From Paul Graham’s piece What Happened to Yahoo?:
One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a “media company.” If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people (yes, there were actually support people) telling users to restart their browsers, and so on, just like a software company. So why did they call themselves a media company?
He’s exactly right. But the following deserves comment:
The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they didn’t take programming seriously enough. Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all had hacker-centric cultures. But Yahoo treated programming as a commodity. At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers. The job of programmers was just to take the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code.
One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren’t very good. But that wasn’t the worst problem. The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers.
(Emphasis mine.)
Paul and I didn’t overlap at Yahoo!, but my observations were slightly different. Yahoo! certainly didn’t take programming seriously, but that wasn’t for lack of great developers. My group — web search — was full of outstanding engineers. People like Qi Lu and Sean Suchter (now at Microsoft) and Udi Manber (now at Google). A quick look at the post-Yahoo accomplishments of my former colleagues speaks for itself.
The problems at Yahoo were more ingrained than simply bad hiring. To Yahoo executives, software was irrelevant. Senior management didn’t think of themselves as technologists any more than building contractors identify as concrete aficionados. With a few notable exceptions — especially Jeff Weiner, now CEO of LinkedIn — they just didn’t care about the product.
There were other arguably more serious problems with Yahoo — such as the horrifying proliferation of middle management and a crippling fear of innovation and risk — but for the most part Paul has it right.
