In this post we’re discussing technical leadership, a topic that is paramount to any engineering organization, but is also hard to define. Even observing whether your team, organization,… Read more
About 5 years after joining Yelp, I was managing several teams in our Hamburg, Germany office and asked my manager, a director at the time, what were the expectations for an engineering manager versus a director. While the conversation was helpful to me at that moment, the gist was basically “we haven’t written that down.”… Read more
Like most companies, Yelp has had to make substantial changes to the way we onboard new team members over the past year. Yelpers have always been naturally good at fostering a welcoming and supportive atmosphere for new employees. Translating this into a welcoming and supportive virtual atmosphere hasn’t happened organically. As we grow distributed teams… Read more
Over the last year, we learned that we can operate successfully as a distributed remote workforce, which we attribute to the tenacity of Yelp employees. While we plan to continue to operate as a distributed workforce when we return to the office, we know that some employees are looking forward to having flexible access to… Read more
For years, Yelp continued to use an interview process that was created when we were a 50-200 person Engineering organization, with only a handful of interviewers: Each interviewer wrote their own interview questions A few senior leaders gave overall hire/no hire decisions for every panel Interviewers received ad hoc feedback from senior leaders when it… Read more
Every year, we celebrate Women’s History Month at Yelp during the month of March. This year, in addition to highlighting women-owned businesses and organizing our first ever Women in Business Summit, we also celebrated by highlighting some of the women at Yelp, their career journeys and successes, as well as advice that they have to… Read more
Compared to where we started, Yelp’s technical organization has made a lot of headway over the years when it comes to diverse hiring. While our approach to this work continues to evolve, we’ve made significant progress in improving the diversity of our organizations by, among other things, reducing gender and ethnicity bias in our interview… Read more
Women continue to find ways to break barriers and lift each other up. This Women’s History Month we wanted to highlight women that have created their own paths and have a passion for sharing their knowledge with others. We had the pleasure of kicking off this year’s celebration with Crystal Henrickson, a certified career and… Read more
I considered writing this as a clickbaity listicle: “7 secrets of engineering team management – you won’t believe number three!” Unfortunately that’s impossible, because it’s a much harder topic, and anyway, number three is: “many years of ongoing investment in building the right team culture, making a lot of mistakes, and learning from them.” Less… Read more
The fast transition to working from home in March of 2020 wasn’t an easy one – from procuring thousands of laptops for our sales force and additional equipment for the rest of our employees, to learning how to work across teams remotely. Following the initial scramble during those first few weeks, our employees worked hard… Read more
A career in sales can be a challenging, yet rewarding one. To be successful in sales, it’s important to recognize that there will be hurdles to overcome, and you will need to be ready to overcome them. That’s why the Yelp Sales organization has developed a rigorous training program (called the Yelp Sales Development Program)… Read more