I also have to pay my gas and electric bill. I got paid yesterday ($733.24, bi-weekly) but I have to save as much of that as possible to pay my rent ($1245) for my apartment that’s 30 miles away from work because it was the cheapest place I could find that had access to the train, which costs me $5.65 one way to get to work. I just got a text from T-Mobile telling me my bill is due. The essay was addressed to Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s co-founder and CEO: On Friday night, Talia Jane, a employee at the customer support section of Yelp and the delivery site Eat24, published an essay on Medium explaining how little she was paid, and how she couldn’t afford to buy groceries or heat her apartment on her $8.15 an hour salary. I didn't even get to the food.When you can’t force your employees to starve for your company, the next-best thing is to leave them jobless, apparently. I was on a trip in Aspen, and I just gave a one-star review to this French restaurant. (Yelp hasn't released it's a breakdown on the diversity of its workforce of about 2,000 people, but Stoppelman says the company eventually will).Ī: I do. So the most impactful thing is to work on math education and then hopefully try to steer more young people toward computer science. They have been trying to address it somewhat, but there is a bit of a limitation of what you can do because fundamentally you know if women aren't entering into software engineering programs in great numbers, there's not going to be great numbers working at Google or Yelp or any tech company. If you want women and minorities to succeed all the way at the end of the funnel in a tech job, you have to increase the numbers starting at the top of the funnel, at the earliest age, and then make sure they stay in the funnel and get all the way through.Ĭertainly, tech companies should feel bad about it, and all the tech companies have been aware of this problem. The funnel begins in high school, really, or even earlier maybe. Q: Where do you stand on another hot-button topic: the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley?Ī: If we are focusing on technology jobs, meaning software engineering jobs primarily, by the time you are talking about a company, you are talking about the end of the funnel. As rents go up, it hurts people here, too. If you look at it, we are just like every other company. The reality is the vast majority of our employees are making anywhere from, you know, like $40,000 to $100,000. The other misperception is that everyone working in tech is a millionaire living in luxury condos and there is nothing left for anyone else. What do you think about the backlash against technology's impact on the city in terms of real estate prices?Ī: Most cities would be falling over themselves to have the problems we have right now, which is like: "Oh my, we have too many jobs and people's compensation keeps going up, so therefore people can afford to pay more to obtain housing." It's not to say that we don't have very serious problems, but a lot of them are completely self-inflicted, which I find incredibly frustrating. For someone like me, who had spent a lot of time trying to build cool technology products, it was literally like talking to a god. Toward the end of our conversation, I had to go into complete `fan boy' mode. He felt that Yelp was a great company and wouldn't be a great company if it fell in the hands of Google. (Jobs had accused Google of stealing ideas from Apple's iPhone to build Android, a rival operating system for mobile devices). Q: You got a call from Steve Jobs during this process, right?Ī: He was very anti-Google, as it turns out. As it became more of an auction process where it felt like there was blood in the water and the sharks were attacking, it just felt like it wasn't going to end up with Yelp in a good spot. Yelp is my baby, so I wanted it to be in a place where it was going to thrive.
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