Yahoo Reviews in London, UK Area

Pros

Well respected company, good benefits, decent opportunities for advancement, ability to travel or get transferred overseas, reasonable salaries, excellent facilities

Cons

constant re-orgs, too many middle managers, institutional inertia, jumbled decision making, organizational lack of focus, lack of innovation, hard to accomplish something challenging

Advice to Senior Management

Pick a direction, focus on it, and stick with your decision.

Pros

Interesting international opportunities and the chance to work on some interesting project. Generally a relaxed environment and nice co-workers.

Cons

Talent has left the company in droves recently. It's not clear where senior management wants to take the company and what business Yahoo is in. There's very little innovative thinking left at the company and people are less willing to take risks. Corporate mentality has set in.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus attention and innovate.

Pros

Working with very smart people who are affecting the lives of millions of people -- one of the few places where you really can get in touch with the world as a whole.

Cons

Often too many projects to be able to truly be able to focus on one thing -- many time there is too much legacy making it hard to innovate and launch new ideas.

Advice to Senior Management

Get the company structure right -- figure out the role between regions and head office, and create the reporting structures accordingly.

Pros

International team

good packages

great brand

great product

Cons

they never figured out how to integrate in europe. europe has always been the cinderella. a part from fabiola arredondo, who was the right bland of european and american and a very nice person too.

Advice to Senior Management

its time to either come up with something innovative or just sell the business.

Pros

High profile global projects. Great experiences, working alongside some extremely talented people. Nice office, perfect location in the heart of London. Free fizzy drinks.

Cons

Severe lack of direction - zero organisation/hierarchy. Constant restructures and lay-offs. Continuous bombardment of pessimistic media reports. Poor management skills and training throughout the business. Little or no personal development opportunities (unless you are lucky). A severe lack of resources in Europe, despite watching the US marketing team shovel money into pointless plastic toys and vanity websites which do nothing to change the user perception of the brand. General frustration.

Advice to Senior Management

End the blame culture, be brave.

Pros

Yahoo! is a diverse business and if you make the effort you can learn a lot.

It has some really smart people. Generally, people are very respectful of one another.

Cons

Matrix organisation which gets worse in Europe.
Very political and the wrong people are promoted.
Management does not make hard decisions about people. They keep people who are mediocre for too long. That is why they are in such a mess now.

Advice to Senior Management

Work much quicker. Stop being wishy-washy. Create a strategy and then let the smart people below to develop and implement a tactical plan

Pros

- Great brand
 - Smart people
 - Products that make a real difference
 - Opportunity for international travel
 - Interesting projects

Cons

- Budgets that go through a continual salami slicer
 - Work life balance
 - Too many meetings
 - Huge difference in experience working in offices and benefits on offer - US was way better than US
 - Constant reorganisations
 - Being forced to use a HP laptop running Windows
 - Excessive politics

Advice to Senior Management

- Be merciless in killing properties and underperforming execs
 - Stamp on political infighting
 - Consolidate low value brands like Kelkoo
 - Work out what you want to be and invest in it
 - Focus more on user experience and the ad inventory will follow
 - Pick a budget and stick to it
 - Plan beyond 90 days

Pros

“The best reason to work at Yahoo! is very simple: the people who work there. I haven't worked before at a place with so many bright, genuine, and good people. Many of them I now consider friends, some very close friends, and feel genuine loss when I see them leave. The daily interactions with my co-workers are the primary reason I have stayed with Yahoo! so long. In addition, the company offers a broad spectrum of products and projects, and allows a decent flexibility to switch between teams or projects. That is if one is inclined to do so. It has definitely helped me broaden my scope of experience, while still feeling excited and engaged about new opportunities.”

Cons

“The organization still feels very convoluted and there is little visibility into the decision making process, at least in many teams, certainly not all. In general, my experience has been that most decisions are made in and by the "Product" team, which also likes to call themselves "Product Owners." It has always struck me as odd to operate in such a way, since the company is thriving to be an innovator. It begs the question if it shouldn't be the talented people who work there to make the right product decisions. The "Product Team" should be the sum of the people working on a project, with shared ownership and responsibilities. It is one of those details I have always found the most limiting and frustrating in delivering a great experience for the many Yahoo! users out there.”

Advice to Senior Management

“My advice to senior management would be to focus more on their job, while I will focus on mine and deliver as best as I can. Ideally, senior management should be focused on appropriately staffing and budgeting business opportunities and ensuring the right people are doing their job. All too often I found senior management engaged on a level of detail that was overbearing. In the end it slows everything down and leads to products that were designed, not by the most qualified people, but rather by those who mostly interested in their personal career benefits and catering to some people in senior management. Again, this is certainly not the rule, but something one will be able to observe when staying at Yahoo! for some time.”

Pros

learn about the best and most interesting industry of the world with a company that is really applying sound management to the industry of online advertising. Yahoo europe is a real operating company rather than a sales subsidiairy.

Cons

long working hours, frustration at tolerance for people not to do what they should.

Advice to Senior Management

don't read the papers and the blogs - keep truckin'. It's amazing how much advice who have not done a zillionth of what Jerry and his team have done in building a $6b company churning $2b of annual cash flow have for them. Meanwhile, Yahoo remains the second largest online advertising business with a true world wide scope of operations. in an industry that is growing and will consolidate.

Pros

Cool and exciting brand, globally recognised

Cons

Disorganised, doesnt make timely business decisions. Management team are going no where fast

Advice to Senior Management

Do the deal with Microsoft