What happens after Yahoo acquires you • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#151

Post by billybob » Thu, Feb 24, 2011, 4:24 PM UTC

wladimir wrote: post #114

jrockway wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. As soon as I have to do bullshit like timesheets, that mental switch flips and my creativity is gone. I assume my employer has decided, ``it's worth making each employee do 20 minutes of busywork a week and killing their happiness rather than doing without a sheet of numbers that says "8 8 8 8 8"''.

Heh, it can be worse. In my last job we actually had three parallel time reporting systems. One for billable hours, one for hours worked on project, and one that clocked on entering/exiting the building. Of course, they all three had to match. I've always wondered how that's useful to anyone. Judge me by the quality of work I do, but not whether I sit in the chair the required number of minutes.

Two jobs ago I had to clock out, using a program installed on my computer, to go to the bathroom.

The program sometimes crashed.

I also had to fill out a paper timesheet, in case the computer one was wrong. My manager and I both had to sign it.

I printed a TPS Report cover and posted it on my cubicle in silent protest. And I happily moved on when the time came.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#152

Post by barredo » Thu, Feb 24, 2011, 4:30 PM UTC

petervandijck wrote: post #23

edw519 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a right way to do this? Yes. a. Make it a fully owned subsidiary. b. Don't fuck with it.

That's what Google did with YouTube, right?

Well, sort-of. I prefer the Amazon-IMDb example

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#153

Post by joshu » Thu, Feb 24, 2011, 9:30 PM UTC

robryan wrote: post #88

joshu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flickr people were pretty good at this. I was less so. One thing that always bugged me - when I ran Delicious, I had people submit a weekly status update (just a list of bullet points) to the entire company. That way everyone knew what was going on. We got to Yahoo, and my boss decided to kill that. When I got to Google, globally visible weekly status in bullet point form are part of the culture. I take this as v…

What's the accountability like? If in delicious case if it is to be shut down, do the execs/managers responsible for it get some kind of penalty or is it business as usual where the blame can be passed to any number of other things for poor performance?

No. There was no corporate memory at all.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#154

Post by neilk » Thu, Feb 24, 2011, 10:51 PM UTC

kscaldef wrote: post #24

kenjackson wrote: post #13

So why does Yahoo buy these properties? While I'm sure we'd all like to think the decision makers at Yahoo since day 1 were all idiots who like to spend millions of dollars on companies and then let them die, but is there actually a rational reason? Were they trying to keep them out of the hands of Google? Did they do it purely for the eyeballs and thought with no additional spending they'd get their money back out o…

The article ignores the stories that turn out differently. For example, I noticed whereonearth in the list of acquisitions. I happen to know that their technology was nearly immediately used to start making money for Yahoo (because I integrated it into parts of the ad serving systems). It also was probably behind the "platform technology that enabled things like geolocation open API" that Upcoming enjoyed. The time c…

I am quoted in this article and I totally agree with you.

It has to do with the nature of the acquisition. As you say, WhereOnEarth was killer technology, easy to integrate into everything that Yahoo did.

The "Class of 2005" startups that Yahoo acquired were not about technology, they were about having a different relationship with the users and creating common resources (photo library, tagged URLs, event information...).

That's a much more problematic kind of innovation for a company like Yahoo. It was alien to how Yahoo worked, and for many groups it was even a kind of threat.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#155

Post by lenn0x » Sun, Mar 06, 2011, 7:29 PM UTC

petervandijck wrote: post #120

lenn0x wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried this approach at MyBlogLog. Managements response is: we'll not let you ship and refuse you resources.

And did they/you take this to upper management, to the people who acquired you?

I am not sure how much farther you can go when it was a SVP executive.