoWhen I've seen this happen, it's been pure mismanagement. An order goes out to do layoffs, so people get laid off. Within days, people realize that they've laid off critical employees who can't be replaced and they get hired back as contractors. The employees who got laid off aren't happy about it, so the ones that do come back demand huge raises and some don't come back.
- 11y ago
- yeukhon 11y ago> Ms. Mayer is expected to announce greater focus on Project Index, an internal project to build a better search engine tailored to mobile phones, said a person familiar with the matter. The company has posted listings for at least 190 jobs on its website this month, the vast majority of which are for engineers. 1. I am eager to find out why it is tailored to mobile phone and what capacity the engine would give to a mobile phone. A search engine should work on both desktop and on the go. 2. Did job research with Yahoo a couple years ago, so I am not sure how much it is true today and whether my observation is correct or not from their hiring standpoint. But I know in the past, half of the Yahoo hiring post dates were at least 6-12 months ago, which indicated either the company was struggling to find and acquire talents, or someone simply never bothered to cancel the request and the team responsible for managing the hiring posts never bothered to check with the requester regularly. Either way, it was bad for a job seeker to see a company fail to remove job posting from months ago. IMO, if you are still hiring the same title for multiple job filling, submit a new one and put a new date.
- Retric 11y agoThere are still plenty of sites that are unusable on a mobile phone, so that's one consideration.
- yeukhon 11y agoDid you mean going over to another site? Because major search engines like google, yahoo and bing have their own app for major mobile OSes. Unless you want to render other sites within your app, that's a whole different story. I am under the impression they want to incorporate Yahoo News Digest (pretty much an update from the expensive Summly acquisition) into the search experience.
- Tomte 11y agoI guess he meant that search results that don't render well/fast on mobile could be demoted.
- tamana 11y agoWhat's the cumulative total of layoffs so far?
- Yhippa 11y agoElop'd. Think Google would buy them for the front page visitors, news, and sports assets?
- blisterpeanuts 11y agoI guess this proves that banning work-from-home didn't solve their problems. Yahoo was the internet destination back in the 90s and into the 2000s until Google started to eat their lunch in search and email. In my opinion, Yahoo's strength was its diversity; it was a one-stop shop for everything internet. You could register domain names, set up web pages, sell items, conduct email, instant messaging, etc. all within the yahoo.com domain. Gradually, it seems that other, nimbler competitors have gradually chipped away at Yahoo's lead until it seems they don't do anything particularly well compared to the competition. Too bad. They still do have 400 million email users, and email users are loathe to change, so that business is probably safe for a while. But with nothing new to offer, and many good offerings sinking or gone, Yahoo is becoming a low price acquisition target. Sad to watch; at one time it was the iconic Internet business, in the Fortune 500, that could seemingly do nothing wrong.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 11y ago> I guess this proves that banning work-from-home didn't solve their problems. I always considered that move to be simply Mayer forcing some attrition without having it declared a layoff.
- Nadya 11y ago>Yahoo's strength was its diversity; it was a one-stop shop for everything internet. I consider that its greatest weakness. It didn't do any of these things particularly well. So focused competitors (Google, GoDaddy, eBay/Amazon, Skype/AIM, etc.) eventually took over and dominated. Yahoo never really retaliated by making their services any better. In fact, I can't even think about any major overhauls to any of Yahoo's various products. They've come out with a few nifty things (none of which I can even remember by name) and that's all I can remember about them since 2003-2004. In 2012 I was surprised to hear they were still in business, to be quite honest.
- 1024core 11y ago> I guess this proves that banning work-from-home didn't solve their problems. I don't know what's the big deal about that. It affected ~200 people max. Yahoo was just tightening the restrictions, bringing them in line with the rest of the Valley companies. And yet people still think that it was a big deal; it wasn't. (Source: I was there.)
- smegel 11y ago> Yahoo had about 11,000 employees as of June 30 That's still a pretty big company in tech terms. A bit less than Facebook.
- adventured 11y agoA lot less than Facebook at this point. There's no longer a good comparison to be made there, as Facebook's business is five times larger. Their Q315 was just about larger than all of Yahoo, and Facebook's sales are growing at 50%. Facebook earned $1.56 billion in net income last quarter (and they'll do $5+ billion annually going forward). Yahoo is struggling to stay near $50-$100 million per quarter. And that's net income, skewed by various b.s., Yahoo is producing lots of red ink on operating income (FB has ~30% operating income margins). Facebook is going to hit near $22-$24+ billion in sales over the coming four quarters. Yahoo is stuck around $4.6 billion. Facebook is a cash generating machine, while Yahoo is becoming AOL: trying to extract dwindling amounts of cash from legacy businesses. It's a really bad contrast these days.
- shawndumas 11y ago"12,691 employees as of December 31, 2015" --> http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
- tosseraccount 11y agoYahoo is #5 web site: http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites Yahoo netted $7B : http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=YHOO+Income+Statement&annual http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=YHOO+Income+Statement&annual Big, mature companies have to go through layoffs now and then; get rid of the dead wood. What's the problem?
- juraj24 11y agoMy thoughts are similar - they dont have one united vision about who they are, but they do have several successful internet properties - finance, sport, tumblr, flickr and more. It seems clear now that marissa is not capable to completely transform the company, but by doing incremental optimalization they can do just fine over time.
- jzwinck 11y agoFlickr was incredibly successful at one point, but it has been slowly dying for years. I used to pay for Pro features there but one day they emailed saying that free accounts were now good enough. So revenue must be reduced since then. And what replaced it is a bunch of porn collectors. Ten years ago there was a community of photographers there. Now the only "likes" I get are on a couple pictures that happen to have nudity or a girl in handcuffs (actual police handcuffs, now reimagined as kink). Most of the people who try to follow me there don't even share a single photo themselves...they use Flickr to catalogue their fetishes.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoThis thread has hundreds of comments and only two people mentioned Flickr. I guess that tells you how much currency it has.
- AjithAntony 11y agoThey recorded $10B from alibaba shares, They broke even on actual operations. http://i.imgur.com/f23T3Xc.png http://i.imgur.com/f23T3Xc.png "Gain on sale of Alibaba Group ADSs"
- ranci 11y agowho is even using yahoo and why?
- acchow 11y agoIt's the default search engine for Firefox. But mostly, Yahoo has a bunch of successful properties (finance, sports, tumblr) that still have users.
- its2complicated 11y agoI still use it for email.
- agounaris 11y agoThe problem is when yahoo does parties that cost some millions when they announce the layoffs... I'm wondering if yahoo has any earnings since her majesty became ceo.
- Alupis 11y ago> I'm wondering if yahoo has any earnings since her majesty became ceo. Why wonder when you can find out for yourself? https://investor.yahoo.net/results.cfm https://investor.yahoo.net/results.cfm
- manishsharan 11y agoWhat about Tumblr ? Is that thing still on? was it worth the bazillion dollars they spent on the aquisition. Also a long time ago, Yahoo made Mark Cuban a billionaire. What happened to the technology they acquired from his company?
- thrownaway2424 11y agoHaha are you kidding? This game isn't about doing useful things or creating useful, long-lived products. This game is about worshipping people like Mark Cuban and Sam Altman who put a lot of money in their pockets while doing nothing of value. I mean seriously have you used Bebo lately? Do you know how much money the founders of Bebo punched out with?
- oh_sigh 11y agoNotoriously bad deal(great for Mr Cuban though). Yahoo paid something along the lines of $10k per user of broadcast.com
- adventured 11y agoTumblr remains a top 50 US site, so yeah it's still on. Was it worth it? I don't see any meaningful competitors to them. Nobody has come along to knock them off. The $1.1 billion price was obviously steep for a blog service. So long as the traffic remains, they have some shot at turning it into a sustainable business. It's realistically worth 10% to 20% of what they paid for it though.
- Crito 11y agoTumblr has a problem of demographics which makes it difficult for Yahoo to make money off of it. A very large segment of their users are teenagers, and another large segment do little other than post pornography.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoTeens are great to market to because they can get money out of their parents.
- felixrieseberg 11y agoYahoo still has a bunch of really smart people doing important open source contributions - I wish all of them all the best and I really hope that the tighter belt will allow them to continue their work.
- icedchai 11y ago15%? That's all? (Yahoo stockholder here.)
- artursapek 11y agoI hope you have puts
- guelo 11y agoThey're going to kill Yahoo because some rich assholes don't want to pay their taxes.
- atom_enger 11y agoCan you elaborate on what you mean by this?
- guelo 11y agoYahoo is profitable. But it's not more profitable than the amount that shareholders think they can save by executing a convoluted plan to avoid paying taxes on the gains from the Alibaba shares that Yahoo owns. The convoluted plan involves getting rid of the Yahoo business by either selling it or killing it if need be.
- tomp 11y agoNo, they're going to kill Yahoo because it deserves to die; a company not making money doesn't really have a reason for existence, does it? (Or it should become a charity instead.)
- cscurmudgeon 11y agoUmm no. Yahoo still makes a lot of money.
- jpetso 11y agoI think there is some value in providing jobs to 10,000 people (currently more, soon a little less) even if there's no extra profit for shareholders on top of that. Maybe these kinds of companies should just be given to employees for free and run as a co-op instead of getting shut down.
- adevine 11y agoWut? There are charities, and there are businesses. If you expect Yahoo to be run as a charity, why should Yahoo's owners be the ones who must provide this? Put it another way. Let's say you had 100k that you were able to invest in your own startup. After a number of years, you found that you could support 5 employees at your startup, but you weren't, and had no hope of, being profitable - there was no "extra profit" for you. Would you be willing to just turn over your investment as charity to your employees?
- inthewoods 11y agoI really don't understand why she continues to hold the job - I haven't seen anything that she's done that has worked at either expanding revenue or at least stemming the bleeding. She also seems does not seem to be an effective manager given the turn over at the senior level.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- melted 11y agoMy only hope wrt Yahoo is that Yahoo Finance gets sold to someone before the company implodes. It's basically the only top notch, useful site they run.
- exhilaration 11y agoWhy is that? I haven't visited it in years and use Google Finance instead.
- melted 11y agoBecause Google Finance is obviously abandonware, and Yahoo Finance has a great iOS (and I assume Android) mobile app.
- rorski 11y agoThe Yahoo Sports app is really good (and seems to be quite popular). Game times, vegas odds, scores, etc. for all sorts of different US and international sports. I'm hoping they continue supporting it.
- fma 11y agoYes, one of the few (only?) sources of real time quotes...not even my damn brokerage provides real time quotes for free.
- jahkobi 11y agoI wonder how many high level engineers quit during the telecommuting ban?
- jahkobi 11y agoI wonder how many high level employees she lost during the ban on telecommuting, and how much of an impact that had on getting product to market?
- sawthat 11y agoZero. Exceptions were granted for pretty much every "high level" employee.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jorgecurio 11y ago> “She said there are going to be no layoffs ‘this week,’ and many of the employees laughed at her,” said one insider, who, fearing retribution, asked not to be named. Isn't this a sign that the modern corporation hierarchy is just a continuation of feudalism with smartphones? At least in Yahoo it seems.
- mythz 11y agoAt the dawn of the Internet Yahoo held the Internet's home page, there were so few sites and Search Engines were so primitive that I remember using Yahoo Directory to find websites and for many years `ping yahoo.com` was my magic command to tell whether my modem had an Internet connection. My first Internet account and online alias was at Yahoo, I used mail and their personalized home page every day... But then started their decades long decay, whilst the Internet boomed the Yahoo directory became old and static, I moved to searching on Google pretty quickly and jumped when gmail was released with it's unprecedented 1GB of free space. Around the same time my Yahoo mail became my junk account, my personalized Yahoo home page started bit rotting, my Internet connectivity command became `ping google.com` and I never went back to searching on Yahoo. They also jacked up prices of Yahoo domains by 300-400%, violating existing customers trust and prompted me to go shopping for a new service provider pretty quickly. Although I've been disconnected from all things Yahoo, I imagine it's been operating in its own niche corner of the Internet, I'm told Yahoo mail has hundreds of million users (my Junk account likely counted), I'd be interested in the number of active accounts and their demographics, my guess goes to an aging population. It's now been years since I heard anything positive coming out of Yahoo, they've hit the news with MS's failed acquisition, switching search engines and CEO churn - but otherwise I can't recall anything new coming from Yahoo that wasn't M&A. They seem like a draconian company holding onto legacy labor-intensive degrading assets which happens to be sitting on a gold mine with their Alibaba investment. I don't see how the current structure is capable of re-inventing itself so stream-lining their existing operations and trimming off dead-weight and losses seems like the only way forward. If they ever have a chance to becoming a tech force again they need new blood and talent pretty quickly. Fortunately they have the resources to make something but I only see it coming from outside of Yahoo, if I was them I would look at using their resources funding young, talented and innovative startups that aligns with their growth and business interests, e.g. they could mandate all ad-supported startups must use Yahoo Ads. Even with all the Talent Google has, many of their most valuable assets like Android and YouTube came from acquisitions. With Yahoo's brain drain I suspect that's going to be the only way we're going to see a resurgence from them.
- gedy 11y ago> `ping yahoo.com` Haha, I still do this out of habit too.
- free2rhyme214 11y agoIn the past 10 years with Yahoo I - deleted Yahoo Weather after they put huge ads and briefly used Flickr. In the past 10 years with Google I - use Gmail, Google Drive, Google docs, Google sheets, Search, Google Maps, Chrome, Waze and YouTube on a daily basis. I've also bought Chromecast and occasionally use Hangouts & Wallet. I'm excited about a lot of their Google X projects. The 15% job cut is because Marissa Mayer failed to suck me and millions of others into the Yahoo ecosystem. I think part of that is shifting Yahoo from a media company to something more like Google.
- dandare 11y agoAll the mentioned Google services are being paid for by Google Search, a luxury that Yahoo never had.
- free2rhyme214 11y agoWhy didn't they innovate more?
- vram22 11y agoMaybe they should spin off every area they operate in, into a separate company? Like Sports, Finance, Mail, etc.?
- anotherhacker 11y agoCEO Training 101 Multiple rounds of layoffs destroy company morale. Better to do one big one, and then hire back if necessary.
- pcurve 11y agoDon't go after workers just because they're highly paid, and force them to pick between paycut or package. This is how you lose all the good people.
- Riod 11y agoAs a post mortem of sorts, could someone with an understanding of yahoo from the inside explain why they have failed to innovate for 10+ years?
- free2rhyme214 11y agoI don't work at Yahoo but I believe the answer is management.
- Riod 11y agoHow so? As in they just never hired the best people/created processes that resulted in innovation?
- free2rhyme214 11y agoHiring is part of it but it's also about systematically launching products to create your own ecosystem. Yahoo's never really built an ecosystem like Google and when you couple that with low performing acquisitions you get job cuts.
- nikdaheratik 11y agoI don't think it's just about innovation. They were one of the first big companies to figure out how to make money selling ads on the Internet, though many of their best paying customers were actually failed dot-coms. It was still enough to get them through that first round okay. The main thing they've lost out on is not having something that competes with Google on ads. Especially the part where Google's entire ad buy market is automated while Yahoo's isn't. Their management made a big bet that just giving out media and other cools stuff for free to users would bring in enough eyeballs to make things profitable. That worked for awhile, but the switch to mobile and a large number of other competitors on the Internet ad front has hurt both income and market share.
- dopkew 11y agoThere is a movie dialogue where a man from the future tells his friend in the past:"I want you to remember this word, okay? It's kind of like a code word: Yahoo. Can you remember that?" It ends up making his friend rich in the future. The movie is Frequency(2000)
- xufi 11y agoI feel bad. First Mayer had the no work from home thing just to save money and now she's doing this. I feel soon Yahoo will be spun off in to a few different entities if they keep going this way
- ChristianKletzl 11y agoIf you are one of the 15% who were let go, ping me at christian@smarthires.io and I'll personally try to help you find a new job. We are working with many companies from YC and other VCs!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- known 11y agoSplit it and sell it off
- bechampion 11y agothis is sad , same with IBM last week , i guess we employees should think more about what kind how loyal can we be to companies that can do this to us i a blink of an eye. All the best for the ex-yahoo and ex-IBM