Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by elq » Fri, Sep 16, 2011, 11:25 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #68

elq wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm quite certain that my views on yahoo are biased.

Nearly no one I've interviewed from yahoo has bad-mouthed their former employer, so my negative bias is from working with people that have passed the technical interview and have been hired... the quirks that people pick up after working at yahoo for many years are odd to me (like the strange desire to put squid in front of everything).

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

#72

Post by steve8918 » Fri, Sep 16, 2011, 11:50 PM UTC

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…

If the experience is awesome, and if you already have savings, and you're an American citizen, then you have nothing to lose. Chances are you can leverage the experience to get a better job if you get laid off. Make sure you save as much money as possible to tide you over in case the worst case scenario occurs (the economy double-dips and you get laid off with no job prospects).

If you are H1B, then don't do it.

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

#73

Post by dpark » Fri, Sep 16, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

0x12 wrote: post #70

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 thei…

>Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!.

Sorry, but what culture do you believe Bartz destroyed? I was at Yahoo before Bartz, and left only about a month before she was fired. I don't believe that Bartz destroyed anything. Yahoo has never had a great culture. They've always had an identity crisis. You can go read PG's older essays and see that.

Bartz was fired because she couldn't work a miracle. Yahoo needs some truly amazing changes in order to avoid Sun's fate, and I'm not sure anyone out there can/will deliver what's needed quickly enough. You mentioned Apple as a turnaround example. Exactly where do you think Yahoo is going to get a Steve Jobs?

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

#74

Post by 0x12 » Sat, Sep 17, 2011, 12:20 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #73

0x12 wrote: post #70

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 thei…

> Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Sorry, but what culture do you believe Bartz destroyed? I was at Yahoo before Bartz, and left only about a month before she was fired. I don't believe that Bartz destroyed anything. Yahoo has never had a great culture. They've always had an identity crisis. You can go read PG's older essays…

When did you join?

I believe Yahoo! definitely had 'culture' in the early days, they were pretty much synonymous with end-user content on the net and the Y! employees and their users were the ones that showed us cool offices, a different kind of company and neat things to do with the web. I think they went downhill since the .com crash and never managed to recover. The final remnants of that were buried in the last two years, now Yahoo! reminds me of an oiltanker with the captain and the rest of the crew below decks. Time will tell if they can turn it around or not but with giants this size even dying will take a long long time.

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

#75

Post by jjm » Sat, Sep 17, 2011, 12:30 AM UTC

elq wrote: post #71

ghshephard wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm quite certain that my views on yahoo are biased. Nearly no one I've interviewed from yahoo has bad-mouthed their former employer, so my negative bias is from working with people that have passed the technical interview and have been hired... the quirks that people pick up after working at yahoo for many years are odd to me (like the strange desire to put squid in front of everything).

No need for squid. You have TrafficServer. Well since it's an Apache top level project so does the world :-)

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

#76

Post by linguaphobe » Sat, Sep 17, 2011, 12:38 AM UTC

lpgauth wrote: post #48

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…

Do you guys use erlang anywhere in that stack?

I believe BOSS has Erlang in the back-end.

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

#77

Post by tdurden » Sat, Sep 17, 2011, 12:39 AM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #38

tdurden wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asian assets are a very large part of the 'P'

Yahoo! is only a minority shareholder in Yahoo! Japan, with SoftBank owning 40+% of the shares.

Yahoo! owns over 40% of Alibaba which is a multibillion dollar company. I have seen valuations over 30B, but these are rough estimates since it is not public.

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

#78

Post by linguaphobe » Sat, Sep 17, 2011, 12:40 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #73

0x12 wrote: post #70

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 thei…

> Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Sorry, but what culture do you believe Bartz destroyed? I was at Yahoo before Bartz, and left only about a month before she was fired. I don't believe that Bartz destroyed anything. Yahoo has never had a great culture. They've always had an identity crisis. You can go read PG's older essays…

One thing off the top of my head: she ended the year-end parties. Those parties were great, because they brought lots of people together, and for one night, you forgot everything else and enjoyed yourself, with your spouse/s.o./friend . It was fun to see geeks bathe, shave and dress up for this yearly event.... ;-)

I keed, I keed about the bathing. :-)

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

#79

Post by linguaphobe » Sat, Sep 17, 2011, 12:41 AM UTC

jmathai wrote: post #37

bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

If vultures are descending, I would think it would be better to wait. The bidding war will temporarily bump up your stock price & options, giving you a better time to sell them. Then the vultures will offer buy-outs to encourage employees to leave. I doubt the vultures will be overly generous in their buy-outs but it can still amount to a substantial amount of cash if you've been there a while.

Most people's stock options are so underwater they're eternally worthless. An increase of a few bucks in the stock price isn't worth the cost on your morale.

How's your open-source Flickr coming along, man?

// sorry, using a throw-away account..

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

#80

Post by linguaphobe » Sat, Sep 17, 2011, 12:43 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #33

uncertain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Santa Clara, CA. I'm just worried that if I move out there I'll be left hanging while I have expenses to keep up with.

Ask for a signing bonus of n months expenses (where n is how long you think it will take to find a job), and then put that in a savings account. Problem sovled. And if Yahoo ends up being okay, you have a big chunk of money you can apply to the down payment of a house (or fund a team of pro bike racers, or wahtever).

This is the best option. If you're good, then you can easily get a job very quickly in today's conditions. So a signing bonus, of, say, 3 months salary is ample.

Also: Yahoo is known for _very_ generous severance benefits. Typically you'll get 3-4 months of salary.

So if you're even half-way decent, you should be OK.