
Yahoo Is Hiring - shawndumas
http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2012/08/16/yahoo-is-hiring/
======
hobonumber1
I'm a front-end engineer on the YUI Team at Yahoo. Let me know if you have any
questions and I'll try my best to answer it here.

~~~
parfe
I'm perpetually mystified Yahoo isn't a bigger presence on my phone. The
Yahoo! games division ignored the mobile market. The Yahoo portal app is a
literally an embedded browser onto which yahoo overlays 4 buttons. Home, _Post
to Facebook_ , Share, and More.

Why does the most noticeable feature in a Yahoo app post links to a
competitor's website? Is management paying attention? Do they have an actual
mission?

Yahoo's mobile websites can be useless (e.g. sports.yahoo.com shows an
alphabetical listing of teams in NCAA football conferences, but you cannot see
their standings). Do the people handing the sports website actually watch
sports? Does the project manager not realize I'll never use their sports site
again?

Does yahoo not see phones as a priority? Why hasn't someone taken charge and
attempted to bring Yahoo to the mobile market in a meaningful way? As an end
user it seems the company is coasting. Is the new CEO going to be able to get
something going or is the company too stuck in the mud to get some focus on
development?

I know the post is not really the questions you were looking for but from the
outside all I see is disorganization, lack of focus and fear of change. Why
would someone want to go into that environment?

~~~
drgath
While I don't have much to say about your product questions (I'm an engineer
an open-source platform team at Yahoo, other end of the spectrum), one that I
can answer though is...

> "Why would someone want to go into that environment?"

Good question. Like all companies, you should choose the one that most fits
your ideals and career objectives, so I can only answer your question from my
perspective. For me, that is working for a large Web company, who values open-
source and front-end engineering, and provides unique challenges and problems
to solve at a massive scale. All other issues or perks are secondary to me as
long as I get to spend my workday doing what I'm passionate about, and my
company supports my interests. There are few, if any other companies I can
work with that match what Yahoo can in that regard. In fact, in 2008 there
were only two companies on my list when I was looking to make the move from
the startup-world, I interviewed at both, one was warm and welcoming (Y!), the
other not as much. Really happy with the way things worked out.

It's tough (impossible?) to get _everything_ you want in a work environment.
Remember, happiness is entirely relative [1]. You can find dozens of blog
posts about people being unhappy at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, startups, etc.
just as you can find people who are extremely happy. Everyone values different
things, but I think the interest most people share is that their company
values them. Oddly enough, last year I referenced a Marissa Mayer quote in a
short blog post [2] about finding happiness in your career, and why I like
Yahoo. Glad to see she also realized Yahoo is an awesome place to be.

You just have to prioritize which aspects are important to you, and ensure
those are important to your employer as well. If someone is choosing their
employer based off reasons other than how they spend 95% of their workday,
they should reevaluate their situation. That's at least my philosophy.

Sorry that probably doesn't answer your product questions, but I felt your
underlying question was "Why Yahoo?", so I tried to best answer that.

[1] Interesting study which you can find references to it all over the Web.
"Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?"
[http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1...](http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1980-01001-001)
Related TED talk,
[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.h...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html)

[2] "The Best Career Advice You’ll Ever Get" [http://derek.io/blog/2011/the-
best-career-advice-youll-ever-...](http://derek.io/blog/2011/the-best-career-
advice-youll-ever-get/)

~~~
parfe
Thank you for taking the time to write a response. I know my original post was
a bit scattershot. You gave a very good reply for what I gave you to work
with.

------
googoobaby
[http://www.businessinsider.com/forget-iphones-and-free-
food-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/forget-iphones-and-free-food-heres-
the-real-big-change-marissa-mayer-is-bringing-to-yahoo-2012-8)

This isn't the team slated for the deathmarch is it?

~~~
hobonumber1
Theres nothing on that article that says a team is on a deathmarch, unless you
posted the URL wrong. Just because a project got re-allocated (I don't even
know what project this is, btw) doesn't mean the engineers were fired or
something. :-/

