Redeye VC: Microsoft/Yahoo - let the exodus begin | Hacker News Reader

Redeye VC: Microsoft/Yahoo - let the exodus begin

redeye.firstround.com

14 pointsjkopelman8 comments

Not trying to be a jackass here but how talented is Yahoo! engineers?

I've heard great stuffs about Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other companies' engineers but never heard much bout Yahoo!.

Can someone share their thoughts?

Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon hackers seem to be roughly equivalent. Google hackers seem better.

I think in all 4 cases, there is enough variability within each company that speaking about "hackers from big company $X" in general is not particularly meaningful -- that is, the mean at Google may be slightly higher, but the variance is still dominant.

I think we all realize this. I think we all realize that "Nine-year-olds are taller than eight-and-a-half-year-olds" doesn't deny the fact that there's more variance among than between. But if you have two random samples from each group, are you going to bet that variance will swamp mean, or that mean will show up despite variance?

Yahoo has been doing a lot of interesting, innovative open source stuff lately like Hadoop and the Javascript lib. They also have Rasmus, of PHP fame, and while I'm not wild about the language, Rasmus is a first rate hacker.

I don't agree that it's a lack of engineering talent (relative to Google) is what's holding Yahoo back. At some point, I think the organization's size, age, and culture impede innovation.

I'd say that YUI is fair demonstration of talent on behalf of Yahoo's engineers.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

I know few people that I used to work with, that moved to yahoo and they are good.

Can't say, best of the best, but they were pretty decent at coding. This is just circumstantial evidence though.

Google is attracting the prime rate "coorporate hackers", apple, yahoo and amazon the second rate ones, then hp and ibm the crap that like to be consultants".

As I say, this is just a generalization, so there are plenty of exceptions.

And when I say "coorporate hackers", i mean it. Unless you have lots of options to vest, or an H-1b, or waiting for the green card, a true hacker would not want to be in those enviroments.

When cooporate grows, so does internal political bullsh!t, which eventually will drive good people away.

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