Pros

The people I worked with directly were all, to a person, really great. They were smart and conscientious and I remain good friends with many of them. My manager was also very flexible with work hours and vacation time.

There is a really awesome amount of computing power available at Yahoo, and it is a lot of fun to work on such huge systems. There are only a handful of companies in the world where this is possible, and Yahoo is one of them.

Cons

Part of it could be my own fault for not tooting my own horn enough, but there was essentially no recognition for any amount of good work, at least among my direct coworkers. There also did not seem to be many opportunities for advancement. Additionally, there was very poor leadership from the top on down in terms of priorities and projects, with huge swings from week to week. "So I just worked 90 hours last week finishing this code, and it's no longer a priority?" There was also a lack of vision or direction, which resulted in a lot of busywork that really wasn't that important but _had_ to be completed immediately. Management at all levels often tells the employees things that are obviously not true, and which often contradict things the employees were told mere days or weeks before.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop coddling incompetent managers. The management structure is completely dysfunctional. Important revenue-impacting projects are held up for months or years because a separate group is incompetent. There are always lots of meetings to discuss these sorts of things, meetings which are never helpful and usually just go around in circles. I have seen a series of weekly meetings end up exactly where they started 6 months earlier!

Pros

Great folks, can-do attitude, the salaries are great, lively environment, great location in California

Cons

Bonuses are stingy, teams do not always collaborate, takes too much time to get other teams to do things right (may impede your own progress), data quality is highly buggy and takes too much time to figure out, too many migration projects and stale projects, too little support on important projects, product managers sometimes run the show (into the ground)

Advice to Senior Management

Please see my comments above, and try to retain the best employees.

Pros

You can get away with not doing anything all day if you play your cards right.

Cons

The company is like a rudderless ship, lost in the ocean. It almost feels like senior management decides strategy on a trial and error basis. Re-orgs are constant. I myself had 4 different managers in one year. Some people had up to 7 different managers that same year. Politics and bureaucracy dominates everything.

Advice to Senior Management

Get a clue.

Pros

Great company culture. Yahoo cares about its employees. Lots of company pride, activities, events, contests, etc. Higher than average salaries.

Cons

Internally in chaos. Difficult to get anything done. Constantly changing priorities, abandoned projects. If your project nears completion, expect it to be cancelled at last minute due to new ever changing priorities.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop trying to imitate other companies and find your own strength. Don't have to jump on every trendy bandwagon to prove your worth.

Pros

* Salary is comparably good
* Good parties
* Ok cafetaria
* Diverse work force
* easily accesible work location in CA

Cons

* Clueless management
* Inexperienced people
* Most skills learnt on an engineering job are not transferable. Platforms, tools, methodologies are home grown.

Advice to Senior Management

Get professional management. Stop promoting project managers, engineers without experience to management positions. Stop passing the buck around. Try to get things done.

Pros

- You're surrounded of talented and creative and cool employees.
- The work, despite the occasional distractions and annoyances, the work is still satisfying
- You'll keep on top of the latest and greatest web and consumer internet design
- Nice environment (if you're on the Sunnyvale Campus... not so great on the other campuses like Santa Clara)

Cons

- Morale is generally not great because of attrition and layoffs and Yahoo! is getting beaten up in the press
- Management is always shuffling around and there are alot of political turf wars
- Consensus driven (impossible to make a quick decision and move quickly). For a Product Manager this is especially frustrating and undermining.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on product excellence and delighting consumers. Depoliticize the management team.

Pros

Apart from free coffee and good salary, there is no reason for a developer to work here. As a fresher i was given only ad-hoc work, treated like a football, kicked from one project to another

Cons

Everything sucks, especially for devlopers, your expected to work on week ends on holidays, your simply dumped work and expected to complete, no career plannning

Advice to Senior Management

Treat employees like person, and not like resources

Pros

Yahoo is a decent place to work .. not the best place but manageable. I think there should improve further for ppl to grow.

Cons

its political CEO is not that great and she is determined to make sure that the company suffers in the long run

Advice to Senior Management

yahoo leadership should start focussing on the work in hand and not to do some random things like what they are doing now

Pros

Good folks to work with, interesting problems to work on. You have a chance to make an enormous impact on a large number of people. Yahoo! defines the term 'Internet Scale'.

Cons

Upper Management is still acting as if Yahoo! is still a garage start-up; middle Management is more concerned with the political infighting than supporting the troops in the trenches. Politics getting in the way of Progress....

Advice to Senior Management

Flatten the structure, get rid of the assorted VP's and Executive VP's. Decide on where the Company is going to be in five years and go for it. Quit reacting to Wall Street and listen to your User base.

Pros

Yahoo is a great place to work. They understand work life balance. They treat employees as humans, not resources. Overall its definitely the best place I've ever worked at.

Cons

It's a big company that is stuck with many acquisitions, and along with that, many different platforms for running the site. Everyone has their own way of doing things and usually they don't want to accept other ways. They need to standardize on one thing, not ten.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention to your employees ideas and the market. I felt like the upper management did not pay attention to the very brilliant people working there or the direction of the market (besides what wall street thought).