Yahoo may be a 21st century technology company but....

their HR practices are stuck in the mid 20th century.

TechCrunch ran a copy of the email that President Jerry Yang sent out to his employees today.  Yahoo's problems are well known as they have basically become today's Visicorp getting the crap pounded out of them by Google just as newcomer Lotus did to the pioneer of spreadsheet technology, Visicorp, 25 years ago.  I know-I was in the Visicorp camp, not as an employee but as one of their distributors.  Reality sometimes sucks.

Notice this line from the memo Yang sent to all "yahoos" (odd that he doesn't call them "yahooers"-or maybe it's not.)

"because compensation expenses are the single largest part of our costs, we anticipate a reduction of at least 10% of our global workforce by year-end."

This also reminds me of what happened at Sperry when Burroughs bought them out in the late 1986 and the merged company that is now Unisys was formed.  A  similar announcement was made to the employees of both companies and the resulting loss of productivity and lost business was epic.  I was a Sperry employee and while I was reasonably certain I was safe, I immediately started sending out resumes and participating in the daily gossip about what was going to happen to everyone.  To say that it was a time of uncertainty and frustration for both employees and customers, is an understatement.  Until I knew I was safe, my heart wasn't in my job and even after the dust settled, like many others, I was pissed about how it was handled and eventually moved on.

I imagine the same thing is now taking place within the ranks of Yahoo as what everyone was anticipating has now become a reality.  The right thing to do would be to start the layoffs immediately so that those who will survive can get back to being productive because there is no way that anyone is working at full capacity right now.  Given today's economic environment, I would imagine that most "yahoos" don't relish the thought of entering the job market right now.

Yahoo's story seems to become grimmer every day and Jerry Yang has done no one any favors by delaying the layoffs.  It's not like Yahoo's execs didn't know this was coming.  They could have done their due diligence in advance about who had to go.  Perhaps they already have and are just hoping for a voluntary exodus which means the severance packages won't be as high, but given today's economy, I would imagine that a lot of folks at Yahoo are hoping for a decent package if they are in the 10% slated for the ax (which I think is an optimistic number.)

Good luck to those affected and good luck to Yahoo surviving this.  The last thing the industry wants or needs is Yahoo's total collapse.