hmmmmm.. an interesting theory... except i think yahoo has more of a revenue problem.... not infrastructure... all the optimized servers in the world won't help if users won't search/drive revenue.

Good effort though.. You really are swinging at everyone.

@TangledWebWatcher: "You really are swinging at everyone."

Yup. I think we're on the fourth version of Yahoo's "real" leadership problem, now.

you're certainly right about ash being a do nothing layabout. are any of the early employees useful in any way whatsoever? i guess they hang around (some even having left and returned) because it's easier to believe you're something more than just a lottery winner if you never try something else. while the founders' loyalty to these flunkies is touching, giving control of product and editorial to a bunch of underservingly wealthy b-teamers (and finding comfortable spots in policy and tech for others) isn't exactly the way to build a future or inspire morale. maybe sue decker can help with morale...or then again...

Swinging at everyone, indeed. So ... Valleywag doesn't like Yahoo. Got it.

You're wrong on this one. While yahoo technology and processes could be improved in some areas, David is one of the good guys.

@buzzzkilll: On the contrary. Valleywag loves Yahoo. If we didn't care so much, we'd just ignore it.

Filo: First in, last out!
Give the guy some respect. What other multi-billionaire engineer shows up to work every day and actually pushes code?

If you ever went thru hardware review - you would agree with it...

filo is not the problem, the guy just writes code.

if the people that were suppose to come with the good ideas to make money only comes with crappy ones, you can't blame the code monkey writing the code for the crappy idea.

From what I hear one of the biggest roadblocks to progress inside Yahoo is directly attributable to the Paranoids. They are part of the organization responsible for overall system security. They are extremely resistant to change and have essential veto power over software deployment. Furthermore, I hear that they make it practically impossible to deploy new software by forcing folks to jump through endless hoops (read endless meetings/paperwork/reviews etc) in order to get anything done

Where's Zod when you need him?

High-Fives all around! ;)

While the uninformed punditry and random opinions abound (like assholes, all blogs have them), your description of the architecture and miserable stygian bureaucracy entangling any hope of improvement jibes with discussions I've had with friends who work there.

My play on the old "opinions are like assholes.." adage seems to have fallen flat on its, er, face. Apologies for the gaffe. This is what I get for trying to catch up before bed.

Christ, I had to log in just to comment about how much I agree with this.

Just ask any technical Yahoo about the dreaded Hardware Review Committee (HRC). In preparation for this, you have to fill out pages and pages of questions dealing with every aspect of your technology and arbitrary guesses for how much traffic your site will get.

Then you actually go to the HRC meeting where you have to plead your case in front of the high-level techies, Filo included. It very much feels like you're a peasant going before the king to beg for bread for your family.

Quite often, the HRC members will grill the people asking for the hardware over the smallest details. You breathe a sigh of relief if they actually grant your request, then you realize "What the fuck? We're all supposed to be on the same fucking side!"

Then you get bitter, quit, and post about your experiences on Valleywag in a late-night rant.

This time you got it wrong guys. As much as I agree with everyone on valleywag, I have to disagree on this one.

The people who actually dread going to the HRC are the senior executives or who took crash course in IT and landed a job in Y!, ones who just open their mouth to say "I need 20 Qty of 5 processor machine.. :-)" -- trust me, there are plenty of them

I 've gotten thousands of machine without even a ppt, without any papers.

Filo is one of those guys who is very careful, sometimes to the extent of being paranoid but hey, look around him, he's gotta be that way. At least he practises what he teaches.

@adam_b

you would have gotten your 68 machines if you could explain why does each of your frontend machine do only 5 QPS while serving vyc.

I would have thrown you out of that room; the hrc just asked you to come back with numbers :-)

I think the problem is that Jerry, David and to some extend Steve are out of touch with reality. It is not a leadership problem, or at least it is a out-of-touch-leadership problem. They need straight talking, and a person of trust that has balls to say what is.

I had a pre-sentiment that the MSFT-YAHOO deal would fail.

I could see that Google would not support Yahoo's BoD and potential competitor.

And I don't talk about my almost psychic abilities even... I just talk about common sense extrapolations.

I don't know, but I would offer my services, and run candidate to be on the MSFT or YAHOO! BoD if that is required. Just leave me a message on ValleyWag, Jerry or Steve, okay? I have alot of common touch an revolutionary ideas...

Best wishes,

Here I'd have to respectfully disagree with nevermindy.

The process not only delayed releases, it killed off many small experiments before they could start - it's just too much of a pain in the ass to get servers to play around with, and therefore people don't bother, and therefore a lot of the serendipitous events that make a tech company successful never happened.

There's plenty of leadership blame to go around at Yahoo -- no need to pin down just one reason. How could you when they screw up so consistently across the board? They've blown it on both functional and technical leadership.

The functional failures are relatively well-publicized, and more just continue to roll out of Sunnyvale everyday -- like little gifts tied with a bow and dropped off on the doorsteps of Kara and Owen. I'm sure that Yang's next announcement will be 100 days of high-fives. Kara can roll out her vision quest vigil again.

Yahoo's technical failures haven't been covered enough. I recently had a chance to see behind the scenes into Yahoo's tech structure, and it's a mess. Each site/team operated somewhat autonomously, and they now have a screwed-up mishmash of technologies that don't work together -- resulting in crappy front-end experiences like constantly popping new windows because, as you navigate from the front page to site sections, they're taking you to completely separate environments.

I don't know when Filo's HRC was created. I'll be generous and assume it was a response to the FUBAR'd tech "strategy" of the previous ten years and he's trying to prevent more of the same mess. More likely, though, this committee was part of the problem.

I have an offer from Yahoo and couple of other offers from financial firms. I am still deciding as to which offer to take. Any suggestions/recommendations greatly appreciated

Actually, the HRC experience is an interesting one. Having sat in on HRC meetings and see the way that some engineers are treated is pretty funny. Although, when Panama was in the throws of development, those engineers got any and every piece of hardware they wanted. This was often without even having to present anything at the HRC. "Panama" was the one word that got you any piece of hardware you wanted.

"Ah, we need that for Panama".

"APPROVED".

Now look at the revenue giant Panama has become.

Anyway, stop blaming anyone and everyone about what a mess Yahoo! is in. Let's just fix it and move on. The company is a household name. Don't lose that. Don't let your own pride get in the way of making the company great once again. Focus, focus, focus. Get rid of the do nothing VP's and Directors that cannot lead their teams. Get rid of the people who are unable to make decisions on their own and just kiss everyone's ass to keep their jobs. Get people into key positions that actually have some balls, can make hard decisions and can execute on plans.

Every annual review, my boss used to say to me "sometimes you have to lose a battle to win the war". What kind of bullshit is that? If you win all the battles, don't you win the war by default? Stand your ground and don't let other people who are lazy assholes try and push you around so that they look important to their bosses so they don't get their asses kicked out of the door.

Come on Yahoo!. Hire some management with balls. Leave Jerry and Filo alone. They don't need to go anywhere, they just need good people around them.

@longtailwagsthevalley:

It was luck that we beat Lycos, Excite, Netscape, AOL, Infoseek and so on and so on?

There was luck involved, sure, but there were also good decisions made.

I do know lots of us retired to go live our lives and the next crop that came in (say 1998-2002) drove the bus into a ditch.

@Owen

David Filo the real leadership problem? Hmmmm. There's plenty of blame to go around at Yahoo. It's a political quagmire with layers and layers of paralyzing and damaging CYA analysis conducted by more boorish and self-serving Directors and VPs than one could shake a talking stick at. If tacit approval for this kind of political (and polarizing) environment can be considered a "leadership problem" then Filo is PART of the problem, not THE problem.

The REAL leadership problem at Yahoo can be directly attributed to the useless layer or two (or three) of management below people like Filo - classic coattail riders who have entrenched themselves as lieutenants and/or confidants, relied upon to make certain day-to-day business and operations decisions that someone like Filo doesn't have the time or inclination to be bothered with. It's these people who are arguably MOST responsible for Yahoo's decline in innovation, speed, and overall moral.

How the leadership team at Yahoo has, dare I say it, ENCOURAGED this kind of culture is of itself, quite telling. And there's the rub.

@TheGunslinger

The management you want for Yahoo are the types of personalities who aspire to make a difference for a company or companies they can believe in. They want to make a difference. The don't want to emulate and prop-up the status-quo. Getting those kinds of personalities to return to Yahoo is a pipe dream at this point.

SOLUTION: get rid of the folks that want to work at great company...and keep and grow those that are there to make a great company.

it's a website. why do you need 15,000+ people to work on it?

the focus of recent valleyway finger pointing has been: david and his nature .....of NOT putting his foot down.

the guy is 99.9% right when he chooses to speak.

looking forward, how to turn jerry around from playing golf with MBA's and start listening to david again???.... that will be a non PC conversation recommending non PC actions that will take balls jerry has not exhibited and a course recommendation that will work if the non PC course is followed.

it's just a website....

It's about time someone pointed this out. Yes, Filo is smart. Yes, even as a billionaire he still contributes to the development and production environments at Yahoo, but Filo is not a leader. Not by a long shot.

The title that always came to my mind was "meddler." After he had picked at the body of your project, it was hard to be enthusiastic about the bloody carcass you were left with. The decisions that he forced on my group, ostensibly to save money on hardware, caused us to burn man hours instead. We didn't save any money, and morale went into the toilet. This scenario played itself out repeatedly. Filo was also long on criticism and short on praise. I could have carved the Venus de Milo for him, and his only comment would have been "She doesn't have arms." He's just not an inspiration.

Maybe it's time for Filo to take a breather.

@TheGunslinger: That's why your boss had to keep saying it over and over in every annual review. Yes, "If you win all the battles, you do win the war by default". However, nobody in all the history of humanity has won "all" their battles.

@siliconvalet

I have to agree with you(partly). Yes, ts not as straightforward as walking into a shop and getting your gear. But its also as simple as getting your current performance numbers, future projections.If its an experiment then just say so. Many times I have seen people just throw off some vague numbers and for vague reasons. Unfortunately such callousness hits us all who go there to get gear for good reasons.
I also have to agree that big project names like "panama" or "apex" always get *anything* they want. Maybe Filo has given up on these projects already :-)

In any case, I wouldn't find a fault with Filo. Poor guy is doing his best, keeping his head down and still writing code. Of course, I cant say the same about Jerry or Laurie or Ash or ... well ... about 50% of the company.

@nervermindy

Er.. I wasn't with VYC. My group's numbers were pretty good, in fact. We could always withstand Yahoo F1 promotion with reasonable hardware.

We DID get our hardware, but the process to me was always another example of why nothing ever seemed to get done at the company. (Seriously, one site redesign I know of took TWO YEARS.)

"Filo was also long on criticism and short on praise."
dear goodness! your parents praise you!... what a lame comment!

your genius boss helps tell you what will make things more useful and if you can't get your own satisfaction then go see a shrink don't blame filo. it's the needy, ever pc and ass covering folks that have driven yahoo! into the toilet. time for some yahoo!s with spines. speaking of spines... will someone prop up filo's spine and help him put his foot down while he's at it?

@princesscrap:

Laurie Mann, is that you? No one else I know could be so clueless about what makes people tick.

Didn't you learn anything in those classes that HR made you go to?

If you couldn't get the hardware you needed at HRC, you didn't do your homework. Existing property: ywatch should be all the story you need. New property: you need a believable product story and the architecture to back it, ideally with benchmarked prototypes.

Protip: Get afternoon HRC appointments, i.e. after they've eaten their pizza. Inevitably by 11am everyone is grumpy and HRC is running 50 minutes late. You can tell because without even looking at your numbers, Filo asks if your property could conceivably run in a yroot jail rather than its own machine. After lunch, though, much willingness to hear why you really need the 3GHz dual quad core Xeons and terabytes of attached 15k RPM storage.

@BaldDog

Bingo. The absolute correct source of "leadership problems" in Engineering, at Filo's expense apparently.