Hacker News Reader

Comment by orangethirty | Hacker News Reader

Those are just updates that were underway already. There has been nothing in terms of software ever since Marissa took over. She has done a lot of policy changes that have affected engineering. In a way that hurt morale. She has to have them ship something new developed under her administration. That will allow them to build trust between engineering and management. All I hear from Yahoo hackers is that they don't trust her. Shipping code can help that.

View on HN

Still in school, but when I visited Yahoo! Headquarters for a recruitment event everyone seemed to be in good morale. Of course it was for recruitment so they would be showing the best, but people there seemed happy and I saw a fairly wide range of offices. I saw changes to the food service in making it free and higher quality (which I can attest was excellent), and they were redesigning the offices while I was there, removing the cubicles and making a more open layout that you see at a lot of newer tech companies.

Everyone I talked to legitimately thought that Marissa is bringing some much needed change to the company as far as I could tell, and I spoke to mostly software engineers, not PR people. Obviously opinions probably vary across the company and it's fairly large though.

I talk to a lot of them through email and they are not very convinced of the new management. They are just scared that she will go on a firing bent when financial goals are not acquired. They won't cut the management fluff or even take pay cuts. They will fire the people that write the code.

Do they have any basis for those fears? I mean founded in her actions since coming on board. Clearly past Yahoo policies would justify those fears, but I don't see any signs that she would just arbitrarily cut engineering over management to meet financial goals.

The one "negative" thing she's done since coming on board is cut remote working, and I'm not convinced that was really so bad. Yahoo needed fix some internal stuff about the culture, and it would be hard to do that when your talented people are spread out all over the place. I agree that the management fluff needs a serious trimming there, so hopefully by bringing all the engineering talent in house, and theoretically trimming management, they can adjust the culture to be more engineering focused, which is what everyone wants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com