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Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100
- fuckYelp 6y agoFormer Employee here : The company is in a fucked up shape and the management team just saw this opportunity to trim the organisation into the right shape and grabbed it. There are a lot of sales people and you can totally call Yelp a fuckedup org that's overrun by sales people rather than by actually making a product. Engineering management is a dumb cult here.
- 23B1 6y agoGood riddance to an exploitative business.
- stri8ed 6y agoPlease explain.
- orky56 6y agoYelp 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.
- luckylion 6y agoThey're not just hiding negative reviews if you pay, they are hiding legitimate positive reviews if you don't. It's simply the online equivalent of the mob asking for protection money.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoIf 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.
- jdross 6y agoThis just is not true. I have worked with a number of companies that have tried to pay Yelp to unhide their legitimate, positive reviews and there was nothing Yelp would do about it, no matter what proof you offered of the transaction or customer relationship. Their algorithm rules all, sales has zero say in it.
- timr 6y agoThey're not doing either. I worked there, on the systems in question.
- dntrkv 6y agoIs there any evidence of this actually happening?
- starpilot 6y agoNumerous credible reports from business owners, and numerous denials from Yelp. I don't really know who to believe.
- smallgovt 6y agoI 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.
- trevor-e 6y agoMy friends who own or help run local small businesses have told me it happened to them, so I believe my friends. Of course, it's not explicit extortion like "pay us $500 a month or else", so there's no hard evidence for anything. Instead, magically not too long after they refuse a cold-call sales pitch, they have a bunch of bad/fraudulent reviews surface to the top of their Yelp page and then get another sales call later on.
- smallgovt 6y agoSimply put, no. No evidence other than hearsay. And this, after countless lawsuits.
- rimlicker 6y agoNo need to repeat what is already spoken. YouTube ROSSMAN YELP for more information.
- rimlicker 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkVbIsAWN2luXUhlA1bO1Ca69zlSMSmie https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkVbIsAWN2luXUhlA1bO1...
- biggc 6y agoThe hiding of positive and negative reviews if you don't/do pay is hard to prove, but one thing incredibly shady thing that Yelp does and is proud of is: They will prominently display ads containing positive reviews for competitors on a business's page unless that business pays Yelp.
- microtherion 6y agoIn addition to other things mentioned in this threat, Yelp recently set up unsolicited GoFundMes for restaurants, and while their intent may not have been sinister, restaurant owners were NOT fond of the move: https://www.eater.com/2020/3/27/21196593/yelp-gofundme-automatic-fundraisers-restaurants-coronavirus-covid-19 https://www.eater.com/2020/3/27/21196593/yelp-gofundme-autom...
- xiaolingxiao 6y agoFor 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 6y agowhat is furluoghed?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 6y agoIt 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.
- hunter-2 6y agoSomeone 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 6y agoIt'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.
- ransom1538 6y agoOff 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.
- bhupy 6y agoFed just announced another $2.3T in loans for small businesses.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoNo where else for the money to go?
- mylons 6y agoThe Fed is dumping cash into the financial system
- PeterStuer 6y agoBecause they expect the US is going to pour unlimited amounts of cash into propping up their ponzi-scheme?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- blat001 6y agoBecause of business loans and tax breaks it looks like companies will come out of this profitable and the government will pay for the workers during this period.
- Waterluvian 6y agoIf 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"
- Waterluvian 6y agoI 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.
- TylerE 6y agoMarketing/sales
- mylons 6y agoModeration and marketing/sales were probably pretty big
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- scurvy 6y agoSales and account management are easier to hire and fire. That said I bet some engineers were let go. If you're not directly client facing or related to e-commerce, you're not essential right now.
- jstanley 6y agoBut aren't sales and account management precisely the people who are client-facing or related to e-commerce?
- scurvy 6y agoYes but they're the easiest to ramp up and wind down. Certain segments of the economy as devastated right now. Would not want to be a flight attendant, but airplane engine mechanics are probably still in demand as cargo flights replace passenger traffic (since we're ordering everything online now). Logically, that would extend to people whose job revolves around signing up restaurants to marketing portals. The restaurants that have an online business are already there. Those that don't have an online business are already closed.
- mcny 6y agoWhat is the biggest source of revenue for Yelp? What part of Yelp's revenue is Empyr or other card-linked offers?
- 23B1 6y agoThey 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-accused-of-hiding-positive-reviews-for-non-advertiser https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp-accuse...
- ViViDboarder 6y agoIf 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.
- flr03 6y agoA 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 6y agoand 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 6y agoLook 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 6y agoYup. 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 6y agoThe 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 6y ago
- duggable 6y ago> 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.
- michaelbuckbee 6y agoMost of the time this is coordinated - that there were group calls to personally announce the layoffs and who was staying.
- trimbo 6y agoMy guess is that it's such a significant share of the workforce that it is considered material information for a public company. For other commenters asking about the workforce: Yelp has an army of salespeople because they have to sell to so many small businesses. What they do is frankly amazing to me. I used to sit on the sales floor sometimes to experience the excitement. It seems like they'd be the most affected, and I hope they fare well. [Source: used to work there in engineering]
- jrockway 6y agoThe 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.
- scurvy 6y agoOr back in the day, post on f*ckedcompany. Though pud wouldn't bring that site back now. Back then it was because of irrational exuberance. Now, people are losing their jobs because of pandemic.
- yalogin 6y agoWait 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.
- runawaybottle 6y agoThey have a cold calling sales staff mostly comprised of interns or new grads. They call up restaurants and try to up sell them on some package, I don’t know the details. They aren’t paid well.
- dntrkv 6y agoHave 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 6y agomeanwhile 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.
- wdb 6y agoWith 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:(
- diogenescynic 6y ago122 points in 2 hours and already on 3rd page or results. Why are we hiding layoff news?
- paradox242 6y agoI really hope the restaurant and hospitality services extortion racket can resume operations after this is all over!
- tengbretson 6y agoI guess even the 21st century mafia isn't immune to an economic downturn.
- milquetoastaf 6y agoNor is the actual Mafia immune https://nypost.com/2020/03/29/how-coronavirus-cripples-the-new-york-mafia/ https://nypost.com/2020/03/29/how-coronavirus-cripples-the-n...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cheriot 6y agoDoes anyone know which departments/roles saw cuts?
- sevencolors 6y agoHopefully most of their scummy sales department
- rchaud 6y agoWhile 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.
- gundmc 6y agoFor Yelp it seems like it's more of a failure to innovate and grow beyond their initial review site concept. The idea was good, but easily challengrd by others who bring additional utility to the table like OpenTable and Google Maps.
- rchaud 6y agoI don't see it that way. It's a review site. There is no need for it to innovate beyond that, nor is there any basis for thinking that reviews should be enough to take a company public. If they're doing that, then you know that the end goal is ads, ads, ads.
- pgsbathhouse2 6y agoThis is not a thing. No one at Yelp does this. There is literally zero evidence that Yelp does this.
- sevencolors 6y agoOk, 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 6y agoDo you have any evidence to support this claim?
- caseyf7 6y agoHow 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 6y agoI feel like that is the least of their problems
- Ascetik 6y agoCan'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.
- controlweather 6y agoI hope the whole business shuts down, this is the greatest day of my life. Yelp is scum!
- 12xo 6y agoEvery advertising business reliant on brick and mortar or real estate is going to be decimated.
- sjg007 6y agoYelp 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.
- sizzle 6y agoDoes anyone have the role percentage breakdown of those let go/furloughed? e.g. marketing, dev, design, sales, etc.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- abinaya_remote 6y agoRemote 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