One of Marisa Mayer’s first actions upon taking the reigns as DungeonMaster of the Yahoo experiment was to call all employees back into office and fire any remote employee who was unable to rto. During that time, the company actually increased stringency in its hiring process, becoming more dogmatic with “brain-teasers” and advanced algo questions to “raise the talent bar”. It also began rating each and every employee based on a bell-curve with bottom tier being fired. While leetcode wasn’t a thing in 2012 and stack ranking employees wasn’t yet common, there are clear parallels between the Yahoo’s culture and management philosophy 2012-2015 and many FAANGs today. Ultimately, there wasn’t a space for tinkering or safe failures. Innovation was stymied. Yahoo relied on acquisition (rather than internal innovation) to stay relevant and eventually lost touch with the market to the point that it’s acquisitions became less strategic. Tumblr was ~20% pornography when it was acquired. Yahoo search traffic declined from 10 billion searches a day to 4.5 billion, while Google went from 17B to 57B. Finally, Yahoo experienced weird internal cultural policial movements (extreme for 2012-2017) that drove employees away. There was a feminist undertone in communication and males were allegedly discriminated against. This resulted in several lawsuits. Does anyone see parallels beteen Yahoo’s move from tech titan to irrelevance and what we see at Google or other FAANGs now?
Good essay, write more!
Boring
I don’t see that many parallels. At AWS, I’m fully remote, no feminist undertones, pretty decent innovation.
Uhmmmm
All the best performing companies are most aggressive in RTO
Keep my company’s name out ya mouth
Was it "10 BILLION ACTIVE USERS A DAY"?
Searches, corrected :)
Zzzzz