By the time the NYTimes runs this story, it's already over.<p>Internally, employees know well in advance when a company is headed downhill. When I was at LivingSocial, the best employees left at what appeared (externally) to be the peak of the company.<p>The trend was already apparent. Once you get to layoffs and press stories, your best employees have already gone. Two sayings that apply here:<p>1) If you're not growing, you're dying
2) People don't leave companies, they leave managers<p>Retention is all about opportunity: personal and organizational. A talented employee with many other opportunities must believe that those above them are beyond competent (providing room for personal growth) and that the company is trending in a direction to make vast organizational change. People, especially top talent, want to be a part of something larger than themselves.<p>When Marissa Mayer started, that bought Yahoo time. They had the appearance of organizational change. Once that honeymoon period ended, however, there isn't much to hold a great employee to Yahoo. At this point, if the best people are leaving, how do you recruit other A+ players? You can't.<p>People are the core of a company and Yahoo is many years down the line of rotting from the inside out.
Just scanning across headlines of the last few days:<p>- San Francisco commercial real estate at record highs, passing NYC in price per square foot (which last happened just before things imploded last time around)<p>- Multiple SF area tech companies running rounds of layoffs<p>- VC funding took a nose dive last quarter<p>- Quite a few unicorns or near unicorns having their valuation tank post-IPO, having a difficult fundraising round or seeing their valuations slashed on private markets<p>One can debate if the Valley is in a full blown bubble, but seems increasingly obvious at a minimum there's a significant cooling off on the horizon.
"<i>Last March, Ms. Mayer told the staff at an all-hands meeting that the bloodletting was finally over. Shortly thereafter, she changed her mind and demanded more cuts.</i>" Of course there's a loss of faith in the CEO.<p>That's been a continuing problem with Meyer. She said Yahoo was getting back into search. (Yahoo resells Bing; Yahoo hasn't had its own search engine since 2008 or so.) That didn't happen. She said Yahoo was going into video. That was canceled. There were a bunch of acquisitions, many of which just disappeared. Nobody can figure out what Yahoo is really for any more.<p>The company minus Alibaba has negative market value. It's that bad.
Having worked at Yahoo a few times ...<p>The press usually reports senior executives leaving as constituting a "brain drain." But if even the CEO's are worthless, as the last 5 have been, how can the senior executives be expected to have any brains?<p>The real Yahoo brain drain is the loss of experienced engineers. And since option blocks are no longer offered to engineers, nobody with any experience is going to join.<p>The only people left are long-time employees with old option grants, recent grads who got rejected from Facebook, and H1B's by the thousands.
One quote in particular sticks out for me:<p>"<i>Others said they were actively looking for their next jobs — a task made more difficult because of the taint of failure that potential employers sometimes associate with anyone at the struggling company.</i>"<p>For those with experience hiring, do you find this to be generally true? Would it really count as a black mark to have worked at a "failing" or "struggling" company, independent of your own experience/skills/accomplishments or would it really depend on the situation/candidate? I realize this isn't a black/white question and is likely more of a gray area.
I was at AOL years ago when Starboard started a proxy fight with Tim Armstrong. They were "activists", which is to say they were looking for public support to break up and sell the company. Armstrong took them on and brought his own public offensive, explaining why the AOL long-term strategy was better than the short-term breakup that Starboard was touting. Armstrong prevailed in his quest and eventually Starboard bowed out, eventually selling a chunk of their position in the company.<p>Two years later, AOL was bought by Verizon.<p>Armstrong was a relatively strong leader in that situation. He was a salesman at heart and knew he needed to reinforce his strategies (however non-plausible those might have been) with the company, the Board, the shareholders and AOL customers.<p>Mayer looks like none of that to me, and remarkably tone deaf against Starboard. Sorry to those Yahoos still hanging on, but Starboard are simply vultures for distressed companies. Not sure how long it will last, but the chances of an independent Yahoo being open for business in 3 years is really low.
When your average CEO makes 200~300x more money than you, why should you be faithful? When you end up paying for executives screw ups and your salary is the first "cost" to cut of, why should one be faithful to Corporate America?
My own impression of Yahoo from years back is that if something as critical as the YUI toolkit sucked, which it did, then Yahoo had limited prospects.<p>Perhaps an odd thing to base an opinion on, but compare stock charts on Google versus stock charts on Yahoo. The Yahoo ones were clunky and sucked.<p>Compare Yahoo Mail with GMail, and Yahoo sucked in comparison, being riddled with giant ad-banners.<p>Even now, Yahoo search results suck, which is really noticeable when FireFox periodically resets my search engine to Yahoo. Suddenly my results suck, and back to Google I go.<p>I don't know what Marissa Meyer has been doing, because it doesn't seem to be apparent in Yahoo getting better at anything really.
In my small corner of numerical computing, pretty much every name I know on the east coast who doesn't hold a university position has moved to Yahoo Research in recent years. So at least their research lab does not seem to experience a brain drain.
Douglas Crockford (author of "Javascript: The Good Parts") shares some thoughts on Yahoo, and what he would do if he were CEO:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HzclYKz4yQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HzclYKz4yQ</a>
I wonder if ordering workers back to office had a long term effect on moral?
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/technology/yahoo-orders-home-workers-back-to-the-office.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/technology/yahoo-orders-ho...</a>
When I was in high school (2005-ish), Yahoo mails were everywhere, most of my friends used AIM, etc. I haven't used either for long now, but it's sad to see the company dying all the same.