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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

#181

Post by marshray »

utopkara wrote: post #88
veguss wrote: post #60

Isn't this illegal? Discrimination laws.

No, it isn't legal. He is just being a troll for Yahoo decreasing the value of his prized facebook shares.

Honest question: Which law or code does it violate?

It's not like he's refusing to hire people of color or Vietnam veterans or even transsexuals. (Edit: I realize it might sound strange, but there's a legal basis behind that ordering it's not just my preferences :-)

He's refusing to hire certain resume' histories arguing that it is professionally relevant.

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

#182

Post by moocow01 »

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…

Im sorry but this is an incredibly sad and dehumanizing way of perceiving people and their skills. Can you make us a full list of all SV companies so we all can know where we stand on your tiered list and accordingly, what startups will and won't hire us?

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

#184

Post by dlss »

notJim wrote: post #172
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…

I have a lot of problems with this story, and with your arguments in favor of it. > the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, > the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have > stopped caring I guarantee you that there are people working at Yahoo! solving difficult and interesting problems, which many of us would envy. Not only that, but there are also going to be people working there now who va…

Dude, go read the article. His first public statement was a tweet. 160 characters. His statements in the article make it sound like he talked to his buddies before tweeting, had a nuanced position much like the one you are describing (ie working at Yahoo is okay if you have a really really good reason), and then tweeted something a bit sensational to get the idea some news coverage.

Sure, he could have phrased the tweet better. But that's arguably not the point of Twitter :p

On an unrelated note, I can't make heads or tails of your third paragraph. First you argue that the "ethical way for a business to behave is to maximize shareholder value", then you claim that "we are looking at ethics here, not whether this is a good business move". Those two sentences come back to back and appear self-contradictory -- maximizing shareholder value is done by good business moves.

Did you mean that if the Yahoo board believed the action was ethical, then the employees shouldn't care if they think it's ethical? (Or that Yammer's CEO shouldn't care if those employees thought it was ethical?) (Or perhaps that Yahoo employees who stay are better hires, since they won't get in the way of business ethics?)

As you can see I am a bit befuddled by your paragraph three.

As to the question of (good arguers) (people with similar ethics) you bring up at the end, I can not say. Personally, the most productive teams I have been on have had relatively heterogeneous beliefs and ethics. Perhaps your experience differs.

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

#185

Post by jacquesm »

daeken wrote: post #180
tptacek wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Give those people 2 days to learn a new instruction set for an architecture that's only ever synthesized onto an FPGA, then reverse firmware compiled to that architecture back to an exploitable overflow. They'll do it. And they won't even use Mongodb to do it.

You're simply measuring passion in a different way. The (very, very small number of) people who can do this are very passionate about the work, as we both know, and this shines through in the work they do in and out of the day job. But let's say you saw someone that was coming from a security consultancy that started doing interesting, challenging work and then turned into a shop doing nothing but the same web pentes…

Some people have had their choices severely constrained by circumstances. A categorical 'I won't hire from company 'x'' without any willingness to look at circumstances is silly.

Another thing the guy overlooks: these people could simply be extremely loyal and may hope that given Y!'s scale that there is a chance that the right management team could make things work. Other companies have been in bad shape and have survived eventually.

Loyalty is an excellent quality and penalizing it is stupid. You really shouldn't hire based on where people used to work, you should hire based on your needs, team fit and skills.

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

#186

Post by jacquesm »

This guy is an idiot. People at Yahoo that do not determine policy may not be at liberty to simply quit their positions. They'll have dependents, mortgages and other long running commitments.

To make blanket statements like this - especially as a CEO - is dumb, plain and simple. I have never used a Yahoo product and I disagree with a lot of things they've done in the past couple of years. But I'd never hold working at some other company during whatever period in their life-cycle against a former employee.

Yes, Yahoo! made a dick move. But that does not mean that everybody working at Yahoo! should be penalized like this.

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

#187

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Yahoo is an enormous company with lots and lots of different products some of which are operating at massive scale and would require a very knowledgeable team to work on them.

They pioneered a lot of those 'latest technologies' there and you'd be lucky to be able to hire them. Ditto for microsoft. If you think these are 'backwards' companies then you have no idea of what is going on there.

You are making blanket statements about untold thousands of people without any knowledge about the individuals at all. You can not make such statements. You can only make such statements about individuals, never about groups.

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

#188

Post by temphn »

jacquesm wrote: post #187
temphn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yahoo is an enormous company with lots and lots of different products some of which are operating at massive scale and would require a very knowledgeable team to work on them. They pioneered a lot of those 'latest technologies' there and you'd be lucky to be able to hire them. Ditto for microsoft. If you think these are 'backwards' companies then you have no idea of what is going on there. You are making blanket stat…

Of course you can make statements about groups. In a different context, most of the people here agreed with this:

  http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

  I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. 
  Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't 
  realize how much they suck. They still think they can 
  write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards 
  of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years 
  ago.
That was 2007. A generalization about a group of people's ability to write software, which arose from observation of their company's products and behavior. If that's not legitimate, I suppose all must have prizes.

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

#189

Post by temphn »

moocow01 wrote: post #182
temphn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Im sorry but this is an incredibly sad and dehumanizing way of perceiving people and their skills. Can you make us a full list of all SV companies so we all can know where we stand on your tiered list and accordingly, what startups will and won't hire us?

  SELECT * FROM companies WHERE field='tech' ORDER BY growth_rate, market_cap;
That will roughly correspond to a rank ordering of companies that are both growing and big. Apple and Facebook will be near the top of that list. Yahoo and Microsoft much lower.

You could also do it Turing style, analyzing LinkedIn data to see which company is raiding which for talent. Very few Googlers are going to MS. And very few Facebook people are going to Google. Like PageRank, these migration signals give you a rank ordering of desirability.

You can rank colleges the same way, which is why people from Stanford and MIT are usually in the headlines for technological breakthroughs and why people from Directional State are not.

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

#190

Post by jacquesm »

temphn wrote: post #188
jacquesm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo is an enormous company with lots and lots of different products some of which are operating at massive scale and would require a very knowledgeable team to work on them. They pioneered a lot of those 'latest technologies' there and you'd be lucky to be able to hire them. Ditto for microsoft. If you think these are 'backwards' companies then you have no idea of what is going on there. You are making blanket stat…

Of course you can make statements about groups. In a different context, most of the people here agreed with this: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended…

No, you can't.

Within every large enough group there will be individuals that you'd be more than happy to hire.

What most people here agree with does not change the facts.

Microsoft as a company may suck (and even that depends on your viewpoint, I would agree with that statement but plenty of people do not and they may have just as much reason to believe their opinions as I do) but that does not automatically translate into 'everybody that works at microsoft sucks'.

Oh, and they're still one of the largest software companies and one of the largest companies in general. There's bound to be interesting work and interesting people within its walls.

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