Incidentally, I agree with the commenters here who've pointed out that the cancellation of the project and layoff itself hardly seem unreasonable or tragic. It's the corporate culture I'm commenting on. If this vignette is indicative, Yahoo is in worse shape than I thought.

I find it hard to talk about "the nature" of a company the size of Yahoo - this is more the "weasliness" of some HR employee which didn't get corrected by the structure of the company. Of course, it doesn't say anything about the many brilliant employees that had nothing to do with the layoffs.

I don't. I noticed years ago that organizations have distinct characters that seem mostly to trace back to their originators. Sometimes the connection is so strong that it almost seems the company itself has a personality. It's true the effect may weaken as companies get big (bureaucracy is depressingly uniform), and we're talking about patterns not laws (lots of room for individual variation), but what's striking is how noticeable the effect is despite those caveats.