Yahoo Reviews

Pros

Very good place to work. People are friendly, flexible work place - allows creativity.

Cons

Not trying to risk, take bold actions. suffers from loosing top talent!

Advice to Senior Management

No strong leadership with vision & execution. Especially lacks execution.

Pros

transport option + fantastic cafetoria+ creche for ladies + mac /blackberry/work from home that may be a dream in service companies. Great place for the folks straight out of college who have never seen MNC grandeur in NIT and IITs ! Good place for max 2-3 years at the beginning of your career. If you are a senior person with the only aim of making decent salary ( dont care about how you make it), then it is a good place too! You cannot see a single news in Internet about innovation in Yahoo but here you seem think that you are innovating ;-) In a way, that sounds a whole lot like those offshore development centres but here you get high end salary for the same. Not a bad deal from that perspective!

Cons

Most immature leadership ( a bunch of jokers and only in Yahoo, it is possible!) ; they say they do engineering but the VPs /leaders have not grown beyond website mindset; the company has lost it's direction long time back and the India leadership is just focussed on satisfying the US senior management ; they say that is execution):- Anybody decent who comes from other decent engineering org, cannot survive here unless you have the stomach to digest this absolute rot ! Most senior directors can be safely demoted to engineering managers. They say the engineering is agile but actually it is like Brownian motion ( net progess is zero). Probably yahoo is the only captive in Bangalore that has a fat cat director of communication with an army of communication folks. If you take out the internal branding/communication budget and see through the immaturity of the leaders/processes here, it's a very ordinary place !! It's a dead place except for those freshers who are recently into programming and those directors/VPs who will normally never get such position in a standard company. The company has lot of assets but it's leadership in every place is a liability that is bringing the company down for past 10 years.

Advice to Senior Management

Quit .. by now you must have made enough money

Pros

Smart engineers
Fun people to work with
Lively and happy atmosphere
Very good work/life balance
Good use of (some) open source code and tools
Good benefits for full time employees

Cons

No clear direction for engineering. Not able to take engineering risks to innovate
Pressure to launch with out much thought on maintenance
Strong "not invented here" pressure against non-yahoo code

Pros

Free internet access from your desktop computer, unlimited filtered water... so drink up! Fridge is stocked with free milk. Fresh wood chips for coffee. Fancy Soda vending machines which charge you 0.50 cents or more. Free pinball and fooseball tables, if you are found using it... then your manager will lay you off or give you zero's for your review.

Cons

No salary increases for years, no promotions for years, they have you work like a dog nights/days/weekends with no thanks. All of management will tell you that they have no budget for anything (which are lies). This is by far the worst tech company I have every worked at. If you are unemployed and desperate for a job... you really should think hard before you accept an offer here (sometimes unemployment is better then this place).

Advice to Senior Management

Yahoo needs a re-boot, it's time to let go of everyone between manager level and Tim Morse. Yahoo could save so much money and probably turn a profit from the cost savings. Time to remove everyone from the board of directors, they have all failed the company. Any person off the street could take this 15B company and turn it around to be 150B, the problem is... you are going back to the same group of fools to get direction.

Pros

- The salary is higher than most places.
- A lot of great technologies to learn.
- Knowledgeable and helpful tech talents (when you managed to find the right people)
- The manager doesn't push you to get things done. You work freely at your own pace with no stress.

Cons

- Getting feedback both from the immediate team and other teams is a problem, it will take forever to get a response back. When I send people emails, 75% of the time they do NOT reply. I have a feeling they just delete/filter them or don't think the emails are important! It is ridiculous.
- The engineering side is way under resourced. They even say so themselves. Why don't they get more engineers to help out?
- Too much blind reliance on Indian contract developers. For the most part, they are poorly skilled programmers and don't stick around for very long. It takes more time fixing their work than building the apps myself.
- Crazy high turnover rate of tech talents. I have never seen so many people leave at any one company in my entire career.
- The seating arrangement is horrible and doesn't encourage communication. Why do they still make people sit in cubicles facing away from your team members? We should be sitting in groups together.

Advice to Senior Management

- I think the upper management has too much ego and does not care about small fries like us. Drop your egos and tough talks and show some substances.
- You should give opportunity to younger, more energetic people to take up management posts. We're more up to date with the trends and have fresh ideas for the new generation. You guys are just too old to keep up (no offense).
- Take more risks, ACT FASTER instead of talking and discussing so much.
- INNOVATE and let the company be engineering driven, for some stupid reason, they're branding it as a premier digital media company. This doesn't work dude! Just look at AOL and Demand Media, they are barely alive, so don't be silly!
- Stop chasing after others.
- You know what all the All-Hands Meetings feel like? Boring lectures from old professors! Just summarize your talks and get to the point - either you screwed up the quarter or you didn't. Then hurry up and get back to work and fix the problem. You're hired to fix the core problems, you're NOT here to make inspirational speeches.
- Get more local quality engineers to help out. How can you support the business with so few engineers? I think the upper management is a little insane.

Pros

-Almost modern technology to play with
-Compensation, stock options in line with industry
-A few smart eggs still hanging around
-Management completely incompetent but not usually abusive

Cons

-Even though everyone in the universe thinks Yahoo! is a tech firm, Yahoo! doesn't
-Instead, Yahoo! thinks it's some kind of an ad company
-So, management is both burdensome and ineffective. They seem to make up "policies" and "procedures" and "strategy" on the fly -- amateur hour.
-For all the points above, Yahoo! no longer embraces tech innovation of any kind. Marketing innovation maybe, but they've intentionally abandoned tech innovation.
-Carol Bartz should have been fired years ago

Advice to Senior Management

Resign or do what you're doing but do it more (thereby running the company into the ground and letting some start-ups rise from the ashes)

Pros

provides all sort of facilities like food, cab , work from home, Gym etc.. people usually leave early but work from home.

Cons

Lot of small small maintenance project going on....
Some times, project quality will be too bad . and the project will return back from the customer. at that time Yahoo will Fire some of the Quality people and hire some more.. and the situation will become even worse after wards. Management people will be keep on changing.. This might be one of the cause.

Advice to Senior Management

organizational restructure needs to be avoided. try to Retain the old employees, who developed the project from scratch.

Pros

Good perks and good working environment

Cons

Struggling company = employees focusing on looking for jobs outside the company

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to company employees for guidance and how to fix internally

Pros

Great people to work with

Cons

Doesn't employ the best people

Advice to Senior Management

hard to think of a better team

Pros

You can learn a lot of stuff -- new technologies and project leading at Yahoo.

Cons

Yahoo is losing talented ppl. Very bad.