Yahoo To Fire Another 15% As Mayer Attempts To Hang On (theguardian.com) 218
New submitter xxxJonBoyxxx writes: Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has announced plans to cut the company's workforce by 15% and close five foreign offices by the end of 2016 after announcing a $4.4bn loss. Yahoo shares have fallen 33% over the past year, including a 17% drop in the last three months. Its shares fell again in after-hours trading after Mayer announced her plan. Yahoo expects its workforce to be down to 9,000 and have fewer than 1,000 contractors by end of 2016. About a third of Yahoo's workforce has left either voluntarily or involuntarily over the last year. And the cuts may just be starting: one activist investor (SpringOwl) says the total number of employees should be closer to 3,000 for a company with its revenue.
If she really wanted to rescue the company... (Score:5, Insightful)
... she'd fire herself.
Re:If she really wanted to rescue the company... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If she really wanted to rescue the company... (Score:5, Interesting)
The company was going in the wrong direction before she was even hired. They hired her as a gamble to make a big change to save the company. It didn't work. Going back to the way it was is stupid, it wasn't working before. The only things worth keeping are its overseas holdings. The core company is worthless. Firing her and hiring a replacement won't change that. They took a big gamble and lost. There is no going back.
I would argue that the core company isn't "worthless", it's just worth far less than it used to be. Plenty of people still go to yahoo.com, use it for email, news, etc. i still go to the financial part if I want to find out more about a company as I've found their tools to be pretty decent for aggregating everything of interest about a public company.
That said I tend to agree with the investor who says that they should be around 3000 staff members. My question to him is also "what is the proper CEO compensation for a company with this revenue?" My guess is that it's not even in the ballpark of what Mayer is getting.
The bottom line is that there's still a business there, probably not any real growth potential. So the proper thing to do is downsize, concentrate on the core(s) that are profitable and be really good at those areas where you're known to be really good.
That's odd advice in the internet world where everybody wants perpetual growth, but there are plenty of stores in my town here that aren't looking to grow but rather provide steady income until retirement. We have to be realistic and understand that that particular model is also relevant on the internet.
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You're right!
I'll go let the MD and the shareholders.... ..oh wait.
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Well I will happily take one year of her salary and stocks and whatever, sign to fire 6000 workers to bring it down to 3000, and then retire myself as incompetent.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
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And the competent replacement will need to start off by firing thousands of workers. What competent person is going to want the job?
Any number of sociopathic executives. The golden parachute will be provided in advance of course.
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And the competent replacement will need to start off by firing thousands of workers. What competent person is going to want the job?
More people than you realize, on the theory that it's not in clear skies and smooth sailing you need a good captain. Some CEOs more or less specialize in this, join a rotten company and find the parts worth keeping, do the harsh cuts then move on to the next rescue/salvage project. If they can get a reputation for turning things around it could pay off very well. They're not going to win any popularity contests but usually they're just the ones announcing the layoffs. It's much worse for the middle managers
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Re:If she really wanted to rescue the company... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't be silly. How could she fulfill her mission of making Carly Fiorina look competent by comparison if she gave up now?
elite workers paradise (Score:5, Funny)
with 50% of the staff fired now, they have removed the bottom 50% of performers. So those remaining must be deleriously happy to be working with such elite peers. their productivity must be skyrocketing now that all the deadwood and even mediocre but dilligent workers are gone.
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with 50% of the staff fired now, they have removed the bottom 50% of performers.
My sarcasm meter went off the scale here but in the off-chance that you might have been serious...
That's quite the assumption there. Sorting employees by performance is never an easy task. It's actually really complicated.
A brilliant team with a shitty manager will look worse than a mediocre team with a half-competent manager. A group whose Director is friends with the VP will gat a pass ticket versus the group whose Director has clashed with the VP in the past. And so on.
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Yeah, you definitely missed the sarcasm bits.
This is just the modern version of "the beatings will continue until morale improves" thing -- the remaining people are expected to be so scared shitless they'll say yes to anything and magically produce awesoms.
Of course, it never works, but that seems to be the idioti
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Not true, all of the executive management is still there, and that is where 75% of the worst performers are.
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Re:If she really wanted to rescue the company... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, whenever she loses her job (voluntarily or involuntarily), I'm sure there's a golden parachute that will deploy and she'll be set for life either way. Ain't capitalism grand.
That sort of arrangement is common-ish practice with senior executives in some industries. Even with NDAs, etc. a company could be very uncomfortable about someone who once let it, and knows all of its secrets, going to a competitor...their contracts have all sorts of clauses and compensations.
For example, the guy who used to run the division of the (huge) company that I work in ended his tenure, and had a contract that basically said "when you leave here, you can't work in this industry again for at least 10 years". On the face of it, the contract terms sound s**t, but when there's a suitably golden parachute payment to protect against loss of earnings, then it makes it more palatable.
It sounds pretty outrageous for foot-soldiers like us, but when you get very high up the food chain, it's more common practice than you might think.
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1. Such agreements are not enforcible in California.
2. Why would a company care about someone who wasn't successful as CEO running another company?
NDAs are enforcible and any company that hires a senior exec risks being sued over trade secrets.
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Andy Grove has a different philosophy: if you screwed up so badly that you cost his company money, he'd give you a GLOWING recommendation to go to work for one of his competitors!
Re:If she really wanted to rescue the company... (Score:4, Interesting)
2. Why would a company care about someone who wasn't successful as CEO running another company?
Because that person has knowledge of trade secrets, internal processes, vendor relationships, future product plans, etc. Sure, they might be shit at leading a company, but what they know could be extremely valuable to a competitor.
Marissa Mayer doesn't need a golden parachute (Score:3)
Of course, whenever she loses her job (voluntarily or involuntarily), I'm sure there's a golden parachute that will deploy and she'll be set for life either way.
Even with Yahoo's stock tanking, Marissa Mayer doesn't [therichest.com] need [nytimes.com] a golden parachute to be set for life.
Re:The 0.01% (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't it burn your ass to know that if she were to get fired, she'd walk away with tens of millions of dollars?
Why would it? To the class of workers Marissa Mayer belongs to, tens of millions of dollars is not a huge sum. Her net worth was about $300 million in 2012 when she took the the Yahoo job. Tens of millions of dollars to her is more like a tens of thousands of dollars to me, which would be a very reasonable severance package to someone in my position.
Just like you probably make far more money than people working in third world slums, Marissa Mayers makes far more money than you. Comparing the salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful.
Re:The 0.01% (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't it burn your ass to know that if she were to get fired, she'd walk away with tens of millions of dollars?
Why would it? To the class of workers Marissa Mayer belongs to, tens of millions of dollars is not a huge sum. Her net worth was about $300 million in 2012 when she took the the Yahoo job. Tens of millions of dollars to her is more like a tens of thousands of dollars to me, which would be a very reasonable severance package to someone in my position.
Just like you probably make far more money than people working in third world slums, Marissa Mayers makes far more money than you. Comparing the salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful.
I totally agree with what you're saying. Here's where it breaks down. Mayer has a bunch of money due solely to incredibly good luck and timing. Nothing more. It has nothing to do with her abilities (obviously), education, or any of that. She was in the right place at the right time.
So she's in a "class" that's occupied by people who made a bunch of money at business, and powerball winners. Although she made her money in business technically the reality is that she's on the "powerball winner" side of the aisle, if you catch my drift. So it's not terribly surprising that when you put her into a position like this she falters.
Of course, she is in an impossible position, anyway, but the company should have pulled a real entrepreneur in if they wanted to have a radical turnaround.
Re:The 0.01% (Score:4, Insightful)
I totally agree with what you're saying. Here's where it breaks down. Mayer has a bunch of money due solely to incredibly good luck and timing. Nothing more. It has nothing to do with her abilities (obviously), education, or any of that. She was in the right place at the right time.
So she's in a "class" that's occupied by people who made a bunch of money at business, and powerball winners. Although she made her money in business technically the reality is that she's on the "powerball winner" side of the aisle, if you catch my drift. So it's not terribly surprising that when you put her into a position like this she falters.
I also agree with you that Marissa Mayer was not up for this task. I thought it was a bad decision in 2012 and I still think that now. But I do think it is unfair to lump her in with "powerball winners", even if just metaphorically. She was certainly lucky to have the opportunity to be rewarded for her skills with hundreds of millions of dollars. But it was her accomplishments that earned her the job with Google, and it was her accomplishments that allowed her to succeed at Google. Not all of the 18 employees hired before Marissa or the 20 or so employees hired after her had the same level of success. A large portion of the credit for that success does go to Marissa.
That said, if she re-lived her life 100 times with slight modifications she is probably only a Senior VP at some company in most of those lives. But that could be said for the vast majority if not all of the world's self-made wealthy elite. There is always a hefty amount of both luck and ability involved in making hundreds of millions of dollars. If you treated every successful businessperson who had a lucky career as a "powerball winner", they would probably all earn that distinction.
Of course, she is in an impossible position, anyway, but the company should have pulled a real entrepreneur in if they wanted to have a radical turnaround.
Most "real entrepreneurs" were just as lucky as Marissa Mayer when achieving their success. That includes Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Yahoo could have certainly chosen other startup founders / early employees, but something about Mrs. Mayer made them think she was the right person for the job. That may have been a bad decision, or someone else may have failed even harder. It really is impossible to know for sure.
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she's on the "powerball winner" side of the aisle, if you catch my drift.
More like "powerbush", if you catch my drift.
Re:The 0.01% (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing the salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful.
Your argument is very worrying not only because it is tautological but because we can never stop ever increasing income inequality if people 'accept it'. The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is about 350. In 1965 it was 20. The committee that decides executive compensation is stacked so that people serve on each others compensation committees guaranteeing extravagant salaries. They also prevent a more meritocratic search going out to the general population. It also is one of the reasons why average pay has fallen or stagnated for most people in the US - money spent on executives means less cash for the workers.
And you might also want to think about pay in terms of productivity. Since 1973 it has gone up by about 100% in the US. And yet wages for many people have fallen in real terms. Median household income should be double what it is and perhaps more given that the number of working adults per household has increased as women have gone to work full time.
In terms of finding 'good people'. I have personally met outstanding people who not only are smart and well educated but have excellent communications and people skills. They made good money - mid six figures. I am certain they could have done a better job than Marissa Mayer running Yahoo and they would have agreed to do it for a mere $1 million. Yet they are never seriously considered because of the tight knit and self referential world of executives.
What's so sad is that this is a bum deal for shareholders - even if you are capitalist and don't have any compassion on people getting poorer you should at least be bothered by the fact that awful CEOs like Marissa Mayer and Steve Ballmer get to destroy value at a company and get paid 8 figures to do so. Imagine that instead of hiring Steve Ballmer, Microsoft would have merely hired an average MIT PhD engineering graduate in their 30s or 40s with some business and management experience. Think about how much better off Microsoft would have been in 2013 when Ballmer did finally leave.
Re:The 0.01% (Score:5, Insightful)
And you might also want to think about pay in terms of productivity. Since 1973 it has gone up by about 100% in the US. And yet wages for many people have fallen in real terms. Median household income should be double what it is and perhaps more given that the number of working adults per household has increased as women have gone to work full time.
That depends on why productivity has risen in the past 40 years. In the mid 1900's I would attribute most of that to educating the middle class. From 1900 to 1960 the number of college graduates rose from about 7% to 25%, over a 200% increase. From 1960-Today it has only risen to about 30%: a 20% increase. In the mid 1900's the workers were seeing increased wages along with their increased productivity because it was their increased skills that made them more productive.
For the past 40 years, however, I believe most of the increased productivity has come from increased investment in equipment, such as computers and robotics. Therefore now the benefits of increased productivity is going to those who invested in that equipment, not the people who use them. That is only a theory but I think it reflects the economic reality very well.
In terms of finding 'good people'. I have personally met outstanding people who not only are smart and well educated but have excellent communications and people skills. They made good money - mid six figures. I am certain they could have done a better job than Marissa Mayer running Yahoo and they would have agreed to do it for a mere $1 million. Yet they are never seriously considered because of the tight knit and self referential world of executives.
One of those people may have done a better job than Marissa Mayer, although of course it is only with hindsight that we believe Marissa did a poor job. The important thing to remember is there isn't much of a difference between a CEO making $1 million per year or $23 million. You are comparing 0.02% of Yahoo's yearly revenue with 0.5%. If for whatever reason I thought a VP at a $200 billion company could improve my company's revenue by 2% more than one of your middle management $150k salary friends, I would gladly pay that extra $20 million per year.
I believe you are correct that a vast number of skilled people are passed over for executives positions because they are never considered. But just like I want a plumber or my house who has worked on a residential home instead of just commercial buildings, a company board wants someone from senior management in a successful multi-billion dollar company to run their multi-billion dollar company. They don't want to take a chance the best SMB printer sales manager in Ohio. I can't really blame them, because when I hire people for personal or professional reasons I also want someone who's current career trajectory shows they are a good fit for the job.
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And the string of acquisitions by Mayer, handing out hundreds of millions to buy companies of questionable value from her friends, former Googlers, brings home the self-referential self-dealing of big business execs.
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"salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful."
So someone is in a different class of society just because of their paycheque? Presumable when (not if) she's fired she'll be back down the class ladder when her salary is zero?
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"salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful."
So someone is in a different class of society just because of their paycheque? Presumable when (not if) she's fired she'll be back down the class ladder when her salary is zero?
Her income will most likely never be zero again. Her net worth is high enough she can count on at least a $5-$10 million yearly income for the rest of her life. Her current salary is not the primary reason she is in the wealthy class. It is her net worth.
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If you ruined the company you would be fired and get nothing. When she ruins the company she gets her severance package and another nice C level job destroying something else.
The difference is, at her level incompetence is not only free of negative consequences, it's actively rewarded. Why can't I be rewarded for being shit at my job?
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If you ruined the company you would be fired and get nothing. When she ruins the company she gets her severance package and another nice C level job destroying something else.
The difference is, at her level incompetence is not only free of negative consequences, it's actively rewarded. Why can't I be rewarded for being shit at my job?
Negotiate a contract with your next company to pay you $X dollars if you are fired. You will need to convince them your future earnings would be negatively impacted if you fail, and the risk of failure is too high to take a risk on their job offer otherwise. I doubt you are in a position to negotiate such a contract, but then again there are people in this country who can't negotiate a $9 hourly wage.
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That requires convincing?
No problem! Let me propose a slate of my best friends to be the board members who vote on the contract. Do you agree? Yes/Abstain (I voted Yes)
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I would argue that if her net worth is actually $300 million then she doesn't really need *any* severance, especially for doing a bad job and/or bad company performance during (or because of) her tenure. These golden parachutes executives get are more about ego than anything else. They already make something like 500% more than their employees make. At most, they should get the same kind of severance other people in their company would get.
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Doesn't it burn your ass to know that if she were to get fired, she'd walk away with tens of millions of dollars?
Try one hundred million dollars. [cnn.com]
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She makes mistakes, and punishes laid off workers. (Score:2)
She is not responsible for her actions. So she holds the laid off people responsible by laying them off.
Layoffs are always done by bad management who won't take responsibility for their actions.
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She is not responsible for her actions. So she holds the laid off people responsible by laying them off.
Keeping her current job is probably not Marissa Mayer's primary motivation. She was worth $300 million before she started working at Yahoo. She could have retired, started her own company, became a full time VC, etc, but she chose to become a CEO of a huge Internet company. It is very likely this means she wants a career running large companies. So Mayer's primary motivation is probably doing a good enough job to be given other similar or even better opportunities in the future.
The more things stay the same
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Management taking responsibility for their actions means THEY take the brunt of the results of the actions, not the laid off employees.
Since the management have no skin in the game, they're not responsible.
How do you propose to make C-level management take the brunt of the negative results of their failed policies? If the management is fired along with the employees, they are not taking the brunt of the negative results because they already had a significant net worth before taking these positions. If they required these managers to invest significant amounts of their own money in the company before taking the job, they wouldn't take the job in the first place because it would always be a horrible investment
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If they required these managers to invest significant amounts of their own money in the company before taking the job, they wouldn't take the job in the first place because it would always be a horrible investment from a diversification standpoint.
The simple and easy solution to this is to completely eliminate the shielding that exists between investors' personal assets and the concrete results of corporate policies.
If an investor is personally responsible for everything his money helped cause, then extreme diversification becomes a severe liability. Did you invest in an investment fund that purchased shares in your name from a company that was found to subcontract to a company involved in child slavery? Now you are guilty of personally trading in ch
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The simple and easy solution to this is to completely eliminate the shielding that exists between investors' personal assets and the concrete results of corporate policies.
This is the exact type of simplistic and unreasonable logic that allows people to believe these are easily solvable problems if only the world wasn't corrupt.
No matter how good controls would be, there would be no way to stop some middle manager from trying to cut a corner and fudge an earnings report. Are you going to put thousands or even millions of people in jail because some manager committed fraud trying to hit his quarterly numbers? All he has to do is profit over $500 from the fraud for it to be a f
Hard to Believe (Score:2, Insightful)
It is hard to believe that Yahoo used to be one of the top search engines with a nice bright future. Now it has a bit less that 10% of Google's revenue, and it keeps dropping. I don't think this is a case of economies of scale... Google isn't the only online advertiser making money. But Yahoo somehow continues to lose money in this ever growing market.
Bottom line: Management at Yahoo sucks. The company should be sold in a fire sale as it has little prospects for turning things around.
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Well, the basic problem is that there is too much advertising - far too much. When you reach a certain degree of saturation, it no longer makes any difference - people just ignore it, and I suspect adding more after that point actually leads to a decrease in effect, when people start to react negatively to it. Hence the widespread use of ad-blocking, script blocking, tracker blocking etc. We have had enough, simply. I don't know of anybody who actually wants to see adverts.
So, with this being the case, it s
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Well, the basic problem is that there is too much advertising - far too much. When you reach a certain degree of saturation, it no longer makes any difference - people just ignore it,
And how! Yahoo bears some measure of responsibility for adblockers escaping from geekworld into the general public.
Now, we would think that Yahoo is some sort of desert, with no one left, no one going there.
But the dirty little secret is that based on page hits, the three most visited places on the internet are Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. So there is apparently some service there.
I can just see the Slashdotters being more embarrassed about getting caught looking at Yahoo, than caught watching shemale
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I do want to see adverts. But I want to see them the way I envision them to be displayed.
I want to be able to subscribe to advert types instead of letting the ad middleman make a guesswork based on which websites I access. I want text-based ads, located in a specific area, which I can glance at and scan quickly. I want to switch ad types quickly in that ad box if I need to.
So yes, I am curios about what's new in a certain area (e.g. games) and I don't mind well-placed, well-behaving, relevant ads. I don't m
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I remember making perl scripts to strip all the crap out of Yahoo searches. Now days I have to do the same with Google (but use greasemonkey instead) results because they took away the filtering system they used to have.
There are certain domains that have nothing of value on them but tons of search hits, I have a nice set of filters that delivers clean and concise search results while destroying all the crap they intentionally let through nowadays.
Sadly there is no competition to dethrone google... I wi
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It is hard to believe that Yahoo used to be one of the top search engines with a nice bright future.
And I remember Alta Vista now get off my lawn
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And I remember Alta Vista now get off my lawn
Hell, I still pine for the days when Webcrawler was a thing. Or Northern Lights, remember them? Or Dogpile....
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I think Yahoo should drop their focus on news and media and turn back into a proper web services provider. They should also bring back Konfabulator.
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I have to agree. Yahoo "news" has become quite tabloid. Especially the "sponsored ads". The images that go along with these ads on their news and finance pages are rather disgusting. Who does Mayer think her customers are? A bunch of teenaged cell phone fondlers?
I pay for Yahoo mail (which I will stop doing soon) and I'm still faced with this crap when I'm trying to research financial information.
Their stock portfolio function is good though but why must I endure the images of airheads fanning out a ha
Re:Hard to Believe (Score:4, Insightful)
Yahoo was never a good search engine. Even before Google, Alta Vista was much better for those who knew.
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Yahoo was a 'portal' business more than ever a search engine. More of a curated portal than a general purpose place to find anything and everything on the 'net.
Volunteering leaving is a bad thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with a volunteering leaving of a company is a really bad thing, almost worse than layoffs. While it makes it easier for the managers to sleep at night knowing that they don't have to let a person go, which for most humans really hate doing.
But for the company the people who are smart enough to see the writing on the wall, know to jump ship early knowing that they can get a good or better job elsewhere. The ones who stick around are often the ones who lack the experience to see the warning signs, or just don't have the skills to get another job, and gamble on not being the one who gets canned. Thus populating the company with less experience or less than ideal employees. This creates a downward spiral of less quality and causing real layoffs (as we see here) which makes allowing for growth much harder.
But when you see voluntary leaving it is a bad sign.
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Sure, like rats leaving a sinking ship.
But, really, if you stand back, this is Yahoo rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
They're a business in decline, who can't figure out what they need to do to boost revenues, skating by on the billions they made at IPO, and desperately trying to remain relevant in a moving technology field.
This is just confirming my long-standing belief that tech IPOs (now and in the .com era) create companies with massive wealth, but no real revenue or business model, who eventu
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Good thing we can short this pig down to delisting.
Re:Volunteering leaving is a bad thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think there's a human being on the planet who can't recognize warning signs at Yahoo.
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But for the company the people who are smart enough to see the writing on the wall, know to jump ship early knowing that they can get a good or better job elsewhere. The ones who stick around are often the ones who lack the experience to see the warning signs, or just don't have the skills to get another job, and gamble on not being the one who gets canned.
In general I agree, but for some kind of weird psychological reason (fear of change?) some people simply will not ever leave a company until they are laid off, even if they know that there is no hope for the job to survive. I've seen this at every job I've ever worked at. Many of these people have questionable skills for sure. In the previous decade my group got told in early July that our jobs would end on Dec. 31 and they were being outsourced to a cheaper country. One of my co-workers stayed to the b
We are infected with MBA-think (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would anyone think there's a constant proper relationship between revenue and the number of employees across all businesses? I mean, let's just skip right over that employees are paid different amounts, businesses take different amount of human effort to create the wealth, the market will support different prices for different services, and the business will have a different amounts necessary to pay their vendors and capital requirements.
Suppose I have a farm business. One year I decide to spin-off the part of the company that picks the tomatoes. The previous company suddenly has much more revenue per employee. Should it go out and hire more people? The tomato picking company has little revenue per employee. Should the tomato picking company fire a bunch of people. Of course not.
Re:We are infected with MBA-think (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an activist investor. Their entire M.O. is pump, dump, and piss on the smoldering crater left behind.
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Hopefully.... (Score:2, Insightful)
She'll get all the credit she deserves for the failure. Maybe she could run for office after she's done sandbagging Yahoo.
Bring Back GeoCities (Score:4, Insightful)
From what I can see, it's not so much that Mayer has made a bunch of bad decisions, but rather that she hasn't made any decisions at all. Well before she took over, everyone knew that Yahoo was in trouble and that their status quo wasn't tenable. So she was fully expected to come in and make sweeping and disruptive changes, hopefully thereby saving the company.
But what has she even attempted to change? From the outside at least, Yahoo as it exists in 2016 still seems fundamentally identical to Yahoo as it was in 2012, or for that matter, in 2006. The only plan I even heard about was that idea to split off the company into two pieces, let the unprofitable half (i.e. Yahoo) die off, and focus on the profitable half (i.e. partial ownership of Alibaba). And that's not really even a plan, that's just surrender.
Do something, at least. This wait-and-see stuff is no good. I'm pretty sure you won't like seeing what you waited for.
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GeoCities 2.0 - Now with more social networking crap!
Big change: telecommuting (Score:3, Informative)
Mayer made one big change: doing away with telecommuting.
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Yahoo Mail works fine for me. I also prefer Yahoo Sports over ESPN's new site.
Wish Yahoo would go more barebones. They try and do too much.
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She has spent money on buying a bunch of small companies that were too small to have an impact on Yahoo. Perhaps she should have bought Netflix whe
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What about their web site designers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are the people who produced the horrid piece of trash they now call a web site part of the 15% being sent packing? What used to be a fairly easy way of getting stories in an easy-to-use format is now a jumbled mess of shitty colors and blocky outlines.
I, and many others I have heard, have stopped going to their site as a direct result of the change. If Mayer, or the morons in charge of web design, were hoping to get more eyeballs to their site, they have failed miserably.
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Too Little, Way Too Late (Score:2)
Yahoo is just now finally getting to the point they wanted to be in the late 90s. Things like their email mostly works now. It will always be my junk mail honeypot, but it does work.
But everything they are trying to fix and improve, someone else beat them to it years ago. They are trying to pry into a market they failed in.
All Mayer will be able to do at this point is try to wind everything down, fold up the chairs, and shut the lights off. The people with any brains have moved on to greener pastures and th
Voluntary separations = talent removal spiral (Score:4, Insightful)
Layoffs should always be a last resort in positions that require technical talent. This goes double if your staff are more experienced and able to see the writing on the wall. I've chosen companies carefully over the years and have had long tenures at places I've worked. But, when a talented person who can get a job somewhere else sees the layoff balloons going up, the immediate thought is whether or not they'll be next. This causes everyone good to head for the exits, and you're left with the low-talent people who are just hanging on hoping they don't get it in the next round. This has happened to me twice, and I've carefully considered my options both times, opting to leave before things got worse.
This is partially driven by the (irrational) preference to hire only employed people. I know a lot of talented people who've just been blindsided by a sudden layoff, capricious firing or even the business going bankrupt. The road back for these people is very hard and they often have to take lower-salary work or work for companies with less-than-ideal working conditions.
technical talent get replaced by H1B's (Score:3)
technical talent get replaced by H1B's. There needs to be an “cool off” period for companies that have laid off an American worker before they can access the H-1B system.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a very big problem too.
Back in the early 2000s, after the dotcom crash, there were thousands of talented people out there (and even more trash). You could, with proper interviews and connections, grab 50 superstars, build a new company, and eventually be successful. A lot of the crazy IPOs we've seen a couple of years ago came out of that.
These days, you have 2 problems:
1) Way too many people fighting over too few "good devs". So most startups and unicorns are staffed with a couple of superstars, and d
Re: (Score:2)
All the smart and talented people jumped ship already. All that is left is idiots that believed that the company was going anywhere but down. They have been less and less relevant every year for the past 10 years.
Yeah... (Score:2)
and if this is like any other layoff I have seen then management probably had 24 hours or less to decide who to let go and who to keep. Without adequate time to do any real analysis then the brown-nosers, game players and golf buddies get to stay. The ratio of dead wood to productive employee then swings even further to the dead wood side.
Then the good employees that did manage to make the cut see the writing on the wall and start sending out resumes. The exodus continues.
By any measure, Mayer has done an a
Who DIDN'T see this coming? (Score:2)
Yahoo lost its way a long time ago. I see more spam ads and malware from folks using Yahoo (and CNET for that matter) than from downloading torrents.
Eliminate all the employees (Score:2)
Eliminate all the employees...problem solved, and think of the money they'd save!
Seriously, I've never seen a company circle the drain as long as Yahoo has, it's like they have some magic drain-circling power than no amount of swirling or flushing can overcome.
I swear, ten years from now we'll still be reading stories like this...."Yahoo Set To Fire Its Last 20 Employees, Mayer Predicts Huge Cost Savings".
Re: (Score:2)
Take the company private (Score:3)
There are millions of people who, for whatever reason, are happy to use Yahoo services and there is no reason why the company can not keep them running well and earning salary for employees. The problem is logically impossible expectation of infinite growth placed on public companies. Sooner or later this drives every successful company into collapse after losing their pyramid scheme and investors flock to the latest overhyped startup to try to recoup their losses with more gambling.
Re: (Score:2)
It's 2016, and Yahoo still lives? (Score:2)
Mind you, this is the company that owns Tumblr. Logic has no place in their world.
not layoffs... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A Trend? (Score:2)
But fear not good citizens, Mayer will probably get a severance package equal to the salaries of the people she fired.
I mean, there has to be justice for the woman, right?
Meyer should run for president.... (Score:2)
They are doing it wrong. (Score:2)
Fire all the executives and save a whole lot more money plus cutting dead weight that does nothing at all for the company.
What, is it bonus time again? (Score:2)
I worked for Y! as a contractor.... (Score:2)
back in 2013 and was able to see this from the inside. Everyone would spend most of their time playing Diplomacy [wikipedia.org] and just like the board game, it was impossible to win without stabbing someone in the back. Even if you survive one round, to survive the next you'd need to betray someone new. I have no idea why anyone would think "Survivor" would be a good work atmosphere -- but that's probably why I don't have a multi-million dollar salary.
I was happy being a contractor because (a) free food was good (b) I
44.6 Billion reasons to fail (Score:2)
Yahoo has been doomed ever since rejecting a MS offer of 44.6 Billion dollars. They were on the slide long before that, mostly because Google is so successful.
http://financesonline.com/top-... [financesonline.com]
Ironically, even in the attached URL Yahoo is broken!
Question (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
secret rocket ship they have been building for their manned Mars mission.
Crew of one: Marissa. One way.