Yahoo

At Yahoo, you would have the ability to impact 500 million internet users. There are very few "wasteful" projects; once you are in the company, you can be quite sure what you do will see the light of the day. Each person can potentially work on projects in the critical path of the company.

The company runs on open-source technologies – it is more open than Google. For example, the backend distributed system is based on Hadoop/Pig, which are in open source.

If you are in Sunnyvale, there are lots of great concerts and events. In other locations, there are fewer.

• Free coffee everywhere.

The company is struggling for revenue growth, so projects get only a short time to prove themselves. Folks can be working very hard and get burnt out on a project for a year or two. Even if they achieve great results, the next year, the project is put on the back burner, and everyone is working on the next big thing.

Due to this, there is no long-term retention of knowledge in many projects. There are only a few long-term strategic projects in the company, mostly around search. In other areas, there are likely to be changes in your priorities every 18 months or so.

Please get the company to focus on areas where the barrier to entry is very high, such as search and grid computing.

Get rid of portals which are #3 or lower in the industry and partner with the #1 or #2. Help these "partners" get traffic by integrating into the front page.