Reflections

Was The Hiring Of Bad Programmers By Yahoo To Blame For Sending The Company Into A Death Spiral?

Posted by on Aug 12, 2010 | 9 Comments

I always wondered what had happened to Yahoo, which at one time was the Cinderella company of Silicon Valley. When I was teaching computer classes at the local college, I recall using the Yahoo story of success as an example of how one company took full advantage of the Internet,   Something happened to Yahoo, which I had  believed was caused by the success of Google. But Bill Graham, a former Yahoo employee, shares with us his personal views why Yahoo really failed. This is part of what he stated:

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.

Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn’t. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn’t have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. And when you consider how much competition there was for programmers when they were hiring, during the Bubble, it’s not surprising that the quality of their programmers was uneven.

In technology, once you have bad programmers, you’re doomed. I can’t think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.

I think the real funny part is that Graham recommended to Yahoo that they buy a start-up called Google. He mentioned to his bosses that he and others from Yahoo were using Google search because it was better than what Yahoo offered. The idea was rejected since the thinking was that search was not a lucrative enough market to be bothered with.

This does make one wonder why Microsoft even to chose to partner with Yahoo. It doesn’t appear that Bing is doing any better with or without Yahoo as a partner.

Comments welcome.

Source – By Paul Graham

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  • D

    When you look at the old management/stockholders and what they were looking for…is it any wonder why they hired these type of programmers. It all comes down to getting all the bang for your buck. When you’re more worried about lining your own/stockholder’s pockets…you get Yahoo.

    • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

      Exactly.

  • http://www.kodesource.com Doug

    Bad programmers don’t help the situation.
    But, the main problem as I see it, is bad management.
    Management oversees the programmers, and set the programming policies and guidelines.
    Without proper planning, organization, and reviews, any large project is doomed to fail.
    Except with me of course, being one of the good programmers :)

    • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

      ‘Except with me of course, being one of the good programmers.’
      Of course! :-)

  • http://www.justenrobertson.com Justen

    Yahoo’s whole approach from the start was bad. They took the “people are stupid” path and attempted to provide a sort of filter through which their presumed stupid audience could view the web. They in other words made to fatal assumptions – one, that they were the smartest and most qualified people in the world to determine what was worth seeing on the web, and two that people were looking to have their hands held (rather than looking for tools of self-empowerment). Google didn’t have to be excellent to beat Yahoo, it just had to be sufficient; the only reason Yahoo was ever successful is that nobody, up to that point, was sufficient and its users were willing to accept patronization in exchange for some level of utility.

    As for bang for buck, if bad programmers give more bang for their buck why do the companies with good programmers make more profit? This isn’t a shareholders vs. customers problem, this is a bad management problem. Management’s job is to make a company successful by picking the best team for the job and giving that team all the tools they need to do it. When management starts thinking it can cut corners and save the difference for themselves both the shareholders and the customers suffer. Shareholders have no interest in a smaller company with lower dividends and customers have no interest in mediocre products. Notice that shareholders don’t get “golden parachutes” and customers don’t get giant settlements when a company dies. For that matter, neither do the employees. Only one class of people gets a shot at profiting from the destruction of a company – the desk jockeys, sociopaths, and power perverts up on the top floor.

  • Yahoo_Employee

    The answer is a “YES”. They hire cheap offshore labors to write spaghetti codes. It’s disgusting.

  • http://twitter.com/zenzizi Frédéric Dénommé

    [ Thanks for your kind words on TEAM ZEN xD ]