The surprise announcement this week that Yahoo had tapped Google geekstar Marissa Mayer as its new CEO got a lot of people talking about the troubled web portal.
But would any of them actually want to work there?
That will be the big challenge from Mayer if she wants to turn around one of the internet's oldest brands. Yahoo was exciting before most of today's top web players even existed, but it started a slide when it spurned Microsoft's $45 billion acquisition bid four years ago.
Top engineering talent has fled the company and the site that was once the internet's front door has developed a reputation as an also-ran. Today it's worth $19 billion.
Bay Area software engineering recruiter Mike Sienkowski says he wouldn't suggest a Yahoo job to an A-list coder. "Although they may not laugh at you, they may be quietly laughing at you," says Sienkowski, founder of the BirdDog recruiting agency. "I wouldn't do it. How do you get excited about it?"
But with Mayer at the helm, there may be reason for some geeks to get excited again -- provided, of course, that they haven't completely written off the company. After all, Mayer herself is an A-list talent: the engineer who was Google employee number 20, and is credited with such hits as Gmail and Google News.
The only way Yahoo's board of directors could have made a bigger splash with technical people is if they'd hired Steve Wozniak, says Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist with security consultancy Dan Kaminsky DKH. And that's a good thing, he says. It shows that the company -- and its new CEO -- are willing to take some risks and make some real changes.
"That's kind of the hope that I see out there about Yahoo," he says. "They are clearly a company that's in distress, and they're making a move that might actually get them out of it."
A glance at insider reviews on employment sites Glassdoor and Indeed.com paints the picture of a once-proud company that treats its employees well, but which has been roiled by management changes. Yahoo has now gone through five CEOs in the past five years, and workers are pessimistic. In reviews posted over the past few months, Yahoo is rated better than average, but only 48 percent of Yahoo's employees see improvement ahead for the company. At Google, it's 98 percent.
About two-thirds of Yahoo employees would recommend the company to a friend. That's not as good as Mayer's former employer, Google (90 percent), but it hints at a place that's not quite so demoralized as the tech punditry makes it out to be.
And one other thing is clear. Although Yahoo is tarnished after years of management missteps -- the failure to develop Flickr; the five CEOs in five years; the botched Microsoft bid -- a lot of geeks genuinely want it to succeed.
Antoni Sousa, a PHP developer with technology consultancy Robert Half Technology in New York says he'd consider working there. "Just because it is old doesn't mean it can't be great," he says. "Maybe I am being nostalgic, but I have been visiting Yahoo for a long time...I think the potential is still there. They have the infrastructure for it."
Yahoo hasn't done a good job promoting its winning technologies lately. Like Google and Facebook, it's an innovator in the data center -- the birthplace, for example, of the Hadoop cluster computing technology and Manhattan, a nifty app development platform. Kaminsky likes two Yahoo projects: software for building web programs called YUI, and a web mashup system called Pipes, for example. And with Flickr, Yahoo Mail, and all of the big data problems created by one of the world's largest web properties, there are plenty of interesting challenges for geeks to solve there.
The question is whether Marissa Mayer will create a culture where that can be done in creative and exciting ways. And whether that's actually happening at Yahoo won't be clear for some time. Engineers will "need to see some forward momentum before it will mean anything," says the recruiter Sienkowski.
Mayer's appointment -- and her connection to a time when Google was really exciting the technical community -- makes for a bit of a perfect geek storm: a story steeped in internet history with an underdog twist.
An now a lot of people want Yahoo to succeed, despite its troubled past.
"Yahoo is part of the original very small club that made the internet what it is today," says Kaminsky "The redemption of something that we all kind of grew up with is a positive thing...The fact that it might actually happen is kind of crazy.
Photo: Flickr/Tahir Hashmi
