11 ms·

Ex-yahoo here, thought I would add my 2 cents. Yahoo under Jerry and Filo (love them both, this is not personal) had a twin culture of niceness and bureaucracy

Ex-yahoo here, thought I would add my 2 cents. Yahoo under Jerry and Filo (love them both, this is not personal) had a twin culture of niceness and bureaucracy which killed us. Here are an example of each: 1. Niceness - a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work (not WFH, just disappear occasionally). I took it to management, and was told we don’t want to hurt his feelings. 2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered.

organsnyder 6y ago
Hard to tell without context, but that first example could easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to employees ethically a good thing to do, but it can also lead to increased productivity in the long run. Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.
- purple-again 6y ago
  Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. It would be very strange if they had no idea and didn’t care that an employee wasn’t showing up. That kind of culture would get swamped fast.
  - glenstein 6y ago
    >Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. Is this based on direct knowledge or are you just listing possible examples? Because these examples are very different from what the ex-yahoo person mentioned in a follow-up comment: stuff like personal hobbies.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Yahoo was good at handling these types of things, but they were also good at keeping line management updated. I did have someone in my team at Yahoo I had to go to HR to get approval for special considerations due to a family member with cancer, and it was approved literally in minutes. But it's also well known that they were for a while very lax about handling unauthorised absence.
- thinkingkong 6y ago
  What kind of increase in productivity does just not showing up provide? People should be able to take sick days, personal days, mental health days, but disappearing should have raised concern from team members to see if that person is OK.
  - bitslayer 6y ago
    Management could have been aware of more personal details that coworkers should not know. I don't think it is necessarily a black mark against the company without knowing the whole story.
    - greyhair 6y ago
      You can never be to certain what other people are dealing with outside of work. Sometimes, management knows things that they are not at liberty to share.
      - oneplane 6y ago
        <joke>Sometimes management hires a hitman to get rid of an annoying employee but then forgot about that awkward moment when they don't show up for work</joke>
      - jointpdf 6y ago
        Exactly. There are a vast number of incapacitating health related reasons that could cause a person to be absent, e.g. panic attacks, stuck in a bathroom (IBS/IBD/Chron’s), migraines, depression. The type of thing that reasonably wouldn’t be broadcasted out to the entire team. I think it’s better to just assume nothing unless you have direct knowledge that the employee is doing something blatantly unethical like working at another job (has happened before).
    - prepend 6y ago
      Management could also communicate to concerns coworkers that the absences are excused. They could also work with the employee to notify teammates in an appropriate way. Just allowing employees to disappear with no notice or trace is an environment where I won’t want to work. There are obviously situations where I have to not be at work suddenly (eg, medical emergency where I don’t want to share details) but I can just send a text to a boss or corworker and have them do the rest. If HR said they didn’t want to act to not hurt feelings that seems like there was no additional info, unless they thought that was a proper way to protect medical info (it isn’t). Sounds like a bad place to work and seems like a negative factor for companies wanting to do well or me awesome.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Yeah, the rest of your team should totally not rely on you being there to pull your weight. They can handle things for you when you’re on call and no-show. Plus, we totally don’t have things like vacation and personal days for the times when somebody really needs a day off. /s
- tarunkotia 6y ago
  The point of being nice it seems that people were not repremended for bad behavior. That’s not a good thing for the culture because it’s demotivating for people who do things the right way as there is very little incentive in doing so.
  - ansible 6y ago
    People in general are hugely sensitive to perceived unfairness. This is a critical thing to maintain in any organization. For example, you can take a group of five billionaires. Give the first four a little tax break for something, which totals up to only be a million each. No big deal, right? All these people are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, the pinnacle of wealth in the world. There's no way that little tax break would prevent the 5th billionaire from buying the private island he always wanted, or whatever. In practice, though, that 5th billionaire will be pissed he didn't also get the tax break. He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break. Is that a good use of his time? He would be happier driving around on his 80ft yacht... if he could focus on that instead. But that's not how our brains are wired.
    - bshacklett 6y ago
      It's not just humans. This behavior seems to go pretty deep: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html
      - _jal 6y ago
        The cool thing is that cheat detection/unfairness detection seems to happen at the semantic level of reasoning. You can see this with kids - one example I recall is a friend's 5 year old being upset at seeing another kid with ice cream. $Parent said it was that kid's birthday (who knows), and her kid immediately got over it. So if only billionaires were human, we could just suggest their semantic categories were wrong. <rimshot>
        6y ago
- nikhizzle 6y ago
  The employee was taking off days without taking vacation to work on hobbies without telling HR or Management. He was just not showing up. This happened with many employees all the time.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Makes me feel like a chump for not taking advantage when I worked there.
  - idlewords 6y ago
    My coworker at a Yahoo office in SF moved to Uruguay (where his wife is from) and then expected the company to fly him in for important meetings. He got away with it for a bit before HR caught wind. Even for them it was too much.
    - HappyDreamer 6y ago
      He got fired? Or moved back to SF?
      - prepend 6y ago
        Judging by the other stories I expect HR cracking down would be something “no more first class flights, only business.”
        ghaff 6y ago
        HR's issue was probably more along the lines of you're violating internal policies and probably various tax, etc. laws if you're supposedly living in one place and are actually living somewhere else--especially in a different country.
      - idlewords 6y ago
        He reluctantly moved back after his boss got yelled at.
14 6y ago
I am curious as to the niceness point. Are you sure he randomly decided not to show up? Perhaps he and management had a quiet agreement where when his chronic diarrhea showed up he stayed home. Work is informed but when you ask they make up some excuse, we don’t want to hurt his feelings, but really that is just the way of not telling you as his medical history is personal and not your business.
madeofpalk 6y ago
> a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work [... ] I took it to management out of the context provided, this sounds likes like none of your business?
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  What if you need that coworker to do your job?
  - outworlder 6y ago
    Then it would be a bad working environment, but for another reason. Companies should assume that anyone can be run over by a bus at any time and plan accordingly.
    - strken 6y ago
      This doesn't seem reasonable. If you assume anyone can be run over by a bus, most ways of mitigating that risk involve some recovery time. If it takes 4 hours to recover that person's work and get up to speed, the company has planned accordingly, but it's still extremely inconvenient to lose half a day because someone didn't show up to work.
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    "out of the context provided"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
marcinzm 6y ago
>2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered. I personally I believe Hadoop took off at Yahoo because it was a way of getting computing resources that did not need to go through the committees. Big Data? Map Reduce? Less important than simply getting a machine to do things on even if it was just the gateway node (the game of trying gateway nodes till one wasn't at 100% cpu was always fun).
- nikhizzle 6y ago
  To get access to the Hadoop cluster you also needed special permissions and to go through a committee. At Facebook, access was given to all technical and non-technical (after an afternoon of training) people.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Sure but you went through the committee once and then had as much computing resources as you needed. I don't remember it being hard and my whole team got access pretty early and quickly. Compared to the five servers we had to nurse for 2 years because that's all we'd get before then.
- fdjlasdfjl 6y ago
  Lol, I do the same thing with Oracle at my oppressively bureaucratic workplace. Servers? No. New software? Fuck no. It's amazing what I've managed to make this clunky language do, because its the only tool I can effectively use.
vidarh 6y ago
I led the European billing engineering team[1] at Yahoo 2003-2005. We processed millions of dollars worth of payments for European premium services every year, so we had a very clear idea of our value to the business, and I had to deal with that exact same thing when we needed a server upgrade once in that three year period that cost a fraction of what I got approved in bonuses for my team every year. Afterwards I tried to estimate the cost to Yahoo of the time of the dozen or so people, including one of the founders, and I don't remember my estimate, but I do remember it was many times the cost of the server. [1] yes, Yahoo had multiple billing teams - that's a story in itself; my team existed almost entirely to protect the European businesses against the perceived inability of the US billing team to accept and respect the requirements of the European business. Of course we couldn't admit that to the US team, so my job was basically to repeatedly refuse to surrender an inch in terms of customer requirements whenever the US team tried to convince us to move something over to the US platform.
- killjoywashere 6y ago
  Jerry Yang is Taiwanese. I'd like to think I work hard, but my current boss is of Taiwanese extraction. The cultural commitment to suffering is hard to explain. My usual joke with her is asking if she slept well on her bed of nails. I can imagine he may feel like his employees should be grateful for the opportunity to exhibit their suffering.
  - tamade 6y ago
    Stereotype much?
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      Read it again. It's not a stereotype. It's his personal observation.
      - lazyasciiart 6y ago
        It's his personal observation that Jerry Yang is the same nationality as his manager, and therefore thinks the same way.
dangus 6y ago
That “niceness” is a textbook example of “ruinous empathy.” https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-honesty/ https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-hone...
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Thanks for that link!
edm0nd 6y ago
Marissa Mayer ruined Yahoo
- mrnobody_67 6y ago
  ... and walked out with a fortune
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Yahoo's decline predates Marissa. But she certainly failed to do anything to correct its tailspin into the ground.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    The company inherited a billion dollars with the Alibaba IPO around the time she became CEO, and she couldn't make it work.
lukatmyshu 6y ago
Are you me? I had the exact two same issues when I was at Yahoo (2005-2007) basically due to Jerry & Filo. Somehow happy to know that I wasn't the only one :)

organsnyder 6y ago

Hard to tell without context, but that first example could easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to employees ethically a good thing to do, but it can also lead to increased productivity in the long run. Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.

purple-again 6y ago
Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. It would be very strange if they had no idea and didn’t care that an employee wasn’t showing up. That kind of culture would get swamped fast.
- glenstein 6y ago
  >Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on. Is this based on direct knowledge or are you just listing possible examples? Because these examples are very different from what the ex-yahoo person mentioned in a follow-up comment: stuff like personal hobbies.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Yahoo was good at handling these types of things, but they were also good at keeping line management updated. I did have someone in my team at Yahoo I had to go to HR to get approval for special considerations due to a family member with cancer, and it was approved literally in minutes. But it's also well known that they were for a while very lax about handling unauthorised absence.
thinkingkong 6y ago
What kind of increase in productivity does just not showing up provide? People should be able to take sick days, personal days, mental health days, but disappearing should have raised concern from team members to see if that person is OK.
- bitslayer 6y ago
  Management could have been aware of more personal details that coworkers should not know. I don't think it is necessarily a black mark against the company without knowing the whole story.
  - greyhair 6y ago
    You can never be to certain what other people are dealing with outside of work. Sometimes, management knows things that they are not at liberty to share.
    - oneplane 6y ago
      <joke>Sometimes management hires a hitman to get rid of an annoying employee but then forgot about that awkward moment when they don't show up for work</joke>
    - jointpdf 6y ago
      Exactly. There are a vast number of incapacitating health related reasons that could cause a person to be absent, e.g. panic attacks, stuck in a bathroom (IBS/IBD/Chron’s), migraines, depression. The type of thing that reasonably wouldn’t be broadcasted out to the entire team. I think it’s better to just assume nothing unless you have direct knowledge that the employee is doing something blatantly unethical like working at another job (has happened before).
  - prepend 6y ago
    Management could also communicate to concerns coworkers that the absences are excused. They could also work with the employee to notify teammates in an appropriate way. Just allowing employees to disappear with no notice or trace is an environment where I won’t want to work. There are obviously situations where I have to not be at work suddenly (eg, medical emergency where I don’t want to share details) but I can just send a text to a boss or corworker and have them do the rest. If HR said they didn’t want to act to not hurt feelings that seems like there was no additional info, unless they thought that was a proper way to protect medical info (it isn’t). Sounds like a bad place to work and seems like a negative factor for companies wanting to do well or me awesome.
jtbayly 6y ago
Yeah, the rest of your team should totally not rely on you being there to pull your weight. They can handle things for you when you’re on call and no-show. Plus, we totally don’t have things like vacation and personal days for the times when somebody really needs a day off. /s
tarunkotia 6y ago
The point of being nice it seems that people were not repremended for bad behavior. That’s not a good thing for the culture because it’s demotivating for people who do things the right way as there is very little incentive in doing so.
- ansible 6y ago
  People in general are hugely sensitive to perceived unfairness. This is a critical thing to maintain in any organization. For example, you can take a group of five billionaires. Give the first four a little tax break for something, which totals up to only be a million each. No big deal, right? All these people are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, the pinnacle of wealth in the world. There's no way that little tax break would prevent the 5th billionaire from buying the private island he always wanted, or whatever. In practice, though, that 5th billionaire will be pissed he didn't also get the tax break. He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break. Is that a good use of his time? He would be happier driving around on his 80ft yacht... if he could focus on that instead. But that's not how our brains are wired.
  - bshacklett 6y ago
    It's not just humans. This behavior seems to go pretty deep: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html
    - _jal 6y ago
      The cool thing is that cheat detection/unfairness detection seems to happen at the semantic level of reasoning. You can see this with kids - one example I recall is a friend's 5 year old being upset at seeing another kid with ice cream. $Parent said it was that kid's birthday (who knows), and her kid immediately got over it. So if only billionaires were human, we could just suggest their semantic categories were wrong. <rimshot>
      - 6y ago
nikhizzle 6y ago
The employee was taking off days without taking vacation to work on hobbies without telling HR or Management. He was just not showing up. This happened with many employees all the time.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Makes me feel like a chump for not taking advantage when I worked there.
- idlewords 6y ago
  My coworker at a Yahoo office in SF moved to Uruguay (where his wife is from) and then expected the company to fly him in for important meetings. He got away with it for a bit before HR caught wind. Even for them it was too much.
  - HappyDreamer 6y ago
    He got fired? Or moved back to SF?
    - prepend 6y ago
      Judging by the other stories I expect HR cracking down would be something “no more first class flights, only business.”
      - ghaff 6y ago
        HR's issue was probably more along the lines of you're violating internal policies and probably various tax, etc. laws if you're supposedly living in one place and are actually living somewhere else--especially in a different country.
    - idlewords 6y ago
      He reluctantly moved back after his boss got yelled at.

14 6y ago

I am curious as to the niceness point. Are you sure he randomly decided not to show up? Perhaps he and management had a quiet agreement where when his chronic diarrhea showed up he stayed home. Work is informed but when you ask they make up some excuse, we don’t want to hurt his feelings, but really that is just the way of not telling you as his medical history is personal and not your business.

madeofpalk 6y ago

> a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work [... ] I took it to management out of the context provided, this sounds likes like none of your business?

jonny_eh 6y ago
What if you need that coworker to do your job?
- outworlder 6y ago
  Then it would be a bad working environment, but for another reason. Companies should assume that anyone can be run over by a bus at any time and plan accordingly.
  - strken 6y ago
    This doesn't seem reasonable. If you assume anyone can be run over by a bus, most ways of mitigating that risk involve some recovery time. If it takes 4 hours to recover that person's work and get up to speed, the company has planned accordingly, but it's still extremely inconvenient to lose half a day because someone didn't show up to work.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  "out of the context provided"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

marcinzm 6y ago

>2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered. I personally I believe Hadoop took off at Yahoo because it was a way of getting computing resources that did not need to go through the committees. Big Data? Map Reduce? Less important than simply getting a machine to do things on even if it was just the gateway node (the game of trying gateway nodes till one wasn't at 100% cpu was always fun).

nikhizzle 6y ago
To get access to the Hadoop cluster you also needed special permissions and to go through a committee. At Facebook, access was given to all technical and non-technical (after an afternoon of training) people.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Sure but you went through the committee once and then had as much computing resources as you needed. I don't remember it being hard and my whole team got access pretty early and quickly. Compared to the five servers we had to nurse for 2 years because that's all we'd get before then.
fdjlasdfjl 6y ago
Lol, I do the same thing with Oracle at my oppressively bureaucratic workplace. Servers? No. New software? Fuck no. It's amazing what I've managed to make this clunky language do, because its the only tool I can effectively use.

vidarh 6y ago

I led the European billing engineering team[1] at Yahoo 2003-2005. We processed millions of dollars worth of payments for European premium services every year, so we had a very clear idea of our value to the business, and I had to deal with that exact same thing when we needed a server upgrade once in that three year period that cost a fraction of what I got approved in bonuses for my team every year. Afterwards I tried to estimate the cost to Yahoo of the time of the dozen or so people, including one of the founders, and I don't remember my estimate, but I do remember it was many times the cost of the server. [1] yes, Yahoo had multiple billing teams - that's a story in itself; my team existed almost entirely to protect the European businesses against the perceived inability of the US billing team to accept and respect the requirements of the European business. Of course we couldn't admit that to the US team, so my job was basically to repeatedly refuse to surrender an inch in terms of customer requirements whenever the US team tried to convince us to move something over to the US platform.

killjoywashere 6y ago
Jerry Yang is Taiwanese. I'd like to think I work hard, but my current boss is of Taiwanese extraction. The cultural commitment to suffering is hard to explain. My usual joke with her is asking if she slept well on her bed of nails. I can imagine he may feel like his employees should be grateful for the opportunity to exhibit their suffering.
- tamade 6y ago
  Stereotype much?
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Read it again. It's not a stereotype. It's his personal observation.
    - lazyasciiart 6y ago
      It's his personal observation that Jerry Yang is the same nationality as his manager, and therefore thinks the same way.

dangus 6y ago

That “niceness” is a textbook example of “ruinous empathy.” https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-honesty/ https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-hone...

quickthrower2 6y ago
Thanks for that link!

edm0nd 6y ago

Marissa Mayer ruined Yahoo

mrnobody_67 6y ago
... and walked out with a fortune
9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
Yahoo's decline predates Marissa. But she certainly failed to do anything to correct its tailspin into the ground.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  The company inherited a billion dollars with the Alibaba IPO around the time she became CEO, and she couldn't make it work.

lukatmyshu 6y ago

Are you me? I had the exact two same issues when I was at Yahoo (2005-2007) basically due to Jerry & Filo. Somehow happy to know that I wasn't the only one :)