Quarterly Performance Reviews (QPRs): They are as awful as you've heard. Every quarter you go through a full-on review cycle. That means having to spend a lot of time justifying the work you've done, a lot of time filling out peer reviews for your coworkers, and a lot of time generally worrying about your status there. Yahoo! uses a stack-ranking system where everyone is ranked from first to worst. Everyone is put into a bell curve and all slots in that curve must be filled. That means that if you're on a high performing team you may wind up in the lower quartiles even if you do good work. When I worked there if you wound up one standard deviation to the right for two consecutive quarters you were put on a PIP. I've heard from friends who still work there that now if you wind up in a lower quartile on *one* QPR you're not put on a PIP, you're simply fired. That's right folks, one bad quarter and you're out. They pretend that the reviews are objective, but they're not. How can they be? It's a nasty political system. If you're not into that, stay away.
The company has been sputtering along for 8 years now. Despite many many changes in top leadership and lots of big talk, nothing has really changed. Yahoo! is always a takeover target. There is always a threat of layoffs, although now with the harsh QPR system there's a constant stealth layoff going on.
Also as I was leaving I noticed that a new harsher, nastier engineering culture was taking hold there. Engineers talked gleefully of "getting rid of the dead weight" (translation: mass firings). If you weren't absolutely stellar you were crap.
If you're anything less than a top-tier engineer, stay away. Your life there won't be pleasant. If you are a top-tier engineer, stay away, there are *much* better companies in the valley where you can really shine.
If you need a job out of college, it's probably a fine place to go. Yahoo! still looks good on the resume. Just don't plan to stay there too long.
