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.

No, you can't.

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.