Pros: Free gourmet coffee. Great gym.

Cons: Management is clueless. There are way too many employees in Yahoo! now who are interested solely in bettering their resumes. There is no interest whatsoever in company profitability or advancement of existing strengths. You will find a great example of this in two failed products, both launched simultaneously because two groups of employees thought they could do it better. I am talking about mash.yahoo.com and 360.yahoo.com, both competing with many other "Web 2.0" products. Take Panama: Some fathead employees convinced management that they should waste >1000 man-years to rewrite an already existing product. Instead of bettering pieces that did not work well, they let the existing system painfully burn to the ground, letting millions of dollars in revenue go. They are doing the same with Apex. No wonder they are losing the old-timers like mice from a sinking ship.

Pros: Work-life balance. A wide variety of products and platform services give opportunities to learn and grow your career.

Cons: Compensation is not good for junior and entry-level roles. Management lacks vision and execution. There are too many incompetent upper-level architects, directors, and VPs. Low-level engineers and roles are underpaid, while high-level positions get good compensation for doing little.

Pros: Yahoo! is full of extremely smart and dedicated employees. It's a big enough company that you are sure to find some area to work in which you are interested. Yahoo! offers good benefits. It has an informal culture. You are generally allowed to do the right thing. If you're an absolute superstar, you'll be well compensated.

Cons: A new way of evaluating employees has come along which, in my opinion, greatly detracts from the once collaborative culture. On a quarterly basis, all employees are stack-ranked against their colleagues in their respective departments. They are then placed in a "bell curve" where each slot in the bell curve *must* be filled. If you are in the bottom of that curve for three quarters in a row, you're fired. This means that if you work in a high-performing group, you could wind up toward the bottom of the bell curve even though you do a good job. This creates an incentive not to help coworkers, to avoid hiring superstars, and to generally not wish good things to happen for your colleagues.