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Yahoo! Reviews
| 1 - 10 of 234 Yahoo! Reviews | Sort by |
Jan 8, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
5.0
Communication
3.5
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
5.0
Recognition & Feedback
4.5
Senior Leadership
3.5
Work/Life Balance
4.5
Fairness & Respect
4.5
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Yahoo's culture is a work-hard, play-hard culture, which I really like. Also Yahoo emphasizes taking care of employees and making them feel at home. So from inside, Yahoo is a very fun and friendly place to work for. Another nice thing about Yahoo is the impact it has, you get to change the lives of 100s of millions of users all around the world, that is not something you can do at many other companies.
Cons
Google outshines it, so you will continuously feel bad about that, despite the fact that it is a good company and leader in many areas other than search. For example, Yahoo is number one in Mail, Messenger, Finance, News, and Sports, only in Search it is number two to Google, but unfortunately Search is the biggest money maker due to its highly monetizable business model (explicit intent).
Advice to Senior Management
Having a clear focused sense of direction for a sustained time period, they keep flipping around a lot.
Jan 7, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
1.0
Communication
3.5
Compensation & Benefits
2.5
Employee Morale
3.0
Recognition & Feedback
2.0
Senior Leadership
1.0
Work/Life Balance
3.0
Fairness & Respect
2.0
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Putting down a big brand on your resume. Working in or breaking into the Internet technology industry. Working for a large company means not having to worry about proposing a budget for even simple, basic things to do your job. Large companies tend to have business sophistication and processes so you can learn to solve complex business problems. Large companies tend to offer great employee benefits, especially in the Internet industry. More specifically, Yahoo is a data-rich company so whenever you need some statistics or data to build a business case, you have information at your fingertips (as long as you are resourceful within the company and know who to contact to get those data). Yahoo employees are mostly very friendly and helpful and as long as you make friends, you will get your resources eventually.
Cons
Like many large companies, Yahoo suffers from bureaucracy. Moreover, it has a systemic problem: a culture of dysfunctions built by "yes-people", "idea people" who don't know a thing about execution reality, self-serving corporate climbers and helpless workaholics who aren't taking the company anywhere even as they work long hours 7 days a week. Yahoo is overly diversified so it is highly likely that you'd be assign to work on a lackluster product, among many they have, with no chance of turning around because of under commitment by executive management.
Advice to Senior Management
Quit your job. Enjoy your wealth from those bonuses you earned. Toss your ego and let OTHERS who can give Yahoo a chance to win lead the company. Use the most valuable resource Yahoo has that no other Internet giants have - audience and behavioral data - and apply a rational, data-based business model to figure out the company's strategic directions. Don't rely on gut-feel or what seems to sexy.
Jan 7, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
2.0
Communication
2.0
Compensation & Benefits
3.5
Employee Morale
2.0
Recognition & Feedback
2.0
Senior Leadership
2.0
Work/Life Balance
3.0
Fairness & Respect
2.0
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Best part about working with Yahoo is the amount of talented engineers you get to work with. I learned a lot about technology just by reading through various mailing lists where these tech-experts are educating other yahoos on the best practices. Its a casual, open work environment which helps you relax and maintain a good work-life balance.
Cons
The company has no direction. the business units does not have enough control over their engineering resources. Promotion opportunities are less as most of the business units are not faring very well. It gets worse by total lack of communication between the upper management and employees.
Advice to Senior Management
Please decide what YAHOO really is !!! is it a media company or search company ? Yahoo could be a very good place to work if they fix the senior management
Jan 6, 2009
Details
Career Opportunities
4.0
Communication
2.0
Compensation & Benefits
3.5
Employee Morale
4.0
Recognition & Feedback
4.5
Senior Leadership
1.0
Work/Life Balance
5.0
Fairness & Respect
4.0
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Yahoo! is a valley pioneer and home to many smart people. I have worked with lots of smart and talented people in my time there and would do it again.
The benefits package is generous with lots of choices for health care, and an excellent vacation accrual system. Work from home depends on your manager, but many are flexible.
Free coffee bars and a corporate cafeteria with supplemented meal prices is an added perk.
The company is large, but there are places within the company that still give you that small company vibe and feel. You will be challenged and given an opportunity to work on really cool things. After a long time of seeming to be without direction, the last 6 months have really shown positive signs and finally sticking to a plan and making things happen.
Cons
Working at Yahoo! is like working in a fishbowl, especially when it comes to the tech rags and valley publications. The last year, since the attempted Microsoft purchase has been especially trying.
Senior management failed to provide a strong direction and in-ability to act led to rumors, speculation, and doubt.
Yahoo! is a big company now, and some of that small company vibe has gone missing during my time there.
Advice to Senior Management
Take a firm stand on a direction, stick to it. Either sell to Microsoft or move-on.
The troops are sick of consultants, getting fit, and waiting for a direction. We need a technologist in charge who will present a clear vision for the future of Yahoo!
Dec 22, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
2.0
Communication
2.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
2.5
Recognition & Feedback
2.0
Senior Leadership
2.5
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
2.0
1 of 1 people found this helpful
Pros
Still very good brand name, and there are still lot of talented individuals around the company. If you landed on a good manager and project, you will feel great, otherwise it is all downhill.....
Cons
unstable both financially and company direction.
It is a very strange environment, they have tons of good engineers( okay most of the engineers are good, only small portion of them under perform), but the end results are far from satisfied.
Not all management are bad to be fair, but there are few bad ones that do lot of damages to the organizations and usually those damages are much greater than those work done by good management.
Lot of overhead in terms of process, you don't yet have a success product launch, but you already have the beuracacy come as free lunch. 300 men working on an app launch that only has 2 customers.
My biggest complaint is that, Yahoo! *created* lot of opportunities for people to grow, but this is the exactly the reason why y! is going downward. Too many layers, too many people try to impose their will on others because they want to show they are growing. It is not natural, lot of people suffer because they are impacted by these people's selfish motivation.
Advice to Senior Management
why don't let engineers vote for who to let go in next round of layoff? instead of purely done by some invisible management that still get it wrong 50% of the time. And maybe a 20% layoff just for managers title, yea, that will help.
Dec 31, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
2.0
Communication
2.5
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
2.0
Recognition & Feedback
1.5
Senior Leadership
1.0
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
2.0
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
Smart and talented co-workers
Good benefits
Internet Industry leader
Cons
Nepotism or favoritism among senior management
Bad reputation in the industry
Unfair promotion practices
Advice to Senior Management
Too much reorganization in recent years
Dec 30, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
3.5
Communication
1.5
Compensation & Benefits
3.5
Employee Morale
1.5
Recognition & Feedback
2.0
Senior Leadership
1.0
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
3.0
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
The people are by and large, really nice. Lots of really brilliant folks.
Obviously, it is cool to work on one of the biggest Internet brands, and know that your work touches hundreds of millions of people every day.
The benefits are very solid. Very satisfied with the healthcare in particular. The Sunnyvale campus is really nice, especially the gym. And the free coffee - I could go on and on about how brilliant that benefit was, especially if you have a healthy caffeine addiction!
Yahoo also cares about the environment and it was nice to see them encourage alternative transportation.
Cons
Massive bureaucracy with more layers than one could ever imagine. It is hard to get visibility into what is happening several layers above you. There's lots of political maneuvering up there, as you can imagine.
No one knows what the overall vision for the company is. People are cynical and have little faith in the leadership. During 2008, management put everyone through a roller coaster ride (MSFT, Icahn, AOL, etc.).
It's not fun to learn everything that you know about management's plans through blogs like valleywag.
There is simply no process at Yahoo. No centralization of anything. People live and work in micro-climates, some of which are healthy, others are severely diseased. It depends where you end up. Before you join, just make sure you understand where you are going. Because everyone's situation is different. there is no common Yahoo experience. I never figured out what characteristics or traits I gained from being a Yahoo that allowed me to relate to other ex- or current Yahoos.
All of this is a result of poor leadership. Yahoo management by and large doesn't consider people development and how people will work together and execute. I'm sure all of the ideas look great in a PPT deck, but the key is how do you execute it.
Advice to Senior Management
Clarify roles and execute. Hire ex-military operational types, because Yahoo clearly has an execution problem.
Dec 28, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
4.5
Communication
4.5
Compensation & Benefits
5.0
Employee Morale
5.0
Recognition & Feedback
5.0
Senior Leadership
4.0
Work/Life Balance
5.0
Fairness & Respect
5.0
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
friendly work environment. great benefits! my manager is supportive of my personal timeoffs, like vacation time, time off to take care of some errands. as a developer, i find it amusing that yahoo doesn't have a unified development environment, as a lot of other big companies do. in a way this allows us to be creative with tools that we use, but sometimes it's confusing for newbies like me.
Cons
it is at this point very unclear where the future of the company is heading to. after 2 layoffs in a year in 2008, the sense of job security at this company is dwindling and morale is certainly hurt from this.
Advice to Senior Management
please, no more reorgs. focus on tackling some real challenges, like have a common platform for all yahoo products to be developed on.
Dec 7, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
4.0
Communication
3.5
Compensation & Benefits
3.0
Employee Morale
3.0
Recognition & Feedback
4.0
Senior Leadership
2.0
Work/Life Balance
3.5
Fairness & Respect
2.0
2 of 2 people found this helpful
Pros
Yahoo itself is still a good brand name on your resume although it is on a downhill now. If you want to discuss technical questions with other talents, Yahoo's internal mailing lists are so far the best I have ever seen; you will easily get tons of replies rather than see your question being ignored.
Cons
In general, Yahoo is a good place to work but the group I worked for was horrible. All the product managers didn't know what they wanted but asked engineers to implement this and that, and then threw away what had already implemented. It might sound so typical, but the worst thing was all the PMs in my group trying to think what the SVP liked as if the SVP was the only user. There was a product with only few thousand users but spent more than 100 people's time on it. Which makes no sense at all.
Advice to Senior Management
Look at the turnover rate; you will see that a particular group has an extremely high turnover rate. Then, you should really find out what is going on there.
Dec 16, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
5.0
Communication
2.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
3.0
Recognition & Feedback
3.5
Senior Leadership
1.0
Work/Life Balance
3.0
Fairness & Respect
2.5
1 of 1 people found this helpful
Pros
There are great perks to working at the company; gym, tuition reimbursement, parties, onsite haircuts and car care.
Cons
Meeting after meeting after meeting. Too much time spent trying to get everyone to buy-off on a decision instead of implementing great ideas.
Advice to Senior Management
Make a decision and move on!
