14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo is confirming the latest round of layoffs at the company. While the number of people being let go is actually a bit smaller than anticipated, it's still a big round. Yahoo says about 4 percent of the company's staff, roughly 600 people based on the latest employee numbers from Yahoo itself.
Apparently, Yahoo is being rather generous at times with its severance packages, but with so many people being let go, there have been some disgruntled employees.
In fact, it looks like one took justice into his or her hands and played a rather damaging prank on their former employer, diverting all image search results, in the main web search page, to a very graphic adult photo for a period of time.
While the layoffs have been rumored for more than a month, they're becoming a reality as the ones being let go have been handed their pink slips and, in some cases, their compensation packages.
"Today’s personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! for revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products to the marketplace. We’ll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities," Yahoo said in a statement.
"Yahoo! is grateful for the important contributions made by the employees affected by this reduction. We are offering severance packages and outplacement services to these employees," it added.
The layoffs are focused on the product team, but affect all areas of Yahoo and subsidiaries like Flickr. The company had a little over 14,000 employees at the end of September 2010.
There doesn't seem to be a job problem in Silicon Valley at the moment, if anything, companies are fighting over engineers, but 600 people are not going to find work so easily.
This is the second big cut since Yahoo began its restructuring about two years ago. It cut about five percent of its staff from the get go but later hired more people. It's now having a second big wave, but the company says it will continue to hire people in the areas it's focusing on.