I think this reflects well on Mayer's distrust of yahoo's HR department. Even though hiring employees from only prestigious universities is a terrible decision when it comes to getting as much good talent as possible, it's the only "solid" solution to force HR to at least be hiring candidates who might almost be good at what they're doing.
The reforms taking place in yahoo are quite interesting. Mayer's probably running under the knowledge that most of yahoo's employees aren't really good at what they do, so it's going to be very interesting to see what kind reforms she can pass so that the quality of the work produced by yahoo doesn't correlate with the quality of employees they're currently dealing with.
I'm willing to believe that people with prestigious qualifications not seeking work at more prestigious companies and startup wunderkinds are probably the worst talent pools for Yahoo to be trying to dredge, especially considering the wealth of smart developers who don't fit into those brackets are probably more likely to stick around.
I remember 5-6 years ago when I was applying for internships I couldn't even finish my application as it required you to pick from a list of universities (no option of "Other") which also happened to be the top 20.
Perhaps they stopped this for a time?
And it all depends on interpretation as what is a top university I worked on campus at Cranfield University in the Uk.
There was a joke on the CIT campus was they looked down on lesser institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge Harvard etc as "they offered BSc's as well as Masters and Phd programs"
Cranfield at the time only offered higher degrees
I don't think the strategy she appears to be employing is 100% bad, but I think it is greatly hampered by the fact that Yahoo is not an inherently desirable place to work. They need to do a far better job of making a public display of why you would want to work for Yahoo, because I know a lot of very good software engineers and none of them , to my knowledge, view Yahoo as a desirable place to work and you'd have to be an absolute dream job to have the ability to make people wait months.
Congrats to them, they got the money without the 18 months contract...
If she is really personally reviewing each new hire, she's not only slowing down the hiring process, but she's also demotivating her HR people.
According to the article, she is personally reviewing all hires, so sounds more ad-hoc based on her judgement than formalized policy.
I'm confused by this statement. In a highly technical company like Yahoo, aren't the hiring decisions made primarily by the managers of the groups that have the open positions? It doesn't seem that an HR department would have the ability to figure out whether a software developer is even minimally competent.
But this isn't 1996. People don't need ANY of this. If I want the weather, I have a gadget on my phone, which by the way is the first thing I look at in the morning. If I want to search I type the query into the URL bar (I use chrome) If I want news I go to reddit or hacker news. Nothing is drawing me into yahoo. Reprinted badly written blog articles do not attract me. My mom would probably read them, but doesn't know how to search for them.
Basically, having an army of the top engineers in the world isn't worth anything if they're not working on something people want to use. Yahoo needs to rethink who they are if they want to survive, they lost news, they lost search, and they lost "hosting gadgets".
In the words of devops borat: "In startup we have great of capability for churn out solution. Please send problem, we are pay good money." https://twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT/status/315549020326088704
You are not the type of web users Yahoo is looking for (at least for now), which is a good thing for yahoo because people like you or me are in the minority. Probably less than 1-2% of the internet users.
Lockheed Martin's F-22 team was worth billions, and nobody wanted that plane. But yes, war profiteering aside, your point stands.
The really sad part is that the F-35 is such a problem, they might restart production on the F-22 to supplement the fleet of uprated older planes to make up for the F-35.
>Yet, after five peer interviews, a candidate is still vetted by hiring committees, and Larry Page must approve every hire.
Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2012/0124/Are-Yo...
Brutal but how else will you separate the wheat from the chaff?
(Not supporting it either way...a bit undecided myself)
Job applicants often go through the interview process, then "wait and wait," said one executive who recently left Yahoo. "One person we wanted waited eight weeks, then they inevitably got another offer."
It seems like at this point, Yahoo would want to streamline their hiring process as much as possible to bring good engineers on as quickly (and painlessly) as possible. And have that be an asset in terms of recruiting. I've had friends complain about this "wait and no response" sort of thing when interviewing with Google, but they're more willing to put up with it, because hey, it's Google.
If you don't like it thats something we need to talk about changing in our industry, not just shooting ire at a single company. Mentorship is not common, and we consider 5 years of experience sufficient for a 'senior' position. Until that changes they are going to have to find some way to limit their hiring. (note: I don't 100% agree with these new practices, but I do understand where Mayer and Yahoo! are coming from)
Did Mayer spend 25 years as a military officer? That seems to be her management style.
Doesn't that seem better than papers? I mean as a software engineer, design and product side of things.
Open source, API's, client side apps and etc.
1. Yahoo! is in trouble. We need someone to take us out of this rut? But who? Enter Marissa Meyer: an executive with little top-level leadership experience and even less experience making desperate companies like Yahoo! relevant.
2. We need more productivity and creativity. Umm, lets get rid of work-from-home. That should do it. But we'll give out free food in company cafeterias. It's what Facebook does, right?
3. Our HR department sucks at hiring. Should we fix it? Nope. Just contrive some draconic hiring practices -- we're only going to look at people from engineering programs at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, Harvey Mudd, and, of course, all the ivies. This kid went to CMU and has had already had a couple of floundering start-ups? Nope, don't even consider him. This is what Google does, isn't it?
So, in short, every single strategy is backwards. Instead of fixing the ACTUAL problems (leadership, HR, productivity, creativity), Yahoo! constantly misfires. Productivity is a side-effect of an already-positive company image. Good hires are a side-effect of an already-healthy corporate image.
I'd imagine once she felt the HR department was capable of hiring the type of employee she personally finds to be exceeding she'll likely consider removing this restriction in favor of having those candidates take an active part in the hiring process. Also with her HR department trained on what candidates she considers good it'll make it harder for them going forward to settle on someone who fits the position but doesn't fit into Mayer's vision.
Who knows though -- I think it's a dumb idea but I'm also not the CEO of Yahoo with whatever knowledge she has on hand to justify this as an area of concern.
Whether it will work or not, I couldn't say. I find it a little sad to see companies wait until they're past the point of no return before looking for a savior. (See: Palm and Jon Rubinstein).
You'll see it mentioned in articles concerning the similarities between her new structure and Google. But they're quickly dismissed usually by flaky differences such as in this one where she's not implementing Google's independent work program, which I'm pretty sure isn't a thing at Google anymore.
She's smart, she doesn't want to reinvent the wheel, she knows what Google is doing works. She just doesn't want to be known as the one who "Google-ized" Yahoo!.
For a company the size of Yahoo (or any company that's bigger than a small business), having the CEO review every hire is the worst kind of micromanagement and sends the message to her managers that she doesn't trust them to do what they're paid to do. It also means that Mayer is spending less time doing the things that really are her job as CEO.
My guess is that current management have become stale, comfortable and somewhat corrupted. Recruiting favors those with connections within the company, not the ones with experience, knowledge or brilliance. She could of course outright fire managers, but that could lead to worse consequences than micromanagment would.
Anyway, time will tell.
I think is her plan to limit managers ability to build empires by only allowing them to replace employees out of a tiny pool hand picked by Mayer. I wouldn't be surprised if it worked, but it's a stunning vote of no-confidence in the entire company structure...
There will be bumps along the road and ugly mistakes, but at the end of the day I have a feeling that She is really going to turn things around for yahoo.
Google: Search Facebook: Newsfeed Yahoo!: ???
Keep going!
To me this screams 'only hire engineers that are like me because they /must/ be the best engineers'.
Sad thing is none of the EXPERIENCED engineers with those degrees will touch Yahoo! with a 10 foot pole.
And I don't care where you graduated from, without experience and good guidance you will be producing mediocre shit and get out performed by a kid who has several years of experience under his belt without any degree.
Can Mayer afford that ? without a product or a strategy ? what yahoo is about ? a brand but what else ?
My two cent is, the reverse can be applied by showing the interviewee some source codes/designs/product.Good programmers definitely cringe at the sight of bad code and excite at sight of good stuff. Same can be said for designers with...well, designs. Rather low cost consulting too for the company who does that. Win-win situation.
Yahoo has...
Google's company-defining products are (in my opinion):
Search - not relevant to hiring practices, Search came before the company
Gmail - initial version made by Paul Buchheit -
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Adsense - created by Oingo and acquired by Google
Android - created by Danger and acquired by Google
(Andy Rubin - Utica College, Utica, New York)
Chrome - basically Webkit, created by KHTML project and Apple
As far as I can tell, the breakthroughs Google has had are completely unrelated to any Ivy League hiring practices.