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Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

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Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#121
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance are quality products.

Yahoo Sports was a quality product,until the redesign that I understand Mayer micromanaged. Now I find it unusable and I find myself going to nfl.com, mlb.com, or ESPN instead.

It must be terrible if you are going to ESPN.com instead. I can't stand going there any more since they redesigned the site earlier this year.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#122
post #60

One of the most visible signs of Yahoo's weakness was its strategy to hire big media stars...I'm aware that Yahoo News brings in a godly amount of pageviews to articles on its site...but that hasn't translated to giving a more noticeable platform for its media stars. Since Yahoo hired Katie Couric, who was once a huge star on network news, the most I've seen her name in the wild is in Reddit ads promoting her intervi…

Another typical sign of its current problems, perhaps an involuntary display of a state of denial, is the ad campaign they are running all over the bay area, with just their logo, no message, nothing.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#123

"another worried about the ability of managers to stanch the flow of valued employees." That is the problem right there: shitty managers at Yahoo. I spent a few years there, and despite being in the industry for many years, I've yet to find a more dysfunctional setup. Managers have absolutely zero accountability at Yahoo. In any other place, if engineers start leaving a manager, it would be cause for concern; if too…

> And the tech stack?!? Don't even get me started.

To me, technical mediocrity at yahoo is the number one problem.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#124
post #99

I'm curious: how bad is it to leave a new job soon after starting (because you realize the product isn't as great as what you thought it would be/too much competition in space)? When you are a high performer, you really don't want to waste everyone's time if you end up in this bad situation. What is the professional thing to do? Asking because the article mentioned some people staying only for a few weeks. In a small…

I'd say it depends on why. My personal experience is a cto totally lied about a job. I was hired to do ml and ended up being a generic backend dev; nothing I worked on required any ml knowledge. I quit after 8 weeks. Oddly enough, the cto -- an early google engineer too -- was very butthurt. He told me I was childish for expecting the job description to match the job; I told him he was a liar and that was the end of…

I used to work for a guy who would advertise a ML/data science job and then tried to convince applicants who made it thru the pipe to take a software engineering role instead.

Didn't get a lot of hires that way.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#125
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it? Either way, you're right about needing to open it back up. The impact to morale overall must have been huge when these people had to scramble to protect their livelihood.

> What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it? VPN usage statistics. We have to take Y!'s word for it, but most news stories about the policy change say that Mayer looked at usage statistics to find that many work-from-home employees were working less than full time. I can't find a cite right now, but I thought I read that several employees would go weeks without logging in once.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-marissa-mayer-figured-out...

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#126
post #17

I'm curious: how bad is it to leave a new job soon after starting (because you realize the product isn't as great as what you thought it would be/too much competition in space)? When you are a high performer, you really don't want to waste everyone's time if you end up in this bad situation. What is the professional thing to do? Asking because the article mentioned some people staying only for a few weeks. In a small…

It only really matters in the eyes of potential future employers, so consider how it looks to them. Having done interviews and resume screening myself, I wouldn't balk too hard at one quick departure, but I would want to hear a good explanation for why you left so soon. The job and/or company being very clearly something different from what you were told would be a good one. Multiple quick departures in a row are kin…

I have two quick departures (4 months and 5 months respectively) on my resume and it has caused me a lot of problems. In both cases, the companies that I joined pulled unbelievable bait-and-switches on me, and my job was essentially unrelated to the job they described during the hiring process. I tried to stick it out in each case, and I even received excellent performance reviews during both short stints, but the burnout and the effect on my mental health of suffering through such egregious bait-and-switch situations was too much and in both cases I couldn't sustain working any longer and so I quit.

I want to find a place to work for a long time, but the quality of software work these days is laughably poor. There are so many ways a job can be bad -- not just normal bad, where you grind it out for 40 hours (I've done plenty of that too and lasted long stints at previous employers), but really, seriously soul-crushingly bad -- that it has made me considerably more paranoid about the motivations and red flags that employers reveal during interviews and hiring.

In general though, most people are willing to at least ask me to explain my unusual resume, and any time my technical skills are evaluated early on, they can see that I know what I am talking about and it goes OK after that.

I'm not sure what lessons this has taught me. Everyone says not to quit a bad job until you know for sure that you have another job lined up. But even though I've quit two jobs in a row and had to live through very hard circumstances and very long, demoralizing spells of unemployment, I still don't actually think my overall life would have been better if I had continued to allow myself to be so egregiously mistreated in those past jobs. I still think the awful grinding-out-the-unemployment stuff has been at least an order of magnitude better than enduring mistreatment, even though it hasn't been good.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#127
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it depends on why. My personal experience is a cto totally lied about a job. I was hired to do ml and ended up being a generic backend dev; nothing I worked on required any ml knowledge. I quit after 8 weeks. Oddly enough, the cto -- an early google engineer too -- was very butthurt. He told me I was childish for expecting the job description to match the job; I told him he was a liar and that was the end of…

I used to work for a guy who would advertise a ML/data science job and then tried to convince applicants who made it thru the pipe to take a software engineering role instead. Didn't get a lot of hires that way.

weird, eh? Must be an Engineering Shortage!

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the tech stack...

Primarily Yahoo Pipes with a PHP and COBOL backend. All stored in Microsoft SourceSafe, if the project you're working on is even using a VCS.

> Microsoft SourceSafe

is that still a nightmare to work with remotely?

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the tech stack...

Primarily Yahoo Pipes with a PHP and COBOL backend. All stored in Microsoft SourceSafe, if the project you're working on is even using a VCS.

I don't know if you're serious.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primarily Yahoo Pipes with a PHP and COBOL backend. All stored in Microsoft SourceSafe, if the project you're working on is even using a VCS.

I don't know if you're serious.

He is bad at joking. E.g. Where do you think Hadoop comes from?
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