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Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

venturebeat.com

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Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#121

Post by neilk »

pbreit wrote: post #75
shingen wrote: post #33

While it's a perfectly fine choice to ostracize Yahoo for their actions, Yammer's CEO is going to end up looking like little more than a hypocrite at the least, and maybe a dipshit, if he doesn't apply the same rules to all companies equally based on behavior. The odds the CEO will apply the same rule to all other companies acting with patent belligerence? Approximately zero. They'd need a substantial piece of tracki…

No he's not. The patent move isn't the only reason to frown on Yahoo employees. The company has been moving sideways for quite some time which is when good employees tend to leave for better opportunities.

There are a lot of good people toiling away at Yahoo for one reason or another. In particular, work visas can tie you to the company for a good portion of a decade.

Just to take one example I'm familiar with, Flickr still has a lot of top-notch people.

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#122

Post by javascriptlol »

shingen wrote: post #33

While it's a perfectly fine choice to ostracize Yahoo for their actions, Yammer's CEO is going to end up looking like little more than a hypocrite at the least, and maybe a dipshit, if he doesn't apply the same rules to all companies equally based on behavior. The odds the CEO will apply the same rule to all other companies acting with patent belligerence? Approximately zero. They'd need a substantial piece of tracki…

Better to be a bit of an unfair bully than to do sit around while parasites send the industry down the toilet. It's like chemotherapy: sometimes you have to hurt the body to kill off the cancerous cells.

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#123

Post by motoford »

robomartin wrote: post #119

What a jerk and a hypocrite. Patents are, like it or not, one of the weapons of war, if you will, in business. Have been for a long, long time. And, while I too hate the "we invented the button and we have a patent" crowd I also recognize that they exist for a reason. Denying someone employment because the company they work for seeks to enforce their patents --legitimate or not-- is nothing less than being a dick. If…

I guess jerk is subjective enough that you can offer that as your opinion.

But how is he a hypocrite?

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#124

Post by msbarnett »

Tossrock wrote: post #68
msbarnett wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the hiring situation in the Valley really so intense that anyone could find new work in 60 days? If you can program your way out of a paper bag and find your ass with both hands and a google search, yeah. Which isn't to say that everyone can feasibly walk away in 60 days. If you're waiting for compensation to vest after an acquisition by Yahoo!, say.

This is patently untrue. I have a friend who graduated from UCLA with a computing minor who was working (unpaid) in a Stanford lab who couldn't find paying work for over 9 months. And no, he is not some kind of idiot, he got a 2390 on the new SAT and even showers regularly.

The hiring situation with no experience is a slightly different beast, particularly if you're not involved in open source or otherwise generating a lot of public code that people can look at.

People are rightly wary of hiring untested kids fresh out of college because so many of the just plain cannot program their way out of a paper bag. Not to accuse your friend of incompetence, it's just that until you have some kind of real portfolio, it's damn hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#125

Post by brown9-2 »

dlss wrote: post #72

Looks like the other comments on here are anti-Yammer. I guess I'll write up why this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. 1. If you read the article, he was apparently talking about people with options and control (Executives, Lawyers, Engineers), rather than janitors or other people who might not have as much say in who they work for. 2. The CEO states that his reasoning is that who you work for and support indicates w…

Re #1, that is not what TFA says:

After some backlash, Sacks is considering modifying his proposal to only extend to executives and lawyers, but he still feels all employees should take some ownership.

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#126

Post by jaxn »

shingen wrote: post #33

While it's a perfectly fine choice to ostracize Yahoo for their actions, Yammer's CEO is going to end up looking like little more than a hypocrite at the least, and maybe a dipshit, if he doesn't apply the same rules to all companies equally based on behavior. The odds the CEO will apply the same rule to all other companies acting with patent belligerence? Approximately zero. They'd need a substantial piece of tracki…

What he is really saying:

Yahoo employees, we are hiring right NOW. NOW is the time to send us your resume. Did I mention we are hiring?

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#127

Post by brown9-2 »

techwraith wrote: post #117
brown9-2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and has (a lot of) real revenue Do they make those numbers public though? All I could find was this http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/26/yammer-doubling-revenue-eve... Revenue in 2009 was “seven figures.” I asked Sacks to narrow that down in the video but he refused. He does say that Q1 2010 revenue exceeded all of 2009 revenue, and that revenue is now doubling every quarter. Yammer’s revenue goal by end of year is to be…

What private company discloses their revenue numbers?

But then how can you claim they have "(a lot of) real revenue" without being about to backup the assertion?

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#128

Post by tptacek »

Random people aren't pawns for political initiatives, even when the politics are good. And you can't walk it back to "well, there's already a taint for working at Yahoo" without being the guy who just called everyone at Yahoo incompetent. There were many ways this guy could have expressed a similar sentiment without casting aspersions on hundreds or maybe even thousands of totally reasonable, perfectly competent people. Instead, he picked the most classless possible way to do it.

I blame this on the choice of Twitter as his venue. Everything he said after it, to Venturebeat, is now subject to the distortions of the news cycle. I know of at least one really smart person who works at and thinks highly of Yammer; I have a hard time believing it's really run the way this article makes it sound.

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#129

Post by robomartin »

motoford wrote: post #123
robomartin wrote: post #119

What a jerk and a hypocrite. Patents are, like it or not, one of the weapons of war, if you will, in business. Have been for a long, long time. And, while I too hate the "we invented the button and we have a patent" crowd I also recognize that they exist for a reason. Denying someone employment because the company they work for seeks to enforce their patents --legitimate or not-- is nothing less than being a dick. If…

I guess jerk is subjective enough that you can offer that as your opinion. But how is he a hypocrite?

That could be a little off-base. It seems that this anti-Yahoo-employee rant was triggered in part because he recently got tangled in a patent lawsuit (affecting him directly). Where was he before he got sued? Remaining silent as it happens to others only to act when it happens to you is a form of hypocrisy.

But, I could be wrong.

Frankly, his attack on perfectly innocent folk really ticked me off.

Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days

#130

Post by [deleted] »

paul wrote: post #96
shingen wrote: post #33

While it's a perfectly fine choice to ostracize Yahoo for their actions, Yammer's CEO is going to end up looking like little more than a hypocrite at the least, and maybe a dipshit, if he doesn't apply the same rules to all companies equally based on behavior. The odds the CEO will apply the same rule to all other companies acting with patent belligerence? Approximately zero. They'd need a substantial piece of tracki…

Leaving Yahoo is a lot easier than leaving the USSR.

[deleted]
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