Yahoo

You can make a difference if you pursue some passion and just focus on the user and on your work. It treats engineers well. Stability. A lot of hardware to play with and opportunity to learn.

The CEO cult of personality and politics has taken over. Today, there are too many management layers with unclear benefit.

Tim Koogle was a top-rate and outstanding CEO: passionate, wise, visionary, with second-to-none people skills. After him, it was all downhill:

• A Hollywood tycoon that cared mostly about the hundreds of millions he took.
• A foul-mouthed lady with no vision.
• A resume liar.
• And now a narcissistic, somewhat dictatorial, knows-it-all type.

The best and brightest have left the building. It is hard to get inspiration by looking up.

Not sure. There's too much mediocrity in top levels, but comparing the two eras, I'd say: bring back the pagers and let those in the trenches push to production again.