Pros

Very good salary and benifits
Cafeteria food is pretty good
Free coffee drinks
Campus is pretty nice and clean
People there are very nice and willing to help
Employees can work from home (though some people seem to be abusing this)

Cons

It is extremely difficult to get data, and I am not talking about sensitive data. Need to go through several teams and get their permissions.

A lot of the documentations are either not detailed enough or simply outdated. It’s difficult to figure out how to use a lot of the tools or even what they are for. Sometimes the team owning the code can’t even help you because the person that wrote it is gone.

A good percentage of engineers do not have math or engineering background. Example: English, History, Music majors. Really make me wonder how they got their jobs.

Now for some personal ventilation, like what the headline stated, I was laid off after just 10 weeks. I was working 10+ hours almost every day and was doing a very good job, yet I got axed with no explaination. I was just out of grad school, and had a couple other offers to choose from. I was told during interview that Yahoo was doing well and still expanding (granted that was last year). Not that I believed all of this given all the negative press, but I still figured that that a newly opened position should be safe for a least a couple of years. Plus I heard that companies rarely layoff young people. That’s why I went with Yahoo anyway, since it gave the highest offer. Boy was I wrong. Now, I’ll have to start my job search all over again, but in a much worse environment, without the help of career center, and a much tighter time constraint. So I pretty much have to take the first offer that I get, whenever that will be. Hard not to get a little angry when I think about it.

Advice to Senior Management

Well, it’s hard for me to give any advice given my short stint there. I guess for one, don't give out offers unless you plan on keeping that person for at least 2 years. Also, try to provide an explanation for the layoff, like why was I needed a couple months ago and not now, instead of just saying the economy is bad and think that people will buy it. I don’t know if that will make it any easier for us to swallow, but at least it shows that the company is taking it seriously and really had no other options.