I heard several orgs were hit yesterday. I don't know much more, but if anybody can tell us if it'll continue today, please do.
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Welcome to life under private equity. Endless squeezes, cuts and demands to do more with less… and little to no reward for those who survive the endless layoffs, pay cuts, and closures.
Many problems have come up since the CEO, Jim Lanzone, instituted a new GM model at Yahoo, effectively forcing all verticals at the company to compete against each other for limited resources and all looking to make their pet projects the highest demand as they seek "easy wins" and "low hanging fruit".
Executives have begun hiring former journalists and editors to run the product and engineering teams, particularly from the Washington Post. Leadership with a background in journalism is poorly equipped to understand the intricacies of product or engineering, and have done a very poor job of communicating, building structured project plans or engineering documents. As a result, they fall back on what they know, which is pushing for radically progressive news coverage, which directly positions the company against the very large moderate and conservative readership base (all polling shows that Yahoo readership is traditionally evenly grouped amongst liberal, neutral and conservative readers).
As a result of their limited skillset, these former journalists and editors have become frustrated with the engineering team's abilities to meet their requests, particularly when they have made everything a high priority, becoming angry when deadlines are not able to be met.
The engineering ethos that Yahoo was founded on and separated the company from other news producers/aggregators has been steadily eroded. It's very much as if the most mediocre talent that had no future at the Washington Post have invaded the company and brought their worst characteristics with them as they have a preference for hiring their former colleagues into positions of leadership.
Layoffs were issued for no rhyme or reason and zero warning in advance. Managers were not consulted; only notified at the last minute. Company had previously suspended structured quarterly and annual performance reviews that enabled management to provide staff with feedback on what they're doing well and what areas need improvement, so individual performance was not a metric used in the decision to target certain staff for layoffs. Most of those impacted were older and had been with the company a long time, wreaking of targeted agism.
Leadership was heavily criticized for their decisions during a town hall to address and how poorly they are communicating with the staff.Leadership did not directly any questions asked about the layoffs and instead stuck to the message about the importance of adhering to Spotify's "Squad" model. Leadership criticized staff for not doing enough to align with the "Squad" model, which was implemented less than a quarter ago.
Staff have all complained that Spotify's "Squad" model is ill conceived, doesn't work in reality, creates too many meetings and unnecessary work, confuses prioritization and responsibilities, and doesn't work with the current engineering infrastructure of the company.
In private discussions, all staff have indicated that they have lost trust in senior leadership. Junior engineers are now saying that they don't believe there is a future for their career in the company and will be quietly looking elsewhere for employment.
Resource wise, this is a heavy blow to an already heavily overloaded engineering force and their ability to satisfy any of the aggressive timelines set for cloud migration and ongoing feature development.
Nothing so far.