Yahoo

My overall experience at Yahoo was positive. The company treats employees well by giving them competitive salaries, decent benefits, some nice perks like a gym, and a fun year-end party.

People at Yahoo are friendly, open-minded, and willing to help each other.

As a software engineer, I learned some good programming practices related to code modularity, scalability, and maintainability. The scale at which Yahoo operates is very large (still one of the biggest websites in the world), and that means there are cool problems to solve (e.g., what is a good data store for holding 500 million user accounts? Make it fast, reliable, and secure).

There are also regular tech talks, which can be stimulating.

Obviously, Yahoo is having a tough time increasing its revenue. While other Internet companies are growing, Yahoo is struggling to grow. Its revenue is heavily dependent on display advertising, which was hit hard ever since the economy began a recession around 2008. The hostile takeover attempt by Microsoft also created divisions within the company, and many talented employees left as a result.

Prior to 2008, I became frustrated that Yahoo wasn't aggressive in seeking new growth opportunities. (In particular, I always wondered where was Yahoo's version of AdSense. It exists today, but is not competitive.) I wanted Yahoo to kick ass. I wanted to be part of a winning team. But in the end, I felt like I was playing for a 2nd or 3rd place team. In Silicon Valley, if you're a decent software engineer, it's not difficult to find a new job. Thus, I decided to move on from Yahoo.

Aggressively seek out new markets. Expand and don't focus on contracting (layoffs). Growth is the way to succeed.

Rely less on advertising as a source of revenue.

• Acquire some of the cool web hosting companies like Weebly, Square Space, etc.
• Look into cloud computing as a new business.

Just make sure that paid services surpasses advertising as the main source of revenue.