What Jerry Yang's really slashing: Yahoo salaries
Is Yahoo cutting 3,000 jobs? 3,500 jobs? 1,500 jobs? Fifteen percent of its operating budgets? We're going with "none of the above." What Yahoo management is really tackling are Yahoo's out-of-control salaries and titles. Yahoo, an insider tells us, has relatively narrow pay bands for specific job titles. That means the best way to keep someone getting wooed by Google or a startup is to promote them. During the Microsoft takeover battle, Yahoo liberally tossed around raises to keep people, a source who tried to recruit people away from yahoo tells us. Add to that Yahoo's epic turnover, which has led to many battlefield promotions. The result: Yahoo has VPs who ought to be directors, directors who ought to be managers, and managers who shouldn't be, period. So what's the answer? A "hard reset," our source tells us — a massive bloodletting that will purge Yahoo of the overpaid and overtitled.