Posted on 02/01/2016 11:38:01 AM PST by Citizen Zed
In a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, Gregory Anderson, an editor who oversaw Yahoo's autos, homes, shopping, small business and travel sites in Sunnyvale, Calif., until he was fired in November 2014, alleges that the company's senior managers routinely manipulated the rating system to fire hundreds of people without just cause to achieve the company's financial goals.
Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE
Yahoo's Brain Drain Shows a Loss of Faith Inside the CompanyJAN. 10, 2016 Bits Blog: Yahoo Shuts Down Its Video PortalJAN. 4, 2016 DealBook: Diagnosing Yahoo's Ills: Ugly Math in Marissa Mayer's ReignDEC. 14, 2015 Mr. Anderson said the cuts, including what his boss said was the firing of about 600 other low-performing Yahoo employees at the time of his termination, amounted to illegal mass layoffs.
Under California law, the layoff of more than 50 employees within 30 days at a single location like Yahoo's Sunnyvale headquarters requires an employer to give workers 60 days of advance notice. A similar federal law, known as the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires advance notice for a layoff of 500 or more employees.
Yahoo has never provided such notices. But it did cut 1,100 employees over a period of months in late 2014 and early 2015, ostensibly for performance reasons.
Violations of either law can lead to penalties of $500 per employee plus back pay for each day of advance notice the company failed to provide.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Is that racist? Black mark.
manipulated the rating system to fire hundreds of people without just cause to achieve the company’s financial goals.
I don’t care how liberal a company culture is, the “ratings system” that they all follow is whether a division or product is making money. If it isn’t the people who work there get fired. So this sounds like BS to me.
:: If you gotta fire people, you gotta fire people ::
Because, that is THE ONLY WAY a company can meet it’s quarterly financial goals...
the ONLY way!
I have mixed emotions on this...
Some schadenfreude that liberal Yahoo is getting strung up by its own petards... but saddened that the free market is further getting eroded by how a company can hire and fire its employees.
It won’t be long before we’ll be using Chinese or Russian search engines. Who the hell wants to do business here anymore.
So I am guessing he has been unable to find a new job.
Ya making a product that people want is so passe.
You don’t get to decide. It may have made more sense to cull the deadwood than dispose of assets.
” but saddened that the free market is further getting eroded by how a company can hire and fire its employees.”
The free market gets eroded when companies are told who they can hire or fire.
It seems fair to me that a company with executives that supported all that labor law expansion (as well as other "democratic" causes) on the backs of everyone else should be hoist by their own petard. People who think that business should be in bed with the government should have a chance to enjoy all the benefits of the same.
Do you really want to root against Yahoo and Marissa Meyer receiving their justly deserved comeuppance? Especially after all the dirty double dealing?
You could say red mark instead of black mark ... whoops, Indians offended ... green mark? the Irish; blue mark, the depressed, white mark, who could read it? yellow mark? I dare you.
Hey smart asses ~ if you had any idea what “the ranking system” being disputed actually is, you wouldn’t be so damn snarky.
Recently used at CSC worldwide, (and probably will continue ) this system demands that managers rank percentages so you have to rate people unequally, and unfairly despite performances or contributions.
Those rankings get chucked up the ladder and your people lose even more ranking based on the office game of “Playing Favorites”.
It’s like Russian Roulette with a guillotine, but management pulls the trigger while looking the victims right in the eye.
Side note: Yes, the same CSC that required 800 taxpayer billed hours to put a single checkbox on one page of an outdated website.
The stickler is that they were firing people for “poor performance” when in reality the company was trying to avoid WARN requirements.
Some/many staff that lost their jobs were probably not poor performers, but now they have that in their minds.
Sounds like the guy was a deadbeat...trotting off to college in the middle of his career.
You obviously do not know how ratings systems were developed or how they were used. In short, ratings systems were designed as zero sum games. On a scale of 1-5 (1 being best), you had to have an equal number of 1’s and 5’s, and an equal number of 2’s and 4’s. Then, once a year, regardless of unit profitability all 5’s get fired.
This year’s 4’s are on notice that they are now at the bottom of the pile, and may very well be next year’s 5’s. New hires get sprinkled in, and you do it all over again.
This type of rating system leads to a dysfunctional company because employees sabotage one another to make sure that their peers get lower evaluations than them. It is referred to often times as “stack ranking”, and by now most MBA programs point out the fallacy of the system and most companies are moving away from it.
:: You don’t get to decide ::
Precisely!
That’s why we have Harvard/Yale/Princeton accounts and FiMans who get taught a single remedy; remove “wet” assets, keep the hard and dry.
:: You don’t get to decide ::
Precisely!
That’s why we have Harvard/Yale/Princeton accounts and FiMans who get taught a single remedy; remove “wet” assets, keep the hard and dry.
But, then, I repeat myself!
:-)
Heh.
bump
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