In our last post we talked about technical leadership, one of the growth paths available to software engineers at Yelp. In this post we’d like to share more about engineering management, which is another path that some software engineers choose after some time in the industry. We’ll start with an explanation of what engineering management is (and isn’t), discuss our approach to management, and talk about what makes it different from engineering. We’ll also discuss how people get started on a management path at Yelp, and what we do to help our management team grow in their roles. What’s an...

Continue reading

Hi there! 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, or company has good technical leadership can be a challenge. You might be thinking right now, “Am I a good technical leader?” To help describe how Yelp thinks about technical leadership, we have two of our Group Tech Leads (a.k.a. GTL, more on what this is later) writing this post. They are both seasoned Yelpers who have held a number of technical leadership roles — they were even willing test...

Continue reading

On the Yelp app and website, there are many occasions where we need to show detailed business information. We refer to this process as Data Hydration, filling out a “dry” business with compelling, rich data. Whether on the home screen, search results page or business details page, there is a large set of properties we may show about any given business, everything from name and address to photos, Verified Licenses, insights, and more. These properties are stored in a variety of different databases, and their display is subject to a significant amount of filtering and transformation logic. All of this...

Continue reading

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.” As you can imagine, it’s hard to know both where you stand and how to grow if that’s not captured anywhere for you to read. Where we started For many years, the career track for engineers at Yelp was not documented. People still advanced in...

Continue reading

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 across the United States, Canada, and Europe, the new ways in which we prepare, welcome, train, and support our employees have become, and will continue to be, important for the advancement of Yelp’s Engineering & Product organizations. Going into 2020, we knew we were already...

Continue reading

The trust of our community of consumers and business owners is Yelp’s top priority. We take significant measures to maintain this trust through our state of the art review recommendation algorithms in order to maintain the integrity and quality of the content on our site. Albeit popular, review text is only one of the many types of user-generated content at Yelp. Photos are also a key piece of content and they are increasingly becoming an attack vector for spammers and inappropriate or other unwanted behavior. In this blog post we show how we built a scalable photo moderation workflow leveraging...

Continue reading

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 seemed like they were too tough or too easy in their interviews A few things went well: there was a strong sense of personal responsibility for both leaders and interviewers turnaround time for offer approvals was quick and Yelp values could be preserved by senior...

Continue reading

From its devastating toll on local economies to its impact on the little things like handshakes and hugs, the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to leave nothing unchanged. Local businesses were especially impacted and forced to make big changes, many overhauling their operations overnight in order to adapt to the new normal. Businesses turned to Yelp to communicate operational changes brought on by the pandemic. They kept their communities in the know by updating the COVID-19 section on their business pages, which was launched at the beginning of the pandemic. They indicated new health and safety precautions, such as wearing masks and...

Continue reading