Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

http://www.itworld.com/software/204139/now-would-be-excellent-time-yahoo-employees-jump-ship

by jfruh • 15 years ago

104 95 15 years ago

wavephorm• 15 years ago

I remember this type of Schadenfreude during the tech collapse in 2000. People seemed to just love hearing about other people losing their jobs. This editorial certainly has undertones of wanting to accelerate the collapse of Yahoo.

Be careful what you wish for.

jpdoctor2• 15 years ago

Anyone have a mirror or cache link?

brador2• 15 years ago

With a fresh top level CEO, could Yahoo survive?

parfe3• 15 years ago

What would Yahoo have to do for you for it to get your business?

http://everything.yahoo.com/

Take a look at all the services yahoo offers.

Has anyone ever sent you a "Yahoo Video" link? I didn't even know it existed until just now. And the prominent video on the main page is "Jazz for Cows" which I can't get a direct link for to paste here. Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it. It's fun enough I want to send it to my friend who plays in a local orchestra, but Yahoo is not concerned with the organic spread of links. http://video.yahoo.com/

It isn't just youtube Yahoo competes poorly with. Craigslist, Gmail, ESPN, every news site on the internet.

Just take a look at their "security" offering http://security.yahoo.com/

Paragraphs of copywriting but no product to download or install. Click "Protect your PC" it's just more words. Lots of words. Someone at Yahoo took the time to create this page for what purpose? There is no direction whatsoever.

Their primary search function is powered by Bing now too. About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr and that's only because pros like it over Facebook.

Yahoo! became the bitbucket to store second rate implementations of every idea the internet has ever had, and they aren't cutting the cruft loose, or differentiating on the products that are quality.

In fact, take a look at their mobile offering. http://m.yahoo.com/w/sports/ncaaf/teams/ncaaf.i-a.2?.ts=1316...

That's the Big East Team list for College Football. It's not standings. It doesn't show records. Some project manager at Yahoo accessed the mobile sports site and either didn't care enough to say "Why can't I see the standings?" or didn't know enough about sports to care about standings. Why does Yahoo! have someone like that in charge of the mobile sports division (If they even have someone in a leadership position anywhere close to such a segment). Someone thought displaying 8 teams in alphabetical order was good usability.

parfe3• 15 years ago

I'm thinking about Yahoo and getting angry. Why can't I get a Yahoo! Games platform app on my Android phone? They have an online community full of Chess, Go, and Scrabble players which means even the first person to pay $15 for the Yahoo! Games app has people to play with.

Full integration between the web and phone means I can always find someone to play chess against. But no, they decided to spend time offering up Yahoo! Weather for free.

Some exec must have sent out an internal memo mandating that no Project Manager develop anything that will make money.

brador2• 15 years ago

I love the colors on Yahoo video! I too had never heard of their video offering. I think they have some good products, they have eyeballs, it's just a very poorly run company lacking direction.

I'd take that CEO position in a flash and I think I could turn it round.

simonbrown• 15 years ago

> Yahoo only offers me the option to embed it.

Clicking the up arrow icon provides me a URL along with an embed link. Or you could just copy it from your browser's URL bar.

drgath3• 15 years ago

> About the only near-market leader Yahoo controls is Flickr

#1 US properties - Y! News - Y! Sports - Y! Finance - OMG - Y! Mail - Homepage (for portals)

And probably some others I don't know of.

vbtemp• 15 years ago

I don't understand why Yahoo still exists (or at least why it still gets so much coverage). At this point it's just a cheap knockoff of everything google does. Has anyone ever used Yahoo mail? It's a POS, it's bloated, slow, prone to failure - and it doesn't even work on linux. Same thing for yahoo maps, news, search, etc. I just don't get it.

pork• 15 years ago

A sinking ship still has momentum.

frou_dh• 15 years ago

I'd have gone with derailing train.

Hisoka2• 15 years ago

I don't get why investment banks exists. I don't get why casinos exist. I don't get why cigarette companies exist. I don't get why Fannie Mae exists.

cellis• 15 years ago

Yeah! Like seriously, why do humans exist? We're slow, bloated, prone to failure, and to top it all off we don't even work on Linux!

jfarmer• 15 years ago

In terms of usage, Hotmail is #1, Yahoo! Mail is #2, and Gmail is #3.

Hisoka2• 15 years ago

Wouldn't it be wiser to wait until you see if you get fired, so you get the severance package? And if you don't, then get out?

spydum• 15 years ago

By then the market may be saturated with your former co-workers..

bryanlarsen2• 15 years ago

If vultures are descending, I would think it would be better to wait. The bidding war will temporarily bump up your stock price & options, giving you a better time to sell them. Then the vultures will offer buy-outs to encourage employees to leave. I doubt the vultures will be overly generous in their buy-outs but it can still amount to a substantial amount of cash if you've been there a while.

yangtheman• 15 years ago

Why buy-outs? If I were looking for cutting costs, I would just lay them off.

chollida12• 15 years ago

I'm not the parent you responded to, but I'm assuming when they said buy-outs, they were including severance for layoffs.

In North America 1 month is pretty common if you've been with a company for more than a year with 2 months not being uncommon.

I've heard of people being given 1 month of notice of a layoff and then being asked to work that month only once:)

jmathai• 15 years ago

Most people's stock options are so underwater they're eternally worthless. An increase of a few bucks in the stock price isn't worth the cost on your morale.

linguaphobe4• 15 years ago

How's your open-source Flickr coming along, man?

// sorry, using a throw-away account..

byrneseyeview• 15 years ago

This article is based on a false premise. The effect of LBOs on job creation is ambiguous:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1034178

Silver Lake, in particular, is more of a growth equity firm that happens to use debt.

(I work at, but by no means speak for, Yahoo.

barry-cotter• 15 years ago

What happened to DDD?

uncertain4• 15 years ago

I was given a very good job offer from Yahoo around the same time Carol Bartz was fired. I have yet to sign anything yet because of what I've been reading about Yahoo's condition. I get the feeling that most of the news about Yahoo's demise are just being sensational, yet at the same time I can't ignore the fact that Yahoo employees have been leaving the company every other week (according to my friends who have worked there).

My worst fear is relocating and then being totally screwed over. I don't know what to do.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

Where would you relocate to? I'm assuming that if Yahoo gave you a good job offer, you'd be able to find other employment in the area without too much problem.

uncertain4• 15 years ago

Santa Clara, CA. I'm just worried that if I move out there I'll be left hanging while I have expenses to keep up with.

geebee• 15 years ago

I don't know what your current gig is like, so it's hard to advise. But there's nothing wrong with taking this job with an eye toward moving on, as long as you work honestly at it while you're there.

My wife was in a similar spot when the company she was working for started to decline and experienced people started to move on. She stuck around and took a new position within the company in a different field she wanted to crack into. She was still very early career and saw an opportunity to get some good experience.

The company did tank, but she got at least a year and a half of experience, and later she got interviews/offers afterwards and built a network that is still active a decade later. She never would have been hired directly into one of those jobs in a new company, but she did get a chance at it in an existing company that wanted to keep her. She wasn't surprised that more senior people were leaving, because they had the background and network to generate comparable offers elsewhere, something she wouldn't have been able to do at that point in her career.

So much depends on your current situation, what kind of risks you're willing to take, what experience you think you'll get...

sriramk4• 15 years ago

I just joined Yahoo a few months ago. Would love to chat with you and give you a perspective (see my other comment on this post)

reid• 15 years ago

I joined and thus relocated cross-country to work for Yahoo in mid-2008, when Microsoft was surely going to screw my life up. If you'd like that perspective, shoot me an message: my email address is in my profile.

steve8918• 15 years ago

If the experience is awesome, and if you already have savings, and you're an American citizen, then you have nothing to lose. Chances are you can leverage the experience to get a better job if you get laid off. Make sure you save as much money as possible to tide you over in case the worst case scenario occurs (the economy double-dips and you get laid off with no job prospects).

If you are H1B, then don't do it.

czhiddy2• 15 years ago

I'm curious - can someone explain to me how Yahoo still has a higher P/E ratio than say, Apple?

For that matter, why is EBay's P/E higher than Google's?

tdurden2• 15 years ago

Asian assets are a very large part of the 'P'

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

Yahoo! is only a minority shareholder in Yahoo! Japan, with SoftBank owning 40+% of the shares.

loganfrederick• 15 years ago

It's always a case by case basis and I'm not a professional analyst, but I could come up with a few (flimsy) reasons.

Basically boils down to odds and the change in growth rate. Just because a company is consistently, wildly profitable does not mean they should have a high P/E ratio. P/E is often much more influenced by the growth rate for earnings. With Yahoo and eBay, investors are saying that these companies are more likely to grow very quickly than Apple and Google, which makes perfect sense since those two giants will most likely grow between some range. Investors must believe Yahoo is either be a huge hit or miss and eBay must have some reasons for people to believe they can juice their growth rate higher quickly, perhaps based on their acquisitions, room to expand their fees, acquiring new customers etc.

*Edit: Added note on Yahoo, its assets (as the Asian comment below reminded me to add) could very well be worth more than its current valuation. This article explains how: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/24/yahoo-shareholder-bartz/

shoham3• 15 years ago

I'm not sure that this is true. Yahoo's earnings are around 1.2 B, and Market Cap is around 20 Billion, whereas Apple's Earnings are around 20 Billion, and their market cap is around 400 Billion. Very similar, unless my numbers are outdated.

czhiddy2• 15 years ago

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl+yhoo+ebay+goog+pe+...

bryanlarsen2• 15 years ago

Price to sales is a better number for Yahoo, as it is for any company that is either losing money or on the edge of doing so. But with P/S you have to compare companies to very similar competitors like Google and cannot compare to hardware manufacturers like Apple or resellers like Amazon.

charlesju• 15 years ago

Apple and Google are probably cheap relative to Yahoo and EBay.

tomkarlo4• 15 years ago

Market cap of $18, assets on balance sheet of $15 bn... some portion of that value may be breakup / liquidation value. In theory, a company is worth the greater of its future earnings (hence P/E) or it's liquidation value. (This assumes they're rational enough to break it up if that value is greater.)

So in theory, Yahoo's earnings could go to zero, and it would still be worth $15bn because you could liquidate the assets... and the P/E would rise towards infinity.

rphlx• 15 years ago

Well, non-cash Assets are often valued way above the firesale price they'd fetch in a rapid liquidation. The $4B in goodwill is not easy to extract.

brackin• 15 years ago

I don't like the idea of a writer telling people to quit their jobs with little first hand knowledge. If they like working for Yahoo they should stay till they can get the severance package or continue working there.

Afterwards you probably have some savvy friends you could convince to join you on making your own future, in the form of a startup.

cHalgan2• 15 years ago

If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL, then I think there might be some bright future for Yahoo! and for AOL.

For example, they could focus on Yahoo! Finance to be the place for investment, stocks info on internet.

In order words, it is too early to predict whether Yahoo! will be sold to PE firms.

EDIT: Stupid comment: AOL is way smaller than Yahoo!

namityadav• 15 years ago

If Yahoo! is acquired by AOL

Yahoo's market cap: $18.91B

AOL's market cap: $1.5B

cHalgan2• 15 years ago

Stupid me. I was honestly thinking that AOL's market cap is about 20B. Wow...

shoham3• 15 years ago

Really sad article -- I'd love to see Yahoo turn it around. It's an amazing company, in many ways.

sriramk4• 15 years ago

Honestly, I find this article ridiculous and borderline offensive. I would love if the author would come talk to a few of us and maybe take a tour of the place and see what makes this place work.

I work at Yahoo, joined a few months ago, run engineering management for a couple of teams working on high-performance cloud stuff very core to the way Yahoo works. I find the engineers sharp and smart, the technology problems fascinating (insane scale/perf requirements) and in general, look forward to getting up and driving to Sunnyvale every morning.

None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens.

P.S We're hiring. :) If any of you want to work on a platform serving a ridiculous (and I do mean ridiculous) number of requests and users, hacking on cutting-edge distributed programming work, send me email (address on my profile).

lpgauth• 15 years ago

Do you guys use erlang anywhere in that stack?

sriramk4• 15 years ago

Nope. But we have our own constructs for a lot of the semantics Erlang provides written from the ground up in C/C++. Sorry, can't talk about it more except in broad strokes :)

linguaphobe4• 15 years ago

I believe BOSS has Erlang in the back-end.

teej• 15 years ago

No one has ever seriously questioned Yahoo's engineering chops. Their technology contributions have always been notable. That's not the point of the article at all.

No offense, but Yahoo's management is just -bad- and it shows. There's a lack of vision, direction, and execution from the top; the fish is rotting from the head. I've heard this directly from Yahoo VPs, managers, and engineers.

Yahoo is like an aircraft carrier in Lake Superior. Sure, it's capable of so much, but it can't turn that into useful action.

elq2• 15 years ago

I question yahoo's engineering chops 4 out of 5 times after interviewing hotshots from search, ads, or research.

After interviewing dozens of folks from yahoo, I've pained the following picture about the engineering there - the vast majority of it is stuck in 1995, some bits of it have evolved isolated from the rest of the tech world - it's steam punk, then there are a few parts that are shiny and new but skin deep. It seems like a sad place.

cbs• 15 years ago

>Honestly, I find this article ridiculous and borderline offensive.

Don't take it seriously, the *-world writers are habitually underinformed about the topics they write on. I don't read them much, but every time I see them posted to HN, on topics I have even a casual understanding of, I can spot the factual errors. I wouldn't give any stock to their analysis of the current situation over at Yahoo.

ramiyer• 15 years ago

jpdoctor2• 15 years ago

> None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens.

LBO's and their ilk are dramatic.

One restructuring guy I know would have a goal of eliminating all but 3 managers from an acquired group of 300 within 6 months.

guelo• 15 years ago

Yea expect the unexpected with those guys. They are creative at wringing out cash right now with no thought to the future or any wishy-washy stuff like morale, culture, history, etc. I've seen 90% of employees fired and the rest relocated a thousand miles away just so they could get the cash out of selling an office building.

beagledude• 15 years ago

"None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens." do you really not think you're in this dramatic situation now?

sandieman2• 15 years ago

Do you still have yellow and purple cubicles?

drgath3• 15 years ago

Yup! They look like this, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmhmm/1753309475/

socratic• 15 years ago

It's weird to see Y! get a lot of hate on HN, because it seems like working there would be a lot like working at a startup. You're trading off risk (will this company exist in n years) for reward (higher salary, greater control over job responsibilities). The best Y! employees also probably have a ton of visibility, working on projects like Hadoop, YUI, YQL, and so on.

What's wrong with this analogy?

thurn• 15 years ago

Well, working at a startup is rewarding because you have a small team of peers, very little bureaucracy or management overhead, no legacy to deal with, etc. I don't think the analogy addresses the core reasons why you'd pick a startup.

0x123• 15 years ago

Funny, this article seems to be written by one of those vultures.

People that don't work at Yahoo! telling people that work there to quit remind me of the pope telling other people to abstain from sex. If you're not playing the game don't tell others how to play it or to stop playing it.

Yahoo! has had a rough time but it still has plenty of life in it, let's wait to see what they intend to do once they've found their new bearings.

Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!. Now it is up to new people to try to restore that culture or at least a semblance of it and then possibly the oil tanker can be turned around. It isn't over until the fat lady sings.

Yahoo! is huge, has a pile of interesting tech, lacks polish and needs focus. If Apple could be turned around then so can Yahoo.

dpark3• 15 years ago

>Carol Bartz was a disaster, she did the worst thing any CEO could ever do, which is to wreck the culture that pervaded Yahoo!.

Sorry, but what culture do you believe Bartz destroyed? I was at Yahoo before Bartz, and left only about a month before she was fired. I don't believe that Bartz destroyed anything. Yahoo has never had a great culture. They've always had an identity crisis. You can go read PG's older essays and see that.

Bartz was fired because she couldn't work a miracle. Yahoo needs some truly amazing changes in order to avoid Sun's fate, and I'm not sure anyone out there can/will deliver what's needed quickly enough. You mentioned Apple as a turnaround example. Exactly where do you think Yahoo is going to get a Steve Jobs?

0x123• 15 years ago

When did you join?

I believe Yahoo! definitely had 'culture' in the early days, they were pretty much synonymous with end-user content on the net and the Y! employees and their users were the ones that showed us cool offices, a different kind of company and neat things to do with the web. I think they went downhill since the .com crash and never managed to recover. The final remnants of that were buried in the last two years, now Yahoo! reminds me of an oiltanker with the captain and the rest of the crew below decks. Time will tell if they can turn it around or not but with giants this size even dying will take a long long time.

linguaphobe4• 15 years ago

One thing off the top of my head: she ended the year-end parties. Those parties were great, because they brought lots of people together, and for one night, you forgot everything else and enjoyed yourself, with your spouse/s.o./friend . It was fun to see geeks bathe, shave and dress up for this yearly event.... ;-)

I keed, I keed about the bathing. :-)

ww520• 15 years ago

Anyone still owns YHOO stocks? Got some at around 13 after the collapse of Microsoft buyout. The book value was/is good. Was hoping there's another acquisition.

Yahoo employees: Get out now before the vultures descend

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