Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

itworld.com

104 pointsjfruh95 comments

Honestly, I find this article ridiculous and borderline offensive. I would love if the author would come talk to a few of us and maybe take a tour of the place and see what makes this place work.

I work at Yahoo, joined a few months ago, run engineering management for a couple of teams working on high-performance cloud stuff very core to the way Yahoo works. I find the engineers sharp and smart, the technology problems fascinating (insane scale/perf requirements) and in general, look forward to getting up and driving to Sunnyvale every morning.

None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens.

P.S We're hiring. :) If any of you want to work on a platform serving a ridiculous (and I do mean ridiculous) number of requests and users, hacking on cutting-edge distributed programming work, send me email (address on my profile).

Do you guys use erlang anywhere in that stack?

Nope. But we have our own constructs for a lot of the semantics Erlang provides written from the ground up in C/C++. Sorry, can't talk about it more except in broad strokes :)

Apache Traffic Server?

Nope, this is not public. Traffic server ( and the stuff it lead to) is built by a peer group under the same VP I report to.

I see. I asked because I recently listened to FLOSS Weekly's "Apache Traffic Server" episode featuring some Yahoos who were involved with it from its beginnings, and which is apparently used heavily within the Yahoo infrastructure.

http://twit.cachefly.net/floss0179.mp3

"We talk about the Apache Traffic Server, a proxy server that you probably don't realize you are already using.

Guests: Leif Hedstrom and Bryan Call"

I believe BOSS has Erlang in the back-end.

It was. Friends of mine who worked on it, eventually got re-org'd and started a project to rewrite it in Java :/

No one has ever seriously questioned Yahoo's engineering chops. Their technology contributions have always been notable. That's not the point of the article at all.

No offense, but Yahoo's management is just -bad- and it shows. There's a lack of vision, direction, and execution from the top; the fish is rotting from the head. I've heard this directly from Yahoo VPs, managers, and engineers.

Yahoo is like an aircraft carrier in Lake Superior. Sure, it's capable of so much, but it can't turn that into useful action.

I question yahoo's engineering chops 4 out of 5 times after interviewing hotshots from search, ads, or research.

After interviewing dozens of folks from yahoo, I've pained the following picture about the engineering there - the vast majority of it is stuck in 1995, some bits of it have evolved isolated from the rest of the tech world - it's steam punk, then there are a few parts that are shiny and new but skin deep. It seems like a sad place.

Yeah, I'm going to have to agree - my experience was bad too.

I'm wondering if you are the victim of sample bias - The Yahoo employees that are happy and talented are likely well paid, well rewarded, and won't be interviewing with you. You are possibly talking to the ones who either are less talented, or unhappy and are reflecting their perspective to you.

I'm quite certain that my views on yahoo are biased.

Nearly no one I've interviewed from yahoo has bad-mouthed their former employer, so my negative bias is from working with people that have passed the technical interview and have been hired... the quirks that people pick up after working at yahoo for many years are odd to me (like the strange desire to put squid in front of everything).

No need for squid. You have TrafficServer. Well since it's an Apache top level project so does the world :-)

>Honestly, I find this article ridiculous and borderline offensive.

Don't take it seriously, the *-world writers are habitually underinformed about the topics they write on. I don't read them much, but every time I see them posted to HN, on topics I have even a casual understanding of, I can spot the factual errors. I wouldn't give any stock to their analysis of the current situation over at Yahoo.

> None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens.

LBO's and their ilk are dramatic.

One restructuring guy I know would have a goal of eliminating all but 3 managers from an acquired group of 300 within 6 months.

Yea expect the unexpected with those guys. They are creative at wringing out cash right now with no thought to the future or any wishy-washy stuff like morale, culture, history, etc. I've seen 90% of employees fired and the rest relocated a thousand miles away just so they could get the cash out of selling an office building.

"None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens." do you really not think you're in this dramatic situation now?

Do you still have yellow and purple cubicles?

Yup! They look like this, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmhmm/1753309475/

yack

I was given a very good job offer from Yahoo around the same time Carol Bartz was fired. I have yet to sign anything yet because of what I've been reading about Yahoo's condition. I get the feeling that most of the news about Yahoo's demise are just being sensational, yet at the same time I can't ignore the fact that Yahoo employees have been leaving the company every other week (according to my friends who have worked there).

My worst fear is relocating and then being totally screwed over. I don't know what to do.

Where would you relocate to? I'm assuming that if Yahoo gave you a good job offer, you'd be able to find other employment in the area without too much problem.

Santa Clara, CA. I'm just worried that if I move out there I'll be left hanging while I have expenses to keep up with.

Are you interviewing anywhere else?

You could probably use the off as leverage. Yahoo's engineering core is still well respected in the industry.

Everybody just knows that none of the people in charge have a clue as to what to do with all of that talent.

I am planning to interview with several other companies. But by then I will need to decide whether I want to stick with Yahoo or not. I've heard great things about working at Yahoo (and the downsides) and the offer is fantastic, but my gut instinct is telling me to reconsider..

I interviewed with them 2 years ago, and got an offer, and my gut instinct told me the same thing back then.

I liked the people I interviewed with, thou'. That seemed like a fun team.

Oh, well, life goes on.

If you are in love with the group or project that much maybe it will be worth the risk.

But also keep in mind that alot of software shops around the country but especially in hot scenes like the Bay Area, NYC, and Austin,TX are searching far and wide for as many qualified applicants as they can get.

If you can/ are willing to avoid the risk of getting caught up in the Yahoo drama I think it will be wise.

Why not take the job, and then continue interviewing? I know it looks bad to leave a job early, but I think most people in the valley are aware of Yahoo's situation, so I wouldn't be too worried about how that'll be perceived.

I really would rather avoid this option. I'm not worried that it'll make me look bad to other employers, but how it will reflect on the team that I was signed up for.

If they can't afford you, it's economics, nothing personal. Nobody works for free.

Ask for a signing bonus of n months expenses (where n is how long you think it will take to find a job), and then put that in a savings account. Problem sovled. And if Yahoo ends up being okay, you have a big chunk of money you can apply to the down payment of a house (or fund a team of pro bike racers, or wahtever).

This is the best option. If you're good, then you can easily get a job very quickly in today's conditions. So a signing bonus, of, say, 3 months salary is ample.

Also: Yahoo is known for _very_ generous severance benefits. Typically you'll get 3-4 months of salary.

So if you're even half-way decent, you should be OK.

I don't know what your current gig is like, so it's hard to advise. But there's nothing wrong with taking this job with an eye toward moving on, as long as you work honestly at it while you're there.

My wife was in a similar spot when the company she was working for started to decline and experienced people started to move on. She stuck around and took a new position within the company in a different field she wanted to crack into. She was still very early career and saw an opportunity to get some good experience.

The company did tank, but she got at least a year and a half of experience, and later she got interviews/offers afterwards and built a network that is still active a decade later. She never would have been hired directly into one of those jobs in a new company, but she did get a chance at it in an existing company that wanted to keep her. She wasn't surprised that more senior people were leaving, because they had the background and network to generate comparable offers elsewhere, something she wouldn't have been able to do at that point in her career.

So much depends on your current situation, what kind of risks you're willing to take, what experience you think you'll get...

I just joined Yahoo a few months ago. Would love to chat with you and give you a perspective (see my other comment on this post)

I joined and thus relocated cross-country to work for Yahoo in mid-2008, when Microsoft was surely going to screw my life up. If you'd like that perspective, shoot me an message: my email address is in my profile.

If the experience is awesome, and if you already have savings, and you're an American citizen, then you have nothing to lose. Chances are you can leverage the experience to get a better job if you get laid off. Make sure you save as much money as possible to tide you over in case the worst case scenario occurs (the economy double-dips and you get laid off with no job prospects).

If you are H1B, then don't do it.

If vultures are descending, I would think it would be better to wait. The bidding war will temporarily bump up your stock price & options, giving you a better time to sell them. Then the vultures will offer buy-outs to encourage employees to leave. I doubt the vultures will be overly generous in their buy-outs but it can still amount to a substantial amount of cash if you've been there a while.

Why buy-outs? If I were looking for cutting costs, I would just lay them off.

I'm not the parent you responded to, but I'm assuming when they said buy-outs, they were including severance for layoffs.

In North America 1 month is pretty common if you've been with a company for more than a year with 2 months not being uncommon.

I've heard of people being given 1 month of notice of a layoff and then being asked to work that month only once:)

1 month is common because companies care about their public image when it comes to hiring new people, and they know that the remaining employees will watch how those being cut are treated. If you've got new folks in charge who don't care about it, or need to cut cash outlay _very_ fast because they levered up the company to buy it, you may not get that severance. There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee.

I've been around at a few companies before where cuts happened. The first round of layoffs always got good severance, because the company wanted to make sure that the remaining employees didn't bail... but after 2 or 3 rounds, the jig was up, so the severance shrank from 2-3 months to 2-3 weeks.

> There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee.

I see, this is news to me.

I'm Canadian so I guess the laws can certainly be different, but I was under the impression that 2 weeks was a minimum severance required by law.

I've never seen less than a month, I guess this could be enforced by employment contracts. I know it's been in every one I've signed:)

There's no minimum severance (at least at the national level), as far as I know. (http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/severancepay.htm) ... In theory it could be in your contract, but I personally can't recall ever seeing a contract that had such a clause. The standard is "at will" - if you come in to work one day and they don't need you any more, that's it, just the same as you don't really have to give two weeks notice when you leave (but most people do for the sake of the relationship.)

Most people's stock options are so underwater they're eternally worthless. An increase of a few bucks in the stock price isn't worth the cost on your morale.

How's your open-source Flickr coming along, man?

// sorry, using a throw-away account..

Funny, this article seems to be written by one of those vultures.

People that don't work at Yahoo! telling people that work there to quit remind me of the pope telling other people to abstain from sex. If you're not playing the game don't tell others how to play it or to stop playing it.

Yahoo! has had a rough time but it still has plenty of life in it, let's wait to see what they intend to do once they've found their new bearings.

Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Now it is up to new people to try to restore that culture or at least a semblance of it and then possibly the oil tanker can be turned around. It isn't over until the fat lady sings.

Yahoo! is huge, has a pile of interesting tech, lacks polish and needs focus. If Apple could be turned around then so can Yahoo.

>Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!.

Sorry, but what culture do you believe Bartz destroyed? I was at Yahoo before Bartz, and left only about a month before she was fired. I don't believe that Bartz destroyed anything. Yahoo has never had a great culture. They've always had an identity crisis. You can go read PG's older essays and see that.

Bartz was fired because she couldn't work a miracle. Yahoo needs some truly amazing changes in order to avoid Sun's fate, and I'm not sure anyone out there can/will deliver what's needed quickly enough. You mentioned Apple as a turnaround example. Exactly where do you think Yahoo is going to get a Steve Jobs?

When did you join?

I believe Yahoo! definitely had 'culture' in the early days, they were pretty much synonymous with end-user content on the net and the Y! employees and their users were the ones that showed us cool offices, a different kind of company and neat things to do with the web. I think they went downhill since the .com crash and never managed to recover. The final remnants of that were buried in the last two years, now Yahoo! reminds me of an oiltanker with the captain and the rest of the crew below decks. Time will tell if they can turn it around or not but with giants this size even dying will take a long long time.

I don't think you can blame Bartz for culture lost since the "early days". She wasn't even there for three full years. I don't think Carol really hurt the culture much during her tenure. If anything I think she improved it, at least in terms of focus.

To answer your question, though, I started three years ago and some months ago. I came in just a bit before the Microsoft deal fell through.

One thing off the top of my head: she ended the year-end parties. Those parties were great, because they brought lots of people together, and for one night, you forgot everything else and enjoyed yourself, with your spouse/s.o./friend . It was fun to see geeks bathe, shave and dress up for this yearly event.... ;-)

I keed, I keed about the bathing. :-)

I'm a bit embarrassed to say I didn't realize she'd cancelled them. I never went to the parties anyway, but I recall her first one stayed, in spite of opposition, because it was pretty much already paid for.

"Culture" is defined by parties? I think you are confusing "culture" and "perks". I love the culture at Yahoo.

I'm curious - can someone explain to me how Yahoo still has a higher P/E ratio than say, Apple?

For that matter, why is EBay's P/E higher than Google's?

Asian assets are a very large part of the 'P'

Yahoo! is only a minority shareholder in Yahoo! Japan, with SoftBank owning 40+% of the shares.

Yahoo! owns over 40% of Alibaba which is a multibillion dollar company. I have seen valuations over 30B, but these are rough estimates since it is not public.

It's always a case by case basis and I'm not a professional analyst, but I could come up with a few (flimsy) reasons.

Basically boils down to odds and the change in growth rate. Just because a company is consistently, wildly profitable does not mean they should have a high P/E ratio. P/E is often much more influenced by the growth rate for earnings. With Yahoo and eBay, investors are saying that these companies are more likely to grow very quickly than Apple and Google, which makes perfect sense since those two giants will most likely grow between some range. Investors must believe Yahoo is either be a huge hit or miss and eBay must have some reasons for people to believe they can juice their growth rate higher quickly, perhaps based on their acquisitions, room to expand their fees, acquiring new customers etc.

*Edit: Added note on Yahoo, its assets (as the Asian comment below reminded me to add) could very well be worth more than its current valuation. This article explains how: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/yahoo-shareholder-bartz/

I'm not sure that this is true. Yahoo's earnings are around 1.2 B, and Market Cap is around 20 Billion, whereas Apple's Earnings are around 20 Billion, and their market cap is around 400 Billion. Very similar, unless my numbers are outdated.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl+yhoo+ebay+goog+pe+...

I guess so. Overhead is much lower for the SOs though, so I can see why they are in such good standing. eBay, on the other hand...?

Price to sales is a better number for Yahoo, as it is for any company that is either losing money or on the edge of doing so. But with P/S you have to compare companies to very similar competitors like Google and cannot compare to hardware manufacturers like Apple or resellers like Amazon.

Apple and Google are probably cheap relative to Yahoo and EBay.

Market cap of $18, assets on balance sheet of $15 bn... some portion of that value may be breakup / liquidation value. In theory, a company is worth the greater of its future earnings (hence P/E) or it's liquidation value. (This assumes they're rational enough to break it up if that value is greater.)

So in theory, Yahoo's earnings could go to zero, and it would still be worth $15bn because you could liquidate the assets... and the P/E would rise towards infinity.

Well, non-cash Assets are often valued way above the firesale price they'd fetch in a rapid liquidation. The $4B in goodwill is not easy to extract.

True, but they have significant investments outside of their own business that would likely hold value, plus the assets on balance sheet don't include any patents, etc. that they own and might have standalone value. I'm just saying that's why the P/E will tend to float higher than you'd expect on the comps alone when you get down to certain market caps.

I don't like the idea of a writer telling people to quit their jobs with little first hand knowledge. If they like working for Yahoo they should stay till they can get the severance package or continue working there.

Afterwards you probably have some savvy friends you could convince to join you on making your own future, in the form of a startup.

It's weird to see Y! get a lot of hate on HN, because it seems like working there would be a lot like working at a startup. You're trading off risk (will this company exist in n years) for reward (higher salary, greater control over job responsibilities). The best Y! employees also probably have a ton of visibility, working on projects like Hadoop, YUI, YQL, and so on.

What's wrong with this analogy?

Well, working at a startup is rewarding because you have a small team of peers, very little bureaucracy or management overhead, no legacy to deal with, etc. I don't think the analogy addresses the core reasons why you'd pick a startup.

This article is based on a false premise. The effect of LBOs on job creation is ambiguous:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1034178

Silver Lake, in particular, is more of a growth equity firm that happens to use debt.

(I work at, but by no means speak for, Yahoo.

What happened to DDD?

Anyone still owns YHOO stocks? Got some at around 13 after the collapse of Microsoft buyout. The book value was/is good. Was hoping there's another acquisition.

With a fresh top level CEO, could Yahoo survive?

What would Yahoo have to do for you for it to get your business?

http://everything.yahoo.com/

Take a look at all the services yahoo offers.

Has anyone ever sent you a "Yahoo Video" link? I didn't even know it existed until just now. And the prominent video on the main page is "Jazz for Cows" which I can't get a direct link for to paste here. Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it. It's fun enough I want to send it to my friend who plays in a local orchestra, but Yahoo is not concerned with the organic spread of links. http://video.yahoo.com/

It isn't just youtube Yahoo competes poorly with. Craigslist, Gmail, ESPN, every news site on the internet.

Just take a look at their "security" offering http://security.yahoo.com/

Paragraphs of copywriting but no product to download or install. Click "Protect your PC" it's just more words. Lots of words. Someone at Yahoo took the time to create this page for what purpose? There is no direction whatsoever.

Their primary search function is powered by Bing now too. About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr and that's only because pros like it over Facebook.

Yahoo! became the bitbucket to store second rate implementations of every idea the internet has ever had, and they aren't cutting the cruft loose, or differentiating on the products that are quality.

In fact, take a look at their mobile offering. http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316...

That's the Big East Team list for College Football. It's not standings. It doesn't show records. Some project manager at Yahoo accessed the mobile sports site and either didn't care enough to say "Why can't I see the standings?" or didn't know enough about sports to care about standings. Why does Yahoo! have someone like that in charge of the mobile sports division (If they even have someone in a leadership position anywhere close to such a segment). Someone thought displaying 8 teams in alphabetical order was good usability.

I'm thinking about Yahoo and getting angry. Why can't I get a Yahoo! Games platform app on my Android phone? They have an online community full of Chess, Go, and Scrabble players which means even the first person to pay $15 for the Yahoo! Games app has people to play with.

Full integration between the web and phone means I can always find someone to play chess against. But no, they decided to spend time offering up Yahoo! Weather for free.

Some exec must have sent out an internal memo mandating that no Project Manager develop anything that will make money.

I love the colors on Yahoo video! I too had never heard of their video offering. I think they have some good products, they have eyeballs, it's just a very poorly run company lacking direction.

I'd take that CEO position in a flash and I think I could turn it round.

What makes you think you are qualified?

> Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it.

Clicking the up arrow icon provides me a URL along with an embed link. Or you could just copy it from your browser's URL bar.

It appears that the promoted/lead video displayed at http://video.yahoo.com does NOT have a link field in the up arrow menu.

Once you find a video's specific page the same video has a link available. At least on ubuntu with flash 11,0,1,129 installed.

> About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr

#1 US properties - Y! News - Y! Sports - Y! Finance - OMG - Y! Mail - Homepage (for portals)

And probably some others I don't know of.

Really sad article -- I'd love to see Yahoo turn it around. It's an amazing company, in many ways.

Anyone have a mirror or cache link?

Wouldn't it be wiser to wait until you see if you get fired, so you get the severance package? And if you don't, then get out?

By then the market may be saturated with your former co-workers..

I remember this type of Schadenfreude during the tech collapse in 2000. People seemed to just love hearing about other people losing their jobs. This editorial certainly has undertones of wanting to accelerate the collapse of Yahoo.

Be careful what you wish for.

If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL, then I think there might be some bright future for Yahoo! and for AOL.

For example, they could focus on Yahoo! Finance to be the place for investment, stocks info on internet.

In order words, it is too early to predict whether Yahoo! will be sold to PE firms.

EDIT: Stupid comment: AOL is way smaller than Yahoo!

If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL

Yahoo's market cap: $18.91B

AOL's market cap: $1.5B

Stupid me. I was honestly thinking that AOL's market cap is about 20B. Wow...

I don't understand why Yahoo still exists (or at least why it still gets so much coverage). At this point it's just a cheap knockoff of everything google does. Has anyone ever used Yahoo mail? It's a POS, it's bloated, slow, prone to failure - and it doesn't even work on linux. Same thing for yahoo maps, news, search, etc. I just don't get it.

A sinking ship still has momentum.

I'd have gone with derailing train.

And that's a lot of momentum!

I don't get why investment banks exists. I don't get why casinos exist. I don't get why cigarette companies exist. I don't get why Fannie Mae exists.

Yeah! Like seriously, why do humans exist? We're slow, bloated, prone to failure, and to top it all off we don't even work on Linux!

In terms of usage, Hotmail is #1, Yahoo! Mail is #2, and Gmail is #3.

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