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What Happened to Yahoo

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#251

Post by ivenkys »

ntoshev wrote: post #236
ivenkys wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - he did cancel the Billion Dollar contract but not because I.T suddenly became a core competency. Non-front office facing I.T is being pushed to cheaper locations - primarily to Scotland and Southampton in the UK and is not considered a Core Competency , its outsourcing in a different form , its called IN-Sourcing. The primary reason for the cancellation of the contract was the sheer amount of beauracracy IBM im…

Are there hedge funds or investment banks who treat quants/software engineers equally to the traders?

"Equally" is a loaded word but depending on the areas you work in, a software engineer can make a lot of money in Hedge Funds and IB's. The key differentiator is how "close" you are to the Front-Office.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#252

Post by sspencer »

smallchou wrote: post #97
enneff wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days." What's your basis for this speculation?

Having worked there, it is definitely very much under way. A great indicator is probably how desirable a company is on the list of Top Companies for MBA's to Work For: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mba100/2009/full_list...

Apple is a little too close to the top for my comfort.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#253

Post by philwelch »

jacobolus wrote: post #219
philwelch wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the second Jobs era, Apple's CEO, central technology, and (in the early years) the bulk of their executive team were directly installed from NeXT. Dogs and smoking were banned from the campus, the icon garden was taken down, Apple's entire industrial design was dropped in favor of new directions, and almost all of their software technology was eventually abandoned along with the Newton and the traditional Old Worl…

By the way, CA banned smoking in the workplace in 1998. I don’t think Apple’s changing policies about that can be solely attributed to the takeover of NeXT culture.

Jobs was a year ahead of the curve I guess. But the main thing was banning dogs--from a lot of things I read, one of the big unofficial benefits of working at Apple before the second Jobs era is how you could bring your dog to work and spend your breaks playing frisbee with him.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#254

Post by russell »

plinkplonk wrote: post #49

"Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers." Interesting statement. I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days. But why does this happen? Is it just that once companies grow large enough, you need middle managers, (who then consolidate power and control)? Is there a more nuanced explanation?

For the first time in a long time, I am working for a public company instead of a startup or near startup. You cant believe the amount of intrusive government crap. (This is not a political statement.) Timesheets reporting capital work vs expensed work. Sarbanes-Oxaly audits. Ethics and harassment classes. All of a sudden there are all these people who can deal with that stuff and it begins to filter into engineering. I think that it is remarkable that there are large technology companies that can compartmentalize this stuff.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#255

Post by eugenejen »

gaius wrote: post #218
eugenejen wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. The guy who called said he was working as contract recruiter for Google. Maybe it's due to bad economy or downsizing? I can imagine a software engineer who is suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome switches jobs from writing to keyboard to talking on the phone.

I'm reminded of JWZ's article http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/phones.html One of the latest tactics that the headhunters have been using is to begin with a line like ``Hey, I used to be an engineer! But now I'm hanging out here doing recruiting, cool huh?''

Good catch. Maybe I am naive and am fooled.

Maybe I should follow JWZ's step. Selling alcohols is more lucrative than programming!

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#256

Post by jarek »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #42
mrshoe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.

Seems like a strange criterion. Would programmers hired to do HR be fulfilled in their jobs? Would they last very long? How does that even work? Do you slip a javascript requirement in the HR position posting? It just seems like you might be missing out on some great HR talent with such an arbitrary requirement.

Programmers have all sorts of side interests. I wouldn't mind studying and potentially working in linguistics for a while; I don't see why there wouldn't be someone who's into working with people in an HR-ish role.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#257

Post by spokey »

toddheasley wrote: post #243
dasil003 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To respond to your "If", I think Apple clearly does have a hacker culture. Even if we say it's a cult of Steve Jobs, I don't think it's a far cry to say Jobs is a consumer product hacker and a bit of a market hacker. Two essential qualities of good hackers is an abundant ability to synthesize elegant solutions from disparate details, and a desire to create great things. Jobs may not write code but he clearly has thes…

"I don't think it's a far cry to say Jobs is a consumer product hacker and a bit of a market hacker." Exactly. Apple isn't really about winning or losing; they're rewriting the game. Does it really get more "hackerly" than that?

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think we should be careful that "hacker" doesn't lose meaning altogether. This thread is coming close to defining "hacking" as simply "winning". That is, if it works, it's hackerly, if it doesn't, it isn't.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#258

Post by jarek »

encoderer wrote: post #225
shalmanese wrote: post #50

"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered." In any conflict, there is always a risk of fighting the last battle. I see today many companies, inspired by the lessons learned from the first dot-com bubble, making the opposite mistake; thinking that they need to be a technology company when they're really a…

I disagree with your "incompetent" assessment of Twitter. First, there's a lot of false info out there about what parts of Twitter were built using which technologies and why it had uptime issues. Second, their issue was massive scalability. A high-class problem.

> Second, their issue was massive scalability. A high-class problem.

That a lot of other companies nevertheless solved far more successfully.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#259

Post by kscaldef »

321speak wrote: post #149
sh1mmer wrote: post #138

Disclaimer #1: My job is technology evangelist for Yahoo! So refuting this is probably the definition of my job. Disclaimer #2: This is my own completely unsanctioned opinion and does not necessarily represent Yahoo!'s views or opinions. I'm obviously biased here, but I have a great respect for HN and PG so I wanted to talk about this. PG accuses Yahoo! of two things right at the very top of the article and the rest…

My sense from meeting Yahoo devs is that they are ok, in that they have the credentials, but didn't seem very passionate or excited about new tech. Can you bring up some examples where Yahoo is pioneering a new field? (search, media delivery, social etc, what ever Yahoo as a company is really excited and passionate about internally...)

The thing about Yahoo is that it's massively silo-ed. There's research teams doing fascinating algorithms and machine learning work. There's small hacker cores working on new crazy ideas and technology. There's also a ton of internal politics, NIH across divisions, and meaningless obstacles to getting stuff done.

As an example, I was at Yahoo for 5 years (2003-2008) working in the Search Marketing division. Tons of data, tons of optimization possibilities. Could we use the Hadoop cluster? No, for some foolish internal accounting reasons.

Re: What Happened to Yahoo

#260

Post by 5teev »

I would remind people that PG's credibility as a successful "big thinker" is largely based on the cash he made winning the dot-com lottery by selling his first company to people who, as he says, had little idea of, and less interest in, what they were buying.
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