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Yahoo will lay off 20% of staff, or 1600 people
- RickJWagner 4y agoI love Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Autos. I use Yahoo email. I hate Yahoo's news page, which I find too biased politically. I wish them luck. Or maybe I wish for a division of the pie, so I could more easily get at the pieces that I like. Either way, I hope Yahoo stays around.
- vcryan 4y agoSo cool to hear that Yahoo still exists!
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThe business and finance class is trying to wrestle back control of the spiraling wages of tech workers that threaten the existing power structure. Will be fascinating to watch this play out over the next 10 years.
- vdddv 4y agoSo many commenters talk about the fact that they never visit Yahoo.com, without realizing that the link shared by OP is from techcrunch.com, a Yahoo.com property. Yahoo is a lot more than services hosted on yahoo.com
- saos 4y ago> without realizing that the link shared by OP is from techcrunch.com, a Yahoo.com property I had no idea lol
- berniedurfee 4y agoSame. That explains a lot about techcrunch.com I guess.
- mesid 4y agowhoa
- roundandround 4y agoNow that techcrunch has this hot scoop they'll have to hire people back..
- JohnFen 4y agoEvery time I hear anything about Yahoo, I am amazed to relearn that they still even exist.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago[flagged]
- lkbm 4y agoOkay, but...what are they supposed to do? Stores higher more employees for the holiday shopping season and then when the season is over, you reduce headcount back to normal. Shouldn't tech companies have expanded to take advantage of the pandemic, and then downsize once that increase in demand goes away? Maybe they overhired, but it's also quite possible that many of these positions were valuable for only a couple years, after which they should be eliminated. I don't want my employer to keep me on if I'm a waste of money to them. We should provide adequate severance, and the unemployment system should be more robust, but "hire people when you need them and fire them when you don't" isn't evil or incompetent. It's correct behavior, and our systems should be built to account for that reality.
- JohnFen 4y ago> Stores higher more employees for the holiday shopping season and then when the season is over, you reduce headcount back to normal. They do. The difference is that the additional employees stores hire for busy season know that they're being hired on a temporary basis. > "hire people when you need them and fire them when you don't" isn't evil or incompetent. It is if you weren't clear to the hires about the expected lifespan of their position.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jlund-molfese 4y agoNo, the article actually states the opposite. “In an interview with Axios, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said that these layoffs are not a result of economic issues, but rather, they are intentional changes to strengthen the unprofitable Yahoo for Business advertising unit.“
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
- evanelias 4y agoAlso discussed earlier today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730297 (17 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34728990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34728990 (12 comments).
- spike021 4y agoI'm really curious how this will affect Yahoo. I know it's not used nearly as much these days in America, but in Japan it's still fairly ubiquitous for Yahoo Auctions.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coolandsmartrr 4y agoYahoo Japan is probably the most visited website in Japan. They are known for more than just Auctions. Yahoo Japan is a separate company from Yahoo. It used to operate with licensing for the "Yahoo" brand, until it bought the brand usage outright from Verison a couple years ago. Therefore, Yahoo's operation has no effect on Yahoo Japan. It is more affected by its parent company Softbank. When Softbank faced losses from its Vision Fund, they reorganized Yahoo into a subsidiary (in lieu of being a sibling company) and therefore consolidated its profitable accounting as well.
- spike021 4y agoHuh, today I learned. That's interesting. Reminds me of how the ownership is for some of the convenience stores are too.
- recuter 4y ago> Yahoo Japan is probably the most visited website in Japan. They are known for more than just Auctions. I just walked past a Yahoo Japan physical store selling SIM cards and unnecessary plastic objects. Although it looked like no customer has actually wandered in there since the 90s..
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gkanai 4y agoYahoo Japan is now completely separate from Yahoo US. Yahoo Japan was originally 33% owned by the Sunnyvale Yahoo but when Yahoo US was sold, Softbank/Yahoo Japan bought back its shareholdings from the US Yahoo.
- un_montagnard 4y agoIf you had asked me, I would have guessed Yahoo still had at least 30k employees.
- ggm 4y agoThey'll be fine. Their business model can handle this. It's opportunistic to timing, less downside PR because all IT sector worldwide is shedding, because "reasons" and they can avoid opprobrium by being in the same fleet.
- killjoywashere 4y agoAm I doing the math right? Yahoo is still employing 2-3x as many people as GitHub? Surely GitHub has more impact.
- lucideer 4y agoI assure you, considerably more people have heard of Yahoo than have heard of GitHub. The software engineering bubble isn't as big as you think.
- thiscatis 4y agoIn our bubble yes, in the real world...not so much.
- encryptluks2 4y agoWhat kind of impact? Yahoo unfortunately has a lot of impact from their news service. It is crap news IMO but a lot of people are into clickbait.
- ShinTakuya 4y agoI often have to remind people here that not everyone in the world is a software developer. Yahoo may have less of its markets but the markets it's in are substantially larger.
- pdntspa 4y agoWhat the hell is Yahoo doing with the other 6400 people?
- monero-xmr 4y agoHN: How does every company have so many people? Twitter / Google / Microsoft / Amazon layoffs occur HN: The feudal lords have decided the serfs are no longer needed. Google shrinking is a travesty and proves they are a dying company! Time for revolution!
- maximus-decimus 4y agoThat doesn't invalidate the point that at some point they thought "man, 6400 employees really enough to run Yahoo, we really need another 1600" so clearly they thought they felt had work for at least 6400 employees. So what was it?
- Macha 4y agoA lot of not invented here (some of which has made it outside like Hadoop, npm being heavily inspired by the yahoo package manager, screwdriver which is a self-hosted travis clone). Things that were once difficult but are now easy (datacenter management). Things that are not user facing but which Yahoo is actually doing with much lower headcount than their competitors (ad tech). Things which don't actually have synergies and have headcounts comparable to independent competitors (e.g. CNET is a 500 person company, Yahoo has a news business, Fanduel is a 2000 person fantasy sports company, Yahoo has one of those too)
- pdntspa 4y agoMy mistake. Please forgive my usage of HN cliche #318. (Though you appear to be in violation of cliche 284) But my question stands. What the hell is Yahoo doing nowadays? Yahoo Finance and search can't take that many folks to run. Maybe it's Yahoo Weather?
- timcederman 4y ago
- zerr 4y agohttps://www.lycos.com/ https://www.lycos.com/ is still kicking well.
- soupfordummies 4y agoWhoa, it has Tripod too!
- themodelplumber 4y agoA subsidiary of Kakao Corporation. (Last I checked)
- roarcher 4y agoNow that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
- andrewstuart2 4y agoReminded me I used to prefer https://www.dogpile.com/ https://www.dogpile.com/. Also still around.
- roydivision 4y agoIf we’re playing this game, https://www.altavista.com https://www.altavista.com, which seems to be a Yahoo property now.
- sgt 4y agoMy fingers still try to type altavista.digital.com Seems like only yesterday!
- darrenf 4y ago> which seems to be a Yahoo property now Yahoo! bought Overture - the then owners of Altavista - 20 years ago.
- smcl 4y agoWeird, for me altavista.com issues a 307 redirect to https://guce.altavista.com/consent?brandType=nonEu&gcrumb=J4vFeCk&done=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.altavista.com%2F https://guce.altavista.com/consent?brandType=nonEu&gcrumb=J4... which fails a DNS lookup I still remember my school Computing teacher introducing the internet and saying that AltaVista was by far and away the best search engine (around 2000 to 2001-ish)
- jay-barronville 4y agoFolks, please keep in mind that everyone doesn’t live in America. Yahoo may seem like old news for many of us Americans, but across the world, for many millions of folks, Yahoo is still a significant and well-known brand/website. E.g., I’m originally from Haiti. A really huge percentage of Haitians still use Yahoo for their email (specifically via yahoo.fr) and they even get a lot of their global news via Yahoo. I’ve seen the same thing apply in various African countries.
- Eumenes 4y agoYahoo is also the homepage for millions of seniors who don't know how to change it, so there's that too.
- bla3 4y agoOr who choose not to change it. Not everyone who has different preferences than you is incompetent.
- berniedurfee 4y agoSame in the US really. It’s so excruciating to change email addresses for many people, Yahoo email is still rockin’ pretty hard. It’ll be nice when we have portable e-mail addresses. Having a phone number that moves with me is really convenient.
- outside1234 4y agoWell give them credit for at least not choosing 7%
- biztos 4y agoIs anybody tracking the growth of the staffs of these companies? When I hear “NetCo lays off 10K” I wonder, does that mean they will have fewer employees than a year ago? Or is this just a blip on an overall trend of hiring? This graph[0] makes it look like Microsoft, for example, is laying off far fewer people than they recently hired. I would intuitively expect Yahoo to be the exception, but it would be great to see something like “…representing N% of its yearly hiring average since 2020” in these headlines. [0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273475/number-of-employees-at-the-microsoft-corporation-since-2005/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273475/number-of-employe...
- alexpotato 4y agoThis chart from Chartr Daily is the best I've seen that shows firms hired like crazy and the layoffs now aren't even bringing us back to 2018/2019 levels: https://www.instagram.com/p/CnxN-Mayo3N/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CnxN-Mayo3N/
- gilbetron 4y agoDepends on if they keep growing or if this was a peak and more layoffs continue to happen over the coming months/years. The current big bump followed by a not-as-big-cut is mostly from overhiring during the pandemic plus the weird economy. I think a big part of it is to push down wages. Collusion without explicit collaboration. However, it could be an initial reaction (right or wrong) to chatGPT and copilot and such. The start (or continuation) of the automation of knowledge work. Nobody has a crystal ball, so we'll see where it goes! I'm thinking the coming two+ decades of AI transformation will make the Web/Internet transition look quaint in terms of societal impact. But I'm just a 52 year old geek that has been following technology for 40+ years ;)
- __jambo 4y agoI agree, there's a very weird media focus on layoffs right now, without broader context (number of hires, number of companies, number of unemployed, number of people in the workforce etc).
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
- snickerbockers 4y agoPretty wild that this happened to Twitter before yahoo.
- utopcell 4y agoIt seems that revenue-wise, Yahoo is growing from ~$5bn circa 2016 (Mayer times) to ~$8bn now. That is impressive. It is also a bit sad to see the Yahoo buildings, which Google bought in 2019, just sitting empty and unutilized.
- matwood 4y agoWhen PE bought Yahoo for $5B I thought it was a great deal for the PE firm [1]. Yahoo is still heavily used, and really just needs competent management. It looks like that's happening, albeit slowly. Not many people may use yahoo search, but all the other properties are used and provide opportunities. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/verizon-sells-yahoo-and-aol-businesses-to-apollo-for-5-billion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/verizon-sells-yahoo-and-aol-...
- ed25519FUUU 4y agoOne of the good reasons for a recession is that it forces the hand of these large tech companies to stop sitting on huge properties. It’s really a shame.
- bastardoperator 4y agoOf course they will, they have to copy what everyone else is doing.
- m3drano 4y agoYahoo! Finance is a pretty good product.
- keiferski 4y agoI feel like the original “curated links” model of Yahoo search (which was supplanted by Google twenty years ago) is actually prime for a comeback. Has anyone at Yahoo commented on this?
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI love the idea and I'm sentimental about when blogs and personal websites for part of circles and chains. I miss being able to find a high quality page and seeing other high quality pages that the author or authors recommended
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoI can't imagine the horrors of fighting off lawsuits for search manipulation with such business model.
- ezconnect 4y agoWe already experienced it via Digg then it evolve to what we have right now that is Reddit.
- mrtranscendence 4y agoOh my god, I haven't thought about Digg for years. It's still around, apparently, but it bears no resemblance from what I (hazily) remember.
- seydor 4y agoI m going back to altavista
- kjaa 4y agoI can't tell if you're joking -- but I assume you are! :D AltaVista _is_ Yahoo search.
- MrPatan 4y agoActual news: Yahoo not dead yet
- smcl 4y agoWow 20% - what a coincidence that after careful analysis and deliberation of what the business needs they landed on a nice, round number!
- thezultimate 4y agoI hope their business will continue. I have been using my daily Yahoo! Mail account since 1997, and unlike my Gmail account which keeps complaining that I have almost used up the 15GB storage limit, my Yahoo! Mail account keeps quiet and works as usual thanks to its 1TB storage limit!
- reid 4y agoI work on Yahoo Mail for the web and appreciate your comment! Our team is currently hiring for several engineering roles and we’re investing a lot into the product this year.
- pellucide 4y agoI have been a Yahoo mail user since 1997. I like it better than gmail. Both the mobile experience and browser experience is better than gmail
- bdcravens 4y agoEvery Yahoo Mail account I've seen needs 60x the storage given the amount of spam you receive vis-a-vis Gmail.
- kqr2 4y agoAfter you reach 15GB will you stop receiving new email or will your old mail just get deleted FIFO?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]