Yahoo

• Opportunity to work on very high-profile products that are accessed by millions of people.

• Learn about years of knowledge regarding scalability, security, etc.

• Good benefits at the main Sunnyvale campus (gym, cafeteria, holiday and company events).

• Good, laid-back atmosphere (most of the time).

• Safari online book subscription, discounts on tickets (movie tickets, aquarium, theme park, etc.).

• Depending on your team's budget and with your manager's approval, you can expense certain things such as technical books and conferences. Yahoo used to have a budget for engineers to attend at least one conference a year, but this may have changed due to budget cutbacks. Do look into it.

• Opportunity to work with YDN if you are interested in presenting technical talks at conferences around the country/world.

• Great opportunity to see lots of internal talks, as well as public talks hosted on campus. Often times the speakers are industry leaders (in engineering, at least).

• I really like Carol Bartz. The best thing about her is she tells it like it is (unlike all of her direct reports, who love to BS). She understands what is wrong within Yahoo, but at the moment it is unclear what she is going to do to fix those things. We pawns suggest firing many of the middle managers and getting people with more of a vision.

• You might get stuck on a team that's treading water, and 100% of your time will simply be fixing bugs and maintaining someone else's code.

• Execs couldn't be more disconnected with reality. Their *#&%-eating grins at all-hands meetings in tough times are infuriating and insulting. They don't realize that most employees see through that stuff and are not happy with it.

• There's a certain distrust of engineers with ideas. Ideas are seen as suspicious to be even considered if they don't appear in the proper time-honored sequence (Product -> UED -> Engineering). An idea that starts in engineering usually dies in engineering, or if Product likes the idea, it's usually not budgeted time correctly, again, because the idea has appeared in an unorthodox way. Expect to do all the work to ram ideas through, with help from no one else.

• This is manager specific, but there is too often little feedback about the job you're doing (this is supposed to be brought up in one-on-ones with your manager). You find that you get the same response whether you are barely doing your job or when you're working long hours.

• Too many people in the company not taking responsibility and "passing the buck."

• There are still constant comparisons to Google both inside and outside the company.

• Benefits have declined in recent years as there's been budget cutbacks. For instance, the cafeteria is no longer open for dinner.

• Little to no innovation, and when there is true innovation, it usually takes a back seat to maintaining an existing product.

• There's a deep-seated fear of failure, so much so that teams end up spending all their time on "critical" bugs and seem to miss the larger picture. Failure ends up being the result anyway.

• Yahoo has a tendency to make acquisitions and run them into the ground, or maintain them and not keep them new and innovative (Geocities is the biggest example of this wastefulness, Zimbra being another recent example). There are MANY once-great properties that are stagnating and not keeping up with the industry (Search, Groups, Maps).

• As of recently, Yahoo has become more of an advertising giant who is also dabbling way too much into the social networking pie (especially collaborating with Facebook, which I'm guessing is soon going to backfire). There's not enough "technology" or new innovative products being launched.

• Most employees are middle-aged (in their 30's), so it's not recommended if you're just starting your career. You can't really hang out with your coworkers after work because they have spouses and families to go home to...

• Yahoo is no longer seen as a "technological" company, but more of a place for less technical people (stay-at-home moms, etc.).

Quit and let younger, more rash, and less hesitant people take your place. Those are the people who aren't afraid of failure, who spearhead great ideas, and who make innovation happen.