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Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

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Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#61

Post by reid »

uncertain wrote: post #15

I was given a very good job offer from Yahoo around the same time Carol Bartz was fired. I have yet to sign anything yet because of what I've been reading about Yahoo's condition. I get the feeling that most of the news about Yahoo's demise are just being sensational, yet at the same time I can't ignore the fact that Yahoo employees have been leaving the company every other week (according to my friends who have work…

I joined and thus relocated cross-country to work for Yahoo in mid-2008, when Microsoft was surely going to screw my life up. If you'd like that perspective, shoot me an message: my email address is in my profile.

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#62

Post by beagledude »

sriramk wrote: post #46

Honestly, I find this article ridiculous and borderline offensive. I would love if the author would come talk to a few of us and maybe take a tour of the place and see what makes this place work. I work at Yahoo, joined a few months ago, run engineering management for a couple of teams working on high-performance cloud stuff very core to the way Yahoo works. I find the engineers sharp and smart, the technology proble…

"None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens." do you really not think you're in this dramatic situation now?

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#63

Post by cellis »

Hisoka wrote: post #7
vbtemp wrote: post #5

I don't understand why Yahoo still exists (or at least why it still gets so much coverage). At this point it's just a cheap knockoff of everything google does. Has anyone ever used Yahoo mail? It's a POS, it's bloated, slow, prone to failure - and it doesn't even work on linux. Same thing for yahoo maps, news, search, etc. I just don't get it.

I don't get why investment banks exists. I don't get why casinos exist. I don't get why cigarette companies exist. I don't get why Fannie Mae exists.

Yeah! Like seriously, why do humans exist? We're slow, bloated, prone to failure, and to top it all off we don't even work on Linux!

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#64

Post by Luyt »

sriramk wrote: post #49
lpgauth wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you guys use erlang anywhere in that stack?

Nope. But we have our own constructs for a lot of the semantics Erlang provides written from the ground up in C/C++. Sorry, can't talk about it more except in broad strokes :)

Apache Traffic Server?

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#65

Post by sriramk »

Luyt wrote: post #64
sriramk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. But we have our own constructs for a lot of the semantics Erlang provides written from the ground up in C/C++. Sorry, can't talk about it more except in broad strokes :)

Apache Traffic Server?

Nope, this is not public. Traffic server ( and the stuff it lead to) is built by a peer group under the same VP I report to.

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#66

Post by chollida1 »

tomkarlo wrote: post #56
chollida1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the parent you responded to, but I'm assuming when they said buy-outs, they were including severance for layoffs. In North America 1 month is pretty common if you've been with a company for more than a year with 2 months not being uncommon. I've heard of people being given 1 month of notice of a layoff and then being asked to work that month only once:)

1 month is common because companies care about their public image when it comes to hiring new people, and they know that the remaining employees will watch how those being cut are treated. If you've got new folks in charge who don't care about it, or need to cut cash outlay _very_ fast because they levered up the company to buy it, you may not get that severance. There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month…

> There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee.

I see, this is news to me.

I'm Canadian so I guess the laws can certainly be different, but I was under the impression that 2 weeks was a minimum severance required by law.

I've never seen less than a month, I guess this could be enforced by employment contracts. I know it's been in every one I've signed:)

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#67

Post by joshu »

elq wrote: post #52
teej wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has ever seriously questioned Yahoo's engineering chops. Their technology contributions have always been notable. That's not the point of the article at all. No offense, but Yahoo's management is just -bad- and it shows. There's a lack of vision, direction, and execution from the top; the fish is rotting from the head. I've heard this directly from Yahoo VPs, managers, and engineers. Yahoo is like an aircraft…

I question yahoo's engineering chops 4 out of 5 times after interviewing hotshots from search, ads, or research. After interviewing dozens of folks from yahoo, I've pained the following picture about the engineering there - the vast majority of it is stuck in 1995, some bits of it have evolved isolated from the rest of the tech world - it's steam punk, then there are a few parts that are shiny and new but skin deep.…

Yeah, I'm going to have to agree - my experience was bad too.

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#68

Post by ghshephard »

elq wrote: post #52
teej wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has ever seriously questioned Yahoo's engineering chops. Their technology contributions have always been notable. That's not the point of the article at all. No offense, but Yahoo's management is just -bad- and it shows. There's a lack of vision, direction, and execution from the top; the fish is rotting from the head. I've heard this directly from Yahoo VPs, managers, and engineers. Yahoo is like an aircraft…

I question yahoo's engineering chops 4 out of 5 times after interviewing hotshots from search, ads, or research. After interviewing dozens of folks from yahoo, I've pained the following picture about the engineering there - the vast majority of it is stuck in 1995, some bits of it have evolved isolated from the rest of the tech world - it's steam punk, then there are a few parts that are shiny and new but skin deep.…

I'm wondering if you are the victim of sample bias - The Yahoo employees that are happy and talented are likely well paid, well rewarded, and won't be interviewing with you. You are possibly talking to the ones who either are less talented, or unhappy and are reflecting their perspective to you.

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#69

Post by socratic »

It's weird to see Y! get a lot of hate on HN, because it seems like working there would be a lot like working at a startup. You're trading off risk (will this company exist in n years) for reward (higher salary, greater control over job responsibilities). The best Y! employees also probably have a ton of visibility, working on projects like Hadoop, YUI, YQL, and so on.

What's wrong with this analogy?

Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

#70

Post by 0x12 »

Funny, this article seems to be written by one of those vultures.

People that don't work at Yahoo! telling people that work there to quit remind me of the pope telling other people to abstain from sex. If you're not playing the game don't tell others how to play it or to stop playing it.

Yahoo! has had a rough time but it still has plenty of life in it, let's wait to see what they intend to do once they've found their new bearings.

Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Now it is up to new people to try to restore that culture or at least a semblance of it and then possibly the oil tanker can be turned around. It isn't over until the fat lady sings.

Yahoo! is huge, has a pile of interesting tech, lacks polish and needs focus. If Apple could be turned around then so can Yahoo.

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