17 ms·
Technically competent and borderline-or-better ambitious people do not work at Yahoo!, generally. There exception are people who are trapped there (H1B, a mass
by rdl 13y ago
Technically competent and borderline-or-better ambitious people do not work at Yahoo!, generally.
There exception are people who are trapped there (H1B, a massive side project, sick family member, whatever), or are vesting out after M&A. Come back to this in 0.5 to 3.5 years when the Tumblr team have filled their vesting.
(You can make a reasonable case that big companies are better at EoE than startups, but I don't see a strong case that Yahoo! is better than Apple or Google or ...)
This is because the culture at Yahoo! has been horrible in terms of actually turning technology into products, or at any real innovation. A succession of utterly incompetent CEOs and ossified and incompetent upper management pretty much killed the company, technically.
Every Yahoo! I've talked to said it was a "nice" place to work if you're just collecting a paycheck. It was a horrible place to actually try to do anything meaningful (with a few exceptions, like Panama, and even then). So, it depends on your goals with a job: a paycheck ,or a chance to change the world. It's up to the individual which it is.
However, people who are neither competent nor ambitious are irrelevant in general, and those who aren't both are largely irrelevant in creating anything new. (I know many highly-competent but situationally-lazy people who remained at Yahoo! a bit longer than was good for them. They had impressive personal projects during that time. They were vastly happier when they moved on to other companies.)
(As an indicator: outside of Government, Yahoo! had more contractors in more key roles than anywhere else I've ever seen. Microsoft had a lot of contractors, too, but they were generally not in core roles, and after that court case, were only there for ~a year.)
So, I stand by my original comment.
- antics 13y agoLet's recap a bit. You said there wasn't any talent. I said that's not true, and there talented people who have good reasons for staying. You now say that the culture sucks and the talented people who stay are there because of they're handcuffed, or because they're lazy, or they're going to leave soon. My opinion is that you're now debating a completely different set of points.First you only told us that no one talented works there, and I think we both know that's just wrong. That you haven't brought it up again indicates that you concede this point. Correct me if I'm wrong. Look. This is not to say that everything you've said is completely wrong. A lot of what you say is true. But I do think your case is pretty overstated, especially since these things depend pretty dramatically on which team your on. The disparity between a good Yahoo team and a good Google team is miniscule, even though the difference between a good Yahoo team and a bad Yahoo team is really high.