> 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.
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.
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?
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.
YUI makes my life easier.
At this point I must know 50 ex-Yahoos, but I don't know a single person there anymore.