Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO • Hacker News Board

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#121

Post by danw » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 9:21 AM UTC

9999 wrote: post #114

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…

"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy." - Steve Jobs When I think of that quote, I usually think about it in regards to wanting to escape a big stupid company and form a startup, but that was not at all the context in which Jobs said it. He was telling this to the Mac team, which had become a kind of splinter group with its own identity within Apple. Of course, it's not just better to be a pirate yourself, s…

"Why doesn't Yahoo take a few million dollars in seed money and start a bunch of companies under its own umbrella using some of its own people?"

They did, it was called Yahoo Brickhouse. Yahoo closed it in 2008[1]. I'd love to know more about what did and didn't work there

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/dec/11/yahoo-mobile...

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#122

Post by mhd » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 9:39 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #50

mhd wrote: post #38

Fired over the phone ? Is that common at that level?

Well, Yahoo got rid of their last telegraph just weeks ago; otherwise they would have used that.

Well, church steeples are still an option… (One if bought by Microsoft, two if firing CEO)

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#123

Post by hga » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 9:42 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #109

sjs wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one key factor in the average quality of workers found in North America and elsewhere is the social aspect of career choice. In North America there's a pretty strong culture of pursuing jobs that people are interested in and enjoy. From what I've heard about India I think that there are very different social pressures that encourage people to choose careers for other reasons. Maybe this is not so, it's pure s…

For a lot of time now, Engineering and Medicine have been the dream careers to chase in India, the reason is simple. Before the FDI reforms started in 1992, the only way some one could make it financially big in our society was through ancestral property, a big family businesses, or plainly doing your engineering and medicine and then settling down some where in the west(immigrating). After the FDI boom, the IT secto…

A tl;dr version of what you're saying, based on my somewhat jaded view of purely US based software development (I've worked with competent Indians based in the US but none of any sort in India) is that software development in India is all too much like it is in the US, exacerbated even more strongly by recent history.

We too had a "gold rush" period in the dot.com boom and even before that most people who call themselves programmer couldn't program (e.g. write code/solve a problem on a dry erase board). Far too much of our software development management is clueless (Dilbert is Revealed Truth and it was well established long before outsourcing became big), software development/programming itself is generally not well respected, etc. etc. etc.

The current US perspective on Indians is biased by the purely cost driven outsourcing craze, which made all of the above worse by the universal service business model race to the bottom, time zone and cultural differences (the latter is something that good management could help) etc.

We don't hate Indians per se (as mentioned, I've worked with some ones in the US every bit as good as any native born developer, even helped to provide one with a horse for his downtown Washington, D.C. wedding :-), we hate the system that's developed that results in our having to deal with very long turn around times for critical stuff, that all too often delivers us code that takes as long or longer to debug or re-write than it would have taken us do correctly in the first place, the constriction of entry level job opportunities and thus the long term career pipeline, how all this has aided the terrible age discrimination in our field, etc.

And certainly many of us "hate" the H1-B etc. visa systems that were established pretty much explicitly to drive down US salaries and replace US workers with cheaper foreigners. If you're like me and have been replaced at some point by an H1-B visa holder (a brilliant Jamaican who was very good at the job and who was not happy about how the company was exploiting him (he was making 60% of what I was making)) that hate of the system is also based on hard, cold reality.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#124

Post by dodo53 » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 9:45 AM UTC

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 think it's also because we tend to see outsourcing as management-sees-devs-as-interchangeable-workers. If good devs in Bangalore/Beijing were given ownership of products and allowed influence over direction of things I'm sure they'd do great. But outsourcing seems to go hand-in-hand with a business creates requirements, devs follow orders attitude.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#125

Post by panabee » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 9:50 AM UTC

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…

Agreed; unshackle the engineers -- particularly if you want to compete with Google and Facebook, which have engineer-centric companies.

But everyone still needs to row in one direction.

What about this for a unifying vision? Help users discover, personalize, and consume content.

Be the service -- mobile or web -- people turn to when they have nothing to do, when they want to find a cool article, deal, song, video, picture, restaurant, conversation, or event.

Today, Google is where you go when you know what you want. Yahoo! could help people upstream of search -- before people know what they want. Which, conveniently, is most of the time.

Lots of companies tackle the problem in different areas: Digg with news, Pandora with music, Yelp with local businesses, Instagram with photos, Groupon with deals.

With content proliferating faster than ever before, there is a need for some service to help people discover and consume content. Users don't want to hunt for content. They want the coolest deals, music, shows, restaurants, and news to come to them.

Qs: What if you killed 90% of the middle management layer? Are the engineers motivated and talented enough to pick up the slack? Killing one layer would produce insane chaos and devastate Yahoo! in the short term, but could the freedom and responsibility drive engineers to care again? If not, what would?

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#126

Post by xxyahoo » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 9:54 AM UTC

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…

Ex yahoo & aol engineer here. In my opinion these places are becoming heaven for narcissistic middle managers. Easiest place to fullfill the psychological needs of such personalities.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#127

Post by wisty » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 10:05 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #69

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…

> The list of Yahoo's problems are long; and C-level people are not high on that list. "Vision" is also not a problem for Yahoo, if they'd just let the engineers just do their fucking jobs! I've got to disagree with this. No one inside or outside of Yahoo seems to be able to concisely state what Yahoo does. There are dozens of properties and various initiatives, but no real statement of purpose. There's too much conf…

Yeah, managers are like salesmen. Don't trust 'em, and don't blame them if they become loose cannons.

Managers typically do whatever gets them the best ratings. The C-level execs must be giving them misaligned incentives.

I'm not saying there's not great people who work in management, but once the environment starts getting toxic (due to bad managers getting all the resources, or even being promoted to the point where they are managing the good managers), the good managers will turn bad or flee.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#128

Post by wisty » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 11:22 AM UTC

What Yahoo could be:

A social graph that's not a walled garden.

Want to add Facebook stuff to your page? Sign the Facebook ToS, lube up, and get ready to get shafted. Want Google+ interaction? Same deal.

Facebook (and to a lessor extent, G+) don't want you to run apps that involve them. They want you to create content for users to "like".

Yahoo could create a great identity system - multiple identities (so you don't need to use your real name for everything), notifications (replacing email for web apps), payments, micropayments, advertising, the works.

Want to make a web app? Check out (the fictional) Yahoo.js, and the (fictional) native client for your server (or just make it all run on JSON as a fallback).

It could work like that. They just need to ask a bunch of people making new web apps what the pain points are, solve them, then use that to push people to a Yahoo Notifications page, and from there to Yahoo's other properties.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#129

Post by eli » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 12:00 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #57

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.

This. I used Yahoo and understood what it did for me. In 1997. Then Google came, and my ass was a portal, and Yahoo's homepage (on the rare occasion I looked at it) was crap. Then there were Yahoo magazines and mass-media advertising -- we're talking 1999/2000 here. The company already didn't make sense to me then. I remember ~2009 when AOL were being accused of copying Yahoo's homepage, and thinking "gee ... I've ne…

AFAIK, yahoo finance is still the number one finance site.

Re: Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO

#130

Post by danmaz74 » Wed, Sep 07, 2011, 12:06 PM UTC

gcb wrote: post #110

xyahoo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apologize if it appeared that I was hating on Bangalore (or Beijing). I was not. What I am against is outsourcing based on the simplistic math that you can get "3 for the price of 1" in Bangalore. When we give Bangaloreans(?) work based simply on price and not on their core competencies (and how the outsourced team will work with the rest of the company), then outsourcing won't work. I feel that outsourcing should…

To be honest, this happens with locals too. often companies rather hire 3 'available ones' instead of paying 3x for a good one that would add immeasurably more value over the other 3 combined.

It's again a corollary of the mythical man-month attitude. It looks like managers really can't understand that often, at least in software development, less is more.