The Google-fication of Yahoo! 242
Hugh Pickens writes "Since coming to Yahoo!, CEO Marissa Mayer has added a weekly, Friday afternoon all-hands meeting, just like at Google; she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google; and she has begun prepping major changes to the layout of the work spaces and buildings of Yahoo to make it feel more collaborative and cool, just like, well.. you get the idea. Such focus on improving cultural issues is an interesting initial move by the neophyte CEO, since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google's success at creating an always-sunny work environment. But Mayer has been up to much more serious business, said several sources, especially product innovation as the savior for Yahoo: Better email! Better search! Better ad-serving! And a special plea to make Flickr awesome again! In other words, better every product Yahoo has to offer. 'This is the sound of Yahoo becoming a technology company again,' says one source. 'It will be all about platforms and products.' Sources say that will likely mean a big splashy tech or product deal in the days ahead, perhaps via an acquisition to signal the new direction, perhaps with the acquisition of a sexy product like Flipboard. In the meantime, many at Yahoo are bracing for a pack of current and former Googlers — Mayer had a lot of loyal staffers — to come on board, writes Kara Swisher. 'And, by the looks of all the Googley changes at Yahoo, they'll feel right at home when they get there.'"
The obvious next shoe to drop... (Score:5, Funny)
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Google now has a clone: SuckToo!
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Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
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I also know what Ted Stevens(R) meant when he said the internet is a series of tubes.
Both still amuse me, as the implication is that it was something put together so simply that it could be explained away so easily.
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Because he's supposed to walk from the USA to Europe? Or bicycle?
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well not as funny as the current conservative candidate, not only is he one but he owns one. Now that's a rich dude.
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Well not as funny as the current conservative candidate, not only is he one but he owns one. Now that's a rich dude.
You can laugh about Mitt all you want, but when HE dies, he'll get his own planet to lord over. It's the planet next to Tom Cruise's planet...
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What would happen if Google started pulling results from Yahoo!?!?!?!
Maybe that is Kurzweil's "singularity."
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Wrong.
Bing is the Windows Phone of the search world.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
No, AC, go fuck yourself. There is no controversy over whether MS pilfered Google's results. They admitted it. The manufactured spin in this case that you girls drink like spiked Kool-Aid is that somehow that's "okay" because their toolbar users clicked through an installer allowing them to do it. Nobody reads those and MS took advantage of that fact to steal search results. You apologist drones are a pestilence.
I'm not the AC you are trading fucks with, but this is not precise, in case you or anyone care. The toolbar was one of many signals used to train the search algo (Google does the same with Chrome btw.), learning from user behavior, not watching Google specifically. What the group of 20 Google engineers did when they installed the toolbar and did coordinated synthetic search+click-throughs was effectively that they poisened this signal. A Google-bomb no less. They managed to do this, but surprisingly only in 7-9 of their 100 attempts (per Google blog), because Bing didn't have any other signals for these forced synthetic cases (they were created, not real). What Bing should have done is of course to ignore such a singel signal completely, but to make of this that Bing is copying Google is either disingenious or blissful ignorance.
Google's accusations was called silly by most search industry analysts an experts (Google it :) and even Dan Sullivan who was one of the key drivers of the "copy"-story in the beginning stated later when learning more about what was happening that he regretted his original headline and how this created a misconception (the one still being promoted here).
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing that a CEO can come in and say "Make a better product!" and it comes as a shock to everyone. And I don't want to take away from what she's doing, on the contrary, I applaud it. Focusing on employees and quality products versus focusing on financials and Wall Street is a huge step in the right direction for any company. It's just sad that it's newsworthy.
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hmmm next stop RIM?
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hmmm next stop RIM?
The next stop for RIM is a buyout. Nothing else.
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Hear hear!
It's sad to see clueless MBAs come into tech companies and try to cut their way to profitability. It never works, but they keep trying it again and again (cue famous quote about the definition of insanity...).
About time somebody tried a different approach: take care of your people, and build great products. And remember that nobody does great work with an axe hanging over their head.
Time to buy some Yahoo! stock - they've found themselves a CEO with a clue.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad to see clueless MBAs come into tech companies and try to cut their way to profitability. It never works, but they keep trying it again and again (cue famous quote about the definition of insanity...).
No, it does work- for them. The aim is to raise profits in the short term- which is also what the markets are concerned with- while they're still at the company and collecting large pay packets, bonuses, etc. etc.
The fact that this doesn't work over the long term is irrelevant, as they'll be long out of the company by that point.
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Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, it would be nice to have one good search engine at this point.
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Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, Google used to be great, but they're like slashdot in that every change makes it worse. If there were no relevant results, Google used to tell you that. Now they serve up pages that don't even have all the words you're searching for, even if you specifically tell it to only return results with that word. Quotes are useless in a Google search any more.
There's a fantastic opportunity for some young talent to invent a better search engine. Ten years ago I could find anything I was looking for, these days Google fails miserably.
That said, Bing is even worse. Every two results return a shopping site on Bing, even if you're looking for technical information. Google only looks good compared to the other worthless search engines. One of you young guys should hop to it!
I wondered about the quotes... (Score:3)
Now they serve up pages that don't even have all the words you're searching for, even if you specifically tell it to only return results with that word. Quotes are useless in a Google search any more.
I wondered if that was just me, I used to use quotes all the time to make sure I got something fairly relevant, but of late it seems not to really limit things well... I just thought perhaps the syntax for blocking exact phrases had changed, but I could not find mention of any new way to lock down sets of words
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You use the -req flag to require a word so the search '-req Moose -req Town' gets you both words and Mosse Town Montana.
For order, still need quotes (Score:2)
Thanks, that didn't quite work - but when combined with the quotes it works again as it should. Searching for :
-req "food animus"
Returns only results where food and animus are next to each other in that order...
Do not ask why I searched for Food Animus, and why there are so many results...
Re:I wondered about the quotes... (Score:5, Informative)
I work on web search at Google, and I can assure you that there is no such -req operator. All that you're doing is filtering out results that match the word "req". :-)
When you find a query where you think you need lots of quotes, you might be interested in Verbatim mode, which can be enabled in the left-hand search tools:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1734130&topic=1221265&ctx=topic [google.com]
Here's the official list of supported search operators:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861 [google.com]
There are also some legacy operators like [inurl:foo], [intitle:foo], and [allintitle: foo bar baz]. http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html [googleguide.com]
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http://googleblog.blogspot.ie/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html [blogspot.ie]
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
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MS admitted to pilfering Google's results then they spun it as "their" customers agreed to be screens scraped via the Bing bar plugin
No they didn't. They admitted using the pages that users of the Bing toolbar navigate to as an input in their search results. Google does exactly the same thing with their toolbar, as did Yahoo back when they ran their own search engine, as did Altavista. The entire controversy is that Google believes that Microsoft should have added extra logic that discards results if the page is Google. Presumably Microsoft should also maintain a list of all pages on the web that are search engines and exclude them a
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Got a source that's not Google marketing?
Goohoo (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I don't think its the best idea to try and turn Yahoo into Google, it needs to find its own strengths and play to them, and tackle new markets where there aren't many established superplayers just yet, in order to compete on a more even footing.
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True, trying to compete head on with google in their core products isn't a great plan. Don't expect yahoo docs or yahoo adwords kinds of things, nor a yahoo mobile operating system. But Google does have a culture that could apply reasonably well to any software product business in terms of employee productivity, satisfaction and coordination and cooperation.
I think the big challenge for yahoo is to compete, but be different. They have search and have e-mail, and have since before google offered those pro
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True, trying to compete head on with google in their core products isn't a great plan.
It worked for Google, didn't it? Who uses infoseek or altavista any more? Do they even still exist?
I think the big challenge for yahoo is to compete, but be different.
That's how Google did it.
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Not really, no that's not how google did it. Google made a radically new type of search product. And now the market has changed, and trying to have a radically better technology than google in search or a much better e-mail is really really hard. When you're going after a bigger competitor you have to be able to produce a product they can't, and get it to market before they can copy it it can get it out the door. Yahoo isn't in that situation.
Googles revenue is from adwords and search. Their search te
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Re:Goohoo (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, probably not as useful if implemented today - but the original directory based search was awesome at the time.
Speak for yourself. I'd love a really good directory based search. The web is just much larger. Imagine being able to type in something like, "mail systems api" or "sound file formats" and getting a directory of 6-25 sites all on that topic rather than having to hunt.
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I don't know about that. There's about 300m-400m websites depending on how you class them.
1) Yahoo can ask the owners to self categorize. Yahoo has the reputation that they might be able to get fairly good compliance. But lets assume not.
2) If we assume classifying a website takes an experienced classifier 5 minutes then a person can do 20k websites in a man-year easily. Which means 400m can be done by 20,000 man years or at 25k / man year (since this work can go abroad and it is only semi-skilled) $5
Yahoo has strengths (Score:3)
Lots of people still use and like Yahoo mail.
Also, Yahoo has really excellent sports coverage (thanks in part to a long ago effort to spend money on first-hand coverage).
Then there is Flickr, still my favorite social photo sharing service that just needs to be overhauled a bit.
I'm sure there are other things too, it was really only search that I found Yahoo terrible at. Everything else they still do reasonably well.
Well, except for Yahoo Answers, but perhaps they could turn that into an entertainment venue
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Actually, I think they have a few strengths - albeit ones not at all interesting to tech:
Yahoo Sports - Say what you will, but their coverage of almost every sport known to man is impressive. Their coverage of hockey & the CFL [www.cfl.ca] is fantastic and I love their soccer & college football coverage as well.
Flickr - Like it or not, it's still an amazing site to browse and utilize for photos (still the best site on the planet for porn IMHO). They also allow you to license your photos in almost any manner of c
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I wish I hadn't already replied to this thread. This needs a mod-up. Perfect way to put it.
She thinks the secret is to just take what was cool in Company A and transplant it into Company B? LOL. What even qualifies her to be CEO? Lucking into being employee number ten at Google? That's all it takes now?
Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
she announced that henceforth the food in Yahoo's URLs Cafe will be free, just like at Google;
That goes a long way to creating a happy work place right there.
15 years ago I worked in a place where it took you 10-12 minutes to get past security, walk through the building, across a large area, go up an elevator, get in your car, go through two more security checkpoints, just to get on the main street. Half your lunch break was spent in transit, and you were only allowed 45 minutes.
You were not allowed to eat at your desks, and no break room was provided. Well, it did exist, but it was more like a closet hallway with a two seat mini table. Not set up to allow dozens of people to eat lunch.
There was a 3rd option.... the cafe at the bottom of the building where the owner realized he had a captive audience and made airport food prices seem cheap in comparison.
Yeah... something like this at Yahoo would seem like paradise to me.
Verboten (Score:2)
You were not allowed to eat at your desks,
I'm not eating - I'm snacking. I just snack at a high volume.
If they want to sack for a snack, well I dare them...
Seriously, never put up with bullshit rules.
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Not providing adequate breaktime facilities for eating is a violation of State law.
In which state(s) is this a violation?
We Have To Modernize (Score:5, Funny)
We have to modernize Yahoo so that when Microsoft and Google want to buy us out we can demand top price!
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Do they discuss.... (Score:2, Funny)
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/yahoo-confirms-apologizes-for-the-email-hack-says-still-fixing-plus-check-if-you-were-impacted-non-yahoo-accounts-apply/
Goolified? (Score:2, Funny)
It's all been tried
With smooth visage
Can't take our pride
Burma Shave
The Rise of Flickr (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that excites me most is the possibility of Flickr getting some real momentum behind it again. Even now I still prefer Flickr over other photo sharing services, and it would be great to see it get first class status among the users of the internet.
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Flickr does have a great deal of momentum and first class (or near first class) status- but it's among the more serious photographers rather than the cell phone toting crowd. Yahoo! is currently in the process of squandering that momentum and reputation though, through a series of ill-conceived and ill-executed UI changes.
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That's not quite right, the number one source of photos on there is the iPhone!!
I agree it also has a lot of credibility with serious photographers too.
The real problem is that it doesn't have a good API for mobile apps to post into the service, making it harder than it should be to add Flickr support.
Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
"since the care and feeding and, most of all, cosseting of employees has been a critical element to Google's success at creating an always-sunny work environment"
Actually, the first and foremost reason for Google's success has been its people. And Yahoo has been taking a beating long enough not to have the same caliber of individuals at this point...so cosseting them isn't exactly going to give the same results as Google gets for taking care of their own employees. Not that it isn't a good idea, but I think Yahoo needs to come up with more compelling reasons to work for them, instead of an up-and-comer (which they absolutely are not, unfortunately). I'm a huge fan of companies providing perks for their people; both scientific studies and my own personal experience show that you get a much bigger ROI on those than on straight salary bumps, for the most part. But they aren't going to improve your company's bottom line automatically.
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Two obvious responses:
1. If I'm a top-caliber talent, all other things being equal, I'll work for the company that's coddling me rather than one that's treating me like I'm a prisoner. And even if I'm middle-tier, I'm going to want to work for you, which means you have more applicants to choose from and can afford to be more picky.
2. If I'm a top-caliber talent, but am at a company that treats me badly or indifferently, I'm not going to give my top effort to the company, I'm going to give my top effort on e
Resistence is futile (Score:2)
I use Yahoo to avoid Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo mail to avoid google mail
Yahoo (or duckduckgo) to avoid google search
Mozilla or Opera browser to avoid google browser
And so on.
I have not found a workaround for youtube, but I don't like having google gathering all this data about me & creating a profile. I want to use alternatives as much as possible.
Re:I use Yahoo to avoid Google (Score:4, Insightful)
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Make the various parties work and pay more for it.
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they are less likely to share the data with each other.
It just means the people actually using that data, marketers, FBI, underpants gnomes, have to buy it from more than one source and then merge it. Facebook and such aren't the evil overmind bent on peering into your home. They're just the middle-man getting paid by the evil overmind bent on peering into your home.
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>>>On the off-chance you're actually serious - you really think Yahoo isn't collecting exactly the same data as Google?
Wow you dense cracka
The point is to separate the information so no one company has all the data. Google knows what videos I watch but not my email or search or browsing habits. Yahoo has my email habits. Duckduckgo has search habits. Mozilla & Opera have the browser history/cookies. NONE have a complete profile.
Who cares about the NSA? (Score:2)
You aren't really saving anything by using yahoo instead of google, the NSA sees it all, for better or worse.
Of course, that is taken for granted. Also any network admin on any hop your email takes you can assume is reading it also, along with a variety of Russians, Chinese, etc. etc.
What you are saving, the only thing that matters is that GOOGLE cannot see it (well, your end anyway). That is the thing of interest to avoid, since they are the ones who are effectively correlating things.
It doesn't matter
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You don't think Yahoo would like to do the same thing?
You'd trade one information overlord for another. For all I'm concerned about Google's information-collating abilities, Yahoo has a track record of more problems with data security than Google.
In the end... if you want to be plugged in to technology services, you have face the fact that the service providers will also b
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I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
No YouTube alternative? What about Vimeo? (Score:2)
What about Vimeo?
There are a number of other alternate video sharing sites too, but Vimeo works really well. They were even first with HD support.
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But you have to actually create an account to disable the "psuedo-anonymous" history they are keeping on you...
Just like you have to pay for your credit report with a credit card, you must join to opt out (and hope they don't use that information against you)...
Easy Improvement for Yahoo! Finance (Score:3)
I've said this several times before (including in feedback to Yahoo), but I'll say it here just in case anyone from Yahoo! is actually paying attention:
In Yahoo! finance, you really need to give users the option to chart dividend-adjusted price (or, equivalently, "growth of $10,000 investment"). Charting the raw stock price isn't very useful, especially for mutual funds that pay out substantial dividends or capital gains distributions at the end of the year (when the market isn't tanking). Those payouts cause the price to drop, but it's not an economically meaningful drop -- no money was lost. If you try to compare two securities, or compare a security to an index, and the price drops off a cliff every December (again, the drop means nothing), it's just not useful. Yahoo! has the adjusted price data needed to make a useful chart (it's called "Adj Close" in the "Historical Prices" table), it just doesn't give the user a way to chart it.
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In addition to the comment above, which would make charts on Yahoo! significantly more useful, I'll also point out a bug:
Since you started displaying live, auto-updating security prices recently, I've noticed that the price change and percent change are not kept in sync. Sometimes, one value will be positive while the other is negative for the same security. Just in case this is a browser compatibility issue, I'm using Seamonkey 2.3.3 on Linux.
Style or substance? (Score:2)
Hopefully her next action will be to purge the middle layers of the organisation and lose all the naysayers
Fix Yahoo / Flickr (Score:4, Informative)
I propose that Yahoo gets it's finger out of it's backside and fix Flickr. For months I've been trying to get a "pro" account to upload more photograhs than the standard freebie 200. However like many other complaints in the forums, Yahoo seem to not be bothered in fixing the billing system, many can't log in to even create a billing account, others can't pay or renew what they have. Sounds a bigger problem then just re-arranging how the chairs and desks are in an office for better Feng shui.
Re:Fix Yahoo / Flickr (Score:4, Insightful)
This sort of thing is where I think it's important that the CEO of a company drink the proverbial kool-aid and actually try and use their own products. Mayer is a geek - if she tries to use any yahoo services she'll probably find what is redundant, what is broken, and what is missing. All things yahoo needs. Badly.
What about platforms (Score:4, Funny)
Yahoo mail (Score:2)
Better email! Better search! Better Ads! (Score:2)
So this means they'll ditch Bing for ... something else, and maybe add things like labels and tags to their email platform.
I'd be worried at Microsoft - this could end up looking in the same mould as Elop at Nokia.
Offices? (Score:2)
"layout of the work spaces"
People at Google don't get (individual) offices, right? They're either in big open areas or share offices with several other people?
Do Yahoo employees (currently) get offices?
I consider it a big benefit to have my own office (with a door I can close, though I usually leave it cracked open).. Though I would even prefer a cube to a shared office in most cases.
Prediction: Yahoo teams up with Oracle (Score:2)
So, when will Yahoo team up with Oracle and make an underwhelming Phone OS: yPhone powered by Oracle's Java!
Note: Prefixing "Java" with "Oracle's" will be made mandatory, on penalty of TOS violation.
Better email! (Score:2)
The "Better email!" target is the one they need to work on first.
Every time I have to correspond with someone with a BT/Yahoo e-mail account I have to explain to them how to check their spam folders for lost messages. They always find other ones there too which Yahoo's dreadful spam filter has consigned there without consultation or good reason.
BT/Yahoo e-mail should come with a health warning.
Good to hear! (Score:2)
Too bad they're getting cozy with Facebook [slashdot.org]. Otherwise I wouldn't have queued my account for deletion that day (I was still logged in after I clicked ok to that, so I have a feeling something got blocked or it just didn't quite go through, but that might just be the 90-day wait time).
I'm also concerned they'll bring in the Google+ elements of Google, perhaps even to look more attractive to FB (unless, of course, FB would rather have them strictly use FB's systems and UI for that).
Steve would have something to say about this (Score:2)
Steve Jobs (praise be his name) had a quote about IBM and institutionalizing process without focusing on the company's actual product:
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This is a pattern repeated at just about every company nowadays. A top-down approach to process makes about as much sense as piping all of your computer operations through a single mainframe. In both cases, you're left with a single point of catastrophic failure. Every process failure is countered with a more rigid process, and you eventually reach the point where nothing gets done and the focus of your job shifts to gaming the system.
She sounds legit (Score:2)
I'm hoping Yahoo turns itself around. 10-15 years ago, Yahoo was my literal internet home. One stop shopping for most of the daily entertainment including playing Yahoo Games like Hearts and Spades. I'd like to see it come back without turning into a Facebook/Google data mining front (GL w/ that, I know).
My plea is for her to fix the card game forums. As it is, they're being overrun by poor sports:
* "Trammers" (TRAM: The Rest Are Mine), who get mad when they're losing and use a convenience feature to ea
Re:Googlizing won't save Yahoo. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sufficient, true. But the thing a new CEO needs most of all is time, and making some trivial but highly visible and generally popular changes that can be implemented in hours will buy her the time to actually address real problems, while giving the press something to talk about besides her uterus. The lady ain't dumb.
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I wouldn't be so sure of that. Google may be a big name that looks good on a resume, but their payscales (ya know, actual cash compensation, the type that pays a mortgage) are crap.
Re:It's already working (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh??? From what I have heard, Google's pay is by far the best in the 'Valley, both cash only and total (including stock/benefits). That said, you're not going to get rich working for either them or Yahoo. You only make it big here by lucking into an employee-number-[2..20] role.
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That's, err, very out-of-line with what I've heard, and I've had friends there only a few years ago -- word was that the total comp was healthy (after you considered everything they spent on you -- a great deal of which wasn't in an
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