Earlier quoted context omitted.
A sinking ship still has momentum.
I'd have gone with derailing train.
And that's a lot of momentum!
Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
81–90 of 111 posts
Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#82Anyone still owns YHOO stocks? Got some at around 13 after the collapse of Microsoft buyout. The book value was/is good. Was hoping there's another acquisition.
Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I see. I asked because I recently listened to FLOSS Weekly's "Apache Traffic Server" episode featuring some Yahoos who were involved with it from its beginnings, and which is apparently used heavily within the Yahoo infrastructure.
http://twit.cachefly.net/floss0179.mp3
"We talk about the Apache Traffic Server, a proxy server that you probably don't realize you are already using.
Guests: Leif Hedstrom and Bryan Call"
Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#84Honestly, 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. LBO's and their ilk are dramatic. One restructuring guy I know would have a goal of eliminating all but 3 managers from an acquired group of 300 within 6 months.
Yea expect the unexpected with those guys. They are creative at wringing out cash right now with no thought to the future or any wishy-washy stuff like morale, culture, history, etc. I've seen 90% of employees fired and the rest relocated a thousand miles away just so they could get the cash out of selling an office building.
Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#85Honestly, 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 still have yellow and purple cubicles?
Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#86Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:)
There's no minimum severance (at least at the national level), as far as I know. (http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/severancepay.htm) ... In theory it could be in your contract, but I personally can't recall ever seeing a contract that had such a clause. The standard is "at will" - if you come in to work one day and they don't need you any more, that's it, just the same as you don't really have to give two weeks notice when you leave (but most people do for the sake of the relationship.)
Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#88I'm curious - can someone explain to me how Yahoo still has a higher P/E ratio than say, Apple? For that matter, why is EBay's P/E higher than Google's?
Market cap of $18, assets on balance sheet of $15 bn... some portion of that value may be breakup / liquidation value. In theory, a company is worth the greater of its future earnings (hence P/E) or it's liquidation value. (This assumes they're rational enough to break it up if that value is greater.)
So in theory, Yahoo's earnings could go to zero, and it would still be worth $15bn because you could liquidate the assets... and the P/E would rise towards infinity.
Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
I don't think you can blame Bartz for culture lost since the "early days". She wasn't even there for three full years. I don't think Carol really hurt the culture much during her tenure. If anything I think she improved it, at least in terms of focus.
To answer your question, though, I started three years ago and some months ago. I came in just a bit before the Microsoft deal fell through.
Re: Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. :-)
I'm a bit embarrassed to say I didn't realize she'd cancelled them. I never went to the parties anyway, but I recall her first one stayed, in spite of opposition, because it was pretty much already paid for.