Matt McGee posted on the Yahoo layoffs, happening today. Here’s Jerry Yang’s fairly standard-issue post as well.
I know some people at Yahoo and don’t know whether/how many are being laid off. Sometimes misfortune in the near term turns out to be a blessing over the long term.
Stepping back from the human part of all this, which is sad, an aspect of this that’s really fascinating is the way in which it’s being broadcast “live” by people on Twitter. Silicon Alley Insider has a bunch of Twitter posts from those being laid off and those staying:
Silicon Valley companies are perhaps uniquely susceptible to this sort of thing, but it occurs to me that no corporation is ever going to be able to have the same sort of “top-down” control over information that once existed.
Screenwerk 
December 10, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Never been a big user of twitter, what am I missing out on??
December 10, 2008 at 9:22 pm
I don’t use it either but there are some very interesting things about it.
December 11, 2008 at 6:08 am
It almost seems like the flurry of layoffs in silicon valley and beyond is do to a mindset more than reality, or maybe the mindset is becoming a reality. I’m just saying that they layoffs followed the media to closely, how is it that all of a sudden as soon as the stock markets plummeted that all us startups and large companies alike need to cut expenses and lay people off, even though we’re not immediately effected by a stock market drop (at least us private companies). Are we just lemmings. I for one haven’t layed anyone off yet but I feel this enormous pressure to do so.
December 11, 2008 at 1:02 pm
The stock market is more about psychology than anything else. And public companies need to lay people off and/or otherwise show markets they’re addressing issues when their shares start to go down.
For startups there’s a memory of 2001 and a fear of running out of cash so many of those layoffs are “preemptive” rather than a necessary reaction. But to some degree all the fear and the “herd mentality” has created the reality that these companies feared would happen.
One thing that’s very real, however, is the credit crisis and the lack of money from banks.
December 11, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Agree, seems like certain cos are using the economy as a big get-out-of-jail-free card with respect to downsizing, though the need to downsize is often due to no underlying rev model.
I guess it’s hard to fault any co that says the “the depressed economy is worse than we expected”. Ironic that many of these cos have have no rev model anyway.
December 11, 2008 at 1:19 pm
The recession should bring back some discipline in that area.