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Comment by sriramk | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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 :-)

> 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.

>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." do you really not think you're in this dramatic situation now?

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 :/

Do you still have yellow and purple cubicles?

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

yack

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