
What's happening at Yahoo - bluesmoon
http://wonko.com/post/whats-happening-at-yahoo
======
pg
I'm sure Yahoo has realized since I was there that it's important to be more
hacker-centric, just as they've realized search is more important than they
thought. The problem (in both areas) is how far they fell behind during the
time when they didn't realize either.

~~~
sh1mmer
Disclaimer: Yahoo! Technology Evangelist

In some ways I'm actually glad you raised your views, because I'm not afraid
of people peeking in to see what it's like now.

I'd still like to reiterate my point from the other thread. We aren't perfect,
but not becoming Google isn't the definition of unsuccessful.

We have things we could do better, like everyone, and we'll work on those.
Personally, the amount of support I've received from the tech community based
on responses to PG's article has given me a two day smile.

~~~
pg
I didn't "raise my views." You're either misinterpreting the original essay,
or misinterpreting the comment above.

~~~
mrshoe
My interpretation of his comment is that by "raise your views" he meant
"express your opinions publicly" (using the "bring to the surface" meaning of
raise), not that your opinion of Yahoo! has somehow changed or improved in the
last 2 days.

~~~
sh1mmer
Correct.

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rabble
Yahoo's got many parts, Search came over from Inktomi and they've got a good
culture. Unfortunately the executives decided to STOP doing search.

YDN, YUI, Flickr, and a few other parts of the organization are pretty good.

But in general, the management is more interested in things like "ONE YAHOO"
than innovation. There is tremendous pressure to get everybody marching in the
same direction, doing what they are told.

I mean, there was a big push at one point for the Yahoo OS. To give you a
sense of how non-hacker yahoo is, OS did NOT mean operating system!

It's a culture driven by a huge heavy bunch of PM's who mostly spend their
time doing terrible powerpoints, fighting, and trying to get each other fired.
A few sections of the company managed to escape that fate, but the general
culture is toxic.

------
elq
As someone who's interviewed dozens of yahoo's fleeing the big purple Y over
the past two or three years and I have seen no evidence what so ever that
yahoo has a hacker culture.

I've primarily been interviewing people from search and ads, so perhaps my
view is skewed.

~~~
neilk
Your view is skewed, but positively.

Search is (or at least was) one of the _good_ areas of Yahoo for
technologists.

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lsc
I think Yahoo's search division is quite different from the rest of yahoo;
yahoo's search division, at least when I left it a few years back, was still
very heavily influenced by inktomi, and from what I saw and felt, it was a
Engineering/hacker driven culture.

(now how different is it from the rest of yahoo? honestly, I don't know. I
never worked anywhere else.

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shadowsun7
Wait - isn't Yahoo's search now powered by Bing? The author says that he was
at Yahoo search - but what hacking can there be in that department today if
you no longer _have_ a search engine?

~~~
sh1mmer
This is a common misconception.

Yahoo's algorithmic search is powered by Bing. But that's like saying
DuckDuckGo can't innovate because Gabriel uses Yahoo, Wikipedia and other APIs
to get data.

Microsoft have partnered with Yahoo! to provide the core matches but what we
do with those is up to us.

~~~
dotcoma
and who's running the adwords-like part of the business? Still Overture? Funny
how MSFT does not understand that's where the money comes from, and where
improvement is most needed.

~~~
hellweaver666
Maybe MSFT are focusing on getting the search experience right before worrying
about money. That's a very startup-like approach to doing business and
probably the best thing they could go given their reputation in the search
market.

~~~
dotcoma
startup-like? How many hundred million dollars have they lost so far?

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vl
Well, author said it himself: he was at Yahoo! Search. Search is so
technologically challenging that there is no choice but to have hackerish
culture in this team (if you want this team to produce something). Microsoft
Bing team (originally known as MSN Search Team) operated noticeably
differently than MSN or rest of Microsoft, as time goes it changes, but still.

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moultano
> If I had a crazy idea, I was encouraged not just to tell people about it (up
> to and including executives), but to implement it and see if it tested well
> with users.

Are there companies that don't encourage this?

~~~
shalmanese
Yes, the ones who looked at the whole Google background images debacle and
decided they were prudent all along to put some sort of QA in place. (Despite
all the conspiracy theories, Google putting background images on google.com
for everyone without an option to turn it off was genuinely a bug made by one
developer who pushed it out without needing approval from anyone else.)

~~~
nostrademons
That's very much false. I've worked with several of the engineers who were
involved in that, and they went through all of the standard code & UI approval
procedures. There was a bug in the ability to turn it off, but that also went
through all of the normal code review & approval channels, it just wasn't
caught.

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joevandyk
Yeah, I think pg was way off on that one.

~~~
dasil003
Could it be that pg's observations about how things were in '98 were realized
at Yahoo around 2003 when Google ate their lunch and all the easy money was
gone and they've since adjusted?

~~~
dotcoma
probably not. Look at who's CEO. And at how many smart people have left, from
the Founders of Flickr and del.icio.us to Jeremy Zawodny and many many more...

~~~
ojbyrne
I'd bet vastly more people have left Google (in both absolute and relative
terms). Employees at both companies would have plenty of opportunities if they
leave and little upward mobility if they stayed.

Paul Bucheit, Evan Williams, that same founder of del.icio.us and many many
more too.

~~~
yurylifshits
More founders leave Yahoo than Google Many founders of Google-acquired
companies are still there (Youtube, Maps, ...)

Out of all companies acquired by Yahoo only founders of most recent
acquisitions are still there.

~~~
ojbyrne
Citation?

~~~
yurylifshits
List of acquisitions:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Yahoo>! Founders can be
found through CrunchBase Founders current status can be checked at LinkedIn

I know, it is a lot of work :)

Some cases where I am sure: Zimbra, Yahoo Groups, Flickr, Delicious

