January 18, 2008

Yahoo Asks Employees To Turn In Computers

Erick Schonfeld

30 comments »

In a move that could be a hint of things to come, Yahoo told a group of about 30 or so employees yesterday that their jobs would be terminated in 60 days, and that they could look for other jobs within Yahoo. But could they please turn in their computers by the end of the day today. Other than the engineers, who tend to get quickly sucked into other groups, it is not likely many will find other jobs at Yahoo.

The layoff represents a small reshuffling of employees, with jobs actually moving to Europe. One of the teams affected is the company’s successful Yahoo Answers team, which is split between the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. employees are losing their jobs, and the the team is consolidating in Europe. The same thing is happening for a search technology group that was split between the U.S. and Europe. This part of a bigger reorganization of the search group that’s been going on since at least December. Many of the engineers in the Answers group in the U.S., for instance, will be going to Delicious.

The remainder of the layoffs will come from Yahoo’s Brand Universe project, which was killed in December, a year after it officially launched. Its leader Vince Broady is leaving the company. Brand Universe was an attempt to make widgetized landing pages for big brands that appealed to advertisers, and is no longer considered a core focus of Yahoo’s renewed consumer-centric strategy.

Yahoo has nearly 14,000 employees, and reshufflings like this happen all the time. The question is whether more substantial layoffs are around the corner.

Sphere It

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Technicle

January 18th, 2008 at 9:53 am

Hmmm.. not a good sign…
JeffC

January 18th, 2008 at 10:15 am

I assume everyone will start yelling “Recession!!” again. Patooey. Stay optimistic folks, don’t listen to the gloomy gloomersons.
Folks

January 18th, 2008 at 10:25 am

for some industries, the recession already started, given the rumor that Google has fired all of its contract recruiters, and this Yahoo layoff news, the internet industry may soon feel the pain too.
Roy

January 18th, 2008 at 10:26 am

30/11000 jobs cut (0.27%)? Check out home improvement, construction, and lending. You’d see 30%, not 30 people.

This is just what you said: “reshufflings like this happen all the time.”

Of course, easy for me to say, don’t work for Yahoo!, and am therefore not one of those 30. My day job’s parent company laid off a couple thousand and delisted from the NYSE in the past 12 months. Could have been me, I suppose. But then again, a couple thousand is somewhat more than 30.
Felipe Contreras

January 18th, 2008 at 10:32 am

I don’t see the relevancy of the story.
fredo

January 18th, 2008 at 10:39 am

whatever happened to the 100 day plan?
Jason

January 18th, 2008 at 10:40 am

How come Felipe? Techcrunch is a gossip rag now, you should have noticed that.
Erik

January 18th, 2008 at 10:48 am

Yahoo needs to cut a lot more than 30.

Get the company down to 5000, then you’ll make some progress.
Beck

January 18th, 2008 at 10:49 am

Probably 30 people out of 11,000 quit every week at Yahoo. Shouldn’t we see a story about this mass exodus?
JT

January 18th, 2008 at 10:52 am

This is why People are looking to the Internet to Make money from Home and
Making Money from Blogs
damon

January 18th, 2008 at 10:53 am

The interesting thing is not the 30 people, but the “turn in your computers”. At first I thought this was for security reasons, disgruntled employee etc. But for that the important thing is disable access (svn, email, logins, etc). Maybe they are doing that to. The please turn in your computers sounds like hey, we can’t afford computers, so we need yours for people that still have work. strange.
damon

January 18th, 2008 at 10:56 am

went to check out f’dcompany, they are down too! must be the same load balancer
Anonymous Coward

January 18th, 2008 at 10:59 am

Company’s don’t use the word layoffs anymore. They use the term “reorganization”. They tell you that you are losing your job and that you have two months to find a new one within the company. It’s been going on for at least two years in the tech industry as a cover for offshoring jobs.
Back channel rumors

January 18th, 2008 at 11:19 am

A sign of things to come. These companies need to shed some weight.

I heard the same about eBay, but on a larger scale. Significant layoffs, and word is the CEO will be leaving the company. With the earnings outlook this quarter (and remaining ones), this maybe the year eBay gets absorbed by Microsoft unless there is a merger with Yahoo.
WhatsNext

January 18th, 2008 at 11:44 am

So the internet companies will go into a recession, and 5 years from now we’ll be riding another bubble! I don’t mind
Josh

January 18th, 2008 at 12:08 pm

I’m surprised people still consider yahoo a competitor.

And Jason, Techrunch is not a gossip rag. And even if it was, it’s funny that your reading it anyways.
Get Your Facts First

January 18th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

Someone was likely upset and leak this info without the facts. This is part of the continued re-org going on for months at Yahoo!, re-aligning priorities of the company with Jerry’s big bets.
Otis Gospodnetic

January 18th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

Questions:

The same is happening to the Yahoo search team, you said. Where is the search team getting consolidated? U.S. or EU?

Answers team going to Delicious - but what exactly is Delicious up to? I haven’t seen much new from them in moooonths.
Don Jones

January 18th, 2008 at 5:14 pm

The relevancy is that Yahoo is making what it thinks are necessary changes. Creative destruction is the greatest asset in the US. Those Yahooligans have lots of options on the outside…
The Hater

January 18th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

@16: You’re a fucking retard. Y! is the most visited website in the world. That alone makes it more than newsworthy. It’s also the world’s largest user base and if you haven’t noticed with the OpenID announcement, it’s changing in a very positive way.
Ganesh

January 18th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

Yahoo! is becoming worst-n-worst now. Their Login screen fails to accept most of the correct passwords. Lots of people are facing problems with that and lost their account in Yahoo!.
Customer care is careless about their customers. They simply reset the password and newly sent passwords are not acceptable by their authentication mechanism but when they import address book from other community sites it is possible with same password!
sandeep

January 18th, 2008 at 8:05 pm

is it boom moving to europe and moving towards slow down in USA
zeke

January 18th, 2008 at 9:11 pm

@Ganesh
as a regular yahoo user, i absolutely don’t know what you are talking about. you must be really from mars to experience these problems.
zach

January 18th, 2008 at 9:47 pm

I continue to hear that there will be significant layoffs at yahoo in the coming months (on top of the massive talent bleed over the past 2 yrs) and that large parts of the company are basically stalled at this point.

As a yahoo shareholder I wonder if they have the financial and human capital to battle it out over the next 2-4 yrs. against Google or Microsoft? You gotta wonder how this all happened so quickly — only 2 short years Yahoo!
Susan Bratton

January 19th, 2008 at 12:08 am

Vince Broady is an accomplished professional. He left CNet to be Head of Games, Entertainment & Youth before this latest assignment. He has a wealth of knowledge and will pop up someplace fabulous soon.
Vandy

January 19th, 2008 at 1:34 am

This signals that Yahoo is making good decisions.

Vince Broady is a smug one who does not play well with others. After achieving some mild success at Gamespot early in his career, he has delivered one failure after another for CNet and Yahoo. I advise anyone considering this hire to get candid references from his managers, his direct reports, and his peers.
J.J.

January 20th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

Please tell me that Yang and Decker will resign right after they force Terry off the board of directors. The three of them make me nauseous. They’re largely responsible for where the company is right now, and if they had any integrity, they’d fall on their swords. Resign. No severance. No extension of their stock options. Nothing.

I’m sick of hearing about how Jerry is so nice and he and Sue is so smart. Are you kidding me? Their track record in recent years indicates the precise opposite. Why nobody seems to hold them responsible for any of this is beyond me. The problems go much deeper than Semel. It takes a whole upper management team to screw up this much. It’s appalling to realize that those responsible are still running things.

The only thing that would make the unemployment line bearable would be to see those responsible out of their jobs. Given American corporate culture, there’s almost no chance of that happening.
Bali

January 21st, 2008 at 6:39 am

Lots of people are facing problems with that and lost their account in Yahoo!.
Anonymous

January 21st, 2008 at 11:33 pm

I’ve been following this for a bit. And have restrained my comments. First, to those who said, “Yahoo! lacks quality engineers” get real! Yahoo! has the finest engineers and they come up with brilliant working prototypes, that never get executed. The company values self projects as much as any other G company.

The biggest problem in Yahoo! is not lack of engineering talent, but, the middle managers, who do not understand either business or technology and whose main agenda is to produce metrics and hollow graphs to VP and Execs. These are the people who cover up failed projects. As if it is something to be ashamed of. As if it were their own personal failure. Instead of saying, “What we created did not work. Let’s figure out why?” “Our project is a great success but the market has changed or some junk.” They continue to work on the failed project for months till the numbers get untwist-able, they then move to another project, to ruin it too.

They suck up considerable developer time, asking them to give worthless numbers and manual reports. While tools for the same reports exist, they lack the ability to understand them and someone has to email a “summary” to them every week/day. There are engineers part who’s primary job is to send these metrics to them.

I can imagine that the people who’ll get “let go” would be the talented engineers and not the middle management.
Bali

January 25th, 2008 at 6:23 am

They simply reset the password and newly sent passwords are not acceptable by their authentication mechanism but when they import address book from other community sites it is possible with same password!