Maybe they are trying to bring their VP to 'people who get actual work done' ratio down to levels seen at successful internet companies? They still have a long, long way to go. Whenever you read a press mention of one of them, it is VP this, SVP that. Eww.

What I really want to know is: When is the big housecleaning among their staff (10%) coming?

Wonder how much all these disappearing managers have taken out of the company in severance? Is that a matter of public record? Some of this is probably Sue putting her people in place. And maybe some folks have just had it with Terry.

As for a larger staff purge, that's anyones guess. Some employees don't believe there will be layoffs. Others have been openly speculating about it in elevators and other common areas. The company's apparently giving mixed signals. Reports are that the company is hiring and providing higher salaries and in some cases large signing bonuses to the newbies (infuriating alot of long-term Yahoos!). At the same time, the company refused to give raises to an unusually large number of people this year (same effect). It also recently standardized job descriptions world wide. And, oh, they're expanding their operations in India significantly.

The net effect is a subtle effort to encourage some people to leave and keep the higher performers by steering stock grants and salary increases their way. If people leave, you don't have to pay them severance and you can layoff fewer people (if that's the goal). And if you have standard definitions, you can always shift jobs abroad pretty easily. The job performances also make it easy to identy any cuts.

Some Yahoos have decisions to make. The lengthy reorganization makes it more difficult. There's also the uncertainty about whether Panama will work. The outcomes of both will greatly affect staff retention, voluntary or otherwise.

Zod leaving the way he did is most curious. The company's explanation that it was months in the making is suspect. One would think they wouldn't have had to tap Yang as interim. But maybe they are having trouble recruiting top talent.

The WSJ says it reinforces doubts about Panama when the guy overseeing the global rollout leaves smack in the middle of it. It's also a month before the next earning call. Maybe he knows something everyone else doesn't. Get out on good terms, quietly sell the stock you have that's above water, and avoid the inevitable blame (and firing) if the system is going south.

Who knows. One Yahoo described it as sort of being on the bridge of the Titanic between the time they hit the berg and Thomas Andrews showed up to give his verdict. If the ship had four or fewer compartments breached, it would have survived and probbly limped into Halifax. More than that, it would sink. Everyone's wondering if the bungling of the last few years has been fatal. If so, they'll be heading for the lifeboats. Or thorwn overboard.

All I can say is what a shame. A terrible shame. Such a great company and used to be a fantastic place to work. Now executives just come in and rape the company for millions, then parachute out leaving a mess behind them. I remember the days when employees (the people *actually* doing the work) were empowered to succeed. Now it's a totally different story and a completely different place to work. Management by concensus and a management team who is incapable of making any decisions without first asking 24 people what they think.

As for Sue Decker hiring one of her friends. Did anyone really expect anything else? They will be there no more than 4 years and take millions out of the company in stocks, salary and bonuses just like everyone else in senior management. You can just hear the chat "Hey, I can get you this gig at Yahoo! and you will make millions".

There still needs to be a few more people pruned from the Yahoo! cash tree before things get better. There are so many talented and smart people in Yahoo! (non-executives) who would do a better job than the current management.

Just my 2 cents worth. As I said, such a shame for a really great company.

It's funny that you mention "Titanic" as a metaphor... I'm forced, as a former employee, to recall a summer party Yahoo threw for its employees.... complete with a large inflatable waterslide, deep in the heart of the bleak 2001 duldrums:

http://gallery.megacity.org/main.php?g2_itemId=5833
http://gallery.megacity.org/main.php?g2_itemId=5830

According to Filo at the time, the slide was courtesy of a party-planner who didn't put that much thought into the process or the symbolism it might invoke. He insisted there was no intentional symbolic value to it. :-)

@TheGunslinger:
yes tired of those raping exec, they come in for a short time do almost nothing and put Yahoo exec as a stamp on their resume.
How could HR be so blind to hire these amount of useless&lazy people.
I believe higher level positions involve passion and commitment. You can't be running just for the money.
FIRE.

I joined yahoo and promptly left 1 year later. Things were pretty screwed up in engineering. The first day I got there, everyone bitched about how sucky management was..And it didn't stop.. The only reason why I didn't leave right after I joined was because I would have had to repay a $30k signon bonus..AND..after a months, morale was soo low that they handed me another $50 "retention" bonuses just to stay for a year, paid in two installments.

Once upon a time I went into work and actually tried to ..uh... work.....But then i figured out that Yahoo was pretty much like communism. No one cared what i did or didn't do...And considering the folks around me basically showed up really late, then surfed the web for hours, and STARTED work in the late evening for probably 2-3 hours, I figured it was pretty much pointless for me to do anything useful for Yahoo. So all i did was spent the year learning new things for my own benefit that eventually helped me land my next job elsewhere...Oh, and collecting on bonuses for my excellent ass sitting.

Of course the stock options were worthless...BUT..., taking the entire Yahoo bonuses paid and shorting the hell out of Yahoo stock when it was in the high thirties...PRICELESS.

@yahoo_smells:
This low morale is largely because of lack of accountability at Yahoo. It took two years for Lloyd Braun to screw up the Media Group before he got fired, 11 years for Zod to sit on his ass busy only with filing papers with the SEC to sell his options before he retired with hundreds of millions, and five years and counting for Semel to screw up the entire company before he got another batch of stock options from the BOD. Semel, Zod, and Braun set good examples for the employees.

In Yahoo, employees who do good work are not rewarded, while other yes-men just BS their way to the director level or above. This has become the norm of the company, and especially so after Semel arrived.

honestly - when a company hits 10k plus employees - i would hope certain unproductive execs, and low performers are edged towards the door.. it's incredibly hard for a company this big to maintain execs who are fat/happy on options and don't really need to work... change is incredibly hard and those who don't need to work, loose the passion. But bottom line is that all HUGE companies go through this - the folks at Y! are simply weeding the garden. I know a large hadnful of people I would never hire again that have migrated over to Google - 3-4 years from now, you'll see the same thing there - happened at MSFT, Apple, eBay, Cisco, etc... that's the way the valley works...

Yahoo! and AOL, mediocrities both, are being groomed for merger...or private equity takeovers.

@hotdog:

Actually, I think the only way that Yahoo can survive is if every company they acquire, they end up leaving it alone and let it run itself.

Seriously, the joke a lot of us had was that being acquired was like handing Superman a large doese of Kryptonite. Despite how good your company might have been, in Yahoo hand's it will end up being screwed up.

Why is Jerry going to cover for Zod being gone instead of Filo? Filo seems like a better fit to me. What gives? is Filo gone too?

The "hiring your friends" thing is rampant at Yahoo.

There are whole departments that fill all their headcount based on employee referrals. And we aren't talking about referrals where you've worked with them before and are confident in their skills. We are talking "my nephew just graduated from college and needs a job" and "my buddy's girlfriend is tired of being a receptionist, I'll hire her into my group".

When established, proven employees see this sort of thing going on, they know their groups are being made weaker. Why stick around for the headaches that are sure to follow?

I have suspected this company to tank ever since they doubled in workforce in less than 2 years. It's difficult to grow so quickly and turn around on promises quickly when your company goes through growing pains. Growing pains include the regular politics, turf and ego wars, and infighting that immobilize creativity and paralyze progress.

Yikes.

In retrospect, the Titanic analogy was not a good one. I was NOT saying that Yahoo IS sinking. I was referring more to the UNCERTAINTY about whether Panama would help the company get back into the game and start repairing the damage that's been done over the last few years. You won't begin to find that out until next month. (If you know anything about Titanic, you know that it could easily have survived and few of us would have heard of it, but enough of that...).

A better analogy is probably that Yahoo has undergone a complicated surgery after being in a car wreck and is now in recovery. You don't know how it's going to do. Some analysts say Google has search locked up, a MS style monopoly. I don't believe that.

You hear some really really good things about Panama. A lot of advertisers seem to like it. You hear some negatives, too. And that's expected. The system is new. It's still being tweaked. And given the diversity of the advertiser base, you won't please everyone.

All that being said, the way Yahoo handled reviews and raises has stoked a lot of anger. First, delay them for three months. Promise a lump sum payment to tide people over. Change that to stock grants a couple weeks before Christmas for only certain employees. Then have people work their asses off for four months getting Panama out the door then deny a lot of them raises. Good employees. People managers want to keep around. Based on reviews that would have gotten them raises last year.

It's rich get richer. Spread the wealth around, keep your team intact. Otherwise, you end up driving good people out. Bad ones stick around as long as possible because they can't necessarily move. It's happened time and time again in companies.

Some people have already left. Others are waiting to see if Panama is a success (the point of my original post). If it does what Yahoo is hoping, the future's really bright. And Yahoo can be a good company to work for.

In the meantime, it's irritating to hear how grateful management is for all the hard work when people don't see that in their paychecks. And it's a little difficult to see execs who bore much more responsibility for the problems jump out with multimillion dollar severance packages. And its annoying to see Semel get $71 million in stock options for the kind of year Yahoo had in 2006.

Hopefully that clarifies a few things...