Yahoo Lays Off 600; Free Beers and Jobs Flow 164
CWmike writes "Yahoo confirmed on Tuesday that it has laid off 600 people, following news reports often based on Twitter messages from employees who had been let go. The layoffs amount to about 4 percent of the company's global workforce, Yahoo said. The company said affected workers are receiving severance packages and outplacement services. Laid-off workers may find some comfort on Twitter, where they are receiving an outpouring of goodwill. One San Francisco brewery is offering a free beer to people from Yahoo who show their termination letters. People with companies including Aprendi Learning, Tucows.com, DirecTV, Combine Couture, OMGPOP.com, and Uptake.com all posted Twitter messages expressing interest in hiring former Yahoo employees. The site Quora is hosting a thread for companies in the San Francisco area interested in hiring laid-off Yahoo workers. So far, there are 14 posts about jobs with companies including Yammer, Mozilla, and Cloudera."
Re:What sorts of jobs were these? (Score:5, Insightful)
What sorts of jobs were lost?
Were these people programmers, graphics designers, server administrators, network administrators, network technicians and others who actually produce something of value?
Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other ill-defined positions that usually just suck resources away from those getting real work done?
It's easy to dismiss those who don't have a direct impact in developing a project. You've obviously never worked with a good project manager. A good PM is vital to a development team when they do the right thing. And I wouldn't dismiss marketing people either. They might be loathed, but marketing works.
Re:Yahoo currently (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What sorts of jobs were these? (Score:5, Insightful)
Were these people programmers, graphics designers, server administrators, network administrators, network technicians and others who actually produce something of value?
Or were these people involved with "marketing", "project management" and other ill-defined positions that usually just suck resources away from those getting real work done?
Spoken like a true naively arrogant 16 year old.
Next time you have to do an upgrade on a live service that is used by millions of people, tell us how it goes without a project manager to define the work breakdown structure, a business analyst to capture functional requirements and produce a traceability matrix, someone to hand hold your valuable clients (you know, the ones who pay the wages?) during the transition...all those other positions that "suck resources away", in your elegant words.
There are good project managers and poor PMs. There are good BAs and poor BAs. It's one thing to chuck up a small web site with a couple of developers; it's quite another to do this in the real world, where if things go wrong you lose millions of dollars, good will, reputation, and customers.
christmas layoffs again? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that many people haven't dealt with proper project managers, as in a manager who's job it is to oversee a protect and make everything work. They've dealt with "Project Managers" people who's title is PM and who believe they can attach themselves to any project, no matter how little they know about it, and "manage" it effectively.
Any project has a manager just because of how it works. Even a one man project, in that case the one guy manages it. For large projects, it is so complex that you need people who do nothing but deal with the management, the logistics, that kind of thing. A project manager, or in some industries a producer. A person who's focus is big picture, making sure everything is working and working to correct problems when they happen. That is valuable. However those people are generally people who are managers of that particular kind of thing. Someone who manages a large programming project effectively is likely just a manager of programmers, and probably has some understanding of how programming works.
However the people who identify themselves as "Project Managers" who find their role in life is just to manage random projects? Worthless normally. I've dealt with a few indirectly, and have friends who spoken, at great length, about them. They are people who attach themselves to projects in a company. They aren't someone in the normal structure of command, they just kind of slip in. Because of this, they've no real knowledge on any of the things they are doing. They don't understand the project. As such they tend to do useless shit like demand meetings with the developers to "See what you have," even when development is in the stage there is nothing running, or they ask useless questions like "How much time could you save if we skip the testing phase?" or "Let's not worry about what's possible right now." (really, I was in the room for that one). They just regurgitate stuff they learned from a book or a course, presuming it works for anything.
That seems to be the problem to me. A case of project management is useful but Project Managers are worthless. In my observation, "professional" Project Managers are a role the useless types work themselves in to. They don't have the skills to get themselves an actual management sort of job, they don't have the skills to really do anything, so they get themselves in the nebulous "I can manage any project even if I understand fuck-all about the technology, process, employees, and so on," position. That's where the dislike comes from I think.
I don't worry when I hear a project has a manager, that just tells me that people have bothered to think about who is in charge, who makes the decisions, who needs to make things run smooth. I worry when a project gets itself a "Project Manager" to "help things out." Someone who had no real involvement and doesn't have a clear position in teh chain of command.