No offense, but Yahoo's management is just -bad- and it shows. There's a lack of vision, direction, and execution from the top; the fish is rotting from the head. I've heard this directly from Yahoo VPs, managers, and engineers.
Yahoo is like an aircraft carrier in Lake Superior. Sure, it's capable of so much, but it can't turn that into useful action.
After interviewing dozens of folks from yahoo, I've pained the following picture about the engineering there - the vast majority of it is stuck in 1995, some bits of it have evolved isolated from the rest of the tech world - it's steam punk, then there are a few parts that are shiny and new but skin deep. It seems like a sad place.
Nearly no one I've interviewed from yahoo has bad-mouthed their former employer, so my negative bias is from working with people that have passed the technical interview and have been hired... the quirks that people pick up after working at yahoo for many years are odd to me (like the strange desire to put squid in front of everything).
LBO's and their ilk are dramatic.
One restructuring guy I know would have a goal of eliminating all but 3 managers from an acquired group of 300 within 6 months.
Don't take it seriously, the *-world writers are habitually underinformed about the topics they write on. I don't read them much, but every time I see them posted to HN, on topics I have even a casual understanding of, I can spot the factual errors. I wouldn't give any stock to their analysis of the current situation over at Yahoo.
http://twit.cachefly.net/floss0179.mp3
"We talk about the Apache Traffic Server, a proxy server that you probably don't realize you are already using.
Guests: Leif Hedstrom and Bryan Call"
I work at Yahoo, joined a few months ago, run engineering management for a couple of teams working on high-performance cloud stuff very core to the way Yahoo works. I find the engineers sharp and smart, the technology problems fascinating (insane scale/perf requirements) and in general, look forward to getting up and driving to Sunnyvale every morning.
None of that is going to change unless something really dramatic happens.
P.S We're hiring. :) If any of you want to work on a platform serving a ridiculous (and I do mean ridiculous) number of requests and users, hacking on cutting-edge distributed programming work, send me email (address on my profile).