Yahoo Workers Expecting Layoffs

Things that are going on at Yahoo are getting very strange, and the workers, who have already endured round after round of layoffs. For those of your who missed our earlier coverage here is a look at how the situation that the workers at Yahoo had to endure before the most recent change in management:

“Over 650 workers face an impending lay off as the Yahoo Inc., a California-based worldwide web portal, plans to slash its workforce to reduce costs and increase profits. Reports said that around 5% of its staff would be eliminated soon, which is equivalent to 650 employees, from the product units of the multinational company. Yahoo had about 14,100 employees as of October.

In earlier months, Yahoo’s chief executive Carol A. Bartz announced that Yahoo is currently devising ways to cut its costs since the company has been suffering from slow growth in the online advertising business over the past few years, which has been blamed on excessive bureaucracy and lack of innovation in the company. This statement has spun a lot of industry rumors that Yahoo Inc. will soon lay off some of its employees. However, no exact number of employees or any concrete plans have been released as of today.”

While the company has gotten rid of about a CEO a year for the last five years, and many of them came complete with rounds of layoffs in order to cut down on the overhead of the company, many people are wondering how many job losses will come with the addition of Chief Executive Scott Thompson to the team.

A reporter for FINS Technology had a chat with a current employee of Yahoo who wished not to be identified, he said the following, “Everyone at Yahoo suspects there will be layoffs, but nobody really knows to what extent and when. They’ve probably held off [on layoffs], waiting for a new CEO. It’s hard to see the company growing from an employee base perspective,” The unnamed employee also took a chance to point out that the new CEO did not have, “a stronger or more obvious media background.”

Other employees have said other negative things about their relationship with the company, one employee told the same reporter that, “Employees go to the media to find out what’s going on with the company internally. Complete transparency and honesty may be able to change people’s mindsets, and rather than going out and pulling up Web pages to see what’s going on, [they’ll] just go ahead and focus on what they need to do.”

He also went on to say that he stays with the company because he lives in hope that things will get better, using an analogy that working with his company is like watching a bad movie. “The movie’s gotten really bad and you think, ‘This movie has got to get good at some point. You’re already invested, you’re already sitting there, and you want to see what the ending is.”

As you can imagine these sentiments are not what an incoming CEO wants to deal with, but with the way that the company was mismanaged it is not surprising.