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

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

#151

Post by dlss »

brown9-2 wrote: post #125
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.

No, no, it is. From the paragraph after the one you are quoting:

“People were telling me I need to think of the Yahoo rank and file, folks who have families, but the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring,”

(Emphasis on were added. Unless janitors are in hot demand in the valley this confirms the statement as is)

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

#152

Post by temphn »

subwindow wrote: post #145
tptacek wrote: post #131

Earlier 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.

Exactly. It's amazing how many people are saying "well, there are lots of programmers who don't pay attention to the latest technology, you can't just refuse to hire them".

But you can and you should.

Anyone at Yahoo/MS today is (on average) already under suspicion of being 2nd tier and a notch below a Facebooker/Googler. And those Yahoo engineers who stick through this one will tend to be the 3rd tier. They aren't going to see this Yammer thread and they sure aren't going to get hired by a good startup.

So why even bring them up in this thread? We're talking about the good folks left at Yahoo, the guys who are like Jeremy Zawodny and Prabhakar Raghavan, who want to leave before Jerry Yang's company completes its transformation into SCO.

Not the time punchers who don't know what the clock says.

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

#153

Post by ktizo »

jaxn wrote: post #126
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?

And, if we haven't found the right people in 60 days time, we might very well be screwed.

Who are Yammer by the way? Should I know about them?

[googles] ahh, is a twitintraweb. Well, I suppose those fortune 500 media budgets have to be spent somewhere.

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

#154

Post by tobtoh »

subwindow wrote: post #145
tptacek wrote: post #131

Earlier 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.

This is simplistic binary thinking - life is not black and white. Judging people by ticking boxes on a checklist shows a lack of understanding of people and the complexity of motivations.

Maybe the employee feels the project they are working on is worthwhile, maybe they thinks that if they can get their project to succeed, it will negate the need for Yahoo to pursue patent litigation, or maybe, the employee has loyalty and passion for Yahoo and will stick with it through thick and thin to try and turn it around. They sound like qualities any startup would benefit from in an employee.

Yet, you judge all employees on a single issue made by someone else at the company.

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

#155

Post by ktizo »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #92
harlanlewis wrote: post #84

Earlier 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…

I think the Godwin-ing of the thread happened in the original post, which referred to Stalin. Responding with Nazi stuff is not an escalation at that point.

I guess there is supposed to be a brief pact before the escalation.

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

#157

Post by larrys »

tptacek wrote: post #146
subwindow wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"please consider dropping us a note"

People in the startupsphere (who in many cases have been doing things since, what, 2007?) fail to understand the amount of capable accomplished people there are that have never read HN or know who Arrington or Wilson or Graham are. In their mind these people simply aren't cut from the right bolt of cloth to work at a startup. I mean they don't know what the word pivot means and god knows they might actually waste time doing sysadmin work themselves on a server. And wow it actually took them like 10 or 20 years to learn what some young hotshot learned in 1 year.

I happened to mention sometime over the last year to my "go to" guy (who happens to run a security team of 17 at some major consulting company and who flys around the world on assignments so, um, I guess he knows what he is doing which is why I rely on him) anyway I told him he might find HN interesting to read. He took a look and said he had been reading PG's essays "for years" but never knew about YC or HN.

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

#158

Post by jjacobson »

chollida1 wrote: post #118

my first reaction to this was similar to most people here, that this guy is just looking for publicity and why punish the good engineers at yahoo for this. However, I do remember the SCO fiasco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO-Linux_controversies . The feeling I got from the tech community was that SCO engineers were certainly black listed from alot of jobs at other tech companies. I guess it's worth exploring what m…

I sat in on an interview for a at that time current SCO Engineer. He told us about his current projects like getting Firefox running on their Unix platform. None of us wanted to work with him even though he had the skills we were looking for.

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

#159

Post by ryanhuff »

temphn wrote: post #152
subwindow wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. It's amazing how many people are saying "well, there are lots of programmers who don't pay attention to the latest technology, you can't just refuse to hire them". But you can and you should. Anyone at Yahoo/MS today is (on average) already under suspicion of being 2nd tier and a notch below a Facebooker/Googler. And those Yahoo engineers who stick through this one will tend to be the 3rd tier. They aren't g…

You misinterpreted and/or mischaracterized what was said. Paying attention to new software development practices has nothing to do with reading tech news. Additionally, your perspective seems grossly shallow.
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