the blog

I love peanut butter.

Date

11/19/2006 11:01:00 PM [permalink]

Author

yahooza

Entry

Over the weekend, someone leaked an executive memo regarding the bureaucratic mass that has grown within Yahoo!. It happens and all growing companies have the same problem. It's inevitable. Growth, growth, growth: that's what defines the success of a publicly-traded company, right? =) Along the way, there will be bad hires, nepotism, power abuse, etc. It's gonna happen folks and it's up to management to wade through the blob or bring in the consultants, "The Bobs," to fix it.

Read the memo: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116379821....

Y! is my first product company as I had been in professional services (consulting) for the past 8-9 years. I would work onsite with clients, quietly chuckling at their politics. Now, i'm one of 'em. *giggles*

It's part of life and I do agree the company needs to part ways with such a heavy top-down management approach. It does stifle passion and innovation. I am 9 or 10 levels from C-level status but I think I make a darn big difference. How? Mostly by sticking to my guns. My credo to corporate life:

"Trust your guts, do what's right and cut the bullshit politics."

You wanna build something cool? Do it. You wanna play games to hold on to your job? Get the hell out of my way. I'm not saying I'm better than other peeps, but I have no desire to hold the team back. Plus, I wanna make dollars ($$$) so I can retire at 45 =P

Better Bookmarks grew up like this. The PMs managed the politics and shielded the worker-bees; basically, I just made up stuff on the fly (agile stuff). The team had sanity checkpoints to verify product goals. It went something like this ....

1. I copied and pasted this example
2. Using this skeleton, I began by wrapping the existing markup, implementing a single drag thing-a-ma-bob
3. Then I did multiple drag thing-a-ma-bobs
4. The designers asked me to mimic the Candygram user experience (I'm using the same akamaized image)
5. Put in a messaging overlay for passive events
6. Couldn't make the cursor scroll upwards to the folder list, so I made the list come down
7. Next: "tag-on-drags"
8. It also helps to build on top of world-class framework like Symfony and the YUI platform libraries

And there you have it! Ding ding! Dinner is served!

How bout some jelly to go with that peanut butter?

So, in a nutshell, I can't wait to hear the Monday-morning quarterbacking on the PB memo. It ain't Valerie Plane, but it sure is darn interesting! Booyakasha!

Labels: bureaucracy, memo

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