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Darren Waters

Twittering a Yahoo exit

  • Darren Waters
  • 13 Feb 08, 08:17 GMT

Blogging about your departure from a job isn't new. But real time updates of your final hours via may well be.

is one of the unfortunate 1,000 staff who lost their jobs at Yahoo this week.

He started his chronicle with:

Y! layoffs today, I'm "impacted". I'm heading into work to pack my desk, get my severance paperwork and hand in my badge...more to come.

And from there he gave an hourly detail of his parting from the company, with plenty of humour and pathos along the way, as well as lots of musings about the end of free lattes.

On the plus side, my commute just got a lot shorter.

This is a serious downer. Trying to drown it in free lattes. Which I will miss.
Dammit. I was hoping to hook up the free Flickr Pro account before I got canned. Major fail.
Lots of whispered conversations. Like people are afraid to ask who's gone.
I'm going dark in a few minutes. The HR guy is on his way over to confiscate my laptop.

Ryan hasn't got anything else lined up - and it seems strange that Yahoo is laying off people before the Microsoft deal has completely played out, especially when MS is hiring, not firing people.

But good luck to Ryan and thanks for the Tweets.

Comments

  • 1.
  • At 11:16 AM on 13 Feb 2008,
  • Richard Ambrose wrote:

Doesn't sound like Ryan was the world's most essential employee. It seems like he was largely there to reap freebies.

  • 2.
  • At 11:54 AM on 13 Feb 2008,
  • me wrote:

Pointless blog from Ryan methinks!

  • 3.
  • At 12:56 PM on 13 Feb 2008,
  • Mike Bailey wrote:

I bet Ryan would be a lot more meaningful on performance-related pay. If I had that kind of an attitude as a translator, I'd never get anywhere - or make any money!

That's the only time I've EVER looked at a twitter page and been interested in what's written. First (and probably) last time for everything I suppose.

I think it's a little unfair to surmise the gentleman's work habits and motivation from reading a few tweets. The fact he neglected to upgrade his Flickr account may very well point to the possibility that he was too busy to do so. I wish him the best and hate to see folks get laid off.

This reminds me of the Clinton years when the dot coms crashed because they were essentially paper tigers. Wouldn't it be great if brilliant folks from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc... were employed to write code and solve complex problems in our manufacturing base. The result could be creating high-tech factories in industrialized countries like the US and the UK. Instead, we worry about search engines and pointless other sites.

  • 6.
  • At 04:54 PM on 13 Feb 2008,
  • gladhand wrote:

Its always the same in these situations. The corporate suits set the short term agenda, whilst the worker bees pay the price. In this instance because Ryan chose to 'twitter' away his last hours; whilst completing his packing, tying up loose ends and completing the last day admin, i.e. the mound of HR Paperwork; doesn't make him a bad person or a poor quality worker. In my experience the workers who are let go are usually mid stream performers on higher stream packages. Hence they get blown away. After all the object for yahoo suits is to reduce costs.

Wouldn't it be a blast if Ryan got picked up by Microsoft, MIcrosoft then do the deal and take over Yahoo, and in about a year Ryan ends up back at Yahoo (now Microhoo) in charge of the HR suit that let him go and his own boss who nominated him for 'impact'.

Keep ur spirits up Ryan!!

  • 7.
  • At 06:49 PM on 15 Feb 2008,
  • Hubert Pereira wrote:

Cool @gladhand ... that would be cool, just for Ryans sake...

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