Yahoo Reviews in Sunnyvale, CA

Pros

Great base compensation
people are fun to work with
great work/life balance

Cons

Rewards for high performance were horrible last year
no room to grow, company is shrinking and directors and vps have been there forever
no clear direction on products from executive team
constant reorgs
a lot of career instability with a lot of movements
quality of people is decreasing
a lot of mid-level mangers are very close minded and are from a different era
hr department is useless for dealing with conflict
your job is always on the line after a reorg, wether you're a good performer or not
constant saving on ridiculous things is tiring. meanwhile we always have money for our top execs
very political

Advice to Senior Management

don't know even where to start. give more guidance. listen to the ics, there a lot of rotten directors and vps

Pros

I love the people I work with at Yahoo!, mostly are friendly compared to other companies I worked at (such as eBay). There is a good work-life balance. We have a lot of fun family related events.

Cons

Management does not seem to care about keeping good talent in house. I was a full time employee that was laid off, then asked to come back as a consultant, now there is an opening in another department for a full time job, my manager has recommended me, but the hiring manager won't even give me a phone interview, she is going straight to external candidates.

Advice to Senior Management

Even if an internal candidate does not have all of the skills you are looking for, if they are still excited to stay at Yahoo!, you have to help them stay, they are showing their loyalty and instead you are kicking them out!!

Pros

Fairly stable. Pay, benefits, and workload is reasonable. Has good community of frontend engineers where you can grown in that area.

Cons

Management clueless. Teams not united. Each functional team only cares about their own interest: architects want to push their latest-and-greatest platforms, VPs only care about test code coverage to satisfy minimum requirements, QA only care about process, PMs only care about launching new features (whether they make sense or not).

Advice to Senior Management

They should recognize that they do not know how to turnaround the company and just leave. If it's the best interest to sell the company, then do what is right.

Pros

There are smart people that work there.
The free shwag is somtimes nifty and fun.
Octoberfest.
Some interesting products and tools to work with.

Cons

4 layoffs in 4 years (and more to come).
$30ish stock options that were never worth it.
Despite layoffs there are incompetent teams (team of 10 working for 2 years did what 1 competent person could do in 6 months (no exaggeration there)).
Apparently you ant fire someone outside of a layoff unless you have a years with of screw ups as evidence.
Poor decisions by upper management and execs.
More leaks than a boat made of Swiss cheese.
Constantly reinventing the wheel except that the wheel they always make is square and they never learn.
Several teams working to reinvent the same wheel at the same time and don't communicate.

Advice to Senior Management

Fire those that do not work well.
Raise salaries.
Apologize to current workers for hiring Bartz that was like poison for the Y! culture.

Pros

cool technology, massive scale, good people

Cons

uncertainty, lot of hiring at higher levels limits growth opportunities for current employees

Advice to Senior Management

Take care of employees

Pros

1. very friendly to engineering, and the working environment is really really well here.
2. Many smart guys. You'll learn a lot from them.

Cons

The management is kind of chaos.
Sometimes it is really tiring if we are pushed to publish a product fast -- it happens many times.

Advice to Senior Management

It is great to work at Yahoo and I'm pround to be part of it.
However, sometimes we just don't know what our focus is.

Pros

free coffee bar in each building--saves you thousands on Starbucks and a chance to work at scale effecting hundreds of millions of internet users

Cons

too much focus on the short-term revenue at the expense of strategic longer term plays have exposed Yahoo! to competitors

Advice to Senior Management

stop trying to be too many things--focus on what makes Yahoo! unique and cut away everything else that doesn't fit

Pros

I joined Yahoo eight years ago.

When I first joined, the company was a fun place to work. The thrill of coding something that had impact on the life on hundreds of millions users was overwhelming. It made me extremely proud.

Even today I still have no regret in staying at Yahoo this long because I, and the team, has moved the product to the top rank on the market.

Cons

For the past several years, Yahoo has been on this downhill slope. And so far I haven't seen the end of the tunnel yet.

Yahoo has become a place that emphasizes on the show/demos. It appears that the upper management is running the company based on PPTs, not realities.

For example, the company has adopted agile process and CI. But everybody seems to forget the original purpose of having agile and CI. The only thing, that matters, is the green light on the dashboard. Nobody pays attention to the quality of test cases.

Advice to Senior Management

1. Talk to the engineers.
2. Get a reality check
3. Get rid of PPTs

Pros

lot of opportunity are available

Cons

loss of vision by leaders

Advice to Senior Management

have a long term vision and implement it

Pros

Yahoo is still a strong brand, if that is a valid reason to work here. There is still a good amount of talent, so it is good to work with some competent individual contributors. One can get to learn a lot if you are in the right place.

Cons

Senior Management is now more clueless than ever. The state of uncertainty has been the only constant at Yahoo for the past couple of years. This continues to demoralize a lot of employees and one can feel it at the cafeteria. Asking folks to keep at it because that is the best thing to do is so lame.

Chief Product Officer Blake may have some vision, but it is more theoretical than actionable. Many people talk about innovation, but an overall strategy is missing. Piecemeal solutions for iPad and other social efforts are not tied to an overall strategy. Even these efforts have stumbled at best. If Blake really means taking bold steps to reach 10-10-10 goals, then the senior leadership needs to take some bold steps and not just talk about them. To execute on such a vision, Yahoo needs leaders - not just managers - who first have the capability to speak the truth and face it.

A lot of what is wrong at Yahoo has to do with two main reasons:
1. There are a lot of people in positions where they should not be. There are senior managers in technical positions and they lack the knowledge to lead and drive teams. This blocks everyone and diminishes group performance. These managers continue to exist for a very long time because of their capability to play politics, spread gossips and build their own pyramids. Many managers and their superiors play the "I scratch your back and you scratch mine" during yearly reviews and continue to advance. Yearly reviews are mostly positive because the culture at Yahoo has gone soft and people are generally scared or just don't care to provide negative reviews or as these are better known as "constructive feedback". Either way the reviews continue to be fit people into curves so that compensation can be spread around. This leads to percolating only positive news upstream so that all looks good at least for a while. When things break, as they do there is a subtle finger pointing campaign to wash themselves fo the responsibility.

2. Lack of or broken new product and innovation strategy. Yahoo continues to make money with what it already has. Nothing new has made money for Yahoo for a very long time. Internally, at the lowest level there are a lot of innovative ideas, but no clear way to get them out there. At the highest levels there is a clear lack of product strategy. Blake has talked about some big goals, but they lack an execution strategy.

HR depart ment at Yahoo is very detached. There is no concept of employee development and training. Perhaps Yahoo has decided that it will be able to attract top talent for new initiative without having to invest in internal training initiatives.

Advice to Senior Management

Review all managers who are not technical and determine whether they are in the right positions. Either let them go or reassign to positions that fit their "competencies".

Dare yourself to not fit employees in the curve. Some groups and teams have more than 10% of employees who perform at the highest levels.

Re-Task HR Depart to be actively engaged in talent identification and development. Actively encourage shuffling people into different groups. This will also help break the stranglehold of incompetent managers.

Jerry Yang continues to be Chief Yahoo and his role has always been dubious. It appears that Jerry wants to have the cake and eat it too. It is time that senior leadership develops some spine to tell Jerry that it is time for him to let go.