4 ms·

Speaking as an ex-Yahoo!, I have to say that with a company that big, with that many external commercial deals, and that many layers of management: effecting ch

• nostrademons 15y ago
  I do think it's significantly more difficult at Yahoo than at Google. Google has a very much bottom-up culture. If you want to try something different, get the support of your manager and peers, and then just go do it. If it turns out to work significantly better, people in other parts of the organization will notice, and copy it. Pretty soon the whole company will be doing it whether or not Larry blesses it. The introduction - and then pervasiveness - of unit tests was one such change that basically took over Google culture despite the ambivalence of the founders. People found they could simply move faster when they had confidence in their code, they started sharing the knowledge of how to write better tests, and eventually it simply became the accepted thing to do. (Interestingly, the testing intergrouplet failed several times before they struck on a bottom-up approached that worked. As with everything, persistence is important inside big companies too.)