Yahoo Reviews in Sunnyvale, CA

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

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.

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!!