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Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

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Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#81

Post by ad93611 »

I worked for Sun in the Bayarea and for Yahoo from their Bangalore office. I found lot of similarities between Sun and Yahoo. Similar to Sun, the engineers at Yahoo were really really good. It was really disappointing to see engineers of so much quality not being used to their full potential.

If there is one good thing that could come out of this, it would be, if those awesome engineers were freed up to help create real value to our economies. I would hire an ex-yahoo engineer in a heartbeat.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#82

Post by tyahoo »

kamaal wrote: post #80
xyahoo wrote: post #53

An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account. Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed. This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking thin…

I am from Bangalore, And I seriously don't understand this Bangalore and Beijing hate. Why do Americans assume all Chinese and Indians are fools? Aren't you people shooting yourself in the foot by assuming your competition is weak? Outsourcing works for a lot more factors than mere money. But money is a major factor. Here in India, we have usual set of good and bad engineers like everywhere . There a lot of very good…

OP is right. I am worked at yahoo till recently and I am an Indian and I don't think people in Bangalore or Beijing are bad. During my career in India and in US I met quite a few good engineers . In early days of Yahoo! India the quality of Indian engineers are pretty good. Off late they are just hiring whoever send in a resume. I know people who are interviewing these candidates even when they say no the manager is hiring because they have fill up the req. Its really sad state you hire these so called "programmers" who can't understand basic things and its frustrating deal with and explain every small details and the work that comes out is completely different from what you wanted and than some more delay. No one complaining about American or Indian engineering quality I seen bad engineers on both sides. Its about getting quality engineer. If you remove pretty good engineers or team here and try to hire below average engineers from India only because they cost less than its really fucked up you are not really saving up anything in this only to realize your product is delayed for an year and it turned to piece of crap. Don't be so defensive about these comparisons not everybody in India are great programmers nor they are fools

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#83

Post by HardyLeung »

omouse wrote: post #35
ethank wrote: post #4

Yahoo needs someone who can clearly articulate what Yahoo does. There is no "product" to draft behind, just a disjointed set of technologies which individually are great (as someone pointed out, YUI and Hadoop, etc), but holistically don't have any focus. Google had the same problem, but they are now shedding this.

Why not ask the employees who actually WORK on their products what the heck Yahoo's vision for the future should be? Crowdsource the company vision so you don't have to rely on someone like Steve Jobs magically appearing out of nowhere.

Everyone has an opinion of what Yahoo should do, the union of which is the entire spectrum of possibilities. Perhaps this is even the cause of the downfall of Yahoo, as its vision seems to be to do most everything others have already done, but poorly. It takes a true visionary to see through the vast majority of these so-called potentials, say no to short-sighted revenue temptations, and make painful decisions. You simply can't crowd-source a Steve Jobs.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#84

Post by robryan »

kamaal wrote: post #80
xyahoo wrote: post #53

An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account. Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed. This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking thin…

I am from Bangalore, And I seriously don't understand this Bangalore and Beijing hate. Why do Americans assume all Chinese and Indians are fools? Aren't you people shooting yourself in the foot by assuming your competition is weak? Outsourcing works for a lot more factors than mere money. But money is a major factor. Here in India, we have usual set of good and bad engineers like everywhere . There a lot of very good…

I don't think it is hate as such, it's more on the management of the outsourcing than their ability. As is said if there isn't a good chain of communication between them and the employees back in the states things that used to be quick can take far longer.

There are also cultural differences that need to be thought about before sending across a stack of work for them to do. Also you can imagine if the employees in the US working in the same offices as managers had a hard time getting things done the outsourced employees would have an almost impossible time getting approval to change things.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#85

Post by pconf »

Stock is reportedly up ~6% on the news. Too bad the board couldn't have figured this out months ago. All she did was sell search to Microsoft. More or less the same as here modus operandi at Autodesk. At least that MS sellout gave ProEngineer a nice batch of customers. Her search sale helped nobody but did reduce the competition for Google's search monopoly.

IMO any Yahoo CEO who can't fix their flagship webmail within a year should be shown the door. Of course fixing webmail means fixing middle management, and that's a rather more difficult problem.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#86

Post by prodigal_erik »

kamaal wrote: post #80
xyahoo wrote: post #53

An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account. Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed. This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking thin…

I am from Bangalore, And I seriously don't understand this Bangalore and Beijing hate. Why do Americans assume all Chinese and Indians are fools? Aren't you people shooting yourself in the foot by assuming your competition is weak? Outsourcing works for a lot more factors than mere money. But money is a major factor. Here in India, we have usual set of good and bad engineers like everywhere . There a lot of very good…

I've had the not-uncommon US developer's experience of working with useless bottom-feeding con artist outsourcers, the kind who throw out deliverables and then drag their heels explaining why there are still syntax errors in code which had allegedly been tested. I've also had the privilege of working with some really sharp people in Hyderabad—the difference is that we had to open an office there and hire full-time to find them. Nobody good wants to be a code monkey implementing somebody else's finished design by rote, and they have alternatives, so outsourcing is going to continue causing trainwrecks as long as western management insists on doing design and project management separately and only offers the least interesting (yet not idiot-proof) work.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#87

Post by tjmc »

diego wrote: post #16

The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It was a directory of web links. A library. It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.

I've always seen Yahoo as a "me too" company - the Carl's Jr of the online titans. If they've ever been the best at something they've never stayed there for long. The decline began when they decided search wasn't their core business and portals were the way to go. Who would want to work there? Even Microsoft are more innovative these days.

Having said all that, thanks for buying Viaweb off PG guys. At least some Yahoo cash went to good use...

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#88

Post by kamaal »

robryan wrote: post #84
kamaal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from Bangalore, And I seriously don't understand this Bangalore and Beijing hate. Why do Americans assume all Chinese and Indians are fools? Aren't you people shooting yourself in the foot by assuming your competition is weak? Outsourcing works for a lot more factors than mere money. But money is a major factor. Here in India, we have usual set of good and bad engineers like everywhere . There a lot of very good…

I don't think it is hate as such, it's more on the management of the outsourcing than their ability. As is said if there isn't a good chain of communication between them and the employees back in the states things that used to be quick can take far longer. There are also cultural differences that need to be thought about before sending across a stack of work for them to do. Also you can imagine if the employees in th…

There are problems, Yes I agree. Both cultural and communication problems.

But on a grand scheme of things when you interact with each other for something like 2-3 years. Those differences are negligible. When I started out, I faced similar problems. But I became friends with a lot of Americans, after our daily interactions.

You do get to hear about projects that fail. But they are small in number. There are so many successful projects here that running for more 5 years and some time even decades. To blanket say that you are never going to get good quality from there, is just not right.

This is a touchy issue, I understand as people are loosing jobs. I would be equally emotional if I lost my job. But self reflection is also important at the same time.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#89

Post by kamaal »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #86
kamaal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am from Bangalore, And I seriously don't understand this Bangalore and Beijing hate. Why do Americans assume all Chinese and Indians are fools? Aren't you people shooting yourself in the foot by assuming your competition is weak? Outsourcing works for a lot more factors than mere money. But money is a major factor. Here in India, we have usual set of good and bad engineers like everywhere . There a lot of very good…

I've had the not-uncommon US developer's experience of working with useless bottom-feeding con artist outsourcers, the kind who throw out deliverables and then drag their heels explaining why there are still syntax errors in code which had allegedly been tested. I've also had the privilege of working with some really sharp people in Hyderabad—the difference is that we had to open an office there and hire full-time to…

Yes, I agree on this. There is a huge problem of hiring good folks here.

In fact most of the work coming to India is somewhat in an area where you are required to maintain and keep systems up and running. In other words a few feature additions but a lot of maintenance and bug requests.

A lot of work is also on the lines package management, something like working on SAP, or IT support or even testing projects.

I would like to know if majority of the developers in west would be happy doing those jobs. Because such jobs don't have a good career growth path. And price at which they do that here, is just unimaginable in US, I know.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#90

Post by minikomi »

ethank wrote: post #4

Yahoo needs someone who can clearly articulate what Yahoo does. There is no "product" to draft behind, just a disjointed set of technologies which individually are great (as someone pointed out, YUI and Hadoop, etc), but holistically don't have any focus. Google had the same problem, but they are now shedding this.

So how is Yahoo still number 4 in ranking (according to Alexa).. Honest question - what drives so much traffic? Search?
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