Pros
- Talented, friendly and considerate colleagues. I will always treasure the personal and professional friendships I made here. - Good benefits: not as good as some of the competition, but generally good. Matching 401k, good vacation, maternity/paternity leave, free food and espresso bars (in some offices).
Cons
- A bright future....in the rearview mirror. Yahoo has spent a decade squandering its future, and is now close to checkmate. Platitudes like 'mobile first' and 'delighting our customers' don't really address the systemic issues at this company. The recent foray into online gambling shows how desperate this company is to shore up its sagging revenue - the primary value of Yahoo is its stake in Alibaba and its Asian assets. - Corporate ineptitude at its finest. The leadership is non-existent, and C-level leadership mixes incompetence with arrogance and lies. The CEO will tell you she doesn't force her leadership teams to stack rank employees, but ask any front-line manager, and you'll see this is a lie. - QPRs...employees are evaluated on a quarterly basis. Sounds good, right? Not when the evaluations are stack ranked, and there's a forced distribution of achieves vs. misses. So if you're on a team of idiots, you're as good as gold...if you work on a team of smart achievers, you might draw the short straw. And make no mistake - that short straw will result in your termination at some point, or at the very least, you'll have to wait over a year for a raise or promotion. Since forced distribution is a zero sum game, it encourages employees to sabotage each other in an effort to avoid the ax. - Ya-who? Not only is Yahoo somewhat of a joke in most of society, they are going through a painful, existential identity crisis. Of the last four CEOs, none has been able to coherently articulate an answer to "What does Yahoo do?". - Layoffs. Yahoo has yet to improve its revenue, so the only other road to profitability is to cut expenses. That means cutting people. For a while in Q1, there were weekly layoffs - management doesn't have the guts to make a large cut, so they cut 20 here, 30 there and hope nobody notices. Everyone noticed. - Lack of communication and transparency. Weekly 'FYI' meetings are supposed to allow employees a chance to ask questions of management - while great in theory, this is just a waste of an hour when the answers are glib coporatisms from the PR department, or complete avoidance of the actual question being asked. Q: 'What are you going to do about QPRs? They're destroying morale at Yahoo'. A: 'I fundamentally disagree, I think morale is great'. It sure is great if you're bringing in the millions in the C-suite! For the drones, maybe not as much. - Terrible products. Try using Yahoo mail alongside Gmail. 'nuff said. Fantasy football is the one bright spot, but even that will probably crash just as you're about to draft your QB.
