Yahoo! Under Fire After Laying Off High Ranking Flickr Staff

Here’s some news that Yahoo! may have wanted to keep quiet: a software developer and ex-Flickr worker Nolan Caudill has revealed on his blog on Monday that the company had let go of a number of customer service personnel in Flickr. Caudill writes, “For reasons I don’t know, Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr’s customer support, the people that end up filing bugs against the developers and helping the trickier cases get solved for the members. Those guys getting shown the door is as bad as it sounds.”

Caudill obviously feels for these employees on a personal level as he says he knew many of them, but in business terms, he sees the axing of these people by Yahoo! as being a bad call for users, saying that the work those people did was pretty invaluable: “Having people on your team aware of everything the site does is huge. You literally can’t buy that or replace it or outsource it, though it appears that Yahoo thinks it can.”

Unsurprisingly, there’s no mention of these job losses on Flickr’s homepage or blog, and they continue to advertise jobs on their site, and it’s unlikely that Yahoo! envisioned this story getting out and getting such coverage.

This move by Yahoo! is the latest addition to the media and technology company’s list of woes, and will no doubt cause further worry for Flickr users over the direction that the platform is taking under Yahoo’s control, given that Yahoo has cut products in the past. Just over a year ago, Flickr deleted 4,000 of a user’s photos and lost its head of services, Matthew Rothenberg, back in March 2011.

Yahoo’s new CEO took over just a few weeks ago, following the September axing of Carol Bartz, and they continue to work on new products – Flickr users will no doubt be hoping that their position in the Yahoo! group is safe.  Yahoo’s decision to cut Flickr staff illustrates the pitfalls that can lie ahead for successful start-ups that are purchased by big international companies, and just goes to show how the tech industry faces the same challenges that traditional businesses do in terms of takeovers and expansion.