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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

I worked on video at Apple. While there, I once got a message on LinkedIn from some recruiter for Yahoo's TV widgets.

Here's the thing: That Yahoo even has TV widgets is why I will never talk to them.

If Mayer can shut all that bullshit down and actually do a small handful of things well enough for people like me to consider talking to them, I think she'll be one of the greatest CEOs in technology.

(I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing, but seriously, what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?)

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> I realize this post is embarrassingly self aggrandizing,

Yes it is.

> what kind of self-respecting engineer works for Yahoo?

The kind that created Hadoop, YUI, YQL, Yahoo BOSS, etc. etc. I'd be pretty proud to work on any of those projects.

I completely agree with you. Those are all very fine and nice technologies.

But I'm not a back-end engineer and I haven't dealt with web technologies at all. The only one of those things I've ever considered using is Hadoop and I didn't even know Yahoo had anything to do with it. Needless to say, none of those technologies are things I would be working on.

I typically write embedded and high performance C/C++ applications and I specialized in video at the time. I'm not going to jump ship for a position in some also-ran fiefdom in a directionless corporation writing embedded JVM UIs.

And that's the problem. Most people who are good in that niche aren't going to risk it with Yahoo vs some other firm or by starting their own company. Simply put: Yahoo can't win at that game because they can't attract the talent. So why do they even play at it?

First it was no "self-respecting engineer", now it's "embedded C/C++ applications", well I guess Yahoo just isn't for you dude. No biggie. Yahoo has had some great engineering talent well past it's time on top, and still even retains some today. If Facebook can attract talent to work on "Timeline" and "App Center" then I'm pretty sure Yahoo just needs to fix the fucking poisonous culture.

That's where the 'self-respecting' part comes in. If these engineers are so good, why don't they jump ship to Facebook or Google or JP Morgan? There's no way the culture could be any more poisonous, even in investment banking.

The only respectable answer I've heard concerns loss of security of changing jobs when you already own a house in the valley, send your kids to private school, lease a Lexus, etc.

Maybe they enjoy the work they do, despite the poisonous culture. If you put time and effort into something and believe in it, then as a 'self-respecting' person you probably wouldn't jump ship that easy.

YUI makes my life easier.

I think the point here is that the OP (of this comment thread) would likely NOT be working on anything nearly that interesting. Yahoo's bread and butter is generating as many 'destinations' for its content and ad network as possible, and all those other tech projects are just byproducts of that.

Those people worked at Yahoo once. How many of them work there now?

At this point I must know 50 ex-Yahoos, but I don't know a single person there anymore.

What's a TV widget?

Edit: ok this is almost cool http://freetubetv.net/tvwidgets.php/ but it seems like it's taking someone else's content and delivering it to other people? That seems about as productive as https://xkcd.com/1060/

OK, that thing in your edit is awesome.

But it was actually this: http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/

Basically, somebody at Yahoo said 'it's like the app store!' and got the green light to write something nobody cares about.

Later in my life, I actually bought a Samsung TV with Yahoo widgets (not that that was a feature I cared about), and it was an ugly clunky GUI on top of a bunch of applications that didn't really work. Then the UI would freeze. And the app would lose its state, including your position in whatever it was playing. Also, if you turned the TV off, the app would forget everything. And nobody fixed any bugs after the first 3 months because it was an abortion of a project.

So ya, I'd say I dodged a bullet.

exactly.

Yahoo has everything. That's their value add, it's what they do. If you want it, and it's on the internet, then yahoo has it - maybe not the best, but it works, and it's integrated with the rest of yahoo.

Douglas Crockfor?

No, he bailed last May.

But speaking of non-existent Scotsmen, the headliners, or fellows as they'd be called at Sun always stay way longer than the nobodies. I'm talking about the rank and file engineers. What bright young kid would look at an offer from Google/Apple/NVidia/AMD/Intel/AMD/PowerVR/etc. and say 'No, I'm going to Yahoo, I'm really going to be respected there'.

Nope, he jumped to PayPal in May: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57427801-93/paypal-lures-ja...

I don't think he's there any longer.

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