Yahoo Reviews in Santa Clara, CA

Pros

-- open source software mostly
-- free coffe
-- technically smart people (depends on team to team)
-- lots of technical and social events

Cons

-- Nobody knows what is going on at higher levels of management
--complete lack of transparency in the recent MS deal
--Very unstable work enviroment
--Engineers never involved in any decision

Advice to Senior Management

Be more transparent and get the engineers into confidence

Pros

Well know brand, strong impact on mainstream media. Extremely smart engineering team, and very ethnically diverse. Higher than average compensation.

Cons

Yahoo! is often spoken of in the shadow of Google - even though Yahoo! is a prime Internet portal. Also, management is not always transparent, for e.g., with the recent Microsoft-yahoo deal.

Advice to Senior Management

Talk to your soldiers: i.e., the engineers before making big-time mergers/deals. It is insufficient to simply loop in upper management.

Pros

Brand name, Internet, free coffee

Cons

Low salary,stress,no recongnition,crazy people and management.bad hiring.

Advice to Senior Management

Do a better and stop treating employees like slaves and if you like doing something you go ahead and do it ...do expect other ppl to do it. and stop lying .

Pros

Excellent compensation and benefits packages. Good work life balance, flexiblity to telecommute. You also get a chance to work with some very smart people.

Cons

Very uncertain environment, bloated middle management, constant reorgs - In 2 yrs I saw 4 reorgs, very unsettling, you never know if you are going to work on the same thing or will be switched to a different project.

Advice to Senior Management

Clean up the mid-level management. Please reduce the layoff/hiring cycles.

Pros

The people I worked with directly were all, to a person, really great. They were smart and conscientious and I remain good friends with many of them. My manager was also very flexible with work hours and vacation time.

There is a really awesome amount of computing power available at Yahoo, and it is a lot of fun to work on such huge systems. There are only a handful of companies in the world where this is possible, and Yahoo is one of them.

Cons

Part of it could be my own fault for not tooting my own horn enough, but there was essentially no recognition for any amount of good work, at least among my direct coworkers. There also did not seem to be many opportunities for advancement. Additionally, there was very poor leadership from the top on down in terms of priorities and projects, with huge swings from week to week. "So I just worked 90 hours last week finishing this code, and it's no longer a priority?" There was also a lack of vision or direction, which resulted in a lot of busywork that really wasn't that important but _had_ to be completed immediately. Management at all levels often tells the employees things that are obviously not true, and which often contradict things the employees were told mere days or weeks before.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop coddling incompetent managers. The management structure is completely dysfunctional. Important revenue-impacting projects are held up for months or years because a separate group is incompetent. There are always lots of meetings to discuss these sorts of things, meetings which are never helpful and usually just go around in circles. I have seen a series of weekly meetings end up exactly where they started 6 months earlier!

Pros

- You're surrounded of talented and creative and cool employees.
- The work, despite the occasional distractions and annoyances, the work is still satisfying
- You'll keep on top of the latest and greatest web and consumer internet design
- Nice environment (if you're on the Sunnyvale Campus... not so great on the other campuses like Santa Clara)

Cons

- Morale is generally not great because of attrition and layoffs and Yahoo! is getting beaten up in the press
- Management is always shuffling around and there are alot of political turf wars
- Consensus driven (impossible to make a quick decision and move quickly). For a Product Manager this is especially frustrating and undermining.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on product excellence and delighting consumers. Depoliticize the management team.

Pros

Yahoo is a great place to work. They understand work life balance. They treat employees as humans, not resources. Overall its definitely the best place I've ever worked at.

Cons

It's a big company that is stuck with many acquisitions, and along with that, many different platforms for running the site. Everyone has their own way of doing things and usually they don't want to accept other ways. They need to standardize on one thing, not ten.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention to your employees ideas and the market. I felt like the upper management did not pay attention to the very brilliant people working there or the direction of the market (besides what wall street thought).

Pros

Yahoo! as a company always takes care of its employees. There are a lot of small events always being organized on campus, and it is never a dull day at work. The people are extremely helpful and fun to work with.

Cons

The past of couple of years working for Yahoo! have been very eventful, with a lot of external distractions. These distractions should have caused the senior management to realize that the decision making needs to speed up, but unfortunately it hasn't. There are a lot of teams even after cutbacks/layoffs that are still extremely slow moving. Being an internet company I don't think this is very helpful.

Advice to Senior Management

The reorgs are a move in the right direction, but senior management needs to put aside some of their personal differences and work towards pushing Yahoo! towards the excellence that it is capable of. We have a lot of very very smart people, but the attitude of these smart people towards work most of the times reflects the attitude of the leaders.

Pros

With some luck, it's possible to advance through the hierarchy of job positions in a company of this size

Cons

Too many managers. People getting comfortable and not pushing their limits. Too many meetings. Too many emails

Advice to Senior Management

There are too many manager. Give engineers your confidence and let them do their work, minus the unnecessary reports / meetings

Pros

Benefits and salaries are very competitive. Environment is great. Not too stiff. It's amazing to work with some of the most talented and intelligent people in the industry. A great place to grow professionally. free coffee. awesome training and development opportunities. the most amazing and engaging conversations I've ever had in any job. Great people! Amazing energy at this company!

Cons

can never keep anything straight with all the re-orgs and projects dying and being created. difficult to follow or understand the direction different teams or management is going. Too many politics and hidden agendas.

Advice to Senior Management

focus on a small set of products and deliver amazing results rather than trying to work on many things and doing an okay job at all of them. Take the approach that Apple has over recent years and focus on a small set of things and deliver an amazing product!