This blog post says much about Yammer CEO, than about Yahoo! employees
Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
141–150 of 202 posts
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#142While 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…
When the patent system is so fundamentally broken, and will take years to fix through political means, drastic measures have a certain logic to them.
Are there a lot of other public companies in SV that have a patent portfolio the size of Yahoo who are going after non-public companies with broad, web 2.0 patents? I think you could count on two hands the number of software companies with the patent portfolio the size of Yahoo (not counting NPE like IV).
If Yahoo succeeds with Facebook, they will extract this tax out of every new web company that is a success. And down the road, if MSFT really falls off, they will do the same.
Somebody has to draw a line in the sand. Get the employees to stand against this, because the mgmt never will.
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#143While 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…
It isn't hypocritical. If you know someone behaves in a manner you think is unethical, you don't have to ignore it just because that information might be less accessible for the next candidate. You use the information you have about each individual candidate. If one candidate got caught stealing office supplies and you somehow know about it, you take that into account rather than ignoring it just because the next guy may have gotten away with it.
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#144I have a little thought experiment:
Yahoo is acting distastefully. David Sacks suggests that we threaten and punish those who work there. This includes those who can have no real influence on company strategy.
David Sacks is also acting distastefully.
Therefore if we were to follow David Sack's advice we should now threaten David's gardener and pool-boy.
I'm sure the cafeteria staff, interns, co-op hires, newly hired, green cards and so forth will appreciate being ostracised like this.
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaving Yahoo is a lot easier than leaving the USSR.
Sure. But now what? The problem here is that a huge number of talented people almost certainly do work for Yahoo without ever paying attention to the news cycle. Lots of talented people don't have startup ambitions; they bust their ass from 9-5 and come home to their families and their woodworking and charcuterie hobbies. Sure, they probably all have a sense that Yahoo isn't on a great trajectory, but they have no ur…
I wouldn't want to hire the person you describe.
This is simply a more visible indicator that a person doesn't care about the company they work for. That's fine for giant corporations, but amazingly deadly for startups.
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. But now what? The problem here is that a huge number of talented people almost certainly do work for Yahoo without ever paying attention to the news cycle. Lots of talented people don't have startup ambitions; they bust their ass from 9-5 and come home to their families and their woodworking and charcuterie hobbies. Sure, they probably all have a sense that Yahoo isn't on a great trajectory, but they have no ur…
I wouldn't want to hire the person you describe. This is simply a more visible indicator that a person doesn't care about the company they work for. That's fine for giant corporations, but amazingly deadly for startups.
The nicest thing Patrick McKenzie ever said about us was:
If I were looking for a day job, I wouldn't be looking for a day job any more: they're friendly, happy people who get social license to join the Dark Side, do smart stuff all day, and then go home while it is still light out.
I have a set of things I need to get done. It is my job as a company owner to help constrain and groom the subset of what's getting done every day so that the business prospers without burning through people like charcoal briquettes. And In my experience doing that, the lifestyle that team members want to lead hasn't proven to be correlated at all with what's actually getting done.
You can hire however you want. It is, I sincerely believe, your loss.
If you can code, particularly in C, are interested in software security, are good at learning lots of things very fast, and get rejected from whatever job "subwindow from Hacker News" was hiring for because you aren't startup-y enough, please consider dropping us a note. We don't think like him.
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#147If I were a talented engineer, I would never apply to Yammer in the first place. (Yahoo employee here), I think its time these companies stop thinking so highly of themselves, the sad truth is everyone does patent litigation, fix the system before making sweeping statements or atleast be fair and blame everyone (apple, msft etc included) .There is a bias in the valley against yahoo, some of which is deserved most of…
You're not an engineer, or you're not talented? :)
Based on his username, it seems likely that he's an engineer...
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#148And I wouldn't work for the CEO of Yammer.
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#149Why does Yammer make me think of this scene from Coming to America?
Re: Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice, pretty solid bit of Godwin's Law trolling. I'm not interested in debating this to the level of detail that will spare me being called a nazi by someone on the internet, so suffice it to say that _any_ blacklist based on generalized attributes and affiliations will unfairly target innocents. Companies have lots of tactics to shorten applicant stacks ("wrote a personalized cover letter", "minimum 12yrs experience…
It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole. It's the model case.
> It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole.
This is a deeply idiotic statement. In fact, it's quite easy to talk about how much responsibility Yahoo employees have for the intellectual property lawsuits started by management, and yet not make use of comparisons to the Nazis.
When the roads into Sunnyvale have signs saying "Arbeit macht frei" over them, then you can feel free to make such comparisons. Till then, you're a complete jackass.