The impact to the eastside, specifically Bellevue should be interesting to see. According to John Cook’s venture blog there is only one opening in the Bellevue area for a software engineer. As Yahoo looses, and the turn over in the senior executive levels keeps on going, the future for Yahoo is undecided at best.

Yahoo declined to comment specifically on any plan for layoffs. In an e-mail statement, a company spokeswoman, Diana Wong, said: “Yahoo plans to invest in some areas, reduce emphasis in others, and eliminate some areas of the business that don’t support the company’s priorities. Yahoo continues to attract and hire talent against the company’s key initiatives to create long-term stockholder value.” Source: NY Times

Yahoo layoffs are expected, this is something that as yahoo tries to find a direction to go in that is profitable, any direction, layoffs are always the easiest way to save money quickly.

In the longer run, and this has been a subject of some debate, how many of these people will ever go back into technology?

The influences of layoffs on people with solid technical skills, and then going to do something else because of the boom/bust cycle in technology has to be weighing in on people’s future plans. It is very hard to build a career around technology when it is quickly becoming a commodity. The worry? That as we go deeper into HaaS, SaaS, cloud computing, and a host of other changes in the industry, the move that Yahoo makes in shutting things down will have a major influence on people choosing a technology career.