20% = 2400 folks - that sucks! I wonder how many of them will land in the GooglePlex? Probably not many since they will let go the fat and not the meat. I’m guessing not only Yahoo will be laying people off in 2008. Smells like a mini 2000 is coming.

An irrelevant question this, nevertheless, Star Wars, Far Cry, Crysis, Sim City 4, and World of Warcraft have something common between them as far as their logic & design go. What?

Thank goodness we have the Google.

yes there were news about the Yahoo answers team at the US being shutdown and people asked to move in to other yahoo teams if possible.If the succesful answers team has met this fate then its tough to imagine the fate for other guys…….in the non performing product teams……

Of late I get the feel Yahoo is caught in a loop trying to turn the corner. There were some big ticket acquisitions, a few deadpool entries…now a huge staff cut…let’s hope in the interest of having some competition for the Googs (laughter here) that this is it!

Duncan,

What new perspective does this post add to the conversation?

I’m having trouble seeing it.

Please advise.

Why don’t they lay off customer service? Wait, they can’t because they don’t have any.

David
it’s a big story that’s worth covering, or are you suggesting that we should totally ignore massive layoffs at Yahoo? It’s not my story as per the links in the post, sometimes you don’t get it first and you link out on the big stuff. End of story.

SAI has been making noise about Yahoo layoffs for some time now. They were more or less correct in their call on AOL layoffs, they could be right this time too.

I think what duncan’s trying to say is that there is no news.

10
try telling that to the over 2000 ppl at Yahoo who may be shown the door in the next two weeks

Downsizing, refocusing, and consolidation. All the elements of a big player that’s lost it’s way and will eventually be gobbled up. As a yahoo shareholder, I think it is time to break it all up and sell. That’s the only way I see shareholders benefiting.

Meanwhile, the guy most responsible for the current mess, Terry Semel, remains as chairman of the board. He’s done nothing in the last year but cash in stock options for millions of dollars of profits.

Jerry, if you have any ball at all, you would have completely fired this asshole last year.

This could be good news for startups (like us), who are looking for designers, developers, managers, etc. Granted there’s lots of competition to hire top talent, and most of these folks would rather go to another salaried job than a pre-launch, pre-salary bootstrap startup. But for those who are sick of being at the mercy of pointy-haired bosses who who, will toss you to the curb if they think it will increase the stock price, starting fresh and from scratch, at a place where your own hard work (and a little luck) will determine your success, not some Wall Street analyst or executive who listens to them, can be exactly what is wanted. Cheers.

Wow, 20% is a large cut to make. Its too bad for all the families involved. I wonder if/how this will affect Yahoo as a business.

Whole companies got scared. Even President of United States. You will see lot of job cuts in 2008.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/.....refer=home

Most companies need to place lot of unemployee workers & homeless people. Inside IRS super computer. Social security isn’t perfect score. No one want to have kids anymore.

You will lots of new houses, school, buildings, etc. No one is buying it.

Check this out. Sooo scary.
http://news.google.com/news?hl.....employment

How does U.S homeless people get a job without corporate suit?
Well, hire more illegal mexicans without SS#.

@14… Yeap, he said it right.

Baby boomers want us to have more kids. LOL. You will see lots of houses that homeless people can’t afford it. It’s very nice economy suicide mission.

@6 David:

This provides the perspective (to me at least) that you are a moron. Not everybody has the time to read every blog and get this story from someplace else.

If this article wasn’t published here, you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to post your silly comment.

A lot of new startups are going to come out of this event.

If layoffs work to pump up YHOO’s share price, than maybe ebay, cisco, sun, and other valley companies could be next in line.

For those of you run startups. You have be careful hiring interviewers. Sometime they can be very dishonest, discrimate innocent over exprience.

1. it doesn’t matter what color human is.
2. You company can turn into Enron if you hired greedy & exprience.
3. you goal is create company that is richer than Saudi’s oil.
4. Microsoft have 95% millioanires.

Can you beat number #4?

Yahoo’s been needing a shakeup for years. Jerry should have announced a 10% cut on his first day with a goal of executing the layoff within 60 days.

Nothing gets a “coaster” into action faster than the possibility of losing their free ride…

Probably none of those laid off are going to end up at Google. Everyone says that Google’s already interviewed and rejected half the Yahoos in SV.

Silicon valley guy, that’s whether the arrogance of a google boy or the jealousy of a guy working for a small company…

Yahoo sucks. I can’t remember the last time I used a Yahoo service.

- I use yahoo mail as my SPAM email
- Yahoo maps is bloated. Even ask.com is better
- Flickr is overrated and slow. Use photobucket
- Yahoo finance is good, but still, nothing special
- yahoo video doesn’t work all the time with my leopard + FF

on top of that, yahoo’s employees are arrogant.

Jerry yang is not my favorite person in the world either

This is in response to bubble head…

The other companies you mentioned are not laying off people. they make good profits.

Getting laid off is never a good thing. However, for the benefit of the shareholders and the long term viability of the company, it is long overdue. I’m rooting for Jerry to set this ship straight and bring relevance back to Yahoo in the internet world. Competition brings innovation. Monopolies bring stagnation.

Yahoo has some great services - so many parts that could add up to more than the whole if they ever got their act together. I wonder how cutting their way to innovation is going to work? Or maybe it makes Yang look like he’s doing something?

Duncan,

I’m just saying I’m surprised you are not asserting an opinion about the subject. Usually you are not one to lack an opinion and I was surprised to not find new information on this story when clicking on this from techmeme - even if it was just your opinion.

That’s all. Peace.

12000 total work force is not too much to be at number 1 and 2 in most of the online services. It simply means that either those people are getting fired due to their performance or Yahoo has ceased to innovate. It might be an overhaul tactic also. Getting rid of some old timers and on boarding some Facebook or Google guys!! Who would come and join. This will hurt yahoo’s reputation.

Yahoo absolutely sucks. You don’t have to be a silicon valley ‘insider’ to see that yahoo has been stuck in the mud for years now. there services are subpar, cluttered, filled with ads, difficult to navigate and completely worthless. They are trying to be everything to everyone and look where it has gotten them. I use yahoo mail as my throwaway email account. The 20% layoffs make sense and it’s probably going to prove to be yet another desparate move as yahoo falls into the abyss.

Hmmm, not a good sign..

I agree with #30. A friend who works at Yahoo tells me that the mood in sunnyvale is constantly somber, sluggish and borderline depressing. She tells me that employees walk around like zombies knowing that they are working for a outdated, outgrown internet company.

She has also told me that some of the people in sunnyvale refer to Yahoo as the Titanic. Its a huge ship that once dominated the ocean but now slowly sinking into oblivion.

If its true that its 20% of the workforce then thats a very huge number. It also brings up the question as to why they ended up with so many ‘excess’ staff in the first place in order to get of a fifth of them just like that. Were they expecting tremendous growth that never came? Maybe.

so sad. i feel bad for the yahoo employees who will be sent packing. my neighbor worked for yahoo for nearly 5 years and he also told me all of things that kyle said in #32. Apparently there is no spirit in sunnyvale. I guess its hard to get excited when your company keeps sinking deeper in the quicksand.

Very Sad. But i am sure all those working at Yahoo are Smart

With the Venture funding reaching 1Billion in 2007, it will not be hard for them to find new jobs. As there are lot of new startups here in the valley

Just wait for Yahoo to join Microsoft. Am sure they will be bought sooooon.

Cheers, Nag

It was my understanding that they will replace these American workers with asian or europian workers. They are dumping the people and country that made them for their own benefit. I refuse to use Yahoo and any other company (if possible) that has abandoned ship.

Yea Nag. With unemployment going up, up, up and up should be no problem for another 20,000 or so to find a job. “Welcome to K-Mart”

I just pray that they are not disgruntled employee’s looking to get back at Yahoo? They have sensitive data on all of us?

This is a trend. Wehn a company grow, they hire a lot of worker and when company suffer or stable then cut job or move job to Asia.

I don’t trust yahoo. I hope that they realize they will never be what they were 10 years ago. The internet has evolved and continued to develop while Yahoo stands still and can’t tell it’s head from it’s ass hole. The lack of enthusiasm in Sunnyvale is apparent in the crappy products that Yahoo has put out recently. Nothing but half-baked ideas that go nowhere fast, or should i say they go to hell in a handbasket.

Now that we all know how desparate Yahoo has become, it wouldnt surprise me if they go out and sell all of the personal information that they have on their users. Selling the names, email addresses, and credit cards of their 500 million user data base would be incredibly lucrative.

Don’t do it Yahoo. Keep your dignity and go out with your head held high.

As a yahoo user, I don’t think things are so bad to Yahoo, why do so many people jump so high to say a ship is going to sink, is that good to you, or you just like to see ppl to suffer, or you are just happy to THINK they are suffering?

I still and always love Yahoo.

HG

Agree with #42, Yahoo still provides great services.

Well this says 2 things….

either you will be the first person to be kicked off or you have your safe Ass in the mgmt

HG - Does this mean Hale Gandu….(I am just doing the part of THINKING you highlighted)

Ur Boss

Just look at the moral of the Y workforce. Everybody is sneaking around trying to ‘look buzy’ and avoid responsibility for failures. The problem is that there is no leadership and no accountability. Even if Jerry had the Balls, (which he probably does) then he still would not be able to execute due to the all the lard laying around.

#35 Nag

“Very Sad. But i am sure all those working at Yahoo are Smart”
—————————————-
Give me a break, the fact is:
Most of those (not all) working at Yahoo are dumb heads.

Courtesy of finance.yahoo.com (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=YHOO), it looks like good ol’ Terry Semel pocketed around $100MM after his departure in June of last year (I admit I eyeballed the numbers and added them in my head). At a fully-loaded cost of $200k/employee, that means his options sales cost Yahoo the salaries of 500 employees for one year. It’s sad how badly he screwed up Y!…the missed opportunities (acquisitions — Google, Facebook mainly) and then the poor execution (search, monetization, being relevant as a business) and now he still torments Sunnyvale with his profiteering. Sick.

What i’m looking forward to most is seeing the spin that the Yahoo executive team puts on this bleak, pathetic situation Anyone who says Yahoo is doing just great needs to pull there head out of their butt!

Yahoo! and their lazy employees suck! Otherwise they would be posting profits and showing growth rather than disappointing investors every quarter and laying off their ‘hard-working’ workforce.

Working for a very well-known company here in Silicon Valley (not Google or Yahoo), it is absolutely incredible to see how many current Yahoo employees submit their resumes and are trying their hardest to escape the Titanic!

@48 — Yahoo employees aren’t lazy. As someone from the inside, I can tell you that the people I work with — at the individual contributor level — are generally hard working and talented. The problem with the company is, and has been for the last 6-7 years, poor management at the higher levels. A lazy or incompetent individual contributor can do some damage, but the damage is 1000x at the VP level. At the CEO level, it’s downright deadly. Unfortunately for Yahoo there has been so much mismanagement at the top (CEO, SVP, VP) that the hard work and execution at the individual contributor level becomes irrelevant.

I recently got an offer from yahoo! LMC team [managing Yahoo personals, etc]. Profile is White BOX + Developing internal automation test suite.

I was wondering if it is a safe bet to join the company ?

Mine was a bit different case.
I got the interview call from Yahoo!
On the day of the interview the interviewer even did not bother to call me.
I took a day off from office for the interview, I got the mail from him that he will call me the next day .
When I replied that it would not be possible for me to shift the interview to other day and would it be possible to shift that to a mutual convenient time, I never got any reply back from him.
The Yahoo management team sucks, they are taking number one position now leaving “ebay” behind who are the real pioneers in this area LOL.

I still prefer Yahoo! over Google.

@51, obviously you have not interviewed by Google, their interview process is the worst i have seen, first, you have to buy your own tickets, rent your car, then the interview for a position you did not even apply for, they just randomly select a few engineers to interview you, then at last, after interview, you will have to wait four to six weeks to get offer, it is just ridiculous long. how other companies can hold their offer this long?

for the yahoo layoff rumor, i just wish they won’t fire their engineers, without capable engineers, they won’t stand a chance to compete with Google.

Wow, zeke, I can’t believe Google let a man of your obvious intellect go through such a painful interview experience. Please let me know where you are working now so I can immediately buy your stock and short Google’s.

FYI, I just heard that Yahoo will be opening a large R&D center in Israel.

forgot to mention that Google refunded my plane tickets, rental car and hotel in two months after interview, i was a college student and nearly broken at the time, i don’t have a couple of thousands in my credit card, so i have to use my parents’ credit card, that caused a little problem too. i like Google’s products, but their interview process is just horrible in my experience, hope they won’t make you purchase your own tickets again.

There is a strong possibility a recession is coming our way. The U.S faltering housing market highlighted by the subprime mortgage crisis is wrecking havoc in global financial markets. Not to imply that the story above is not relevant. My point is that that may be a sign of things to come.

I would say “Go For It” anonymous.

http://simongeorgeinc.googlepages.com

sad news, but somewhat inevitable. as a former employee, like many have mentioned above, i worked with a bunch of incredibly bright and smart people, and it really was management who were the ones who brought down the company with bad decisions, conveniently lining their already deep pockets further, while us humble folks below got more disgruntled. i remember writing to one of the management team after one of the company’s quarterly “all-hands” meetings where he had taken great delight in dissing and laughing at how AOL was failing miserably. i merely wanted to tell him how things like that can sometimes come back and bite you on the ass in the end. to his credit, he actually wrote back and said he’d temper down such comments in the future. in the end we both left the company, but guess which one of us got to exercise millions of dollars in stock options?

might be that Y! is planning to get rid of the highly paid, experienced, lousy employees and to hire new employees to cut the expenditure.

As a former Y! employee who left amidst the mass exodus of late - my 2 cents
20% is not enough. They can cut back to 5000 employees and basically do everything they are doing now - only better because of less bureaucracy - How?

1) Get rid of - Y! Europe - that battle is lost - Google has completely wiped out Yahoo! in Europe.
2) Close down Y! International in Sunnyvale they are worthless bunch- the only Y! that matters is Japan & China - which is already owned by local entities
3) Get rid of all the sandbox projects done by “researchers” who haven’t done squat to produce any product the last 3 years - that’s all the groups in SF downtown office, the Berkeley office, etc. Let Google with its billions coddle worthless ex-academics, you don’t have the luxury.
4) Sell off Yahoo! Shopping, Autos, Local, Travel - all the properties that are e-commerce also-rans.
5) Keep Search, FrontPage, News, Sports, Mail, Messenger, Groups, Answers

Places to Invest
1) Fire Marco and actually hire someone who knows something about Mobile - become #1 provider of Mobile content from existing properties
2) Hire away the best behavioral targeting specialists from Google and become #1 in content/behavioral targeting
3) Become a much better social platform for Millions in Y!Groups -

Yahoo has bright engineers who are capable of building good products; though they are not glorified as the Google boys. But, its over-dependence on MBA’s to release products could be one of the problems. MBA’s may be good to run business, but not good to come up with ideas on killer apps.

Look at the status of Yahoo Pipes- even google employers use it to build interesting stuff and virtually has no competition. But, it is so slow and need offline-patience to obtain the results. May be the MBA product manager determined that it doesn’t bring in any direct revenue and so ignore it. Bad for Yahoo, to have such attitude.

#61 nailed it.

and as posted elsewhere…..without yahoo, google becomes even more of a monoploy. and monoplies lead to stagnation. competition leads to innovation. and atr some point.

the obvious hubris of google employees and mgmnt will casue google to mis-step at some point. we need an alternative when that happens.

plus, advertisers don’t want to throw all their dollars at just one online player.

yes, yahoo has its problems, but we all of us would be worse off it didn’t exist.

#61: Amen!

@51

Yes, take the job! I love working at Yahoo!, it’s the best job I can imagine having.

As with any large company that has seen better days (and will hopefully see the best days to come), there are a number of people who reminisce about the “good old days” and bemoan how it’s not like it used to be.

But those of us who are newer employees are generally very happy to be there. I work with a lot of good people and a lot of very cool technology.

yahoo is stuck in the mud. they suck.

yhoo has one foot in the grave and the other on the banana peel. And now that they are following thru on their threat to allow random websites to gather their users yahoo id and passwords, expect for there to be thousands of cases of identity theft. yahoo is a lost cause. they cant find there way.

i hope they all get laid off. the internet would be so much better without yhoo.

I heard Yahoo is increasing its headcount in Bangalore

TO JERRY YANG & SUE DECKER
This is not complicated in the slightest: You need to get the stock price moving north again to chill the Street and boost company morale and strike prices. You do that by doing four things - refocus on Yahoo’s new core mission - a big fat RIF - do something symbolic to refocus the Street and the heads who are left - then you still need to reclaim the very soul of Yahoo!
Here’s how to do it:
1.) REFOCUS ON CORE MISSION: Announce Yahoo! is getting back to focusing on the intersection of communications, content, and technology. This annoucement will be code that the Semel fat cat era is over.
2.) A BIG FAT RIF: Then say the company has decided to reset the clock, refocus on priorities and that you are returning the company back to 2005 staffing levels of approx. 7,500 to 8,500 employees.
Be honest: A RIF of 4,000 heads - say 30% to 40% - would send the exactly right message to the Street and to the company and force everyone to prioritize EVERYTHING they do and focus on core value delivery. Anything less will look like you guys (sorry, but this really means you Sue) don’t have the guts to lead Yahoo!
How to do this? It’s focal time at Yahoo! isn’t it? A stacked ranking will do very nicely. Cut the bottom 30% on the list. Everyone gets a pro-rated severance package. Then to show you mean business and to REALLY boost the morale of everyone at Yahoo! lead by example and also do a stacked ranking of all your SVPs and VPs and slash 50% of your top heavy ranks there too.
3.) BIG AND SYMBOLIC: Announce the ride in Santa Monica is over: Point out Yahoo! never made a dime on its $50M+ (it’s more like $75M with that Lloyd Braun 6-story office building at “The Yahoo! Center” on Colorado - isn’t it?) investment there and that it was a failed distraction away from Yahoo’s core technology-enabling mission.
Then really shut down Santa Monica YMG. First slash 30% of all underperforming heads in YMG and then move the sales and marketing team to the Burbank Overture/Yahoo Search offices. For the rest of YMG, repatriate 70% of them back to Northern California.

Then you cut all other Yahoo! divisions in Sunnyvale and in Europe too by the same 30%. Search too.
Finally, close down all the layers of fat Yahoo! took on in recent years. Kill all non-essential (that means non-profitable) properties and special projects to free up resources so the company can refocus on creating core value to shareholders. KILL KILL KILL: SF Brickhouse - Berkeley Lab - Foreign labs in Argentina and Spain and China - Yahoo! Green (LOL!) - Yahoo! 360 (CRAP!) - Yahoo! Bix (YOU PAID WHAT?) - Yahoo! Kids (liked it MUCH better as education-friendly Yahooligans!) - Yahoo! Voice - and other special pet projects! Remember how TS killed all the useless TK projects? Do that.
4.) GET YOUR SOUL BACK AND GET SOME GOODWILL FLOWING YAHOO’s WAY!
You do that by announcing that Yahoo! plans to change it’s business relationship with Alibaba in China because of concerns over human rights violations there. You do that by placing your Alibaba holdings into a blind trust monitored by an independent board of directors (hire Tom Brokaw as chairman) and that you plan to revisit the company’s committments to China on an annual basis.
Then announce you are launching a $100M cash and stock-based fund for human-rights work and that the recipients are 4 non-profits (Amnesty International - International Rescue Committee - Human Right Watch - the ICRC).
Now sit back and watch the stock price hit $40 by Q4 when Jerry exits “to spend more time with his family” given he hates being CEO anyway and Sue Decker steps up as CEO.
Mr. Spin

Hi All,

Nice to see ur all thoughts about Yahoo!, as a x-yahoo employee, believe me, work, technology, talent,facility everything is ultimate in yahoo, I think the plan is to layoff highly paid employees (mgmt) from SV and they will hire some good talent from Asia. Yahoo can easily hire 3-4 employees in the salary of 1 in SV.

Hi All,

Is is good to join Yahoo Bangalore (India). How much they pay for a software engineer of 3-4 yrs experience. I want to know an approximate value only. I request you to please advice me. Will there be any layoff for Yahoo Bangalore. Please do reply me in jarc1981@gmail.com if you want to share any personal feeling. Also I request Kulkarni the reason for leaving Yahoo.

Thanks & regards
Jitendra.

as far as I know , yahoo bangalore needs more people , forget about any lay off ….

TCS is quite soft as compared to Yahoo that is laying off 1000 workers. Azim Premji should transform Wipro into a Product Company like Microsoft.

India’s labour arbitrage will gradually lessen; as Outsourcing means cutting costs primarily and quality of talent is secondary.