8 ms·

While it's a perfectly fine choice to ostracize Yahoo for their actions, Yammer's CEO is going to end up looking like little more than a hypocrite at the least,

by shingen 15y ago

While it's a perfectly fine choice to ostracize Yahoo for their actions, Yammer's CEO is going to end up looking like little more than a hypocrite at the least, and maybe a dipshit, if he doesn't apply the same rules to all companies equally based on behavior. The odds the CEO will apply the same rule to all other companies acting with patent belligerence? Approximately zero. They'd need a substantial piece of tracking software just to attempt it, and then it'd be down to subjective whim as to which company employees deserves to be 'punished'. Lame. Here's what it's equivalent to intellectually (using an extreme example to frame it): Joseph Stalin was evil, therefore everyone in the USSR was evil; never allow anyone from the USSR to immigrate. Sometimes it's not so simple as to pack up and leave your job when, say, you have children and a family to look out for or any number of a zillion other considerations in life (which is already hard enough in general). Really makes me think the CEO is a serious jerkwad.

guimarin 15y ago
It can be done. Look at the US. Ever had to fill out, 'Not a member of the Nazi Party between 1933-1945? The US Citizenship test in no way makes the US look like a 'serious jerkwad.'
- shingen 15y ago
  If the US Citizenship test assumed all Germans from 1933-45 were volitional Nazis, then yes it'd be a jerkwad test.
  - stickfigure 15y ago
    If you collect a paycheck from the Gestapo, it doesn't really matter whether or not you call yourself a Nazi.
- atonse 15y ago
  To add some perspective Yahoo has just entered the ranks of a Grade-A patent troll. That is the _worst_ of their offenses. That puts them in the same league as Intellectual Ventures. That's it. They're no worse. Let's not lose sight of that. There's no real "news" here, apart from the sad realization that this is the strongest signal yet that Yahoo is now just an empty shell of suits, bean counters, and lawyers.
  - spullara 15y ago
    To be clear, Yahoo has implemented and currently has in production the things covered by the patents. As much as I don't like what they are doing, they are pretty far above a patent troll.
- MichaelApproved 15y ago
  Does checking that off automatically disqualify you from being a citizen or does it simply spark an investigation into what your role was in the party?
  - protomyth 15y ago
    One of my friends Dad immigrated here after WWII from Germany and he was HY (forced) and he got his citizenship. From his decription, it only triggers a check against of list of people the US would like to have a "deeper conversation" with.
- recoiledsnake 15y ago
  Thanks for invoking the Godwin's law. I can easily ignore this comment thread.
  - vibrunazo 15y ago
    I think you're confusing his argument with Godwin's law because of the similarity with a nazi analogy. But above all, the Godwin's law is an Ad Hominem, which is not what guimarin is doing. He's just fighting an analogy with another analogy. I do agree that both of them have bad analogies :) But that's a different problem, it's not an Ad Hominem.
- praxeologist 15y ago
  As a good example for how long it might take people to wise up about IP (it needs to be abolished wholesale), take note that US citizenship stuff still asks if people are a member of the Communist Party.
- harlanlewis 15y ago
  Nice, pretty solid bit of Godwin's Law trolling. I'm not interested in debating this to the level of detail that will spare me being called a nazi by someone on the internet, so suffice it to say that _any_ blacklist based on generalized attributes and affiliations will unfairly target innocents. Companies have lots of tactics to shorten applicant stacks ("wrote a personalized cover letter", "minimum 12yrs experience HTML5", "name printed in blue"). Power to Yammer if they want to add "dates employed at yahoo" to the list - talented folks will have little trouble finding work.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    I think the Godwin-ing of the thread happened in the original post, which referred to Stalin. Responding with Nazi stuff is not an escalation at that point.
    - ktizo 15y ago
      I guess there is supposed to be a brief pact before the escalation.
  - pessimizer 15y ago
    It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole. It's the model case.
    - meepmorp 15y ago
      > It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole. This is a deeply idiotic statement. In fact, it's quite easy to talk about how much responsibility Yahoo employees have for the intellectual property lawsuits started by management, and yet not make use of comparisons to the Nazis. When the roads into Sunnyvale have signs saying "Arbeit macht frei" over them, then you can feel free to make such comparisons. Till then, you're a complete jackass.
- guimarin 15y ago
  My original intent was to point out with sarcasm how taking what this CEO said as anything more than a publicity stunt/icebreaker for employees looking to leave yahoo, is absolutely absurd. OP is a result of way too much naval gazing on a pretty cut and dry topic. Yahoo is acting the villain, so let's incentivize employees to leave them. I don't think anyone believes seriously that the CEO is either going to keep a big list, or start acting this way towards other valley companies. He is capitalizing on the hype surrounding yahoos use of the 'nuclear option.' Implementation of such a system is riddled with flaws, as evidenced by the fact that the US still asks people [ with a straight face as well ] if they were a member of the Nazi party on current citizenship tests.
benatkin 15y ago
I agree that your example is extreme. But I think that its extremeness invalidates it. There's a big difference between immigration and employment. Many families depend on a single country's immigration policies to be together. People who are barred from one company can seek employment at another company. David Sacks' move is personal, and moves made out of frustration are often hypocritical, and I'm not surprised it's going to piss some people off. I'm glad this is just one person and one medium-sized company. If Apple, Microsoft, or Google announced this type of policy in a press release I'd be disgusted. It's easy for me to shrug it off when a CEO of a company with fewer than 500 employees announces it in a tweet and quickly waters it down significantly. https://twitter.com/#!/DavidSacks/status/179788086862028800 https://twitter.com/#!/DavidSacks/status/179788086862028800
psycho 15y ago
I guess that it won't go far more than just a statement from one CEO. Hope, other Valley CEOs are more reasonable and will take arguments like yours into consideration.
Jimmie 15y ago
Actually he specifically mentioned people with families. ' “People were telling me I need to think of the Yahoo rank and file, folks who have families, but the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring,” Sacks told VentureBeat. '
pbreit 15y ago
No he's not. The patent move isn't the only reason to frown on Yahoo employees. The company has been moving sideways for quite some time which is when good employees tend to leave for better opportunities.
- phaus 15y ago
  Even if Yahoo has been on a downward spiral, it is foolish to think that all of the good people will leave. Even if you are good at what you do, trying to find a new job is a humiliating, degrading, and terrifying experience for many people. I'm not a programmer (yet), but I work in a technical field that is currently experiencing a similar level of growth. Having worked for the same employer for over 9 years, it wasn't an easy decision to make when I decided to leave. Now that I am searching for a job in an industry where everyone claims to be facing a desperate shortage of qualified personnel, I find it rather difficult to convince someone to even grant me an interview. It is far too easy to judge the actions of a family man who has a wife and kids to worry about when you are the CEO of your own company.
- neilk 15y ago
  There are a lot of good people toiling away at Yahoo for one reason or another. In particular, work visas can tie you to the company for a good portion of a decade. Just to take one example I'm familiar with, Flickr still has a lot of top-notch people.
  - bigbang 15y ago
    Not to mention, I guess Yahoo! tends to pay really well (that won't be matched by Google/MS etc)
  - sgwizdak 15y ago
    And then there is Yahoo Research, who do produce quality work...
paul 15y ago
Leaving Yahoo is a lot easier than leaving the USSR.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 15y ago
  Sure. But now what? The problem here is that a huge number of talented people almost certainly do work for Yahoo without ever paying attention to the news cycle. Lots of talented people don't have startup ambitions; they bust their ass from 9-5 and come home to their families and their woodworking and charcuterie hobbies. Sure, they probably all have a sense that Yahoo isn't on a great trajectory, but they have no urgent need to leave. Yahoo might even be a better deal for them; pick the wrong startup and you could be hunting for a job again in 6 months. It isn't reasonable to start penalizing people like that for the actions of Yahoo management; or, at least, if it is, it's not reasonable to do it over patent lawsuits. Patent lawsuits aren't a big enough issue to justify collective punishment. I'm a little surprised at the tacit support I read out of this comment. (For what it's worth: I have just as much to fear from patent suits as anyone else; my field is riddled with them).
  - subwindow 15y ago
    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.
    - tim_h 15y ago
      Just curious, what specifically is the indicator that a person doesn't care for the company? I didn't get that impression from reading the GP. Is it not paying attention to the news cycle? Or knowing that the company is on a bad trajectory but still working there? Surely it's not the focus on work-life balance. I could see myself working at Yahoo. I bet they still have interesting problems to work on. Yahoo Research does awesome stuff with computational advertising. Hypothetically speaking, would this opinion disqualify me from your hiring consideration?
javascriptlol 15y ago
Better to be a bit of an unfair bully than to do sit around while parasites send the industry down the toilet. It's like chemotherapy: sometimes you have to hurt the body to kill off the cancerous cells.
jaxn 15y ago
What he is really saying: Yahoo employees, we are hiring right NOW. NOW is the time to send us your resume. Did I mention we are hiring?
- ktizo 15y ago
  And, if we haven't found the right people in 60 days time, we might very well be screwed. Who are Yammer by the way? Should I know about them? [googles] ahh, is a twitintraweb. Well, I suppose those fortune 500 media budgets have to be spent somewhere.
  - tomflack 15y ago
    The university I work at, without any kind of official direction, has had the entire staff body move from the internal mailing list to Yammer for staff chat. It is brilliant.
    - ktizo 15y ago
      I'll look at it a bit closer then. Was just being annoyed by the 60 day thing really, purely as I am not sure I would want to hire someone who jumped someone else's ship just because I set a deadline. I shouldn't really extend my annoyance to being snarky about their products as I admittedly know little about them.
      - jaxn 15y ago
        They are pretty cool for mid-size groups. They won TechCrunch 50 (or were a finalist) the year I went.
bproper 15y ago
When the patent system is so fundamentally broken, and will take years to fix through political means, drastic measures have a certain logic to them. Are there a lot of other public companies in SV that have a patent portfolio the size of Yahoo who are going after non-public companies with broad, web 2.0 patents? I think you could count on two hands the number of software companies with the patent portfolio the size of Yahoo (not counting NPE like IV). If Yahoo succeeds with Facebook, they will extract this tax out of every new web company that is a success. And down the road, if MSFT really falls off, they will do the same. Somebody has to draw a line in the sand. Get the employees to stand against this, because the mgmt never will.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  MSFT isn't already doing the same in mobile?
furyofantares 15y ago
It isn't hypocritical. If you know someone behaves in a manner you think is unethical, you don't have to ignore it just because that information might be less accessible for the next candidate. You use the information you have about each individual candidate. If one candidate got caught stealing office supplies and you somehow know about it, you take that into account rather than ignoring it just because the next guy may have gotten away with it.

by shingen 15y ago

guimarin 15y ago

It can be done. Look at the US. Ever had to fill out, 'Not a member of the Nazi Party between 1933-1945? The US Citizenship test in no way makes the US look like a 'serious jerkwad.'

shingen 15y ago
If the US Citizenship test assumed all Germans from 1933-45 were volitional Nazis, then yes it'd be a jerkwad test.
- stickfigure 15y ago
  If you collect a paycheck from the Gestapo, it doesn't really matter whether or not you call yourself a Nazi.
atonse 15y ago
To add some perspective Yahoo has just entered the ranks of a Grade-A patent troll. That is the _worst_ of their offenses. That puts them in the same league as Intellectual Ventures. That's it. They're no worse. Let's not lose sight of that. There's no real "news" here, apart from the sad realization that this is the strongest signal yet that Yahoo is now just an empty shell of suits, bean counters, and lawyers.
- spullara 15y ago
  To be clear, Yahoo has implemented and currently has in production the things covered by the patents. As much as I don't like what they are doing, they are pretty far above a patent troll.
MichaelApproved 15y ago
Does checking that off automatically disqualify you from being a citizen or does it simply spark an investigation into what your role was in the party?
- protomyth 15y ago
  One of my friends Dad immigrated here after WWII from Germany and he was HY (forced) and he got his citizenship. From his decription, it only triggers a check against of list of people the US would like to have a "deeper conversation" with.
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Thanks for invoking the Godwin's law. I can easily ignore this comment thread.
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  I think you're confusing his argument with Godwin's law because of the similarity with a nazi analogy. But above all, the Godwin's law is an Ad Hominem, which is not what guimarin is doing. He's just fighting an analogy with another analogy. I do agree that both of them have bad analogies :) But that's a different problem, it's not an Ad Hominem.
praxeologist 15y ago
As a good example for how long it might take people to wise up about IP (it needs to be abolished wholesale), take note that US citizenship stuff still asks if people are a member of the Communist Party.
harlanlewis 15y ago
Nice, pretty solid bit of Godwin's Law trolling. I'm not interested in debating this to the level of detail that will spare me being called a nazi by someone on the internet, so suffice it to say that _any_ blacklist based on generalized attributes and affiliations will unfairly target innocents. Companies have lots of tactics to shorten applicant stacks ("wrote a personalized cover letter", "minimum 12yrs experience HTML5", "name printed in blue"). Power to Yammer if they want to add "dates employed at yahoo" to the list - talented folks will have little trouble finding work.
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  I think the Godwin-ing of the thread happened in the original post, which referred to Stalin. Responding with Nazi stuff is not an escalation at that point.
  - ktizo 15y ago
    I guess there is supposed to be a brief pact before the escalation.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole. It's the model case.
  - meepmorp 15y ago
    > It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole. This is a deeply idiotic statement. In fact, it's quite easy to talk about how much responsibility Yahoo employees have for the intellectual property lawsuits started by management, and yet not make use of comparisons to the Nazis. When the roads into Sunnyvale have signs saying "Arbeit macht frei" over them, then you can feel free to make such comparisons. Till then, you're a complete jackass.
guimarin 15y ago
My original intent was to point out with sarcasm how taking what this CEO said as anything more than a publicity stunt/icebreaker for employees looking to leave yahoo, is absolutely absurd. OP is a result of way too much naval gazing on a pretty cut and dry topic. Yahoo is acting the villain, so let's incentivize employees to leave them. I don't think anyone believes seriously that the CEO is either going to keep a big list, or start acting this way towards other valley companies. He is capitalizing on the hype surrounding yahoos use of the 'nuclear option.' Implementation of such a system is riddled with flaws, as evidenced by the fact that the US still asks people [ with a straight face as well ] if they were a member of the Nazi party on current citizenship tests.

benatkin 15y ago

I agree that your example is extreme. But I think that its extremeness invalidates it. There's a big difference between immigration and employment. Many families depend on a single country's immigration policies to be together. People who are barred from one company can seek employment at another company. David Sacks' move is personal, and moves made out of frustration are often hypocritical, and I'm not surprised it's going to piss some people off. I'm glad this is just one person and one medium-sized company. If Apple, Microsoft, or Google announced this type of policy in a press release I'd be disgusted. It's easy for me to shrug it off when a CEO of a company with fewer than 500 employees announces it in a tweet and quickly waters it down significantly. https://twitter.com/#!/DavidSacks/status/179788086862028800 https://twitter.com/#!/DavidSacks/status/179788086862028800

psycho 15y ago

I guess that it won't go far more than just a statement from one CEO. Hope, other Valley CEOs are more reasonable and will take arguments like yours into consideration.

Jimmie 15y ago

Actually he specifically mentioned people with families. ' “People were telling me I need to think of the Yahoo rank and file, folks who have families, but the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring,” Sacks told VentureBeat. '

pbreit 15y ago

No he's not. The patent move isn't the only reason to frown on Yahoo employees. The company has been moving sideways for quite some time which is when good employees tend to leave for better opportunities.

phaus 15y ago
Even if Yahoo has been on a downward spiral, it is foolish to think that all of the good people will leave. Even if you are good at what you do, trying to find a new job is a humiliating, degrading, and terrifying experience for many people. I'm not a programmer (yet), but I work in a technical field that is currently experiencing a similar level of growth. Having worked for the same employer for over 9 years, it wasn't an easy decision to make when I decided to leave. Now that I am searching for a job in an industry where everyone claims to be facing a desperate shortage of qualified personnel, I find it rather difficult to convince someone to even grant me an interview. It is far too easy to judge the actions of a family man who has a wife and kids to worry about when you are the CEO of your own company.
neilk 15y ago
There are a lot of good people toiling away at Yahoo for one reason or another. In particular, work visas can tie you to the company for a good portion of a decade. Just to take one example I'm familiar with, Flickr still has a lot of top-notch people.
- bigbang 15y ago
  Not to mention, I guess Yahoo! tends to pay really well (that won't be matched by Google/MS etc)
- sgwizdak 15y ago
  And then there is Yahoo Research, who do produce quality work...

paul 15y ago

Leaving Yahoo is a lot easier than leaving the USSR.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 15y ago
Sure. But now what? The problem here is that a huge number of talented people almost certainly do work for Yahoo without ever paying attention to the news cycle. Lots of talented people don't have startup ambitions; they bust their ass from 9-5 and come home to their families and their woodworking and charcuterie hobbies. Sure, they probably all have a sense that Yahoo isn't on a great trajectory, but they have no urgent need to leave. Yahoo might even be a better deal for them; pick the wrong startup and you could be hunting for a job again in 6 months. It isn't reasonable to start penalizing people like that for the actions of Yahoo management; or, at least, if it is, it's not reasonable to do it over patent lawsuits. Patent lawsuits aren't a big enough issue to justify collective punishment. I'm a little surprised at the tacit support I read out of this comment. (For what it's worth: I have just as much to fear from patent suits as anyone else; my field is riddled with them).
- subwindow 15y ago
  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.
  - tim_h 15y ago
    Just curious, what specifically is the indicator that a person doesn't care for the company? I didn't get that impression from reading the GP. Is it not paying attention to the news cycle? Or knowing that the company is on a bad trajectory but still working there? Surely it's not the focus on work-life balance. I could see myself working at Yahoo. I bet they still have interesting problems to work on. Yahoo Research does awesome stuff with computational advertising. Hypothetically speaking, would this opinion disqualify me from your hiring consideration?

javascriptlol 15y ago

Better to be a bit of an unfair bully than to do sit around while parasites send the industry down the toilet. It's like chemotherapy: sometimes you have to hurt the body to kill off the cancerous cells.

jaxn 15y ago

What he is really saying: Yahoo employees, we are hiring right NOW. NOW is the time to send us your resume. Did I mention we are hiring?

ktizo 15y ago
And, if we haven't found the right people in 60 days time, we might very well be screwed. Who are Yammer by the way? Should I know about them? [googles] ahh, is a twitintraweb. Well, I suppose those fortune 500 media budgets have to be spent somewhere.
- tomflack 15y ago
  The university I work at, without any kind of official direction, has had the entire staff body move from the internal mailing list to Yammer for staff chat. It is brilliant.
  - ktizo 15y ago
    I'll look at it a bit closer then. Was just being annoyed by the 60 day thing really, purely as I am not sure I would want to hire someone who jumped someone else's ship just because I set a deadline. I shouldn't really extend my annoyance to being snarky about their products as I admittedly know little about them.
    - jaxn 15y ago
      They are pretty cool for mid-size groups. They won TechCrunch 50 (or were a finalist) the year I went.

bproper 15y ago

When the patent system is so fundamentally broken, and will take years to fix through political means, drastic measures have a certain logic to them. Are there a lot of other public companies in SV that have a patent portfolio the size of Yahoo who are going after non-public companies with broad, web 2.0 patents? I think you could count on two hands the number of software companies with the patent portfolio the size of Yahoo (not counting NPE like IV). If Yahoo succeeds with Facebook, they will extract this tax out of every new web company that is a success. And down the road, if MSFT really falls off, they will do the same. Somebody has to draw a line in the sand. Get the employees to stand against this, because the mgmt never will.

fpgeek 15y ago
MSFT isn't already doing the same in mobile?

furyofantares 15y ago

It isn't hypocritical. If you know someone behaves in a manner you think is unethical, you don't have to ignore it just because that information might be less accessible for the next candidate. You use the information you have about each individual candidate. If one candidate got caught stealing office supplies and you somehow know about it, you take that into account rather than ignoring it just because the next guy may have gotten away with it.