I'll be honest, this is a pretty despicable comment, Ryan. The fact that you personally don't like the culture at Yahoo certainly does not mean that everyone who is talented also dislikes the culture at Yahoo. For example, I know a very talented woman who chooses to work there because her judgement is that the company has superior procedures for dealing with sexism. Versus, say, the generally-toxic startup scene. You should carefully consider whether you actually understand why someone would choose to stay in a situation like this, because I suspect you don't.

Beyond the fact that I don't think you understand the reasons why people would stay at a company like Yahoo, I don't think you actually know much about the people who work there. Yahoo owns Tumblr, which still employs some of the best engineers I've ever met. More than 20% of the hires the first year after the Mayer takeover were boomerangs, which is a good indication that your implication that between 2009 and now Yahoo suddenly lost every talented non-immigrant employee is just wrong. And so on.

I'm not saying this to pick on you or just to be critical for its own sake. I'm sure you're a nice person. But this comment was just painful to read. Please think carefully about this sort of thing before you say something else like it.

EDIT: Ah, HN. Where telling someone that a company with 10,000 employees probably does in fact have a few talented engineers earns you anonymous down votes. :(

Technically competent and borderline-or-better ambitious people do not work at Yahoo!, generally.

There exception are people who are trapped there (H1B, a massive side project, sick family member, whatever), or are vesting out after M&A. Come back to this in 0.5 to 3.5 years when the Tumblr team have filled their vesting.

(You can make a reasonable case that big companies are better at EoE than startups, but I don't see a strong case that Yahoo! is better than Apple or Google or ...)

This is because the culture at Yahoo! has been horrible in terms of actually turning technology into products, or at any real innovation. A succession of utterly incompetent CEOs and ossified and incompetent upper management pretty much killed the company, technically.

Every Yahoo! I've talked to said it was a "nice" place to work if you're just collecting a paycheck. It was a horrible place to actually try to do anything meaningful (with a few exceptions, like Panama, and even then). So, it depends on your goals with a job: a paycheck ,or a chance to change the world. It's up to the individual which it is.

However, people who are neither competent nor ambitious are irrelevant in general, and those who aren't both are largely irrelevant in creating anything new. (I know many highly-competent but situationally-lazy people who remained at Yahoo! a bit longer than was good for them. They had impressive personal projects during that time. They were vastly happier when they moved on to other companies.)

(As an indicator: outside of Government, Yahoo! had more contractors in more key roles than anywhere else I've ever seen. Microsoft had a lot of contractors, too, but they were generally not in core roles, and after that court case, were only there for ~a year.)

So, I stand by my original comment.

Let's recap a bit. You said there wasn't any talent. I said that's not true, and there talented people who have good reasons for staying. You now say that the culture sucks and the talented people who stay are there because of they're handcuffed, or because they're lazy, or they're going to leave soon.

My opinion is that you're now debating a completely different set of points.First you only told us that no one talented works there, and I think we both know that's just wrong. That you haven't brought it up again indicates that you concede this point. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Look. This is not to say that everything you've said is completely wrong. A lot of what you say is true. But I do think your case is pretty overstated, especially since these things depend pretty dramatically on which team your on. The disparity between a good Yahoo team and a good Google team is miniscule, even though the difference between a good Yahoo team and a bad Yahoo team is really high.

There might be some talent at Yahoo, but its exodus can't be denied. However, I did actually see Yahoo re-attract some talent after Mayer's ascent. So as with most anything else, you have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis and neither "hire anyone from Yahoo without any consideration" nor "never hire anyone who worked at Yahoo past a certain date" are both wrong.

That said, majority of Yahoo employees fit neither into "not employable elsewhere" nor "absolute genius who is hanging on because he is working on the Cure Cancer feature of Yahoo Horoscopes". Far more common were/are people who joined either from graduate school, a startup that burnt them out, a far crappier industry (e.g., government, finance, etc...), who wanted to do something cool (and usually there were chances to do that at least initially on the team you joined) and stayed despite much badness (e.g., their project being cancelled) _not_ because they did not think they could do something as good elsewhere, but because being at Yahoo was a known quantity of pain.

That's the default mode of behavior for most people and it's fine to hire these kinds of people as long as there are others to balance them out -- but not into leadership roles at startups (anyone of the first 15 people in a startup is probably in a leadership role even as an individual contributor). That said there are limits: there were people who were doing very little in their roles and thought neither internal transfers, nor job transfers, nor personal side projects -- I'd have a hard time hiring such a person.

Keep in mind that WhatsApp founders did leave to found WhatsApp (obviously...) and when they were at Yahoo they worked on very challenging and interesting things. They were early employees (as in 96-98), (de-facto or de-jure) technical leaders, and Yahoo was their baby: they had a vested interested and non-negligible ability to have a positive impact at Yahoo and they certainly did.

"Worked at Yahoo! 1997-~1999" seems like a very strong positive signal on a resume (maybe less so now because there have been other similarly great periods in other companies, but certainly in the early to mid 2000s). Not a "hire without any consideration", but I'd certainly weigh it highly. I'm not sure what the end date on that should be -- clearly by 2007-2008, but I don't remember the best people going there in mid-2000s either as new hires; there were still existing good people, but mainly they entered through M&A.