Yahoo Reviews in San Francisco, CA Area

Pros

Brand name and the job profile that I was given.

Cons

Some of the employees are too laid back

Advice to Senior Management

Need to bring the spirit of startup back into Yahoo!

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 benefits, cool brand, some great people ( or used to be, anyway ).

Cons

People were allowed to hide - letting the wrong people go - reinforcing mediocrity. No real compelling vision from management.

Pros

Great company culture. Young, fun and great food. The campus in Mountainview is amazing.

Cons

Huge company. Hard to stand out. Stick options are almost worthless right now.

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to care about the little people and not just the big picture.

Pros

Office location, awesome work environment, work hard, play hard mentality, Yahoo's benefits, fun co-workers all around the same age, company happy hours/outings/sporting events, great random office bonuses

Cons

The few leads that would come in went managers "friends", no plan on how to grow book of business, no direction from mamagement when asked for help re: prospecting, customer questions, product changes, product issues, etc.

Advice to Senior Management

None...Yahoo sold HotJobs to Monster

Pros

Smart people and really interesting cutting edge products

Cons

Management is utterly incompetent. It's not about your skill or abilities, but who you know and who you're friends with. Horribly cliquey environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Leave Yahoo now. You are singlehandedly ruining this company

Pros

There is a culture of stewardship about the internet and open-source software. Pride in competence and deep team spirit add an esprit de corps that is nearly unbeatable. Leaders in the field are easily accessible to all, and make for an ongoing discussion of how to make things better. Redesign is never completely out of the question, and the right people are available to vet ideas in the context of the larger organization. Add to that the satisfaction and pride of working for a company that walks the talk when it comes to respecting the privacy of it's users' data, and that has over 500M active users, and you have something very special indeed.

Cons

The larger organization is mired in a culture of deference towards people with notable prior achievements. This sometimes means that problems are perpetuated by people with great recognition weighing in... causing ideas to be weighed on the reputation of their proponents more than on a technical examination of their merits - means that newer problems tend to get bigger than they need to and that the productivity of people with new ideas suffers because of the difficulty in overcoming the inertia of prior solutions adapted. As a result, there are many needlessly complex and sometimes volatile links in the chain of production for any new property or software, and many of the pieces tend to be hacked up enough that only their authors really know how to make them work and understand the regressive potential of certain seemingly small changes. The amount of energy necessary to get something done in the development tree using Yahoo's own tools exclusively is therefore sometimes more than it might be supplying the same functionality with unmodified opensource tools.
There are pockets of brilliance and efficiency that are sometimes held back by the services they must rely on.

Advice to Senior Management

"Green the code." - Simplify and refactor, reaching for a better ratio of lines of code to function points. Pivotal in making this happen is having cross-property code reviews that are not run exclusively by the technical architect of one property.
Eliminate 'pretend-agile' methodologies - they just generate hacked results - i.e. don't try to do agile development when requirements gathering is not a part of it - that is just fatal.
Get rid of the current database as afterthought culture by hiring real data architects and making an API level of separation between those services and their clients - dumping mdb as a replacement for design, and revamping the entire enterprise data universe from a unified perspective.
Make sure when service-based teams such as VAS provide a service, there is oversight of the communication between them and their clients.

Pros

free latte, young and competent coworkers, nice gym, good compensation package. friendly people with most of them genuinely trying to excel at their jobs.

Cons

lousy management. no clear strategic direction and choke full of politics at every level of organization

Advice to Senior Management

quit and stop screwing people who are sweating bullets for you every day

Pros

The people are genuinely nice - some of the nicest, funniest people I've encountered

Cons

Revisiting decisions, again and again. This really has to stop as it impacts several people, not to mention morale.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate clearer and more frequently. Align under one clear strategy. Listen to employees more.

Pros

Lots of great talent, young and fun people around, well respected brand (on the internet and amongst advertisers - not so much on the Wall Street!) and possibly offers huge opportunity if Yahoo succeeds in making a real sustainable comeback

Cons

Constant uncertainty, lack of focus and for a long time now - very low morale. There are a several duplication of roles and responsibilities causing obvious inefficiency and lack of accountability.

Advice to Senior Management

Shape up and stay focused - its time to stop getting distracted! Communicate more and more honestly and openly with employees - make them a part of the solution not the problem.