kmike
Member
Wow, it's almost exactly what I read today, from Paul Graham:Something I read recently, which certainly rings true in my experience:
http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
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.