Yahoo Reviews in Santa Monica, CA

Pros

Yahoo! is a fun place to work, full of a lot of smart and talented people. You feel like the work you are doing (when it makes it out into the world) has a big impact because of the large user base. When you tell people where you work, they recognize the name and smile. People love Yahoo!

Cons

There's more bureaucracy than there needs to be, and the company seems a little directionless. Senior management doesn't seem to know what to do or how to communicate it through the ranks. Politics and/or centralized initiatives seem to stifle the good stuff that can happens in small teams.

Advice to Senior Management

Yahoo! is great as an aggregator of content. It should focus on doing this and doing it well.

Pros

Yahoo has great benefits and pays very well compared to the rest of the market. Management tries hard to foster an environment where people work together. There are monthly (about) get togethers, be they all hands', Guitar Hero tournaments, or outdoor bbqs. Yahoo provides free sodas and snack machines in Santa Monica, and free gourmet coffee and subsidized lunches in Sunnyvale. Yahoo generally hires very smart people below the executive level.

Cons

There are a lot of politics at Yahoo! It was sometimes astounding that people who failed to deliver on their jobs and were not liked got promoted while people who launched successful products did not. Very often, we'd receive corporate mandates to integrate something into our product even though it made no sense for the product. Just as quickly, management would decide that what they wanted 3 weeks ago is no longer a priority and would shut it down. This would repeat itself in a loop, and along with constant reorgs, it would be tough to get anything done at Yahoo or learn anything new after a while.

Advice to Senior Management

Prioritize what you want to get done and make sure it's realistic. If a product is not a priority, shut it down and move resources over to priorities - don't make promises and then change your mind a month later over and over again. Stop with the constant reorgs. Pick a strategy, resource it accordingly and give it a fair amount of time to succeed.

Pros

High performance culture. Merit-based. It's a very fun place to work though. Enormous opportunity for career development in both depth and breadth. I feel very proud to be part of a company the is striving to the best.

Cons

-There is a lot of stress here.
-It's no longer always a "startup" feel.

Advice to Senior Management

N/A

Pros

First and foremost, the people here are really great. In my experience there is very little politics and everyone seems to be playing on the same team. That is refreshing. It is also nice to see a company so supportive of a work/life balance. Yahoo! generally treats their employees well through good perks, great benefits and lots of 'small things' that mean a lot. It is a very social atmosphere and I consider my co-workers my friends. This makes it really hard when they choose to leave though.

Cons

Projects take a long time to launch. There are many re-org's that affect company direction. Sometimes mandates seem not thought through enough. There seem to be a lot of technical limitations that are legacy and hard to get around in a company of this size.

Advice to Senior Management

It's frustrating because on the inside, I feel that we are doing really great things...but it seems like on the outside none of this is being recognized. We are constantly being clobbered by analysts and wall street.

Pros

There are some amazing reasons to work for Yahoo beyond having a great name on your resume and an opportunity to work on industry-leading web sites. First, they pay above the industry standard which can be life changing. Second, they offer some incredible on-campus training courses that you can take during your normal work day. Some are required and some are not, but every one of them that I have taken as been extremely worthwhile. The courses range from business type (like managerial training) to skill-based (software development, design, excel, etc) courses. At Yahoo!, you work with passionate co-workers whose abilities are generally far superior to other in-house teams. Finally, true to it's mission statement, Yahoo! also does value it's fun. If you enjoy socializing with your co-workers this is the place for you. Some months have probably seen three to five Yahoo sponsored social events complete with games, music, food and drinks. I've worked at social companies before, but nothing like this. (I've heard people say they'd rather have that money spent on their bonuses, but most people seem to really enjoy the chance to unwind.)

Cons

A downside to working at such a huge corporation is that at times you can feel like a cog-in-the-wheel. With 14,000 fellow employees it's pretty difficult to stand out beyond your smaller team. Depending on your job function there can be as many as 6 levels of management above you so getting noticed for your efforts can be difficult, particularly if you don't work for one of the flagship divisions like mail, search, frontpage, or news. Also, because of the way many departments are structured, it is possible that you won't work directly with your manager. Yahoo! calls this a matrix organization structure. This can be nice if you don't like to be micro-managed (and who does), but it's not so great and can be very frustrating when it comes time for your evaluation (think raise / bonus) and your supervisor has no idea what you do or at what level you are doing it. Yahoo is also constantly reorganizing. This is a side effect of trying to streamline it's business focus but it can be very unsettling for individual employees. In the last half of the year, there are some employees who have had 3 different managers and been part of 4 different groups as a result of so much reorganizing. This is not a way to retain top talent.

Advice to Senior Management

I think senior management does a great job of trying to communicate with the entire staff. However, sometimes it can come across as condescending, particularly all of the recent communications dealing with Microsoft. Repeating the same exact language to us "now is the time to focus," "I'm very proud of you," and repeating our "purpose" over and over has worn thin and has become meaningless when it appears the same way in coutnless different emails. I understand that it can be difficult to come up with new ways to communicate but respect does start to dwindle when the communications seem copied and pasted and therefore insincere. Along these lines, I think it's important to remember that those of us out here doing the work are not a group of people but individuals. With all of the reorganizing and all of the upheaval that has happened in the last year it seems that this has been forgotten. It's traumatic to go through layoffs, reorganizations, buyouts and no amount of "beer on the balcony" is going to make that better. I might suggest training your lower management, who have access to individuals, with ways to make sure individuals feel valued and their feeling of job insecurity is calmed.

Pros

Our benefits are excellent benefits. You work with great people at a company everyone recognizes.

Cons

It is a big company and sometimes has a lot of beuracracy.

Advice to Senior Management

We need to market ourselves to a younger generation, under 24 especially.

Pros

The atmosphere and community are both great, and this has been a huge learning experience for me.

Cons

Being that it is a large company, there often is a lot of red tape.

Advice to Senior Management

No advice, I am currently very happy.

Pros

It used to look good on your resume and maybe you can get a good exit package.

Cons

The management is completing incompentent, racist, sexist, anything you can name I have never seen such bad behaviour. It's a sad state of affairs over there and they are cutting back in fear and hope that is will raise the stock price. They buy up companies and then don't integrate them properly knowing nothing of culture or inspiration. They've lost the plot completely.

Advice to Senior Management

Sell the company now, you don't know what the hell you are doing.

Pros

money and perks ( free vending, coffee cards, ping pong)

Cons

Not the place for innovative people or people who tend to work hard

Advice to Senior Management

stop trying to protect your jobs are do somethng innovative

Pros

It used to be a great place to work

Cons

Too many pissing matches at levels above you keeping any progress from occurring.
For instance HRC why? If there is an budget why the micromanaging?
Platforms? Platforms do not work. Why does it takes months to release features - platforms. If properties were able to build innovative products without having the restrictive nature of platforms then yahoo would be more interesting place to work. As it is now it is like crawling vs the pace it used to conduct run. May it run like a 1000 small BUs and yahoo will innovate and lead again. Sure that seems hard but how well are you doing now?

Advice to Senior Management

Stop hiring and promoting only sycophants. Being given input by those who benefit from only good news is the down turn of that place.