Yahoo Reviews in San Jose, CA Area

Pros

Great place to work because you're working with great people. The facilities are fantastic. Innovation was always appreciated and rewarded.

Cons

Sometimes the higher ups were out of touch with the users of Yahoo and they didn't quite understand that recruiting people to Yahoo wasn't the attractive proposition they thought it was.

Advice to Senior Management

Just keep moving forward. Keep rewarding innovative people. Reward them with the usual compensation, but also promote more from within, and provide more verbal accolades.

Pros

- Excellent benefits package
- High quality in-house developed application stack
- the full dot-com corporate culture :-)
- many skilled and dedicated engineers

Cons

- Uncertainty in the company road map
- A bit on the low-side for base pay
- Questionable Executive-level decisions
- Product managers seem oblivious to the concept of a rational product cycle

Advice to Senior Management

A breakup would allow you to raise a lot of cash and increase your focus. Yes, Yahoo! has the title of sole surviving portal company, but the rest of the world is past that. Find your niche in the mobile market and take inspiration from the facebook business model rather than Google's. We have experienced questionable leadership in the past, let's hope the new CEO has some bright ideas and can execute.

Pros

-Fun place to work
-Surrounded by talent
-Respected company

Cons

-Upward mobility
-Employee morale
-Unable to keep their talent

Advice to Senior Management

None

Pros

- atmosphere, quality of colleagues, ideas

Cons

- discouraged by the bad press

Advice to Senior Management

keep up the good work

Pros

- Interesting work and challenges
- Massive compute and storage scale
- Training, conferences, travel ops just enough to keep things interesting not overwhelming
- Employees treated like "gold". 2x better than any of my past employers
- Good work/life balance on most teams
- Excellent compensation and benefits

Cons

- Lots of churn in management.
- Lots of churn in staff, mostly old timers tired of change.

Advice to Senior Management

Yahoo is a complex environment. Learning all the processes, procedures, and technology takes time. Bleeding too many experienced employees stunts progress. 1 employee with 5 years experience is worth more than 5 employees with no experience.

Pros

Working on petabytes of data.
Free coffee
Good company recognition outside of North America.
By and large, friendly staff and non competitive culture. (read collaborative).

Cons

Leaks. Non stop leaks. You find out more about the company from AllthingsD then you do from your management. The word "Yahoo" is used as the antonym of "Google" in North America. Large number of "obstructionist" long time Y! employees. These are the ones that have mastered the art of doing as little as possible while looking busy. Most are waiting for that all elusive layoff package or for their green card to be approved. More red tape then your local government. Their idea of automation is to manually push twice a week. Wide and i mean wide technology stack. 1 department can have mind numbing number of technical solutions for the same problem.

Advice to Senior Management

Purge your VP's. If they have a "chief of staff", something is very wrong. Make your architects do real work. Group hugs don't solve technical problems.

Pros

The internship was challenging and interesting and you were surrounded by really knowledgeable people. Overall good experience for my future career, and a good line to have in your CV

Cons

The uncertainty around Yahoo's situation was very disturbing. Some parts of our project got cancelled because of rearrangements in Yahoo's assets. A lot of people were on the fence about staying or leaving.

Advice to Senior Management

Find a way to leverage the great talent at Yahoo and rally it around a unified focused vision and product.

Pros

good pay - above average for valley prob
good benefits - no complaints
good people - although leaving
laid back atmosphere

Cons

incompetent management
too much management - how many Senior Directors and above?
unfairness in promotions/compensation
reorgs - expect a new manager every 6 months or so
layoffs - expect at least 1 a year

Advice to Senior Management

Upper management should quit - or force peers to quit. Communicate more to all employees instead of trying to gloss over problems - address them.

Pros

- Very smart and pleasant colleagues.
- Interesting work -- Y! still has a number of the leading web properties in the US and WW.
- Generally collaborative and friendly culture.
- Great pay and benefits.

Cons

- Within Silicon Valley, the brand has suffered a lot and it is not as 'cool' to work at Y! is it is at FB or G. (Outside of Silicon Valley people recognize it as experience at a top company + like the brand a lot and tend to think it is very cool that you have worked there.)
- Multiple re-orgs can be tiring, but hopefully that's behind Y! with the new CEO as of early 2012.

Advice to Senior Management

- Make sure employees know that they have been heard & understood before restructuring what they are working on. Also make sure they understand the logic behind the new direction.
- Make fundamental choices about the businesses Y! should be in, and then stick to them.

Pros

Great onsite perks - gym, cafeteria. Great offices. Good co-workers. Employees are treated with respect. Fun environment. Company was open to doing things differently.

Cons

Constant reorganization. Lack of clarity in company's objectives. Selfish senior management (VP and up). Highly political. Terrible parking. Decisions didn't "stick".

Advice to Senior Management

Pick a strategy, align around it, and just do it.