Yahoo

Good pay; nice and intelligent people; good cafeteria; low pressure; no crazy deadlines.

I can always get time off for my own needs.

Managers are in cubes, not offices; this makes a huge difference for some reason.

Engineers are in cubes, not in ridiculous "pods" that are becoming trendy at some companies.

Linux and FreeBSD workstations with big monitors.

Sane technologies; Y is mostly too smart to buy shrinkwrap junk.

Total paralysis by red tape. With thousands of engineers, almost nothing gets done. There is no clear delineation of responsibility. Too many chefs with fingers in too many pies. We will spend months discussing whether it's worthwhile to build a system that would actually take a weekend to code.

The org is impossibly deep; last time they tried to flatten it, it got deeper. We are more focused on means than ends. We are totally committed to our rules, systems, and procedures, and totally oblivious to the outside world.

The executives are amazingly out of touch. Every few months they have a new "trend" which has no relation to what engineers are doing. At one point, they claimed everyone should have one number they were being judged on - whether it was sales per quarter, site uptime, etc. Of course, nothing was done about this.

Yahoo welcomes ideas from engineers, but almost always discards them. We have built a lot of cool features which would have put Y ahead of Google in small areas, but the public will never see them. The only thing Y reliably cares about is more ads.

I don't know how to solve Yahoo's problems. We were basically the same under Semel. Changing leadership didn't help; constant reorgs haven't helped.