4 ms·

What the hell is Yahoo doing with the other 6400 people?

monero-xmr 4y ago
HN: 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 ago
  That 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 ago
    A 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 ago
  My 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
    It's a shame you're continuing with your snark - if you work in tech, I'm sure you could use your imagination on the myriad of ways that many employees could still be generating value, or you could even do a quick search and satisfy your own curiosity. More recent: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yahoo-makes-money-yhoo.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yah... Older, but more clearly laid out: https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/ https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/
  - irrational 4y ago
    What about Twitter? How in the world did it take that many people to run a single website?
    - piva00 4y ago
      How much do you know about the machinery running that single website? If you can't answer this question then the reduction in your assumption of how simple it is falls flat. How many large orgs with hundreds of millions of users have you worked for? Derive from that experience how many people it takes to run their systems...
      - irrational 4y ago
        I've been working on a single website for a Fortune 50 company more than 20 years. For the first 12 years years it was just me. I built the entire thing from the ground up. Provisioned servers, installed software (database, web server, application server, etc.), hardened software, optimized software, designed database schema for hundreds of tables, wrote tens of thousands of sql scripts, optimized queries, wrote server side software, wrote apache config file, built front end, etc. After 12 years they hired another developer and the two of us have been the only ones working on it since. Now, our website isn't used by hundreds of millions of users, but it has been used by millions of users and we get about a million unique users each day. Obviously it will take more than 1 or 2 developers to create and maintain a website of Twitter's size, but 10s of thousands of developers? That seems pretty crazy.
- slg 4y ago
  You know that (potentially misattributed) Steinbeck quote about how poor Americans view themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires? Well it seems like a large percentage of HN view themselves as temporarily embarrassed FAANG employees. Those are the cool places that people want to work, so people have a more natural empathy for their employees. Few have dreams of working for Yahoo, so their employees don't merit the same empathy and instead we get jokes made at their expense.
  - incrudible 4y ago
    FAANG is the opposite of cool. The money is good and there is some prestige in getting through the hiring funnel, but ultimately as an individual you will be unimportant to the company and you will never be highly productive due to all the red tape.
  - rjbwork 4y ago
    I thought we were mostly startup folks, at least as far as engineers go?
    - irrational 4y ago
      That would be an interesting poll. Personally I’ve never worked for a startup. I’m an engineer at a non-tech Fortune 100 company.
    - ido 4y ago
      I think this was the case then HN was new, these days it's a very general tech crowd (like slashdot was 20 years ago).
    - aardvark179 4y ago
      So the startups are temporarily embarrassed FAANGs?
  - gardenhedge 4y ago
    I would imagine this place hates on FAANG more than the average place.
- kweingar 4y ago
  “You could run Twitter with 50 engineers” is practically an HN meme at this point. There was lots of discussion claiming that many Googlers sit around and do nothing. I think there are two consistent sides of this particular debates
  - pocket_cheese 4y ago
    FAANG is what you make it. If you wanna coast and make 350k for 20 hours of actual work, it's doable. But if you wanna work on some super fancy team, make it to staff eng, make an impact etc... there's a path for that too. Neither of them are wrong approaches to working at FAANG
- busterarm 4y ago
  Google hasn't been what engineers think Google is since at least 2008. Probably a few years earlier.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
Still employing them? Probably not out of the goodness of their hearts. What do you want them to do differently? Edit: wasn’t it just yesterday there was a front page HN post about Yahoo getting back into search?
- pdntspa 4y ago
  I don't know, up until this year tech's attitude towards headcount seems to suggest that higher numbers make for happier managers. Which means that emotion is driving hiring which does, in fact, make it done out of the kindness of their hearts.
  - etothepii 4y ago
    This is an interesting take but maybe the kindness of their pay packets would be closer to the truth.
kenjackson 4y ago
They have a lot of properties. For example, Rivals, that does scouting and ranking of HS athletes has like 300 people in it. And if you’re not an athlete you probably never heard of them. Much less Yahoo Mail and Finance.
- busterarm 4y ago
  There's also an absolutely ridiculous number of companies in this very same startup space, each with a different sports niche but all with a business model that seems just shy of questionable wrt to exploiting peoples' dreams.
vidarh 4y ago
It runs a bunch of brands, including Techcrunch, Engadget, the remains of AOL... It has very little to do with the original Yahoo! (and isn't even the same company) though one of its holdings is the majority of the old Yahoo! properties still running.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Yahoo finance is actually pretty good.

HN: 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 ago
That 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 ago
  A 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 ago
My 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
  It's a shame you're continuing with your snark - if you work in tech, I'm sure you could use your imagination on the myriad of ways that many employees could still be generating value, or you could even do a quick search and satisfy your own curiosity. More recent: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yahoo-makes-money-yhoo.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yah... Older, but more clearly laid out: https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/ https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/
- irrational 4y ago
  What about Twitter? How in the world did it take that many people to run a single website?
  - piva00 4y ago
    How much do you know about the machinery running that single website? If you can't answer this question then the reduction in your assumption of how simple it is falls flat. How many large orgs with hundreds of millions of users have you worked for? Derive from that experience how many people it takes to run their systems...
    - irrational 4y ago
      I've been working on a single website for a Fortune 50 company more than 20 years. For the first 12 years years it was just me. I built the entire thing from the ground up. Provisioned servers, installed software (database, web server, application server, etc.), hardened software, optimized software, designed database schema for hundreds of tables, wrote tens of thousands of sql scripts, optimized queries, wrote server side software, wrote apache config file, built front end, etc. After 12 years they hired another developer and the two of us have been the only ones working on it since. Now, our website isn't used by hundreds of millions of users, but it has been used by millions of users and we get about a million unique users each day. Obviously it will take more than 1 or 2 developers to create and maintain a website of Twitter's size, but 10s of thousands of developers? That seems pretty crazy.
slg 4y ago
You know that (potentially misattributed) Steinbeck quote about how poor Americans view themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires? Well it seems like a large percentage of HN view themselves as temporarily embarrassed FAANG employees. Those are the cool places that people want to work, so people have a more natural empathy for their employees. Few have dreams of working for Yahoo, so their employees don't merit the same empathy and instead we get jokes made at their expense.
- incrudible 4y ago
  FAANG is the opposite of cool. The money is good and there is some prestige in getting through the hiring funnel, but ultimately as an individual you will be unimportant to the company and you will never be highly productive due to all the red tape.
- rjbwork 4y ago
  I thought we were mostly startup folks, at least as far as engineers go?
  - irrational 4y ago
    That would be an interesting poll. Personally I’ve never worked for a startup. I’m an engineer at a non-tech Fortune 100 company.
  - ido 4y ago
    I think this was the case then HN was new, these days it's a very general tech crowd (like slashdot was 20 years ago).
  - aardvark179 4y ago
    So the startups are temporarily embarrassed FAANGs?
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  I would imagine this place hates on FAANG more than the average place.
kweingar 4y ago
“You could run Twitter with 50 engineers” is practically an HN meme at this point. There was lots of discussion claiming that many Googlers sit around and do nothing. I think there are two consistent sides of this particular debates
- pocket_cheese 4y ago
  FAANG is what you make it. If you wanna coast and make 350k for 20 hours of actual work, it's doable. But if you wanna work on some super fancy team, make it to staff eng, make an impact etc... there's a path for that too. Neither of them are wrong approaches to working at FAANG
busterarm 4y ago
Google hasn't been what engineers think Google is since at least 2008. Probably a few years earlier.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

Still employing them? Probably not out of the goodness of their hearts. What do you want them to do differently? Edit: wasn’t it just yesterday there was a front page HN post about Yahoo getting back into search?

pdntspa 4y ago
I don't know, up until this year tech's attitude towards headcount seems to suggest that higher numbers make for happier managers. Which means that emotion is driving hiring which does, in fact, make it done out of the kindness of their hearts.
- etothepii 4y ago
  This is an interesting take but maybe the kindness of their pay packets would be closer to the truth.

kenjackson 4y ago

They have a lot of properties. For example, Rivals, that does scouting and ranking of HS athletes has like 300 people in it. And if you’re not an athlete you probably never heard of them. Much less Yahoo Mail and Finance.

busterarm 4y ago
There's also an absolutely ridiculous number of companies in this very same startup space, each with a different sports niche but all with a business model that seems just shy of questionable wrt to exploiting peoples' dreams.

vidarh 4y ago

It runs a bunch of brands, including Techcrunch, Engadget, the remains of AOL... It has very little to do with the original Yahoo! (and isn't even the same company) though one of its holdings is the majority of the old Yahoo! properties still running.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Yahoo finance is actually pretty good.