From Quora: http://www.quora.com/How-valid-are-the-reasons-for-Yahoo-problems-mentioned-in-Paul-Grahams-new-article-What-Happened-to-Yahoo-Are-they-still-valid-

From Quora: http://www.quora.com/How-valid-are-the-reasons-for-Yahoo-problems-mentioned-in-Paul-Grahams-new-article-What-Happened-to-Yahoo-Are-they-still-valid-in-current-Yahoo http://www.quora.com/How-valid-are-the-reasons-for-Yahoo-pro... The main point of Graham's article is that Yahoo! didn't have a hacker-centric culture. If there was a time when that was true, it must have been before I joined. A company without a hacker-centric culture doesn't encourage the kind of risk-taking and experimentation I saw when I was at Yahoo! Search. As an engineer, I had direct input into product features at every level, from ideation to design to implementation to launch. If I had a crazy idea, I was encouraged not just to tell people about it (up to and including executives), but to implement it and see if it tested well with users. I was able to add my own personal touch to parts of the product (sometimes big parts) without needing to ask permission or wade through excessive red tape. This may not sound impressive to someone who's used to the way things work at startups or small companies. But this was at one of the largest Internet companies in the world, on one of the most visited websites in the world. For Yahoo! to give me and other engineers the kind of freedom and power we had is not normal for a company or a product that operates at this scale.