What a ridiculous statement from a CEO. I sympathise with the issue he's trying to draw attention to, but his hysterical over the top utterance doesn't reflect positively on him as a CEO. The last thing I want in my CEO is someone who seeks to vilify those who had nothing to do with bad decisions, or judges people in such black and white terms.
This reeks of publicity seeking - which reflects even more poorly on the CEO. He's willing to vilify innocent workers to promote his company - so not only does he exhibit poor judgement, he's also unethical.
It's not only his statement that is ridiculous. Have you see his photo? Admittedly, it is unlikely he had any control over the choice of snap that went with this story, but who approved such a insincere photo on behalf of his company?
This tactic leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Yes patent abuse needs to be dealt with, yes Yahoo is now apart of the abuse and it is sad. But firing a rocket at Yahoo employees by telling them they need uproot their lives or otherwise they will be black listed from employment, with hopes that other companies will follow along is disgusting and says more about Yammer than Yahoo.
Look, yes Yahoo needs to take it in the chin as well as their decision makers and true owners. Regular employees even with their stock options are for all intensive purposes not owners. Employees all have unique individual situations (H1B, mortgages, etc etc) and they will leave when the situation is right for them. Weaponizing hiring is just as pitiful as weaponizing patents.
They're both terrible, but I'd way "weaponizing hiring" is worse than "weaponizing patents". At least with patents, you're not directly targeting people (just the things they build and the companies they work for).
Looks like the other comments on here are anti-Yammer. I guess I'll write up why this doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
1. If you read the article, he was apparently talking about people with options and control (Executives, Lawyers, Engineers), rather than janitors or other people who might not have as much say in who they work for.
2. The CEO states that his reasoning is that who you work for and support indicates what kind of person you are ("the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring"). Contrast this with the knee jerk reactions to the article indicating that this is purely about punishing Yahoo. He just doesn't want people who enable bad behavior. He wants Yammer employees who will stand up to him if things look immoral.
3. Yes the article / his announcement is sensational. But look at the general idea: expecting engineers to refuse support to business doing immoral things is taught in every university ethics class. Why not include ethics questions in the interview?
I have a lot of problems with this story, and with your arguments in favor of it.
> the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now,
> the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have
> stopped caring
I guarantee you that there are people working at Yahoo! solving difficult and interesting problems, which many of us would envy. Not only that, but there are also going to be people working there now who value stability and have a sense of loyalty to the company they work for. Not everyone is going to jump ship for the new hotness every 3 years, and software engineering is not a monoculture where we all share the same values. I think it's incredibly problematic to broadly assert that anyone working at a given company is not worthy of employing.
> 3. Yes the article / his announcement is sensational. But look at the
> general idea: expecting engineers to refuse support to business doing
> immoral things is taught in every university ethics class. Why not include
> ethics questions in the interview?
So Yammer should only allow a single interpretation of ethics? What about someone who doesn't believe this move is unethical? Yahoo is after all a business, and according to some, the ethical way for a business to behave is to maximize shareholder value [I do not agree with this, for the record, but some people have definitely said it here and elsewhere.] Apparently Yahoo believes this move will achieve that goal. [Remember, we're looking at ethics here, not whether this is a good business move.]
Additionally, if one can make a good case for his/her stance on this issue, does that mean that he/she will be considered as an exception to the no-hire rule? If the CEO of Yammer wants employees who will correct him on ethics issues, then certainly having strong critical thinking skills, and ability to present a compelling argument for an issue should be far more important than being able to "Patents are bad, mmkay?" And having a diversity of viewpoints on these issues would surely also be a benefit, would it not?
Dude, go read the article. His first public statement was a tweet. 160 characters. His statements in the article make it sound like he talked to his buddies before tweeting, had a nuanced position much like the one you are describing (ie working at Yahoo is okay if you have a really really good reason), and then tweeted something a bit sensational to get the idea some news coverage.
Sure, he could have phrased the tweet better. But that's arguably not the point of Twitter :p
On an unrelated note, I can't make heads or tails of your third paragraph. First you argue that the "ethical way for a business to behave is to maximize shareholder value", then you claim that "we are looking at ethics here, not whether this is a good business move". Those two sentences come back to back and appear self-contradictory -- maximizing shareholder value is done by good business moves.
Did you mean that if the Yahoo board believed the action was ethical, then the employees shouldn't care if they think it's ethical? (Or that Yammer's CEO shouldn't care if those employees thought it was ethical?) (Or perhaps that Yahoo employees who stay are better hires, since they won't get in the way of business ethics?)
As you can see I am a bit befuddled by your paragraph three.
As to the question of (good arguers) <> (people with similar ethics) you bring up at the end, I can not say. Personally, the most productive teams I have been on have had relatively heterogeneous beliefs and ethics. Perhaps your experience differs.
After some backlash, Sacks is considering modifying his proposal to only extend to executives and lawyers, but he still feels all employees should take some ownership.
No, no, it is. From the paragraph after the one you are quoting:
“People were telling me I need to think of the Yahoo rank and file, folks who have families, but the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring,”
(Emphasis on were added. Unless janitors are in hot demand in the valley this confirms the statement as is)
In his original statement, the CEO clearly meant anyone at the company (we can assume he didn't mean janitors and such, but he certainly meant engineers.)
Later on, he decided to clarify it only to people with control: executives and lawyers. This would not seem to include engineers.
You're making the statement that you think this should include engineers.
I thought his statement was over the top at first, but after I read the article I say good for him for standing up for what he thinks is right.
We all know that this patent nonsense has got to stop. There is nobody building any app anywhere that does not violate some patent. The only way we are surviving is by being under the radar.
Let's not forgive Yahoo for this like we forgave Amazon. I'm especially pissed at Yahoo for making me take the side of Facebook on something.
If my employer suddenly got into the business of mulching orphans for fertilizer, I'd consider it my personal responsibility to quit/move on as soon as possible.
Yahoo employees should get no blame for decisions they didn't make, but they do have to bear the responsibility for tacitly condoning this behavior. Considering the current job market for software engineers in the Bay Area, the whole "but I need to pay rent" argument doesn't even hold water.
"Considering the current job market for software engineers in the Bay Area, the whole "but I need to pay rent" argument doesn't even hold water."
The whole world (and Yahoo offices) doesn't revolve around the Bay area. And those Bay Area startups? How many will be around in 2 years and how "hot" will the market be then?
Did you go through what happened in the 90's? I don't think you did after looking at your resume.
They have multiple offices in the US as well as around the world. I'm sure also they have plenty of engineers working remotely as well.
"If my employer suddenly got into the business of mulching orphans for fertilizer, I'd consider it my personal responsibility to quit/move on as soon as possible."
The comparison made and context is ridiculous. Why not make it "funnier" then? "If my employer got into the business of raping children then...or "If my employer walked into a high school and..." The point being made by the OP is pretty obvious and doesn't require humor to increase understanding.
Humor might enhance learning of a harder to grasp concept. If done appropriately.
I find posts like this and the OP to be great posturing for the internet masses and really silly. 99% of us out there who work for a company larger than some small startup can find policies or things we don't agree with in our corporate bureaucracy. So we all should be self employed, unemployed or work for a company of < 10 people until we find The One Righteous Company?
Some of us have walked away from good gigs -- forfeiting ownership, abandoning products that we conceived, developed and lived and breathed -- all because someone in control started doing something evil.
I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I have never regretted that decision.
If I were a talented engineer, I would never apply to Yammer in the first place. (Yahoo employee here), I think its time these companies stop thinking so highly of themselves, the sad truth is everyone does patent litigation, fix the system before making sweeping statements or atleast be fair and blame everyone (apple, msft etc included) .There is a bias in the valley against yahoo, some of which is deserved most of which is not. Yahoo has some attractive challenges of scale that might be appealing to some folks and be reason enough to work here. Most of the companies that try to act supercool don't even have a real revenue model.
Also this is the first time I've heard of Yammer, while Yahoo is big and old. Is this even a likely occurrence? Have they had or hired many or any yahoo ex employees in the past?
Headline read to me "Small no name startup says they won't hire employees from huge company that's also never heard of them"
Yammer as a company has almost 300 employees, just raised an $85 million round, is growing like crazy, and has (a lot of) real revenue. Hardly a "small no name startup".
Revenue in 2009 was “seven figures.” I asked Sacks to narrow that down in the video but he refused. He does say that Q1 2010 revenue exceeded all of 2009 revenue, and that revenue is now doubling every quarter. Yammer’s revenue goal by end of year is to be at a $10 million annual run rate.
That's not nothing, but it seems unfair to laud a company for bringing in a lot of real revenue if they don't disclose the actual number.
Agreed. Just reading the headline alone, I wondered to myself how presumptuous he was to assume that many Yahoo employees even wanted to work at Yammer.
Of course it is, but its also a clever strategy to capitalize on engineers who might be feeling poorly about their own company at the moment. As recruiters know, there are a lot of great candidates just under the surface (or 'loose in the socket' as a manager of mine once said). This kind of thing might make them more likely to see employment elsewhere, and like car dealers that offer a free 'umbrella hat' if you will let them get 'first crack at a deal' you can capture some good talent if you are the first company they talk to.
The story helps Yammer reach out to those people and offer them a conversation.
If anyone does go interview there, ask what they they are doing about software patents. One interesting trick would be to let the employee/inventor retain ownership and sign over only a license to the company.
Random people aren't pawns for political initiatives, even when the politics are good. And you can't walk it back to "well, there's already a taint for working at Yahoo" without being the guy who just called everyone at Yahoo incompetent. There were many ways this guy could have expressed a similar sentiment without casting aspersions on hundreds or maybe even thousands of totally reasonable, perfectly competent people. Instead, he picked the most classless possible way to do it.
I blame this on the choice of Twitter as his venue. Everything he said after it, to Venturebeat, is now subject to the distortions of the news cycle. I know of at least one really smart person who works at and thinks highly of Yammer; I have a hard time believing it's really run the way this article makes it sound.
This goes a bit far. I am sure there are fine folks at Yahoo who have achieved seniority that they need to support their families. They may object to how the company does business, but can't just walk away job. Is the hiring situation in the Valley really so intense that anyone could find new work in 60 days?
This is patently untrue. I have a friend who graduated from UCLA with a computing minor who was working (unpaid) in a Stanford lab who couldn't find paying work for over 9 months. And no, he is not some kind of idiot, he got a 2390 on the new SAT and even showers regularly.
The hiring situation with no experience is a slightly different beast, particularly if you're not involved in open source or otherwise generating a lot of public code that people can look at.
People are rightly wary of hiring untested kids fresh out of college because so many of the just plain cannot program their way out of a paper bag. Not to accuse your friend of incompetence, it's just that until you have some kind of real portfolio, it's damn hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
>> So either you're soulless and refuse to leave, or you're incompetent and you're scared to leave
So... in your world, everyone (not soulless and incompetent) is currently employed where they agree 100% with the direction and vision of the company as dictated by management. If, sometime in the future, they don't agree with management decisions, their only course of action is to give notice and leave. Pensions, security, and seniority be damned. Since they must also do this within 60 days (more than enough time according to Yammer), having another job lined up is not guaranteed either.
Maybe I missed the part where Yammer would automatically hire ex-Yahoo employees on the spot, at the same pay-rate and bonus structure, if they quit within 60 days?
I'll put my money where my mouth is. Know a talented engineer over the age of 30? Or 40? Or 50? I know several prestigious firms that would be eager to hire her. Contact me and I'll share my referral bounty with you.
Oh darn it, you said "her", which would be an EEOC win for said corporation (if they had been feeling legal pressure), although women in the profession suffer age discrimination as well - being less numerous, you don't hear about it nearly as much.
The CEO of Yammer is free to hire whomever he wants, but saying you're either soulless or incompetent is a false dichotomy. Just because your employer's use of patents isn't the most important factor in your life doesn't make you soulless. There are much more controversial topics on which reasonable people disagree.
There are few other topics which can threaten the very independence of our profession. That said, patent trolls don't really need engineers—any sociopath who can afford a patent agent can trick the beleaguered USPTO examiners into rubber-stamping an absurdly overbroad patent that claims an entire problem. I'm a little surprised Yahoo didn't assign their patents to some troll who can't be counter-sued.
Things are rarely that cut and dry. That "soulless" programmer could be locked into a contract from an acquisition, or have other reasons that I don't think warrant a presumptuous "soulless" label.
While his stance is perhaps extreme, I think it forms part of a larger rejection of Yahoo by the tech community. Sadly, that's going to hurt everyone- Yahoo has some phenomenal tech going on, but most of it generates no revenue. So, we stop using it, Yahoo just fires the developers and continues on it's "content portal" path. Sad.
I really agree with his sentiments, but sometimes even if someone wants to quit in the next 60 days, they can't.
Example 1: Yahoo buys out your company, but it is more of a talent acquisition rather than a real tech/market grab, and the terms of the deal are marked accordingly.
Example 2: Someone takes a job at Yahoo as a sales exec, but differs all their compensation in favor of stock options that expire at a very specific date.
But yeah, generally I like the direction this is going.
I'm assuming he's also unwilling to hire people from the top 10 or even maybe top 20 internet-related companies, based on my totally unscientific study, in the world? Because, in case he hasn't noticed, everybody is suing everybody these days. I guess those millions of employees world-wide should just all quit in the next 60 days and move to Silicon Valley since the job market is apparently so hot there.
I guess Jonathan Ive should quit Apple and go work for Yammer to save his soul and be considered a good person again.
I feel he's just a loudmouth that's lucky his company isn't big enough or well-known enough for him to get slapped down by his investors and/or board and have his twitter account take away. Regardless of how you feel about his opinion or Yahoo's actions, this is a bad move and a potential PR disaster on his part.
Plus, who would want to work for him now he's shown himself to be the type of person to blame people for actions they had no part in?
And I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks every single employee of Yahoo is worthless, soulless, evil, or whatever, is a total freaking moron.
I wonder if Yammer could issue some sort of legal covenant not to sue that would be binding even if they sold the company or the patent changed hands some other way? It looks like Yammer's CEO filed a patent as recently as last August:
A system and method for collaborative short messaging and discussion are described. According to one embodiment, a computer-implemented method for collaborative short messaging and discussion, comprises grouping users into client networks based on existing shared attributes. System resources are partitioned for messaging across client networks. Users in a client network are allowed to view or respond only to messages within the client network.
I know it's just a summary, but this sounds pretty much exactly like the early days of Facebook when user's were confined to their college "network".
IANAL but people who Are A Lawyer seem to feel that there's no legally meaningful way to place anything in the public domain, currently, at least in the United States.
Write up what you did and publish it somewhere. It's not magic - patent examiners would still need to find what you did, and if the patent is eventually granted and someone sued, it's always expensive to deal with lawsuits even if you're in the right. But if you clearly state what you did and put that write-up in some place that is accessible by others and clearly dated, then you've established that others should not be able to patent it.
The public domain is the wrong place for this, but you can certainly grant irrevocable patent licenses. IIRC this is how the GPL3 works. (Not that you'd have to license under the GPL to use the same strategy, it just shows it's possible)
If everybody would quit because of some (perceived) wrongdoing on part of their employer, most businesses probably would have to close up for lack of employees.
Microsoft and Apple would be history, just for starters.
Y'know, publicly calling on people to quit their jobs based upon one's own political opinions is really unprofessional and if this guy really said that, it says more about him than Yahoo.
Oh, please! I like Yammer (especially Coda Hale's technical abilities), but this is ridiculous. I'm against software patents as much as the next hacker, but treating it like a mortal sin is preposterous. Corporations do far worse things to people and to society than sue other corporations for IP infringement. Drawing the line here, of all places, just shows Yammer's CEO's ethical cluelessness. But I guess he was just pissed and couldn't control himself. It happens.
> Corporations do far worse things to people and to society than sue other corporations for IP infringement.
This isn't just unethical in a general sense. If it were, then yes, corporations do much worse.
The bigger issue is that Yahoo's move here threatens the entire software industry and specifically the internet. Yes, we already have massive patent battles in the mobile space. But they are fought over the selling of smartphones and tablets - hardware. Many of the relevant patents are software ones, so the distinction is not absolute, but at least they still happen in a clearly hardware-orientated space. The players all sell hardware and are already familiar with the patent game from hardware patents. It's bad there, don't get me wrong, but it is - for now - a controlled bad.
Whereas Yahoo's move here does not involve hardware. It doesn't even involve shipping any product at all or even selling one. It's a lawsuit over a website that is free for people to use - one of the most important forms of online business.
Imagine if patent warfare broke out on in the web space. It would be a massacre for big companies and startups alike. Everyone violates patents all the time, its impossible to avoid doing so. If such lawsuits are brought, they would devastate silicon valley. Yahoo's lawsuit here looks, worryingly, like it might be the first attack in such a war.
That's why people are so shocked and react so strongly - and rightly so. Pressuring companies that use software patents, and pressuring their employees to try to effect change internally or consider jumping ship, is something that makes sense for the software industry to do. To do otherwise would be suicidal. Only Intellectual Ventures and other patent holders win if patent warfare becomes commonplace on the internet.
If I remember correctly, Amazon has sued over web-only supposed patent infringement. It's just that Amazon is so big and powerful, while Yahoo has fallen from grace. I hate it when companies feign moral outrage over what is simply corporate warfare. There are very few companies that, when standing over a cliff like Yahoo is, would choose the right thing over using whatever is in their arsenal to survive. So, yeah, changing the rules of the game is a necessity, but it is Yammer's CEO who's crossing the line by implying Yahoo employees are somehow tainted, like ex-Nazis or something.
One company does stand to (possibly) gain from all this - Google.
Amazon did get a lot of flak back then, there was a boycott. And Amazon, thankfully, stopped its lawsuits. Meanwhile we have seen an entire industry - mobile - become a patent battleground, so people are more concerned now then then.
I do see the point that threatening employees to leave or be blacklisted is... disturbing. I think we should put pressure on Yahoo and its employees to change Yahoo's ways, but not like that.
Edit: Google doesn't stand to gain from this. Well sure, in the short term Facebook's loss is Google's gain. But if patent lawsuits become a norm in the internet industry, Google in fact has perhaps the most to lose.
While I hadn't ever heard of Yammer, just one look at the home page makes it seem as though it's a Facebook rip-off (no other way to really say it) just for use in a corporate setting.
Seems as though he's just a little worried that if Facebook bows to the patents his company will be next on Yahoo's hit list.
And worse, the whole layout is a Facebook ripoff. My girlfriend uses Yammer for work and when I took a closer look at it today it seems that most of the IU elements are 1 to 1 copies of Facebook. Pretty sad to be honest.
Wow. Imagine the immaturity and entitlement going on here.
Like a girl/guy, that you don't even know if you want to date, stating emphatically that they won't date you unless you stop immediately from any behavior that they find objectionable. How would that go over?
Who would want to work for (or date) someone who makes a demand like that, regardless of whether you agree with the issue or not?
Patents are, like it or not, one of the weapons of war, if you will, in business. Have been for a long, long time. And, while I too hate the "we invented the button and we have a patent" crowd I also recognize that they exist for a reason.
Denying someone employment because the company they work for seeks to enforce their patents --legitimate or not-- is nothing less than being a dick.
If you want to do something about frivolous patents get involved politically, seek to understand the issues and push to make sensible changes. So, how about it Mr. David Sacks instead of being a total dick by seeking to cause damage to Yahoo employees, would you use your money and influence to help change patent laws?
I have yet to see any of the loud-mouths spouting off about patents offer to do something like put together a fund to be used in pursuing changes to the laws. An, of course, none of them will write a check for a few million to fund it. If I was in a position to get something like this started I would. Maybe someone can reach vocal anti-patent guys like Mark Cuban and ask him to throw the first ten million into the pot to get this going?
With the money available in the top layer of tech companies it should be possible to put together a fund with billions of dollars. This fund could either be available to fight patent trolls or act as a PAC (or both).
Imagine, if you will, what would go through patent troll's minds if they tried to enforce bullshit patents and this group existed.
Let's call it the AFSPL (Americans For Sensible Patent Laws). Furthermore, imagine that this group had massive amounts of money and a whole floor full of lawyers and engineers to throw at the problem. The ACLU of the patent world, if you will.
If someone comes after you with a bullshit patent you could bring it up with the AFSPL for review. And, if they see it your way they defend you. Trolls would disappear almost instantly. Bullshit patents would be invalidated. The skies would turn blue and the birds would sing.
Maybe they could even mount a massive lawsuit against the patent office itself.
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that there's a place for valid an solid patents, even software patents. Having said that, I've read through so many patents that have caused me to yell and scream at the top of my lungs "this is bullshit!" that it is easy to loose hope.
Nah, going after Yahoo employees is crap. Get a grip on reality and put your time, effort and passion behind a real solution.
That could be a little off-base. It seems that this anti-Yahoo-employee rant was triggered in part because he recently got tangled in a patent lawsuit (affecting him directly). Where was he before he got sued? Remaining silent as it happens to others only to act when it happens to you is a form of hypocrisy.
But, I could be wrong.
Frankly, his attack on perfectly innocent folk really ticked me off.
have yet to see any of the loud-mouths spouting off about patents offer to do something like put together a fund to be used in pursuing changes to the laws. An, of course, none of them will write a check for a few million to fund it.
Jeff Bezos was talking a good game there for a while, but nothing ever came of it.
What's "Yammer" and what hiring process is finding them so many qualified potential employees that they can afford to artificially limit the supply?
Also: when you want employees rather than startup founders, you have to expect that they are in it for security rather than ideals. Very few employee-types who are otherwise happy with their company are going to quit over one lawsuit. It's simply not worth not being able to feed your kids.
I only wonder what everyone's opinion on someone who goes to work from 9-5 to do the job they love, then come back home to live the life they love, which doesn't involve reading about the company they work for or reading tech news or doing anything to do with their professional life. I enjoy fishing in my spare time and fixing my rusty, dingy boat, not blogging, working on project or running a startup. I know you probably think i'm terrible engineer and wouldn't want to hire me for your startup, and that's your choice. I love engineering and building stuff but I absolutely refuse to be caught up in my professional life 24/7. I may have a wife and kids. An older parent to take care of. It doesn't matter. What matters is i try to live a life and i only got 1 shot at it. I can imagine there are some folks at Yahoo! who have the same stance on their job/life.
Forget about Yahoo's dumb patent trolling decision for a second...
If you're still working at Yahoo today that sends a clear message to me about how you value innovation, product quality, thought leadership, and other important assets. As an employee you're making an explicit choice that the company you work for merits spending your most valuable asset: your time.
I have been wary of anyone with Yahoo on their resume for the past two years, and will be more wary going forward. This patent troll mess is just another data point in that calculus.
Yahoo is acting distastefully. David Sacks suggests that we threaten and punish those who work there. This includes those who can have no real influence on company strategy.
David Sacks is also acting distastefully.
Therefore if we were to follow David Sack's advice we should now threaten David's gardener and pool-boy.
I'm sure the cafeteria staff, interns, co-op hires, newly hired, green cards and so forth will appreciate being ostracised like this.
I'm not sure whether to mention this, but here goes. I refused to help a company I worked for create a patent, despite the large cash incentive to do so. I didn't want to have my name on a patent for two reason: firstly, I thought companies, especially startups, would increasingly see even engineers who collaborate with the patent system in a negative light. Yammer has proved me right.
Secondly, I didn't want to be personally responsible for making the patent situation worse. Worse? Yes, because despite the assertion made that obviously a good company like ours would only use patents defensively, this was not backed up with any public statement to that effect, nor would even that be binding in the future when management changed or the patent portfolio was sold. Every defensive patent can be used offensively.
The suggestion of a defensive silicon valley patent pool (perhaps owned by some kind of internet foundation), more rights for inventors to control how their patents are used, and pressuring engineers not to collaborate in the creation of bad patents would be a good way out of the current madness without requiring a total overhaul.
This is really funny. He is asking people to leave without promising them a job. What's the downside of leaving - Risking visa, income etc. What's the downside of not leaving - Cannot be hired at Yammer at some future point :) Who cares in this hot job market.
Publicity stunts like this only fit Hollywood. Seems like we have a new culture in Silicon Valley.
If you only decide to stop hiring Yahoo engineers now, you're a bit too late to the game. Anyone who's still at Yahoo1 today is probably someone who hasn't been able to find a job elsewhere. I have interviewed a lot of Yahoo! engineers these past years and it's been an unmitigated (as in 100% rejection) disaster.
I think you have a bad sample set. As an ex-Yahoo! I can tell you there are still a ton of really smart engineers at the company. The YUI team, Hadoop team, and the research group are a few places where you'll find particularly high concentrations, but there's talent throughout the company.
This guy is an idiot. People at Yahoo that do not determine policy may not be at liberty to simply quit their positions. They'll have dependents, mortgages and other long running commitments.
To make blanket statements like this - especially as a CEO - is dumb, plain and simple. I have never used a Yahoo product and I disagree with a lot of things they've done in the past couple of years. But I'd never hold working at some other company during whatever period in their life-cycle against a former employee.
Yes, Yahoo! made a dick move. But that does not mean that everybody working at Yahoo! should be penalized like this.
Is he promising a job to anyone who does leave? It appears not. Although I understand his anti-patent sensibilities, a stick without a carrot makes this announcement seem like little more than publicity-seeking.
The lawsuit itself was a douche move. Now, this guy piles on with more douche-ness.
Incredibly classless move on this guy's part. As if anyone that he would be interested in hiring had anything to do with the lawsuit filing. And trying to apply leverage by calling them out as some sort of accomplice to the suit if they don't leave in 60 days? Talk about not being able to stand in someone else's shoes.
I can think of about a dozen different ways I could have used this as a recruiting opportunity where I didn't sound like a complete dick. This guy obviously doesn't have that capability.
I sincerely don't think Yammer would be able to absorb any significant part of Yahoo's workforce. That said, imagining Yahoos all over took his advice, the company would become a hollow shell with patents.
Does he even realize what kind of damage an NPE the size of Yahoo could make? I assume he knows his threats have no effect on the lawyers Yahoo pays to pursue such actions.
note: instead of a downvote, I'd appreciate constructive feedback or a discussion. You may like Yammer a lot, or even work for them, but I'm more interested on what did you find worthy of a downvote in my post.
Unrelated question. Is it normal to notify your employer of leaving 60+ days in advance, or is it just USA feature? In Europe there is a common practice (and legally binding, if not agreed otherwise upon notifying your employer) of 30 days notice. I'm curios (sorry, if this qualifies as an offoptic).
Honest question: Which law or code does it violate?
It's not like he's refusing to hire people of color or Vietnam veterans or even transsexuals. (Edit: I realize it might sound strange, but there's a legal basis behind that ordering it's not just my preferences :-)
He's refusing to hire certain resume' histories arguing that it is professionally relevant.
First of all this is non-merit discrimination; which should bar yammer from doing business with government, and contractors. Check out their fron-page, the top of their customer list is Pitney-Bowes.
Second, he is creating a hostile work environment for his own employees who may feel differently about the case, or who have come from companies that collapsed as he is expecting Yahoo would.
I think he's saying that it is an issue of merit, in the sense that he considers it a negative indication of the judgment of an applicant.
Hostile work environment? Meh. Sure maybe somebody could bring a suit, maybe they could even have a chance at winning if he was beating people on the head with it every day. But I doubt many startup execs would worry about it to the point they would let it censor their behavior.
Who really cares what yammer does or says? I wasn't all that impressed with the app when using it. Are they a company anyone actually actively seeks out for employment as anything other than "I can't find anything I like, might as well"?... Fail
my first reaction to this was similar to most people here, that this guy is just looking for publicity and why punish the good engineers at yahoo for this.
However, I do remember the SCO fiasco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO-Linux_controversies . The feeling I got from the tech community was that SCO engineers were certainly black listed from alot of jobs at other tech companies.
I guess it's worth exploring what makes Yahoo and SCO different.
I sat in on an interview for a at that time current SCO Engineer. He told us about his current projects like getting Firefox running on their Unix platform. None of us wanted to work with him even though he had the skills we were looking for.
This seems a bit of a broad swath for my taste, as Yahoo is a big place, but when screening resumes, someone listing their software patents is an automatic strike 1 and 2 in my book.
I think it is a bit unfair as a policy, unless then used those patents themselves. While not ideal, right now it would be silly not to attempt to register defensive patents given the resources to do so.
I don't search to see if you've ever filed for one, but putting it on your resume to me says that you want to work for a company that promotes them. The day may come when I have to file defensive patents of my own, but I'll never brag about it.
And as jongraehl said, there's still one strike left :)
Alberts point re pooling startup patents is interesting, and may have relevance for tech on tech litigation. But it doesn't defend against the shell troll entities.
Well, i think actually, perhaps a call for developers to refuse to participate in software patents, refuse to put your name on it, might be more effective.
Pretty much everyone is missing that the patent situation isn't the only reason an employer might frown on Yahoo employees. The company has been moving sideways (at best) for quite some time and better employees tend to leave in those circumstances. The patent move was just the final straw.
While it's a perfectly fine choice to ostracize Yahoo for their actions, Yammer's CEO is going to end up looking like little more than a hypocrite at the least, and maybe a dipshit, if he doesn't apply the same rules to all companies equally based on behavior.
The odds the CEO will apply the same rule to all other companies acting with patent belligerence? Approximately zero. They'd need a substantial piece of tracking software just to attempt it, and then it'd be down to subjective whim as to which company employees deserves to be 'punished'.
Lame.
Here's what it's equivalent to intellectually (using an extreme example to frame it): Joseph Stalin was evil, therefore everyone in the USSR was evil; never allow anyone from the USSR to immigrate.
Sometimes it's not so simple as to pack up and leave your job when, say, you have children and a family to look out for or any number of a zillion other considerations in life (which is already hard enough in general). Really makes me think the CEO is a serious jerkwad.
Actually he specifically mentioned people with families.
' “People were telling me I need to think of the Yahoo rank and file, folks who have families, but the talent market in Silicon Valley is so hot right now, the only folks staying at Yahoo are the ones who have stopped caring,” Sacks told VentureBeat. '
The problem here is that a huge number of talented people almost certainly do work for Yahoo without ever paying attention to the news cycle. Lots of talented people don't have startup ambitions; they bust their ass from 9-5 and come home to their families and their woodworking and charcuterie hobbies. Sure, they probably all have a sense that Yahoo isn't on a great trajectory, but they have no urgent need to leave. Yahoo might even be a better deal for them; pick the wrong startup and you could be hunting for a job again in 6 months.
It isn't reasonable to start penalizing people like that for the actions of Yahoo management; or, at least, if it is, it's not reasonable to do it over patent lawsuits. Patent lawsuits aren't a big enough issue to justify collective punishment.
I'm a little surprised at the tacit support I read out of this comment.
(For what it's worth: I have just as much to fear from patent suits as anyone else; my field is riddled with them).
This is simply a more visible indicator that a person doesn't care about the company they work for. That's fine for giant corporations, but amazingly deadly for startups.
The nicest thing Patrick McKenzie ever said about us was:
If I were looking for a day job, I wouldn't be looking for a day job any more: they're friendly, happy people who get social license to join the Dark Side, do smart stuff all day, and then go home while it is still light out.
I have a set of things I need to get done. It is my job as a company owner to help constrain and groom the subset of what's getting done every day so that the business prospers without burning through people like charcoal briquettes. And In my experience doing that, the lifestyle that team members want to lead hasn't proven to be correlated at all with what's actually getting done.
You can hire however you want. It is, I sincerely believe, your loss.
If you can code, particularly in C, are interested in software security, are good at learning lots of things very fast, and get rejected from whatever job "subwindow from Hacker News" was hiring for because you aren't startup-y enough, please consider dropping us a note. We don't think like him.
People in the startupsphere (who in many cases have been doing things since, what, 2007?) fail to understand the amount of capable accomplished people there are that have never read HN or know who Arrington or Wilson or Graham are. In their mind these people simply aren't cut from the right bolt of cloth to work at a startup. I mean they don't know what the word pivot means and god knows they might actually waste time doing sysadmin work themselves on a server. And wow it actually took them like 10 or 20 years to learn what some young hotshot learned in 1 year.
I happened to mention sometime over the last year to my "go to" guy (who happens to run a security team of 17 at some major consulting company and who flys around the world on assignments so, um, I guess he knows what he is doing which is why I rely on him) anyway I told him he might find HN interesting to read. He took a look and said he had been reading PG's essays "for years" but never knew about YC or HN.
Yup. Give those people 2 days to learn a new instruction set for an architecture that's only ever synthesized onto an FPGA, then reverse firmware compiled to that architecture back to an exploitable overflow. They'll do it. And they won't even use Mongodb to do it.
You're simply measuring passion in a different way. The (very, very small number of) people who can do this are very passionate about the work, as we both know, and this shines through in the work they do in and out of the day job.
But let's say you saw someone that was coming from a security consultancy that started doing interesting, challenging work and then turned into a shop doing nothing but the same web pentests day in and day out. Don't you think you'd seriously question whether they're capable of doing the challenging work, or still hungry for that kind of work? I know I'd think twice about it. I think that's why people are so against the people left at Yahoo; it's a company that's been on a downward trajectory for a long while, and is actively doing Bad Things (TM). It's not unreasonable to expect that someone that's ok with that (or blind to it) isn't going to be a fantastic hire, but that doesn't mean there aren't certainly exceptions.
Some people have had their choices severely constrained by circumstances. A categorical 'I won't hire from company 'x'' without any willingness to look at circumstances is silly.
Another thing the guy overlooks: these people could simply be extremely loyal and may hope that given Y!'s scale that there is a chance that the right management team could make things work. Other companies have been in bad shape and have survived eventually.
Loyalty is an excellent quality and penalizing it is stupid. You really shouldn't hire based on where people used to work, you should hire based on your needs, team fit and skills.
I have no idea where you got the idea that I want people to be burned like charcoal. I'm absolutely not in favor of that. Work hours are the least important factor in why I wouldn't hire the theoretical employee you described. It's the lack of ambition- the lack of enthusiasm towards the field.
In a startup you can't have unambitious employees- regardless of how talented they are. You have to have people who challenge the way things are done or the company will grow stagnant and won't seize opportunities to pivot.
I think people should care. If you spend half of your waking life at work, you should be proud of what you do and the people you work with. Pride in your work is one of the single largest contributors to happiness (more so than family, but that is largely tangential to the point).
Quite frankly I don't think that most of the people left at Yahoo care. If they cared, or had ambition, or had enthusiasm towards the web, they would leave.
If they cared, or had ambition, or had enthusiasm towards the web, they would leave.
A similar heuristic applied to me would have returned NOHIRE approximately 80% of the days during my working career and, critically, 100% of the days I was actually available for hire (+). There exist at least a few companies looking for caring, ambitious, enthusiastic employees at which somebody similar to me would be a pretty good fit. Isn't that a fairly silly heuristic next to attempting to measure e.g. ambition or enthusiasm?
On the other hand, if your company is just drowning under a deluge of qualified programmers willing to work for peanuts at the moment, and you get 5 star-spangled resumes thrown over the transom every day, feel free to be picky.
+ Joel Spolsky had a great article back in the day about how the best prospective are on the public employment markets essentially never. This plus the general market economics argument that you're most likely to find value by exploiting a difference between the true value of something and what other people value it as suggest to me that if there were a rock that Silicon Valley culturally scorned I would be checking under it very carefully looking for juicy wor... OK, the metaphor breaks a little bit, but you get the idea.
As a developer, it's fantastic to read your perspective on this: I am glad there are entrepreneurs out there who don't buy into the cargo-cult of startup geek burnout.
If anything, I'd be wary of someone who is too into their craft - they might consider actual results a lower priority. Nobody likes a "star programmer".
This is simplistic binary thinking - life is not black and white. Judging people by ticking boxes on a checklist shows a lack of understanding of people and the complexity of motivations.
Maybe the employee feels the project they are working on is worthwhile, maybe they thinks that if they can get their project to succeed, it will negate the need for Yahoo to pursue patent litigation, or maybe, the employee has loyalty and passion for Yahoo and will stick with it through thick and thin to try and turn it around. They sound like qualities any startup would benefit from in an employee.
Yet, you judge all employees on a single issue made by someone else at the company.
I don't get the start up hype. Start ups are great. But not all start ups are great. Similarly not all big companies are bad.
There are a certain things only a big companies can do, Big companies put man on moon, put satellites into orbits, invented the first mobile phone, build mainframes, manufacture drugs that save billions of lives on planet etc.
Minus some very bad places, if you can't do great work where your are now. You won't do it any where else.
There are a lot of brilliant people who work in big corporations on things that are important. You may not see them or their work as upfront as Google's homepage. But every time you take your medication, every time you swipe your credit card. Some one some where is building stuff that makes such a thing possible.
Just curious, what specifically is the indicator that a person doesn't care for the company? I didn't get that impression from reading the GP.
Is it not paying attention to the news cycle? Or knowing that the company is on a bad trajectory but still working there? Surely it's not the focus on work-life balance.
I could see myself working at Yahoo. I bet they still have interesting problems to work on. Yahoo Research does awesome stuff with computational advertising. Hypothetically speaking, would this opinion disqualify me from your hiring consideration?
It's not this particular issue. I don't care all that much about patents. It's mostly that Yahoo has been a zombie corporation for a long while and has key symptoms of not being able to foster creativity or innovation.
There may be interesting things going on inside Yahoo, but I'm not aware of them. Every single thing that I found interesting about Yahoo has withered or completely died in the last 5+ years.
Exactly. It's amazing how many people are saying "well, there are lots of programmers who don't pay attention to the latest technology, you can't just refuse to hire them".
But you can and you should.
Anyone at Yahoo/MS today is (on average) already under suspicion of being 2nd tier and a notch below a Facebooker/Googler. And those Yahoo engineers who stick through this one will tend to be the 3rd tier. They aren't going to see this Yammer thread and they sure aren't going to get hired by a good startup.
So why even bring them up in this thread? We're talking about the good folks left at Yahoo, the guys who are like Jeremy Zawodny and Prabhakar Raghavan, who want to leave before Jerry Yang's company completes its transformation into SCO.
Not the time punchers who don't know what the clock says.
Yahoo is an enormous company with lots and lots of different products some of which are operating at massive scale and would require a very knowledgeable team to work on them.
They pioneered a lot of those 'latest technologies' there and you'd be lucky to be able to hire them. Ditto for microsoft. If you think these are 'backwards' companies then you have no idea of what is going on there.
You are making blanket statements about untold thousands of people without any knowledge about the individuals at all. You can not make such statements. You can only make such statements about individuals, never about groups.
Of course you can make statements about groups. In a different context, most of the people here agreed with this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it.
Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't
realize how much they suck. They still think they can
write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards
of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years
ago.
That was 2007. A generalization about a group of people's ability to write software, which arose from observation of their company's products and behavior. If that's not legitimate, I suppose all must have prizes.
Within every large enough group there will be individuals that you'd be more than happy to hire.
What most people here agree with does not change the facts.
Microsoft as a company may suck (and even that depends on your viewpoint, I would agree with that statement but plenty of people do not and they may have just as much reason to believe their opinions as I do) but that does not automatically translate into 'everybody that works at microsoft sucks'.
Oh, and they're still one of the largest software companies and one of the largest companies in general. There's bound to be interesting work and interesting people within its walls.
Im sorry but this is an incredibly sad and dehumanizing way of perceiving people and their skills. Can you make us a full list of all SV companies so we all can know where we stand on your tiered list and accordingly, what startups will and won't hire us?
SELECT * FROM companies WHERE field='tech' ORDER BY growth_rate, market_cap;
That will roughly correspond to a rank ordering of companies that are both growing and big. Apple and Facebook will be near the top of that list. Yahoo and Microsoft much lower.
You could also do it Turing style, analyzing LinkedIn data to see which company is raiding which for talent. Very few Googlers are going to MS. And very few Facebook people are going to Google. Like PageRank, these migration signals give you a rank ordering of desirability.
You can rank colleges the same way, which is why people from Stanford and MIT are usually in the headlines for technological breakthroughs and why people from Directional State are not.
To be fair to MS, there's lots of interesting stuff going on there. I have a friend who's working on the .NET CLR, and it would be foolish to think that he's not working on extremely awesome stuff.
At the same time, I don't know of anything like that at all going on at Yahoo. And he doesn't go home at 5pm.
You misinterpreted and/or mischaracterized what was said. Paying attention to new software development practices has nothing to do with reading tech news. Additionally, your perspective seems grossly shallow.
The university I work at, without any kind of official direction, has had the entire staff body move from the internal mailing list to Yammer for staff chat. It is brilliant.
Was just being annoyed by the 60 day thing really, purely as I am not sure I would want to hire someone who jumped someone else's ship just because I set a deadline.
I shouldn't really extend my annoyance to being snarky about their products as I admittedly know little about them.
When the patent system is so fundamentally broken, and will take years to fix through political means, drastic measures have a certain logic to them.
Are there a lot of other public companies in SV that have a patent portfolio the size of Yahoo who are going after non-public companies with broad, web 2.0 patents? I think you could count on two hands the number of software companies with the patent portfolio the size of Yahoo (not counting NPE like IV).
If Yahoo succeeds with Facebook, they will extract this tax out of every new web company that is a success. And down the road, if MSFT really falls off, they will do the same.
Somebody has to draw a line in the sand. Get the employees to stand against this, because the mgmt never will.
It isn't hypocritical. If you know someone behaves in a manner you think is unethical, you don't have to ignore it just because that information might be less accessible for the next candidate. You use the information you have about each individual candidate. If one candidate got caught stealing office supplies and you somehow know about it, you take that into account rather than ignoring it just because the next guy may have gotten away with it.
I agree that your example is extreme. But I think that its extremeness invalidates it. There's a big difference between immigration and employment. Many families depend on a single country's immigration policies to be together. People who are barred from one company can seek employment at another company.
David Sacks' move is personal, and moves made out of frustration are often hypocritical, and I'm not surprised it's going to piss some people off. I'm glad this is just one person and one medium-sized company. If Apple, Microsoft, or Google announced this type of policy in a press release I'd be disgusted. It's easy for me to shrug it off when a CEO of a company with fewer than 500 employees announces it in a tweet and quickly waters it down significantly. https://twitter.com/#!/DavidSacks/status/179788086862028800
No he's not. The patent move isn't the only reason to frown on Yahoo employees. The company has been moving sideways for quite some time which is when good employees tend to leave for better opportunities.
Even if Yahoo has been on a downward spiral, it is foolish to think that all of the good people will leave. Even if you are good at what you do, trying to find a new job is a humiliating, degrading, and terrifying experience for many people.
I'm not a programmer (yet), but I work in a technical field that is currently experiencing a similar level of growth. Having worked for the same employer for over 9 years, it wasn't an easy decision to make when I decided to leave. Now that I am searching for a job in an industry where everyone claims to be facing a desperate shortage of qualified personnel, I find it rather difficult to convince someone to even grant me an interview.
It is far too easy to judge the actions of a family man who has a wife and kids to worry about when you are the CEO of your own company.
There are a lot of good people toiling away at Yahoo for one reason or another. In particular, work visas can tie you to the company for a good portion of a decade.
Just to take one example I'm familiar with, Flickr still has a lot of top-notch people.
It can be done. Look at the US. Ever had to fill out, 'Not a member of the Nazi Party between 1933-1945? The US Citizenship test in no way makes the US look like a 'serious jerkwad.'
My original intent was to point out with sarcasm how taking what this CEO said as anything more than a publicity stunt/icebreaker for employees looking to leave yahoo, is absolutely absurd. OP is a result of way too much naval gazing on a pretty cut and dry topic. Yahoo is acting the villain, so let's incentivize employees to leave them. I don't think anyone believes seriously that the CEO is either going to keep a big list, or start acting this way towards other valley companies. He is capitalizing on the hype surrounding yahoos use of the 'nuclear option.'
Implementation of such a system is riddled with flaws, as evidenced by the fact that the US still asks people [ with a straight face as well ] if they were a member of the Nazi party on current citizenship tests.
To add some perspective Yahoo has just entered the ranks of a Grade-A patent troll. That is the _worst_ of their offenses. That puts them in the same league as Intellectual Ventures. That's it. They're no worse.
Let's not lose sight of that. There's no real "news" here, apart from the sad realization that this is the strongest signal yet that Yahoo is now just an empty shell of suits, bean counters, and lawyers.
To be clear, Yahoo has implemented and currently has in production the things covered by the patents. As much as I don't like what they are doing, they are pretty far above a patent troll.
Nice, pretty solid bit of Godwin's Law trolling. I'm not interested in debating this to the level of detail that will spare me being called a nazi by someone on the internet, so suffice it to say that _any_ blacklist based on generalized attributes and affiliations will unfairly target innocents.
Companies have lots of tactics to shorten applicant stacks ("wrote a personalized cover letter", "minimum 12yrs experience HTML5", "name printed in blue"). Power to Yammer if they want to add "dates employed at yahoo" to the list - talented folks will have little trouble finding work.
It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole. It's the model case.
> It's really really hard to avoid Godwin when discussing the responsibility of the rank and file of an organization for the actions of the whole.
This is a deeply idiotic statement. In fact, it's quite easy to talk about how much responsibility Yahoo employees have for the intellectual property lawsuits started by management, and yet not make use of comparisons to the Nazis.
When the roads into Sunnyvale have signs saying "Arbeit macht frei" over them, then you can feel free to make such comparisons. Till then, you're a complete jackass.
No, it's not. It's a debate commonly held when people claim to be innocent of the actions of an institution that they were a part of, and the source of modern debates about the ethics that apply are sourced in the writings of Arendt about the subject. You're not the only person in the room that realizes that Yahoo aren't the Nazis, Facebook aren't the victims of WWII, and Yammer certainly isn't Nurnburg, so cut the name calling and histrionics.
Just because naked mole rats aren't ants doesn't mean you can't refer to ants when talking about them, silly.
I think the Godwin-ing of the thread happened in the original post, which referred to Stalin. Responding with Nazi stuff is not an escalation at that point.
Does checking that off automatically disqualify you from being a citizen or does it simply spark an investigation into what your role was in the party?
One of my friends Dad immigrated here after WWII from Germany and he was HY (forced) and he got his citizenship. From his decription, it only triggers a check against of list of people the US would like to have a "deeper conversation" with.
As a good example for how long it might take people to wise up about IP (it needs to be abolished wholesale), take note that US citizenship stuff still asks if people are a member of the Communist Party.
I think you're confusing his argument with Godwin's law because of the similarity with a nazi analogy. But above all, the Godwin's law is an Ad Hominem, which is not what guimarin is doing. He's just fighting an analogy with another analogy.
I do agree that both of them have bad analogies :) But that's a different problem, it's not an Ad Hominem.
I guess that it won't go far more than just a statement from one CEO. Hope, other Valley CEOs are more reasonable and will take arguments like yours into consideration.
Better to be a bit of an unfair bully than to do sit around while parasites send the industry down the toilet. It's like chemotherapy: sometimes you have to hurt the body to kill off the cancerous cells.
This reeks of publicity seeking - which reflects even more poorly on the CEO. He's willing to vilify innocent workers to promote his company - so not only does he exhibit poor judgement, he's also unethical.