Yahoo

Very good salary and benefits.

Cafeteria food is pretty good.

Free coffee drinks.

Campus is pretty nice and clean.

People there are very nice and willing to help.

Employees can work from home (though some people seem to be abusing this).

It is extremely difficult to get data, and I am not talking about sensitive data. You need to go through several teams and get their permissions.

A lot of the documentation is either not detailed enough or simply outdated. It’s difficult to figure out how to use a lot of the tools or even what they are for. Sometimes the team owning the code can’t even help you because the person that wrote it is gone.

A good percentage of engineers do not have a math or engineering background. Examples include English, History, and Music majors. It really makes me wonder how they got their jobs.

Now for some personal ventilation, like what the headline stated: I was laid off after just 10 weeks. I was working 10+ hours almost every day and was doing a very good job, yet I was axed with no explanation. I was just out of grad school and had a couple of other offers to choose from. I was told during the interview that Yahoo was doing well and still expanding (granted that was last year). Not that I believed all of this, given all the negative press, but I still figured that a newly opened position should be safe for at least a couple of years. Plus, I heard that companies rarely lay off young people. That’s why I went with Yahoo anyway, since it gave the highest offer. Boy, was I wrong.

Now, I’ll have to start my job search all over again, but in a much worse environment, without the help of a career center, and with a much tighter time constraint. So, I pretty much have to take the first offer that I get, whenever that will be. It's hard not to get a little angry when I think about it.

Well, it’s hard for me to give any advice given my short stint there. I guess for one, don't give out offers unless you plan on keeping that person for at least two years.

Also, try to provide an explanation for the layoff. Like, why was I needed a couple of months ago and not now, instead of just saying the economy is bad and thinking that people will buy it.

I don’t know if that will make it any easier for us to swallow, but at least it shows that the company is taking it seriously and really had no other options.