About a Month at Yahoo
bensign.com
bensign.com
Edit: @coolsunglasses, thanks for the follow up. I can see why a YC moderator would think that his posts are linkbait.
I'm glad he's happy (right now), but this is exactly why I will never work for a company like Yahoo. I absolutely love what I do. And I protect it by ensuring I have healthy boundaries. No, Yahoo isn't "taking care" of you Ben. They're taking advantage.
I was pointing that out because it seemed like a massive contradiction to say that working at Yahoo is comfortable, but then to say in the following sentence that home life is non-existent. I often ponder the long term stuff in the tech realm as a current full time grad student, and this particular section was striking to me.
I don't have kids, I'd probably do the same thing if it were so convenient.
Now, to be fair, I live in Cupertino (right next to Sunnyvale) and I would rather live in Berkeley or SF, because there is certainly MORE to do, but Sunnyvale isn't THAT bad.
If you can't find something to do, you're probably just being lazy.
1. If you like the outdoors, there are plenty of wonderful places to run/hike/bike in the South Bay/Peninsula. 2. There are frequent sporting events at HP Pavilion. 3. Sunnyvale may not be Paris, but museums and art galleries do exist in the area. 4. The diversity and quality of Bay Area restaurants is unrivaled. 5. Nightlife can be found in San Jose. 6. For weekend getaways, Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay and Napa are all within reasonable driving distance. 7. Like most metropolitan areas, there are tons of gyms where you can stay in shape and meet people. 8. Meetups of all types abound in the Bay Area. 9. If you like shopping or window shopping, you could do a lot worse than Valley Fair Mall and Santana Row. 10. A lot of the downtowns in the area are great for grabbing a cup of coffee and people watching.
2. Trying to compare cities on a relative basis is a pointless exercise. You could easily find people living in major cities outside of the Bay Area who would suggest that San Francisco is boring. That doesn't mean that if you live in San Francisco, you should lock yourself in your room and wait until you can move to Miami or Las Vegas to have fun.
3. The idea is that you can't have a life and work hard and improve your skills is asinine.
4. The sad truth is that "I'll do x when y" is usually just an intellectually dishonest rationale for convincing oneself not to do y.
There is a pretty active club scene on Murphy street, there are great restaurants on Sunnyvale a few miles up in Mtn View, a few miles south in Cupertino, and a few miles south in Santa Clara. You've got hiking and parks with wetlands and concert venues (Shoreline, Great America, HP Pavilion), soon you'll have NFL football and world cup Soccer nearby, and you've got an amusement park with concerts and roller coasters, and you've got quicker access to the mountains, and the Steven's creek trail for some excellent biking, running, and walking.
Downtown Palo Alto is a quick train trip, where you can walk from the University Ave station to pretty much anywhere.
What you don't have are some high density urban buildings. More of those are coming with the Murphy Park build but they will still not be high rise apartment/condos. Its not clear to me what the buys you, but it is a difference.
And yes, I'm a bit defensive when people say "its so boring and plastic" (or words to that effect) but getting them to say what is 'not boring' or 'not plastic' seems unexpressable.
I'd love to know what makes a for a 'non-boring' place if you have a list.
A few places I've lived, such as NYC, Tokyo and Paris, have had all these things, but also a whole bunch of other stuff going on I wouldn't have ever thought of. A few other ones have had all this stuff, but didn't really surprise me in any way, like SF, Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland. Most places I've been meet some of these criteria, but not all. I found that Cupertino did not have anything on my wish list, and also didn't have any other stuff going on that I wouldn't have thought of. In addition, there was a lot of stuff that seemed additionally negative: driving everywhere, expensive, bad rental properties, mediocre food, etc.
A fantastic question, and my answer as a south bay dweller is absolutely-freaking-not. Expensive, hot (for CA), crowded, weak culture:size ratio.
Quality theaters (both movie & traditional).
Parts of town you'd feel comfortable walking alone at 1am.
Art, both public (public installations, statues, etc) & private (museums & so forth).
Varied & competing viewpoints/ideas/industry.
Crime.
I'd prefer a higher salary and getting my own meals, but free dinner without free lunch is a huge warning sign.
Office gyms are usually awkward as well, but the shower is useful because you can bike or run to work, so that's a plus.
Looks like the plan is working.
Not for long, hopefully! There is clearly a need for on-campus dormitories so that employees don't have to worry about maintaining their own spaces and finding things to do on their own time.
I can see it now...
Google employee: "I live in the Adwords Apartments. Pretty ritzy. Where do you live?" Yahoo employee: "I'm in Flickr House. It was recently renovated." Facebook employee: "You should apply for a job at Facebook. If you're really lucky, you might be able to get a room at Poke Place. We have the best co-ed hackathons on Saturday nights."
But seriously, I feel like technically you could be homeless if you're single and work at Google or (now) Yahoo, they've got gyms, couches, private rooms to chill, you just put a tie on the doorknob (or whatever) and sleep there for the night. and Boom! you've just saved yourself like $1000+ /month, not to mention paying for internet/cable or furniture and other household items, in fact, I wonder if people aren't doing that right now...
/s
I would honestly rather have a $100k take-home but my employer pay $500k (i.e. 400k goes to charity) and think that's my salary, than a regular $150k. You get treated better if you cost more. Your salary is what it costs your employer to waste your time, so if you're at a high level, management actually fucking listens to you. Taking a long-term career perspective, it's worth a $50k/year drop to be in a situation where management feels like it can't afford not to take your ideas seriously.
In fact, I think that's so many talented engineers quit the employee game and become consultants in their 30s. Even if you're only able to get a few hours of work per week, you at least know that your boss is going to take your suggestions seriously.
Acq-hires are people bought in at a panic price ($1 million+ per engineer) so management actually listens to them because of what they cost. Until the "golden child" aura wears off and they're just regular employees.
This really is a new company under Marissa. I wasn't special, aqui-hired, or anything. I now can easily access management when I need them, my suggestions are taken seriously and acted on, and I get everything I need from upper management to excel at what I do. My manager has always been great, but now she is more empowered to get stuff done more than ever before.
I'm also 24, so I have a bit of a way to go before I get jaded and go into consulting. Maybe. But I've also been working for 5 years instead of school, which gives me a less than rosy perspective of life at a big company.
Can you speak a bit more on your unique situation of before a software engineer there since you were 19? Im quite curious what led to that.
This is pretty much the exact story from the two folk I know it Yahoo! They went from being at the point of nearly resigning to being really happy post-MM.
(I've been through one startup/bigco acquisition, by [what is now] McAfee, back in the '90s; it wasn't a good experience, from the jump.)
Why jump through the traditional hoops applying at 100 companies, interviewing at 10 of them, then maybe getting an offer at one of them for a "market rate" salary, when instead, you can take a moderate amount of risk and a little bit of time, and start a company with the sole intent of being acquired for $1MM/head? It doesn't even matter what your company makes, as long as it's something that shows off your talent.
I wonder if one day we'll see "acqui-hire incubators" sprint up, focused on helping teams land such positions..
I've been involved in the staff and eventual senior management (but not founding) of three small companies in my career: two began as bootstrap startups that morphed into relatively successful lifestyle companies once it became clear we had no scalable product/market fit. They settled into hardware or software consulting, one is pretty sizeable now (a few hundred strong), the other remains under a hundred employees. The final one got to Series B funding but tanked after burning through $15 million.
To summarize, all were highly intense and emotional experiences. I compressed 2-3x the amount of learning I would have otherwise had in most other jobs, particularly in areas where you don't usually get exposure to as a young geek: business development & sales, marketing, HR, finances, etc., and I also became a much better software developer.
That said, small companies, especially if you're involved with steering them, are very personal affairs, and are extremely sensitive the founders' personality quirks while they're under 50 employees. They were hard to work for after a while.
So, in sum:
- Working in a startup is a great experience if you're not in it to get rich, but rather to improve your career by compressing your learning & working on something that inspires you
- Get involved with senior management if you want the experience, but be prepared for the emotional/health toll
- Luck is important, but not just any luck, you want luck that helps you survive - a good market being most important.
That's not the same thing as saying people who are acquired for their talent didn't try to build something awesome -- it's just that, if your GOAL is to get acquired, that's a different goal than building something people want or need.