What happens after Yahoo acquires you • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#101

Post by orky56 » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 5:24 AM UTC

gamble wrote: post #47

orky56 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for Cisco at Linksys and this is far from truth. Although Linksys operated pretty much as their own division, Cisco EOLed a lot of successful Linksys products in the SMB market since they might compete with Cisco's. Also, Linksys had and still has a stronger brand presence among consumers which Cisco resented a bit. This led to a rather long brand transition that made things pretty difficult at Linksys…

Interesting to hear from an insider. Cisco is very good at getting the media to write about how skilled they are with acquisitions. Do you think it's more marketing than reality?

Sad to say but they are better than most when it comes to acquisitions. I think that's more due to the fact that their acquisitions are usually strategically related to what they want to do.

The big exception has been Flip. Although they are a great company, their limelight was too short for a company like Cisco to get recurring growth over a long period with this push into the consumer space.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#102

Post by rdl » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 5:38 AM UTC

joshu wrote: post #42

petervandijck wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are being acquired, you could say: "We're worried about loosing our culture, which has brought us the success we've seen so far. I want to agree that our group will be allowed to set its own rules to some degree in terms of working environment." And give a few examples. No need to push it or make this legally binding, or even put it in writing. Then, when the timesheet dude shows up (which they will), just s…

The flickr people were pretty good at this. I was less so. One thing that always bugged me - when I ran Delicious, I had people submit a weekly status update (just a list of bullet points) to the entire company. That way everyone knew what was going on. We got to Yahoo, and my boss decided to kill that. When I got to Google, globally visible weekly status in bullet point form are part of the culture. I take this as v…

It does sound like your boss was a particular low point, even for Yahoo.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#103

Post by ajhit406 » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 5:47 AM UTC

I think google has done a much better job of targeting services they know they can integrate into their core. Yahoo has really just had a bunch of different silos operating (for the most part) on their own.

When the founders lose their ability to control the product and their economic incentives, then they're really fked.

Facebook has integrated their acquisitions' technology in some cases, but it seems they're mostly in it for talent acquisitions. They've done a good job so far in retaining (they're still pre-IPO) but we'll see what happens when they get old and some new hotness appears at school (might take 10 yrs)

Scorecards:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Yahoo!-owned_sites_and_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#104

Post by jrockway » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #71

jrockway wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most acquisitions are to get the app's users, not to get the programmers or the code. Sure, there is the typical "you don't get your $250 million until you work here for a year", but that is just to help move your code to their servers. Then you leave and do Idea 2.0 and fund it yourself so that you don't need to be acquired. As for timesheets, all that stuff sucks, which is why you need to think of work as "…

Many of the best engineers balk at corporate bureaucratic bullshit like timesheets. They don't work merely to pay the bills, they work because it's their passion. Once you take away that passion they may still come to work but maybe they're just zombie-ing through the day just for the paycheck, they're not giving you their best work anymore. And they're also no longer happy, so they'll slowly evaporate out of your co…

I agree completely. As soon as I have to do bullshit like timesheets, that mental switch flips and my creativity is gone. I assume my employer has decided, ``it's worth making each employee do 20 minutes of busywork a week and killing their happiness rather than doing without a sheet of numbers that says "8 8 8 8 8"''.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#105

Post by pdaviesa » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 5:52 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #71

jrockway wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most acquisitions are to get the app's users, not to get the programmers or the code. Sure, there is the typical "you don't get your $250 million until you work here for a year", but that is just to help move your code to their servers. Then you leave and do Idea 2.0 and fund it yourself so that you don't need to be acquired. As for timesheets, all that stuff sucks, which is why you need to think of work as "…

Many of the best engineers balk at corporate bureaucratic bullshit like timesheets. They don't work merely to pay the bills, they work because it's their passion. Once you take away that passion they may still come to work but maybe they're just zombie-ing through the day just for the paycheck, they're not giving you their best work anymore. And they're also no longer happy, so they'll slowly evaporate out of your co…

All this talk of freakin timesheets - they may be the biggest waste of time in the post-industrial era. Outside of a "billable hour" type firm, how many managers go back and look through timesheet data to make tactical or strategic decisions? I am now convinced that timesheets will be the downfall of civilization as we know it!

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#106

Post by yuhong » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:10 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #63

democracy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just do the time-sheets?

For one thing, because it is part of the way that your team is turned into a Resource. I never watched Star Trek, but I'm pop-culture literate, and my understanding is they use something called "nanoprobes" to effect the process of "assimilation". Once you're assimilated, business decisions that impact your team become an MBA math abstraction to the parent company leadership. Time sheets are BigCo's mechanism for map…

Yea I know, the myth that a MBA can manage everything.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#107

Post by thasmin » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 6:32 AM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #66

tptacek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case in point for "don't fuck with it".

From what I gather AOL didn't really "fuck" with Nullsoft, they kept working on what they wanted. Justin & Co. got bored being a big corp subsidiary and needing to work on WinAmp (which is what they were acquired for). And so it just didn't really whip llama's ass for them anymore, they escalated and quit. Effectively it was them fucking with AOL, not the other way around.

AOL shut down Gnutella and WASTE. Certainly the right business move because of they were both lawsuits waiting to happen, but I'd imagine that it disappointed Nullsoft nonetheless.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#108

Post by mscarborough » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 7:02 AM UTC

JacobAldridge wrote: post #3

At the risk of preaching to the choir, here's some more input from another Yahoo acquiree - pg on 'What Happened to Yahoo' (Aug '10) http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Sigh.

I work for Yahoo, after 6 years of ('failed') startup work. I respect YC and pg immensely.

However, linking to this article that is written in 2010 that references the mid-1990s (except for a single mention of Facebook in 2007) seems a bit weak.

It doesn't bother me that HN folks dismiss Yahoo as a company, so much as it does that HN folks ignore Yahoo engineering. Hadoop, WOEID, Pipes, etc.

For me as an engineer that has worked for a few startups and companies that hoped to be acquired, working for Yahoo is great because we are exposed to a lot of engineering work that is optimized for large scale. I'm sure Google and others are doing a great job of this as well, but why is it an either/or situation?

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#109

Post by zeemonkee » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 7:50 AM UTC

wh-uws wrote: post #100

tptacek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing, because it is part of the way that your team is turned into a Resource. I never watched Star Trek, but I'm pop-culture literate, and my understanding is they use something called "nanoprobes" to effect the process of "assimilation". Once you're assimilated, business decisions that impact your team become an MBA math abstraction to the parent company leadership. Time sheets are BigCo's mechanism for map…

there is something about timecard software that brings out the worst in enterprise software developers. I have never, ever seen one implemented well. If I could upvote that a thousand times I would. Why o why is this so true? And why hasn't anyone done anything about it?

Having recently been forced to use one maybe I have a little bit of perspective.

The problem I believe, is, fundamentally, the need for managers to justify their existence. Whereas other roles in the organization - engineers, salespeople, secretaries - have clear reason for their existence and work they can point to (code written, products sold, paychecks processed) managers do not.

The fact that nobody reads any of these timesheets and that project estimates based on hours are a complete nonsensical fiction are really beside the point. The point is that the very production of this work is taken as proof that the manager, too, is producing valuable work.

In small startups timesheets are irrelevant because everyone has their heads down getting on with the job. Managers exist, but the company can't afford to have people who just "manage". They do other valuable roles - whether technical or sales or office admin. The sign of a company "growing up" is when you suddenly have all these new people you have to report to, with ill-defined titles like "Product Delivery Manager" - and the timesheets.

OK, but why are timesheet programs so badly designed ? The hardest thing in software development is to design something that's ill-defined - in other words, if the purpose of the program is a bad one, it's really hard to build a good program to fulfill that purpose. Simple timekeeping software isn't hard but management have so many nonsensical requirements that the software increases in complexity and correspondingly decreases in usability.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#110

Post by dennisgorelik » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 8:08 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #94

democracy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just do the time-sheets?

I've been at a few companies that required timesheets of software devs, and it was always weird/awkward at best. They never wanted just hours - they wanted to know what was done as well. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not, but the thing that bugged me was that it eventually was used against you. Mgr: "Oh.. well.. I see here you've only put in 38 hours on core projects this last week... this doesn't look too good…

Mgr could not say it directly, but he implied that timesheet must have 40 hours reported on the main project. How hard could that be to write it down like that?

I understand that it's still unpleasant to deal with that.