The Biz of Coding

Bloodbath at Yahoo! Sr Folks Laid-Off or Jump Ship

by Ujwal Tickoo on February 13th, 2008

Its Bloodbath in the truest sense that I have ever seen for a company in turmoil. Yahoo!'s layoff is painting horror stories on the Blogosphere. The twitters from laid-off employees are dark, sad, sickening. Some read:

"Signing off from Yahoo! Fade to black…"

"I'm going dark in a few minutes. The HR guy is on his way over to confiscate my laptop."

"Lots of whispered conversations. Like people are afraid to ask who's gone."

"Taking my last walk through URLs. (cafeteria in Sunnyvale). Remember that time we sat in that booth to review ad yields? That was great…"

"Ironic that I just got my PC repaired yesterday. Won't be needing that anymore."

• Bradley Horowitz VP Products, very visible guy, – jumped ship to Google.
• Jeff Bonforte, VP of Social Search including Y! Answers and a successful entraprenuer — given the pink slip
• Susan Mernit, regular blogger, Director of Products — given pink slip…

I happened to meet a few of these folks, shaken hands with some, been in meetings with some….Sigh….Guys feel sad for you all and pray that things go well. But for the wasteful reign of an overpaid ex-CEO, things could have been different. Who is paying for someone elses mistakes? Is there justice? I will always wonder.

And what will Microsoft get after these layoffs and the people who leave out of insecurity or just frustration?

P.S.: Salim Ismail, who was head of Yahoo!'s Brickhouse — a separate group for innovation — also left. ValleyWag is happy. Folks at Salim's blog are sad and completely in disagreement with the folks at ValleyWag who don't seem to like him — quite on record.

P.P.S: Technorati has a list of over 2000 blogs tracking Yahoo! layoffs

P.P.P.S.  Ben Metcalf leaves a message saying MySpace is hiring

POSTED IN: Yahoo