Yammer CEO won't hire anyone from Yahoo who doesn't quit in next 60 days
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
This reeks of publicity seeking - which reflects even more poorly on the CEO. He's willing to vilify innocent workers to promote his company - so not only does he exhibit poor judgement, he's also unethical.
Look, yes Yahoo needs to take it in the chin as well as their decision makers and true owners. Regular employees even with their stock options are for all intensive purposes not owners. Employees all have unique individual situations (H1B, mortgages, etc etc) and they will leave when the situation is right for them. Weaponizing hiring is just as pitiful as weaponizing patents.
Find another way to do it.
1. If you read the article, he was apparently talking about people with options and control (Executives, Lawyers, Engineers), rather than janitors or other people who might not have as much say in who they work for.
2. The CEO states that his reasoning is that who you work for and support indicates what kind of person you are ("the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring"). Contrast this with the knee jerk reactions to the article indicating that this is purely about punishing Yahoo. He just doesn't want people who enable bad behavior. He wants Yammer employees who will stand up to him if things look immoral.
3. Yes the article / his announcement is sensational. But look at the general idea: expecting engineers to refuse support to business doing immoral things is taught in every university ethics class. Why not include ethics questions in the interview?
After some backlash, Sacks is considering modifying his proposal to only extend to executives and lawyers, but he still feels all employees should take some ownership.
“People were telling me I need to think of the Yahoo rank and file, folks who have families, but the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring,”
(Emphasis on were added. Unless janitors are in hot demand in the valley this confirms the statement as is)
In his original statement, the CEO clearly meant anyone at the company (we can assume he didn't mean janitors and such, but he certainly meant engineers.)
Later on, he decided to clarify it only to people with control: executives and lawyers. This would not seem to include engineers.
You're making the statement that you think this should include engineers.
> the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now,
> the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have
> stopped caring
> 3. Yes the article / his announcement is sensational. But look at the
> general idea: expecting engineers to refuse support to business doing
> immoral things is taught in every university ethics class. Why not include
> ethics questions in the interview?
Additionally, if one can make a good case for his/her stance on this issue, does that mean that he/she will be considered as an exception to the no-hire rule? If the CEO of Yammer wants employees who will correct him on ethics issues, then certainly having strong critical thinking skills, and ability to present a compelling argument for an issue should be far more important than being able to "Patents are bad, mmkay?" And having a diversity of viewpoints on these issues would surely also be a benefit, would it not?
Sure, he could have phrased the tweet better. But that's arguably not the point of Twitter :p
On an unrelated note, I can't make heads or tails of your third paragraph. First you argue that the "ethical way for a business to behave is to maximize shareholder value", then you claim that "we are looking at ethics here, not whether this is a good business move". Those two sentences come back to back and appear self-contradictory -- maximizing shareholder value is done by good business moves.
Did you mean that if the Yahoo board believed the action was ethical, then the employees shouldn't care if they think it's ethical? (Or that Yammer's CEO shouldn't care if those employees thought it was ethical?) (Or perhaps that Yahoo employees who stay are better hires, since they won't get in the way of business ethics?)
As you can see I am a bit befuddled by your paragraph three.
As to the question of (good arguers) <> (people with similar ethics) you bring up at the end, I can not say. Personally, the most productive teams I have been on have had relatively heterogeneous beliefs and ethics. Perhaps your experience differs.
We all know that this patent nonsense has got to stop. There is nobody building any app anywhere that does not violate some patent. The only way we are surviving is by being under the radar.
Let's not forgive Yahoo for this like we forgave Amazon. I'm especially pissed at Yahoo for making me take the side of Facebook on something.
Yahoo employees should get no blame for decisions they didn't make, but they do have to bear the responsibility for tacitly condoning this behavior. Considering the current job market for software engineers in the Bay Area, the whole "but I need to pay rent" argument doesn't even hold water.
You mean you wouldn't leave the same day?
What's the point of using an example like that?
Humor might enhance learning of a harder to grasp concept. If done appropriately.
I dare say the perimeter security at such a company might be quite formidable.
The whole world (and Yahoo offices) doesn't revolve around the Bay area. And those Bay Area startups? How many will be around in 2 years and how "hot" will the market be then?
Did you go through what happened in the 90's? I don't think you did after looking at your resume.
They have multiple offices in the US as well as around the world. I'm sure also they have plenty of engineers working remotely as well.
http://ibrandstudio.com/inspiration/a-showcase-of-amazing-go...
I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I have never regretted that decision.
This reeks of publicity-seeking.
Headline read to me "Small no name startup says they won't hire employees from huge company that's also never heard of them"
Seems all about the publicity.
Do they make those numbers public though? All I could find was this http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/26/yammer-doubling-revenue-eve...
Revenue in 2009 was “seven figures.” I asked Sacks to narrow that down in the video but he refused. He does say that Q1 2010 revenue exceeded all of 2009 revenue, and that revenue is now doubling every quarter. Yammer’s revenue goal by end of year is to be at a $10 million annual run rate.
That's not nothing, but it seems unfair to laud a company for bringing in a lot of real revenue if they don't disclose the actual number.
The story helps Yammer reach out to those people and offer them a conversation.
If anyone does go interview there, ask what they they are doing about software patents. One interesting trick would be to let the employee/inventor retain ownership and sign over only a license to the company.
I blame this on the choice of Twitter as his venue. Everything he said after it, to Venturebeat, is now subject to the distortions of the news cycle. I know of at least one really smart person who works at and thinks highly of Yammer; I have a hard time believing it's really run the way this article makes it sound.
So either you're soulless and refuse to leave, or you're incompetent and you're scared to leave. Either way, not hiring them seems fair to me.
I'll put my money where my mouth is. Know a talented engineer over the age of 30? Or 40? Or 50? I know several prestigious firms that would be eager to hire her. Contact me and I'll share my referral bounty with you.
Oh darn it, you said "her", which would be an EEOC win for said corporation (if they had been feeling legal pressure), although women in the profession suffer age discrimination as well - being less numerous, you don't hear about it nearly as much.
So... in your world, everyone (not soulless and incompetent) is currently employed where they agree 100% with the direction and vision of the company as dictated by management. If, sometime in the future, they don't agree with management decisions, their only course of action is to give notice and leave. Pensions, security, and seniority be damned. Since they must also do this within 60 days (more than enough time according to Yammer), having another job lined up is not guaranteed either.
Maybe I missed the part where Yammer would automatically hire ex-Yahoo employees on the spot, at the same pay-rate and bonus structure, if they quit within 60 days?
If you can program your way out of a paper bag and find your ass with both hands and a google search, yeah.
Which isn't to say that everyone can feasibly walk away in 60 days. If you're waiting for compensation to vest after an acquisition by Yahoo!, say.
People are rightly wary of hiring untested kids fresh out of college because so many of the just plain cannot program their way out of a paper bag. Not to accuse your friend of incompetence, it's just that until you have some kind of real portfolio, it's damn hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Example 1: Yahoo buys out your company, but it is more of a talent acquisition rather than a real tech/market grab, and the terms of the deal are marked accordingly.
Example 2: Someone takes a job at Yahoo as a sales exec, but differs all their compensation in favor of stock options that expire at a very specific date.
But yeah, generally I like the direction this is going.
I guess Jonathan Ive should quit Apple and go work for Yammer to save his soul and be considered a good person again.
I feel he's just a loudmouth that's lucky his company isn't big enough or well-known enough for him to get slapped down by his investors and/or board and have his twitter account take away. Regardless of how you feel about his opinion or Yahoo's actions, this is a bad move and a potential PR disaster on his part.
Plus, who would want to work for him now he's shown himself to be the type of person to blame people for actions they had no part in?
And I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks every single employee of Yahoo is worthless, soulless, evil, or whatever, is a total freaking moron.
I know it's just a summary, but this sounds pretty much exactly like the early days of Facebook when user's were confined to their college "network".
Y'know, publicly calling on people to quit their jobs based upon one's own political opinions is really unprofessional and if this guy really said that, it says more about him than Yahoo.
This isn't just unethical in a general sense. If it were, then yes, corporations do much worse.
The bigger issue is that Yahoo's move here threatens the entire software industry and specifically the internet. Yes, we already have massive patent battles in the mobile space. But they are fought over the selling of smartphones and tablets - hardware. Many of the relevant patents are software ones, so the distinction is not absolute, but at least they still happen in a clearly hardware-orientated space. The players all sell hardware and are already familiar with the patent game from hardware patents. It's bad there, don't get me wrong, but it is - for now - a controlled bad.
Whereas Yahoo's move here does not involve hardware. It doesn't even involve shipping any product at all or even selling one. It's a lawsuit over a website that is free for people to use - one of the most important forms of online business.
Imagine if patent warfare broke out on in the web space. It would be a massacre for big companies and startups alike. Everyone violates patents all the time, its impossible to avoid doing so. If such lawsuits are brought, they would devastate silicon valley. Yahoo's lawsuit here looks, worryingly, like it might be the first attack in such a war.
That's why people are so shocked and react so strongly - and rightly so. Pressuring companies that use software patents, and pressuring their employees to try to effect change internally or consider jumping ship, is something that makes sense for the software industry to do. To do otherwise would be suicidal. Only Intellectual Ventures and other patent holders win if patent warfare becomes commonplace on the internet.
One company does stand to (possibly) gain from all this - Google.
I do see the point that threatening employees to leave or be blacklisted is... disturbing. I think we should put pressure on Yahoo and its employees to change Yahoo's ways, but not like that.
Edit: Google doesn't stand to gain from this. Well sure, in the short term Facebook's loss is Google's gain. But if patent lawsuits become a norm in the internet industry, Google in fact has perhaps the most to lose.
Oh please! Get over yourself. Yahoo sued Google in 2004 for similar reasons; and the world didn't end.
Seems as though he's just a little worried that if Facebook bows to the patents his company will be next on Yahoo's hit list.
Like a girl/guy, that you don't even know if you want to date, stating emphatically that they won't date you unless you stop immediately from any behavior that they find objectionable. How would that go over?
Who would want to work for (or date) someone who makes a demand like that, regardless of whether you agree with the issue or not?
Patents are, like it or not, one of the weapons of war, if you will, in business. Have been for a long, long time. And, while I too hate the "we invented the button and we have a patent" crowd I also recognize that they exist for a reason.
Denying someone employment because the company they work for seeks to enforce their patents --legitimate or not-- is nothing less than being a dick.
If you want to do something about frivolous patents get involved politically, seek to understand the issues and push to make sensible changes. So, how about it Mr. David Sacks instead of being a total dick by seeking to cause damage to Yahoo employees, would you use your money and influence to help change patent laws?
I have yet to see any of the loud-mouths spouting off about patents offer to do something like put together a fund to be used in pursuing changes to the laws. An, of course, none of them will write a check for a few million to fund it. If I was in a position to get something like this started I would. Maybe someone can reach vocal anti-patent guys like Mark Cuban and ask him to throw the first ten million into the pot to get this going?
With the money available in the top layer of tech companies it should be possible to put together a fund with billions of dollars. This fund could either be available to fight patent trolls or act as a PAC (or both).
Imagine, if you will, what would go through patent troll's minds if they tried to enforce bullshit patents and this group existed.
Let's call it the AFSPL (Americans For Sensible Patent Laws). Furthermore, imagine that this group had massive amounts of money and a whole floor full of lawyers and engineers to throw at the problem. The ACLU of the patent world, if you will.
If someone comes after you with a bullshit patent you could bring it up with the AFSPL for review. And, if they see it your way they defend you. Trolls would disappear almost instantly. Bullshit patents would be invalidated. The skies would turn blue and the birds would sing.
Maybe they could even mount a massive lawsuit against the patent office itself.
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that there's a place for valid an solid patents, even software patents. Having said that, I've read through so many patents that have caused me to yell and scream at the top of my lungs "this is bullshit!" that it is easy to loose hope.
Nah, going after Yahoo employees is crap. Get a grip on reality and put your time, effort and passion behind a real solution.
But how is he a hypocrite?
But, I could be wrong.
Frankly, his attack on perfectly innocent folk really ticked me off.
Jeff Bezos was talking a good game there for a while, but nothing ever came of it.
Also: when you want employees rather than startup founders, you have to expect that they are in it for security rather than ideals. Very few employee-types who are otherwise happy with their company are going to quit over one lawsuit. It's simply not worth not being able to feed your kids.
Or people who can't leave because of immigration reasons(such as a pending green card).
If you're still working at Yahoo today that sends a clear message to me about how you value innovation, product quality, thought leadership, and other important assets. As an employee you're making an explicit choice that the company you work for merits spending your most valuable asset: your time.
I have been wary of anyone with Yahoo on their resume for the past two years, and will be more wary going forward. This patent troll mess is just another data point in that calculus.
Yahoo is acting distastefully. David Sacks suggests that we threaten and punish those who work there. This includes those who can have no real influence on company strategy.
David Sacks is also acting distastefully.
Therefore if we were to follow David Sack's advice we should now threaten David's gardener and pool-boy.
I'm sure the cafeteria staff, interns, co-op hires, newly hired, green cards and so forth will appreciate being ostracised like this.
Secondly, I didn't want to be personally responsible for making the patent situation worse. Worse? Yes, because despite the assertion made that obviously a good company like ours would only use patents defensively, this was not backed up with any public statement to that effect, nor would even that be binding in the future when management changed or the patent portfolio was sold. Every defensive patent can be used offensively.
The suggestion of a defensive silicon valley patent pool (perhaps owned by some kind of internet foundation), more rights for inventors to control how their patents are used, and pressuring engineers not to collaborate in the creation of bad patents would be a good way out of the current madness without requiring a total overhaul.
Publicity stunts like this only fit Hollywood. Seems like we have a new culture in Silicon Valley.
YUI team has some cool stuff under their belt. And how about Doug Crockford?
To make blanket statements like this - especially as a CEO - is dumb, plain and simple. I have never used a Yahoo product and I disagree with a lot of things they've done in the past couple of years. But I'd never hold working at some other company during whatever period in their life-cycle against a former employee.
Yes, Yahoo! made a dick move. But that does not mean that everybody working at Yahoo! should be penalized like this.
Incredibly classless move on this guy's part. As if anyone that he would be interested in hiring had anything to do with the lawsuit filing. And trying to apply leverage by calling them out as some sort of accomplice to the suit if they don't leave in 60 days? Talk about not being able to stand in someone else's shoes.
I can think of about a dozen different ways I could have used this as a recruiting opportunity where I didn't sound like a complete dick. This guy obviously doesn't have that capability.
Does he even realize what kind of damage an NPE the size of Yahoo could make? I assume he knows his threats have no effect on the lawyers Yahoo pays to pursue such actions.
note: instead of a downvote, I'd appreciate constructive feedback or a discussion. You may like Yammer a lot, or even work for them, but I'm more interested on what did you find worthy of a downvote in my post.
It's not like he's refusing to hire people of color or Vietnam veterans or even transsexuals. (Edit: I realize it might sound strange, but there's a legal basis behind that ordering it's not just my preferences :-)
He's refusing to hire certain resume' histories arguing that it is professionally relevant.
Second, he is creating a hostile work environment for his own employees who may feel differently about the case, or who have come from companies that collapsed as he is expecting Yahoo would.
Hostile work environment? Meh. Sure maybe somebody could bring a suit, maybe they could even have a chance at winning if he was beating people on the head with it every day. But I doubt many startup execs would worry about it to the point they would let it censor their behavior.
However, I do remember the SCO fiasco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO-Linux_controversies . The feeling I got from the tech community was that SCO engineers were certainly black listed from alot of jobs at other tech companies.
I guess it's worth exploring what makes Yahoo and SCO different.
I list a patent on my CV.
And as jongraehl said, there's still one strike left :)
It seems to me that making a public statement about this could burn them in the future.
Sure. But could it work?
Maybe he should focus on hiring the best engineers for his own business rather than trying to optimize his value in something else.
The odds the CEO will apply the same rule to all other companies acting with patent belligerence? Approximately zero. They'd need a substantial piece of tracking software just to attempt it, and then it'd be down to subjective whim as to which company employees deserves to be 'punished'.
Lame.
Here's what it's equivalent to intellectually (using an extreme example to frame it): Joseph Stalin was evil, therefore everyone in the USSR was evil; never allow anyone from the USSR to immigrate.
Sometimes it's not so simple as to pack up and leave your job when, say, you have children and a family to look out for or any number of a zillion other considerations in life (which is already hard enough in general). Really makes me think the CEO is a serious jerkwad.
Let's not lose sight of that. There's no real "news" here, apart from the sad realization that this is the strongest signal yet that Yahoo is now just an empty shell of suits, bean counters, and lawyers.
I do agree that both of them have bad analogies :) But that's a different problem, it's not an Ad Hominem.
Companies have lots of tactics to shorten applicant stacks ("wrote a personalized cover letter", "minimum 12yrs experience HTML5", "name printed in blue"). Power to Yammer if they want to add "dates employed at yahoo" to the list - talented folks will have little trouble finding work.
This is a deeply idiotic statement. In fact, it's quite easy to talk about how much responsibility Yahoo employees have for the intellectual property lawsuits started by management, and yet not make use of comparisons to the Nazis.
When the roads into Sunnyvale have signs saying "Arbeit macht frei" over them, then you can feel free to make such comparisons. Till then, you're a complete jackass.
Just because naked mole rats aren't ants doesn't mean you can't refer to ants when talking about them, silly.
Implementation of such a system is riddled with flaws, as evidenced by the fact that the US still asks people [ with a straight face as well ] if they were a member of the Nazi party on current citizenship tests.
David Sacks' move is personal, and moves made out of frustration are often hypocritical, and I'm not surprised it's going to piss some people off. I'm glad this is just one person and one medium-sized company. If Apple, Microsoft, or Google announced this type of policy in a press release I'd be disgusted. It's easy for me to shrug it off when a CEO of a company with fewer than 500 employees announces it in a tweet and quickly waters it down significantly. https://twitter.com/#!/DavidSacks/status/179788086862028800
' “People were telling me I need to think of the Yahoo rank and file, folks who have families, but the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring,” Sacks told VentureBeat. '
I'm not a programmer (yet), but I work in a technical field that is currently experiencing a similar level of growth. Having worked for the same employer for over 9 years, it wasn't an easy decision to make when I decided to leave. Now that I am searching for a job in an industry where everyone claims to be facing a desperate shortage of qualified personnel, I find it rather difficult to convince someone to even grant me an interview.
It is far too easy to judge the actions of a family man who has a wife and kids to worry about when you are the CEO of your own company.
Just to take one example I'm familiar with, Flickr still has a lot of top-notch people.
The problem here is that a huge number of talented people almost certainly do work for Yahoo without ever paying attention to the news cycle. Lots of talented people don't have startup ambitions; they bust their ass from 9-5 and come home to their families and their woodworking and charcuterie hobbies. Sure, they probably all have a sense that Yahoo isn't on a great trajectory, but they have no urgent need to leave. Yahoo might even be a better deal for them; pick the wrong startup and you could be hunting for a job again in 6 months.
It isn't reasonable to start penalizing people like that for the actions of Yahoo management; or, at least, if it is, it's not reasonable to do it over patent lawsuits. Patent lawsuits aren't a big enough issue to justify collective punishment.
I'm a little surprised at the tacit support I read out of this comment.
(For what it's worth: I have just as much to fear from patent suits as anyone else; my field is riddled with them).
This is simply a more visible indicator that a person doesn't care about the company they work for. That's fine for giant corporations, but amazingly deadly for startups.
If I were looking for a day job, I wouldn't be looking for a day job any more: they're friendly, happy people who get social license to join the Dark Side, do smart stuff all day, and then go home while it is still light out.
I have a set of things I need to get done. It is my job as a company owner to help constrain and groom the subset of what's getting done every day so that the business prospers without burning through people like charcoal briquettes. And In my experience doing that, the lifestyle that team members want to lead hasn't proven to be correlated at all with what's actually getting done.
You can hire however you want. It is, I sincerely believe, your loss.
If you can code, particularly in C, are interested in software security, are good at learning lots of things very fast, and get rejected from whatever job "subwindow from Hacker News" was hiring for because you aren't startup-y enough, please consider dropping us a note. We don't think like him.
People in the startupsphere (who in many cases have been doing things since, what, 2007?) fail to understand the amount of capable accomplished people there are that have never read HN or know who Arrington or Wilson or Graham are. In their mind these people simply aren't cut from the right bolt of cloth to work at a startup. I mean they don't know what the word pivot means and god knows they might actually waste time doing sysadmin work themselves on a server. And wow it actually took them like 10 or 20 years to learn what some young hotshot learned in 1 year.
I happened to mention sometime over the last year to my "go to" guy (who happens to run a security team of 17 at some major consulting company and who flys around the world on assignments so, um, I guess he knows what he is doing which is why I rely on him) anyway I told him he might find HN interesting to read. He took a look and said he had been reading PG's essays "for years" but never knew about YC or HN.
But let's say you saw someone that was coming from a security consultancy that started doing interesting, challenging work and then turned into a shop doing nothing but the same web pentests day in and day out. Don't you think you'd seriously question whether they're capable of doing the challenging work, or still hungry for that kind of work? I know I'd think twice about it. I think that's why people are so against the people left at Yahoo; it's a company that's been on a downward trajectory for a long while, and is actively doing Bad Things (TM). It's not unreasonable to expect that someone that's ok with that (or blind to it) isn't going to be a fantastic hire, but that doesn't mean there aren't certainly exceptions.
Another thing the guy overlooks: these people could simply be extremely loyal and may hope that given Y!'s scale that there is a chance that the right management team could make things work. Other companies have been in bad shape and have survived eventually.
Loyalty is an excellent quality and penalizing it is stupid. You really shouldn't hire based on where people used to work, you should hire based on your needs, team fit and skills.
If anything, I'd be wary of someone who is too into their craft - they might consider actual results a lower priority. Nobody likes a "star programmer".
In a startup you can't have unambitious employees- regardless of how talented they are. You have to have people who challenge the way things are done or the company will grow stagnant and won't seize opportunities to pivot.
I think people should care. If you spend half of your waking life at work, you should be proud of what you do and the people you work with. Pride in your work is one of the single largest contributors to happiness (more so than family, but that is largely tangential to the point).
Quite frankly I don't think that most of the people left at Yahoo care. If they cared, or had ambition, or had enthusiasm towards the web, they would leave.
A similar heuristic applied to me would have returned NOHIRE approximately 80% of the days during my working career and, critically, 100% of the days I was actually available for hire (+). There exist at least a few companies looking for caring, ambitious, enthusiastic employees at which somebody similar to me would be a pretty good fit. Isn't that a fairly silly heuristic next to attempting to measure e.g. ambition or enthusiasm?
On the other hand, if your company is just drowning under a deluge of qualified programmers willing to work for peanuts at the moment, and you get 5 star-spangled resumes thrown over the transom every day, feel free to be picky.
+ Joel Spolsky had a great article back in the day about how the best prospective are on the public employment markets essentially never. This plus the general market economics argument that you're most likely to find value by exploiting a difference between the true value of something and what other people value it as suggest to me that if there were a rock that Silicon Valley culturally scorned I would be checking under it very carefully looking for juicy wor... OK, the metaphor breaks a little bit, but you get the idea.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...
But you can and you should.
Anyone at Yahoo/MS today is (on average) already under suspicion of being 2nd tier and a notch below a Facebooker/Googler. And those Yahoo engineers who stick through this one will tend to be the 3rd tier. They aren't going to see this Yammer thread and they sure aren't going to get hired by a good startup.
So why even bring them up in this thread? We're talking about the good folks left at Yahoo, the guys who are like Jeremy Zawodny and Prabhakar Raghavan, who want to leave before Jerry Yang's company completes its transformation into SCO.
Not the time punchers who don't know what the clock says.
At the same time, I don't know of anything like that at all going on at Yahoo. And he doesn't go home at 5pm.
SELECT * FROM companies WHERE field='tech' ORDER BY growth_rate, market_cap;
You could also do it Turing style, analyzing LinkedIn data to see which company is raiding which for talent. Very few Googlers are going to MS. And very few Facebook people are going to Google. Like PageRank, these migration signals give you a rank ordering of desirability.
You can rank colleges the same way, which is why people from Stanford and MIT are usually in the headlines for technological breakthroughs and why people from Directional State are not.
They pioneered a lot of those 'latest technologies' there and you'd be lucky to be able to hire them. Ditto for microsoft. If you think these are 'backwards' companies then you have no idea of what is going on there.
You are making blanket statements about untold thousands of people without any knowledge about the individuals at all. You can not make such statements. You can only make such statements about individuals, never about groups.
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it.
Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't
realize how much they suck. They still think they can
write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards
of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years
ago.
Within every large enough group there will be individuals that you'd be more than happy to hire.
What most people here agree with does not change the facts.
Microsoft as a company may suck (and even that depends on your viewpoint, I would agree with that statement but plenty of people do not and they may have just as much reason to believe their opinions as I do) but that does not automatically translate into 'everybody that works at microsoft sucks'.
Oh, and they're still one of the largest software companies and one of the largest companies in general. There's bound to be interesting work and interesting people within its walls.
Maybe the employee feels the project they are working on is worthwhile, maybe they thinks that if they can get their project to succeed, it will negate the need for Yahoo to pursue patent litigation, or maybe, the employee has loyalty and passion for Yahoo and will stick with it through thick and thin to try and turn it around. They sound like qualities any startup would benefit from in an employee.
Yet, you judge all employees on a single issue made by someone else at the company.
Is it not paying attention to the news cycle? Or knowing that the company is on a bad trajectory but still working there? Surely it's not the focus on work-life balance.
I could see myself working at Yahoo. I bet they still have interesting problems to work on. Yahoo Research does awesome stuff with computational advertising. Hypothetically speaking, would this opinion disqualify me from your hiring consideration?
There may be interesting things going on inside Yahoo, but I'm not aware of them. Every single thing that I found interesting about Yahoo has withered or completely died in the last 5+ years.
There are a certain things only a big companies can do, Big companies put man on moon, put satellites into orbits, invented the first mobile phone, build mainframes, manufacture drugs that save billions of lives on planet etc.
Minus some very bad places, if you can't do great work where your are now. You won't do it any where else.
There are a lot of brilliant people who work in big corporations on things that are important. You may not see them or their work as upfront as Google's homepage. But every time you take your medication, every time you swipe your credit card. Some one some where is building stuff that makes such a thing possible.
Yahoo employees, we are hiring right NOW. NOW is the time to send us your resume. Did I mention we are hiring?
Who are Yammer by the way? Should I know about them?
[googles] ahh, is a twitintraweb. Well, I suppose those fortune 500 media budgets have to be spent somewhere.
Was just being annoyed by the 60 day thing really, purely as I am not sure I would want to hire someone who jumped someone else's ship just because I set a deadline.
I shouldn't really extend my annoyance to being snarky about their products as I admittedly know little about them.
Are there a lot of other public companies in SV that have a patent portfolio the size of Yahoo who are going after non-public companies with broad, web 2.0 patents? I think you could count on two hands the number of software companies with the patent portfolio the size of Yahoo (not counting NPE like IV).
If Yahoo succeeds with Facebook, they will extract this tax out of every new web company that is a success. And down the road, if MSFT really falls off, they will do the same.
Somebody has to draw a line in the sand. Get the employees to stand against this, because the mgmt never will.
Pure bait link BS..