Yahoo’s Brain Drain Shows a Loss of Faith Inside the Company
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Internally, employees know well in advance when a company is headed downhill. When I was at LivingSocial, the best employees left at what appeared (externally) to be the peak of the company.
The trend was already apparent. Once you get to layoffs and press stories, your best employees have already gone. Two sayings that apply here:
1) If you're not growing, you're dying 2) People don't leave companies, they leave managers
Retention is all about opportunity: personal and organizational. A talented employee with many other opportunities must believe that those above them are beyond competent (providing room for personal growth) and that the company is trending in a direction to make vast organizational change. People, especially top talent, want to be a part of something larger than themselves.
When Marissa Mayer started, that bought Yahoo time. They had the appearance of organizational change. Once that honeymoon period ended, however, there isn't much to hold a great employee to Yahoo. At this point, if the best people are leaving, how do you recruit other A+ players? You can't.
People are the core of a company and Yahoo is many years down the line of rotting from the inside out.
I would love to hear others' thoughts on this statement. It sounds good, but is it real? Would you stay at a company in whose purpose you don't believe, if you liked your manager?
It says that (in general) people who do leave, leave because of bad management.
It does not say that people who stay, stay because of their managers.
Your statement may also be true or false, but it is independent of the original.
you wouldnt stay in a company because it have clean bathrooms
but you will surely leave if it has dirty bathrooms
having a good manager should be the norm having a bad one, is not acceptable
easy
A good mansger miiight be able to retain you longer under bad external conditions because they shield you from them.
I think people are pretty good about differentiating success for their companies vs. personal success (salary, learning, building a network, etc).
A good manager shields team members from politics, drama and similar nonsense, and is not afraid to make personal sacrifices for the good of the team. They create an environment where each team member can thrive and grow professionally. That's why a lot of companies with bad reputation can still retain A+ talent (e.g. Amazon).
That said, people tend to have many different reasons for leaving a company. Maybe they're no longer learning at the rate they want, or they don't get paid enough, or they're simply worried about hurting their employability if they stay in one place for too long. It's impossible to generalize. But managers probably have the biggest impact on someone's decision to leave.
Agree. I worked with a manager who was kind of a dick at work, but really cool outside of work. After I left the company, he confessed he "had to play the part" so to speak. Turns out he hated it too and left shortly after I did.
Most people don't leave managers. They leave a crappy company culture that creates bad managers.
Happy employees require 1) a mission they find internally compelling and 2) a management environment that they feel allows them to do meaningful work towards that mission.
1 is usually pretty fixed. If you sign on because you want to change finance, or help people find apartments, or whatever else, your emotional situation re: that topic will likely be pretty stable over ~years.
2 changes quickly and often. Projects that an employee feels are important get killed. Things that seem silly get prioritized. Accolades are distributed in ways that seem unfair, etc.
So, the parent's quote could be rewritten more clearly as:
People don't leave because they stop caring about a company's mission. They leave because they lose faith that the company infrastructure is capable of letting them contribute to/achieve that mission.
Enormously complex topic. 3 employees at a company may have 3 different slightly different takes on a company's mission at the start, and feel totally different about its trajectory down the line.
---
As for your 2nd point about staying under a manager you like at a company you don't care about, personally, I find myself incapable of doing it. I don't have to be doing the most impactful company premise in the world (soylent? watsi?) but I at least have to be working on problems I find highly interesting. I've left some companies whose people, culture, and processes I loved, because ultimately their problem space just didn't keep me up at night.
On the contrary, I can tolerate a much more hostile management environment when its offset by work so personally meaningful that I'd be doing it in my spare time even if I weren't an employee.
I find it rare for people to take an opportunity with a company they don't feel good about, regardless of how much they might like the interviewing manager. IMO those who do accept such an offer are just resume surfing, and weren't going to stick around regardless.
Would you join a company in whose purpose you don't believe?
There are a couple of people on my current project whose company I enjoy and who have personal attributes that I'd like to foster in myself. I'm staying with it solely for that reason, the business model it uses was dead in the water two years ago and it's in the die-off period - the project itself is just making efficiency savings on something that's never going to be profitable again.
I'd choose to do so again, it's never made life bad for me to choose to share closer company with the people I respect - and when the time to move jobs has come up, a few months ahead of the crash, there have always been plenty of friends in other companies that would put in a good word.
What has been a bad call for me has been to stay in bad company, for the chance to work on something 'important' while management has been incompetent or peers have been markedly hostile. That's contributed to some of the lowest times of my life.
I left a startup that eventually exited prior to my first year. vesting. The manager I had was one of those that was a smart guy, but didn't know his limits and between checking in broken code, aggressively (to the point of insult) insisting people work insane hours, and pushing for outsourcing more and more to a firm that was incompetent, I had enough. Being lead engineer and stuck with a launch that had no prep or IT people in place didn't help.
My favorite two stories were:
1) Disappearing on a weekend (well before launch) for my wife's birthday down to Big Sur. I had told people, but apparently it didn't register. I was at work Monday and lectured despite a 70 hour week the week before.
2) Getting yelled had for whiffing and underhand toss of a pen to a colleague (and friend) of mine during a meeting where we went up to write what we were doing on the whiteboard. Said manager thought I was annoyed and chewed me out. I pointed out, I had just pulled an all nighter and was fucking beat.
When I walked, I told the management team straight up he was the reason I was leaving.
A colleague/friend (he was the UI lead) had hoped to stick it out awhile, he lasted a month after I did.
I went through the frenzy of bubble one, had fun. I'm usually pretty darn dedicated, but that startup showed me my breaking point and I've avoided such situations since.
That's probably the saddest part. You're obviously a hard worker, dedicated employee, sane manager. A sane start-up would benefit a lot from having you on board, you would get well-paid from it, and the economy would benefit from having employees who fit jobs. But now you probably have to be overly cautious and choose a more reasonable job.
Granted, our 1:1s were like "Yeah, so what other horrible thing happened to you this week and when are you leaving?" They were also looking for an exit, and left a few months later.
It can easily be your managers manager, a vp/director or even upper management as a whole.
The last of which sounds like the case in your situation.
That said, good programmers always have opportunities, and while good management can do a lot towards helping retention, if the company is dying, people will start to look elsewhere. After all, nobody wants to be in the lurch when the layoffs hit. It's always better to have another opportunity arranged, so that you can leave on your own terms, without having a gap on your resume.
I would say that I make a trade-off, balancing the benefits of staying where I am (social capital, rapport with my coworkers, etc.) with the potential benefits of moving elsewhere (quit-before-I'm-fired, opportunity to work on a better technology or a more interesting problem). When the benefits of staying become less than the benefits of switching, then I start looking. Individual management can do a lot to increase my propensity to stay where I'm currently at, but it's not an unlimited power. At some point, broader economic concerns swamp the benefit I get from staying with my current team.
http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
I love this analogy and the super nerd Tolkien reference of it's name to not link to it.
- San Francisco commercial real estate at record highs, passing NYC in price per square foot (which last happened just before things imploded last time around)
- Multiple SF area tech companies running rounds of layoffs
- VC funding took a nose dive last quarter
- Quite a few unicorns or near unicorns having their valuation tank post-IPO, having a difficult fundraising round or seeing their valuations slashed on private markets
One can debate if the Valley is in a full blown bubble, but seems increasingly obvious at a minimum there's a significant cooling off on the horizon.
None of the problems that we caught just a glimpse of during the financial crisis were really fixed - they were just patched over with some spit and duct tape. The interest on that technical debt will have to be paid sooner or later.
Honestly you're better off starting your career at a middle point or low point in the market rather than a high point. You'll be better calibrated for the ups and downs and you are far more resilient and flexible.
I graduated in 2009, when there were no jobs and it was awful. I slowly climbed my way to Google and on into an exciting future.
The dotcom bust per-capita was worse than the autoindustry layoffs in the 80s. I lived through it. It was very hard, and some people I know were out of jobs for 2 years. Our company had half a dozen layoffs in 12 months and we shrank by 50%. If 2016 is half of what 2001 was, then most new grads won't get jobs.
You have admitted you didn't go through the 2001 bust, so you, by definition, have no idea what it was like. Dismissing talk of 2016 being a bad year as doom-saying, exaggerating or self-aggrandizing clearly shows you have no idea how bad it can get for the industry as a whole. I don't care if you were unemployed and living in a car for 18 months in 2009/2010, because it's irrelevant to the point. There are plenty of people unemployed and living in cars even during the dotcom boom. But 2009/2010 weren't anything compared to the depths of the dotcom bust.
2008-2009 wasn't anywhere near as bad for the overall tech job market.
I don't think this is true. There's one study that found that students who graduate into a recession have worse earnings even long after the recession has ended: http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html
Eventually the effect wears off, but there's no evidence of a long-term benefit to graduating into a bad economy.
There is a general cooling off, not a collapse. There aren't many companies going under entirely, which is distinctly unlike the first dotcom bubble where after the pop the ground was littered with the corpses of companies.
IMO what we're likely to see is a slowdown in early-stage startup hiring. Series-A and B funding is already harder to come by, and so execs will be more conservative about burn rate, including on payroll. Unicorns will continue to hire aggressively, but their equity will look worse and worse as their valuations get cut or they get murdered in the aftermath of their own IPO.
I think we will continue to see major unicorns have their valuations slashed, and we will continue to see tech stocks struggle in the public markets. But this will impact employee compensation more than it will impact overall demand for new hires. What this probably will mean is that offers from unicorns will be less attractive next to offers from BigTechCo, but ultimately we're still talking about offers in the top 10% of the entire USA, so it's hardly a cause for panic.
And of course the juggernauts of AmaGooFaceSoft and co. will continue to hire like crazy.
So yeah, the job market will get a bit softer, so you might be facing tougher competition, but it's not exactly doom and gloom.
It's certainly still a better outlook than what you were facing in electrical engineering.
Networking. Sales. Domain knowledge.
As an undergrad myself, I feel most of my peers expect a job to be given to them as soon as they graduate. For some this will be true, for many it will not. I feel that this is a terrible mindset and will cause a lot of pain for people in our age group.
So networking, as in know people, know companies, you don't have to be an extreme extrovert but put yourself out their and actively try to meet and build relationships with people in the industry.
Sales, as in selling yourself as the product. Practice interviews, enunciation, phone conversations, whatever you have to do. If you come across as an A-player/personality you are much more likely to be hired.
Domain knowledge, get a basic understanding of what's in use today, what probably will be in use tomorrow, and build an expertise in it. It requires a lot of time but it will clearly distinguish you from those who don't bother doing so. While many companies prioritize hires that can learn quickly, don't forget the very real business need of someone who can jump in and run with the team immediately. If you have this there will always be a place for you at some company, you would only need to find one with a real immediate need, then, "oh hey I can do that for you"..
Go to conferences. If you're short on cash, go to where a conference is being held and hang out in the halls chatting people up. Maybe security will kick you out, maybe they won't. Maybe they aren't even checking who is going into the BOF sessions at night.
Go that one year old's birthday party you were invited to being thrown by that older coworker of yours that you kinda know. Maybe you'll meet an interesting person who turns out to be your boss in ten years.
There's lots of ways to meet people, it's just not going to get thrown on your lap anymore. You gotta go out and find it.
1. Control inflation.
2. Manage unemployment.
They are, unfortunately, directly at odds. Fighting inflation tanks the economy (that's what Paul Volker did in the late 1970s, to tackle "stagflation", and Jimmy Carter's 2nd term hopes), and promoting employment tends to hot up inflation.
Over the past 8 years, the Fed (and other central bankers) have dumped unholy amounts of liquidity into the global economy. That is, they've been "printing money", except that the Fed doesn't actually print money, it simply wills it into existence. It's done this after reducing its own lending rates (the prime rate) to effectively zero wasn't sufficiently stimulating the economy.
It's slightly more complex than that: the Fed distributes that money by buying "assets" from major banks -- it's an auction process, but the goal of the Fed isn't to get valuable assets[1], only to manage how that money's introduced to the economy and keep tabs on its value by way of inflation, as I understand it.
For whatever the reasons, inflation hasn't actually been a problem, though the reasons why are elusive, and several alternatives have been suggested:
1. The money's gone into financial instruments, including stocks and real estate. The rise in major stock market indices and the Fed's balance sheet (its money supply injections) pretty much exactly track one another.
2. It's gone into offshore tax havens. Last numbers I've seen are about $7 trillion from the US, and $25-30 trillion globally, from various sources. The ICIJ and The Guardian have run a multi-year expose on off-shore investment havens, and other financial sources have reported on this.
3. Chasing other investments. Silicon Valley VC money comes from somewhere, and much of it chases start-ups whose ultimate valuation is either advertising potential, or buy-it-to-kill-the-threat-to-us (WhatsApp's purchase by Facebook). Advertising's terrifying because a tremendous amount of it is financial services -- about 40% in "FIRE" industries: finance, insurance, and real estate. Pull the plug on easy money, and all three of those tailspin.
Which gets us to why fighting inflation is seen as such a bad thing. Usually the argument given is "inflation hurts those with fixed incomes", by which most people think of the elderly on social security or pensions. But we've learned how to fix that: you index those systems to inflation, hence SSI's COLA adjustment -- the cost-of-living factor that boosts Social Security payments. Who really get hurt by inflation are those who are holding dollar-denominated assets. Lenders.
That's banks, and holders of bonds (debt), which aren't themselves inflation adjusted. If you've got a home mortgage, inflation is your best friend, because it reduces the amount of your debt (in real terms) while your income increases. Banks, on the other hand, hate that, because their assets (your mortgage) falls in value.
So: the Fed is raising rates to stem inflation fears, even though inflation's been fairly much a non-player. Probably because banks and other lenders / bondholders are getting nervous. And to give itself more maneuvering room.
There's a whole bunch more in this, such as what money "really" is (in a functional / role sense, not the boring old fiat-vs-gold-backed debate), what, whether, why, and how economic growth is, can be extended, is justified, and is based on, and whether or not inflation is an unavoidable element of a collapsing economic system. On that last, the fate of the (specie-based) Roman denarius is quite interesting.
But stay tuned. Things might get interesting.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Told to me directly by a regional Fed branch president in a public Q&A.
Declaring victory and going home may not match the battlefield status.
Inflation has to do with money chasing goods. All you've said is that "money wasn't chasing goods". Which gets us to two further questions:
1. Why wasn't that money chasing goods (or real, economically productive, investment opportunitys, by which I specifically exclude financial derivatives or simply "buying" tax sheltering).
2. What is that money chasing?
As I understand, the answers don't do much to make the situation any less bad.
Employee's generally don't have that type of protection, and the liquidation preferences also decrease the value of the common shares after a down round. So even with a relatively modest decline in overall valuations, a lot of employees are going to end up with worthless options/shares after a down round.
It's not as if equity is necessarily bad, but unless you are a founder, you have ZERO control over what is going to happen to your equity. If the plan is not to exit after just a few years, you could be stuck for a long time, if just because without an IPO, you won't even be able to keep your equity if you leave, even if it's just because you can't pay the taxes.
I think that educating recent graduates about what are the realistic outcomes of betting on equity. For every early google employee, there are thousands of people whose equity was worth nothing. Even options in big companies can be worth nothing, if they were handed to you at very high prices.
When people learn the real risks, we'll see employees getting either a whole lot more equity, or salaries will go up. Either way, good for the industry.
Let's also keep in mind that the world is becoming more automated, not less, so this isn't going to be last time we see bubble valuations in our lifetime.
Also what happened with public companies that had their IPO just a few months before the Dot-com bubble in March 2000?
Are there good books about the Dot-com bubble?
What is the outlook for SaaS companies? If there are less VC funded startups, should they focus on enterprise sales?
That's been a continuing problem with Meyer. She said Yahoo was getting back into search. (Yahoo resells Bing; Yahoo hasn't had its own search engine since 2008 or so.) That didn't happen. She said Yahoo was going into video. That was canceled. There were a bunch of acquisitions, many of which just disappeared. Nobody can figure out what Yahoo is really for any more.
The company minus Alibaba has negative market value. It's that bad.
This is the key to their problems. Companies need to be able to articulate very specifically: this is what we do and who we are. Everything else follows from there. Yahoo's answer to this is, "We're a media company" and no one knows what that means including Yahoo.
So she probably will do whatever the board decides that week.
(The Board):"Let's have more cuts" (Her):"Ok". (The Board):"We should buy a startup" (Her):"Ok."
I can't believe she doesn't know or nobody told her the ship is sinking (or the gravy train is headed to a dead end). She knows it. But yeah as you said, at this point she is just playing the game of "let's see how long I can hang on here".
In the end she can point fingers to "the board", "internal naysayers", "it wasn't much that could be done", etc, etc. The board can point to her. Employees and customers will point to both and so on.
Umm no. The stock has tax implications priced in.
YAHOO STOCK = ALIBABA + YAHOO + YAHOO_JAPAN - TAX_FOR_ALIBABA
All the breathless press about Yahoo core being zero works only if set TAX_FOR_ALIBABA = 0.
No way a company making billions of dollars can logically have negative market value.
"Efficient Market" is only a hypothesis.
What? That has nothing to do with it.
Why would you pay someone to take something off you? There is no way just owning a public company's stock can hurt an investor other than loosing them $. (no liability etc).
It is all about tax. Investors understand this.
We are just seeing a special case of this:
For another tech company example, HP's physical assets on the books exceeded the market cap of the company a couple years ago. The meaning is that even if HP is able to make a profit that the business is so unattractive to hold a long position that investors want to dump their shares (in bulk) - someone will be left holding the stock and nobody wants to be sucked at the end unless you are private equity or something and want to flip the company basically. There's also still potentially cooked books from when HP bought Autonomy, and that's priced in as the bet by how bad it's scope would be. As fate so happened, HP wound up selling a bunch of land it owned in Cupertino to Apple for its new campus indicating it has no plans to expand in that area it used to dominate the industry (most US employees are in low cost of living areas for HP now consistent with companies that are in survival mode moreso than innovation / growth mode).
Owning a stock is different from owning a house.
Owning a stock is never a liability. Never would a stock go negative dollars. Even if the management team and the board of directors killed a billion people or robbed an entire nation while killing everyone in that nation, the common stock holder won't go to prison or be sued. The stock will be toilet paper. You can at the worst sell it for $0.
Basic Finance 101.
I agree that the market isn't currently quite saying that core Yahoo is worth < 0, but your logic here is completely incorrect. While of course this is true of an entire share of stock, we're not talking about a literal share of stock being valued at less than zero. Core Yahoo is a subset of what the share represents ownership of, and that subset is what people are claiming is being valued at less than zero.
This is quite clearly possible if the expectation is that the subset will use more resources from the overall entity than it will produce (for a trivial example, if we imagine that the subset is worth X billion and you expect it to spend its entire cash hoard of X+1 billion on unprofitable investments, then the subset has negative value).
It's far from impossible for the market to value core Yahoo at less than zero; it simply means that it thinks that Yahoo is going to die and on the way it's going to net-squander some of the other resources that are contained within a single share of YHOO.
Basic Finance 101.
Even if it does it does not make sense to value it at less than zero. Even if the company kills the entire Panda population nobody is going to go after the stockholder. Why are you ignoring taxes?
Repeating an incorrect argument does not make it correct.
People do go after the stockholder if the holder was trading on margins and the margin call happens from the broker to recoup their losses. But this scenario is really between a broker and a client, not shareholder v. anyone else relationship.
And to be a bit snarky, if the board of directors robbed said nation, they would have some assets now worth something in possession even if they're acquired illegally :) Heck, what would the valuation of the Third Reich be at the end of WWII if it was a corporation?
With Yahoo exploring a separation of its core business, the world may soon know what the company — minus its lucrative stake in Alibaba — is worth.
As of Wednesday, that figure is a negative (yes, negative) $13 billion.
How can a company that has $4.5 billion in revenue and one billion users be worth less than zero?
Let’s walk through the numbers.
The value of Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba is $32.5 billion and its stake in Yahoo Japan is $8.6 billion. The company’s net cash — or cash minus debt — is $4.2 billion. All told, that is $45.3 billion.
But stock market investors are assigning a valuation of $32.5 billion, based on Wednesday’s trading. The news that Yahoo was halting a spinoff of its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, choosing instead to explore a spinoff of Yahoo’s core Internet operations plus its stake in Yahoo Japan, sent shares lower, widening that gap.
On average, analysts value Yahoo’s core based on five times projected Ebitda – some a little higher, some a little lower. That yields a market capitalization of $4.6 billion if Yahoo were an independent company. Tack on the 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, worth about $8.6 billion, and you’ve got a $13.2 billion business that could be spun out.
If the transaction ultimately is taxed, the bill would be a lot smaller for the Yahoo core plus Yahoo Japan entity than the original plan to spin off its Alibaba stake. Assuming a 41 percent tax rate, as CRT did in Wednesday’s note, Yahoo would pay $5.4 billion in taxes, versus $13.3 billion in taxes if it spun out Alibaba – potential savings that amount to $8 billion. That’s an extra dollar back for each share outstanding. Yet, interestingly, the stock lost 45 cents a share Wednesday.
> Yahoo shares rise as board meets and considers sale of Web business
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-divestiture-shares-i...
The popular press makes it own narrative which may or may not be true.
If you want intelligent reporting in finance, stick to WSJ.
The press usually reports senior executives leaving as constituting a "brain drain." But if even the CEO's are worthless, as the last 5 have been, how can the senior executives be expected to have any brains?
The real Yahoo brain drain is the loss of experienced engineers. And since option blocks are no longer offered to engineers, nobody with any experience is going to join.
The only people left are long-time employees with old option grants, recent grads who got rejected from Facebook, and H1B's by the thousands.
Throwaway_exer listed 3 categories of workers who don't have the same freedom to choose to jump as other workers and said nothing about their comparative talent.
"Others said they were actively looking for their next jobs — a task made more difficult because of the taint of failure that potential employers sometimes associate with anyone at the struggling company."
For those with experience hiring, do you find this to be generally true? Would it really count as a black mark to have worked at a "failing" or "struggling" company, independent of your own experience/skills/accomplishments or would it really depend on the situation/candidate? I realize this isn't a black/white question and is likely more of a gray area.
A good hiring manager is trying earnestly to see how the candidate's skills fit into the job req, and how the personality fits into the team.
The name of the company you worked for last is not really that important. There are talented folks on the market right out of school, from failed startups, and leaving boring or stagnant companies.
I do suppose that experience at some companies, like AWS or Google, is a real bonus.
But you need to be careful of this too. Experience at Google doesn't mean the engineer learned all the best practices and isn't a jerk.
Another way of saying this is that any potentially negative detail on a resume will be invariably perceived as negative by someone. Not because it's right but because people are people.
Would you think this particular employee would be valuable? I think many of the best employees have already left. Good employees will easily find new jobs and won't need the severance payment, I would think.
I think in general Yahoo employees will be less attractive for employers now, compared to perhaps half a year ago.
Maybe they have a family or a new house, or both. Maybe they are excellent developers but lack political awareness or marketing skills. Maybe they have more freedom with a certain task than likely elsewhere. Maybe they feel a lot of loyalty.
Its a very unreliable inference to assume they are just somehow less than ideal canidates because they choose to continue with what appears to be a failing company from the outside. Not everyone cares about absolutely maximizing long term career prospects at all stages of their life. That dosent make them bad employees.
I would no sooner discount someone who worked for Yahoo anymore than I would give high-mark credence to those who work at Google or Facebook.
Trust buy verify.
Is this a typo or are you deliberately trying to be profound as this is quite clever.
Offtopic: before today, I was unaware of the (alleged) Russian roots of the statement and assumed Reagan coined it.
In other words, while I take prior places of employment as signal (just as others do), I tend to discount it heavily. I know smart people working at not-great places, as well as people I would never hire working at some very well-respected companies.
In the end, I'm hiring the person now, not their history.
"Trust but verify."
That is of course not entirely true -- I have very talented friends who still work there. But I would be more cautious for sure.
Two years later, AOL was bought by Verizon.
Armstrong was a relatively strong leader in that situation. He was a salesman at heart and knew he needed to reinforce his strategies (however non-plausible those might have been) with the company, the Board, the shareholders and AOL customers.
Mayer looks like none of that to me, and remarkably tone deaf against Starboard. Sorry to those Yahoos still hanging on, but Starboard are simply vultures for distressed companies. Not sure how long it will last, but the chances of an independent Yahoo being open for business in 3 years is really low.
The top several dozen CEOs in the S&P 500 or Fortune 500 are solely responsible for causing that claim, by dramatically swaying the average (and only within the top corporations).
Not only is the median much lower among that group, but the average American CEO only makes single digits times what the average employee does. The average CEO is not running a top 50 corporation, they're running a small business with less than 50 to 100 employees.
Perhaps an odd thing to base an opinion on, but compare stock charts on Google versus stock charts on Yahoo. The Yahoo ones were clunky and sucked.
Compare Yahoo Mail with GMail, and Yahoo sucked in comparison, being riddled with giant ad-banners.
Even now, Yahoo search results suck, which is really noticeable when FireFox periodically resets my search engine to Yahoo. Suddenly my results suck, and back to Google I go.
I don't know what Marissa Meyer has been doing, because it doesn't seem to be apparent in Yahoo getting better at anything really.
They had a huge brain drain of their research lab like 4 years ago after some past company turmoil. Andrei Broder and dozens of other researchers left.
They might be building it up again, but I feel it's unfortunate for those being hired, because research is usually one of the first things to get cut when a company is in financial difficulty. Research is long term, and Yahoo doesn't appear to have a long term plan unfortunately.
Not only that, but the people who did have to move are going to resent the company for making them do it. It was really a stealth layoff, and anyone who had prospects elsewhere bailed out at that point.
I've literally been in a meeting where 1 team that was twice as productive as another was cut because that wasn't enough to make up for the fixed cost differential (rent, benefits, regulatory costs etc).
In software development I don't believe it. This smells like wishful thinking from management for which non-fungible employees are a problem. I'd like to see the evidence you're talking about.
In my experience at these companies, there is sufficient bureaucracy that high performers hit bottlenecks due to the org structure, reducing everyone down to the lowest common denominator anyway. So even an otherwise talented dev can be replaced by a less talented one.
They're so large that essentially nothing about your personal output has any real effect on your individual productivity. It's equal parts politicking, luck, and self-promotion that garners you kudos, not actually getting anything done.
In a dysfunctional organization, like I daresay yahoo is at this point, you don't lose anything by firing people who are unable to contribute due to organizational problems.
As an example, when I worked at AT&T, individual and project success was decided essentially based on the whim of management.
I don't think we went 3 months with the same remit, organization, management structure or goals.
In that kind of situation, much like I perceive Yahoo to be, there's really no point in attempting to achieve productive work since the targets change before you can actually do anything. It's pathologically better to focus on shifting blame and self-aggrandizement, so that when things inevitably fail you can dump it on a scapegoat. There's a reason I don't work there any more.
Yeah, all those software engineers corporate America outsourced in the 2000s turned out to be real fungible, right?
There is /a lot/ of debt at Yahoo, I think 10% doesn't even begin to cut through the majority of the fat. Unfortunately, most of issues stem from middle management that seem to avoid the layoff cycles.