I know that the OP did take it off the table. I'm not doing so. It's important, and here's why.
I'm sure he's extremely talented. Most 17-year-olds aren't programming at all. However, this is an HR acquisition (they're shutting Summly down). What exactly does a 17-year-old have that merits a $30m hiring bonus?
I'm not ragging on him, at all. I think it's great for him. He had the opportunity and took it. That's awesome. But... what are Yahoo's executives thinking?
When DE Shaw hires Putnam Fellows, they start them at $150-200k. Not $30 million. They have to work their way up to that.
I'm not asking this out of resentment, because I don't care. Yahoo could have acquired him for $500m and I wouldn't care. I'm asking that out of honest curiosity. If you're that desperate for talent that you're hiring 17-year-olds (very good 17-year-olds, no doubt) with a $30m hiring bonus instead of a much more reasonable, I don't know, $500k, then what did you do so wrong as to get there?
See, I'm sure there are economic reasons for large companies to buy goofy startups for $7 million per engineer. But that's a sign that either (a) they're all seriously underpaying their people, and it's systemic across the Valley, or (b) their internal cultures are so stifling of creativity that they're desperate for innovation, and the only thing they can come up with is to massively overpay "credible" people from the outside instead of developing internal talent.
I suspect that it's both (a) and (b). In fact, I've been inside enough short-sighted, badly-run companies to know that it is.
It's of personal interest to me. Companies are literally in headline-making death throes because they can't get people like me, and when one of us shows up-- we aren't that rare, maybe 1 in ~100 software engineers-- they treat us like shit. It's bizarre.
Here's a proposal to all the large corporations out there. For a mere $2500 per hour I, Michael O. Church, will tell you how to unfuck your inefficient, talent-stifling culture. CEO of a megalith that can't hire good people without a 5-million-per-engineer acq-hire? (Actually, you probably have good people-- some much better than I am-- but the dopey middle managers keep you from seeing their talents. Fire them. That'll be $175.) I will help you change that. All you have to do is listen to me. After 200 hours (that's a mere $500k) you will no longer to acq-hire at $5-10m per engineer to get good teams. You'll be able to do it for $3m per engineer because people will actually want to work for you. Or, better yet, you'll be able to get good people the old-fashioned way.
Mark Zuckerberg is young and rich, but he actually built a free-standing company. So it's not as ridiculous that he's worth billions, given that the work (possibly not the code, but the ongoing business process) is still in use.
It's hard to say this without sounding insulting or belittling, but I'm genuinely curious... What are your credentials? You don't have to justify yourself to some random guy on the internet (me), but a few of your comments mention you're in the "1 in a 100" category, so I'm wondering what you've done that would be so valuable to Yahoo. Is it that you're a talented engineer or more?
I probably sound like a complete dick but I'm being sincere. I often wonder where on the scale I sit (e.g. 10 in 100?), and whether I'm undervaluing myself or my talents, or even whether I'm overvaluing it? So I'm wondering how/why you arrived at your personal valuation. Hope that's not taken the wrong way.
It's from 0.0 to 3.0, but the majority of professional software engineers are between 1.0 and 2.0. Average is about 1.1-1.2, and 1.5 is seriously good; it means you're starting to have sound multiplier, infrastructural contributions.
I'm probably at 1.8, which is about 97th percentile. I promoted to "1 in ~100" because I have a lot of creative talents, cultural insight, and design experience. That's just a ballpark. I'm somewhere between 1-in-10 and 1-in-1000 (among software engineers). It's highly subjective and has a lot to do with tool fit, project/person coherence, and peoples' motivations. In some companies, I'm the absolute last guy you want to hire. In others, I'm a 4-sigma catch. Especially at the upper end, it depends a lot more on fit than anything objective.
My point with "1 in ~100" was that, while I won't claim to be average, if you're at Yahoo's size you almost certainly have people who think like me. If you can't find them through normal methods and have to acq-hire to get top talent, that's on you, but I think you're spilling money on the floor. It'd be cheaper, in the long run, to develop what you have internally.
Interesting credentials, but I prefer to rank professional software engineers on the Freyr scale, which ranges from 'Fink Melange' to 'Banana Whelp'. It's a complex system based on myriad factors, and even discounts for spatial-temporal mislocations and organizational dissynergies.
Right now, I'm a 'Piebald Lummox', which places me squarely in the 99.3 percentile. In other words, I command top dollar and you're an idiot if you don't hire me.
If you need any further credentials, I'll tell you about my inverse Graftenberg scale of managerial excellence. I'm currently at -ξ.
Haha, "here's an article I prepared earlier"! Looks like an interesting read, I'll go through it now.
I understand what you mean, given the sample size it's statistically likely that there must be a some number of extraordinarily talented devs. And that they're not nurturing that talent. It is a fair observation I must say.
This "strange" deal actually did a few things for Yahoo:
- people are talking about it (and not in a bad way, like it was with the telecommuting memo)
- this may attract some fresh talent (just out of novelty; before, Yahoo was pretty much written off)
- it's crazy enough, it's actually pretty energizing for the right kind of people on the inside
On the other hand, I can only imagine what kind of internal HR issues these acqui-hires may create for Yahoo.
People are talking about it in a bad way. I don't think it's useful to hate or resent a 17-year-old for getting acq-hired (although it's pretty disgusting that he keeps the company of Mark Pincus and Rupert Murdoch; I'll give him till 21 to clean his judgment of character of such) but this reflects really badly on Yahoo.
On the other hand, I can only imagine what kind of internal HR issues these acqui-hires may create for Yahoo.
Well, for fuck's sake yeah.
What Yahoo needs to do, and fast, is get better at discovering talent within. Apparently they have a problem with lazy people. Ok, so make it possible for a not-lazy employee to make a real dent-- important projects, self-direction, lots of autonomy. Give your best people an incentive to bring themselves out and shine. Honestly, if you give your most talented people basic support and autonomy instead of letting them get eaten alive by people they intimidate, you're doing better than 90+ percent of companies.
Any attempt to innovate in corporation is potential career killer. That is how companies work. So many smart engineers are just quiet and they just do what they are told (make they boss happy).
Seems Yahoo! tried to solve this with their "brickhouse" program, a new product incubator, but ultimately it seems that was too disruptive and got axed.
As a cynic who is constantly looking for ways for human structures to fall to pieces, I'd be very worried about the large-company politics of a center-of-excellence/"honors college". When you set up a CoE, the rest of the organization feels put out.
If you put some set of people into R&D roles where they have full autonomy, then everyone wants it. The "Real Googler" issue (~10% of engineers have 20%T and the freedom to move around the company; the rest have manager-as-SPOF bullshit) is definitely a source of resentment at the Big G.
If you're going to do that, then have open allocation for all engineers. It's a much ballsier step, but it avoids resentment of the "special friends club" that gets to do cool R&D and that the rest of the company ends up undermining.
Whilst I generally agree with your view on innovation and the whole "special friends club". But 20% time wouldn't counter the innovator's dilemma: there will still be established power structures in place, reaching to the top levels of the business, who have a vested interest in their status quo (and that doesn't mean no innovation - they can still be innovating), who will fight disruptive innovation. Google seems particularly rife with this!
The value in a incubator, new product development group, or "spin out", (don't think any CoE I've seen fits this model...), is that they have top level sponsorship to go outside of normal process for: hiring, sales, tools, platforms, etc. as required, and just build new stuff. If that's disruptive in the short term, C-levels should be pushing it through for long term gains.
You also place a lot of trust in engineers to have Clue about what to work on. Most will have ideas, many of those ideas would be a very poor use of the companies resources. If those guys feel strongly, they should spin out, and pitch to their old senior execs for seed funding. They'll soon find out if their idea has legs...
I'm sure he's extremely talented. Most 17-year-olds aren't programming at all. However, this is an HR acquisition (they're shutting Summly down). What exactly does a 17-year-old have that merits a $30m hiring bonus?
I'm not ragging on him, at all. I think it's great for him. He had the opportunity and took it. That's awesome. But... what are Yahoo's executives thinking?
When DE Shaw hires Putnam Fellows, they start them at $150-200k. Not $30 million. They have to work their way up to that.
I'm not asking this out of resentment, because I don't care. Yahoo could have acquired him for $500m and I wouldn't care. I'm asking that out of honest curiosity. If you're that desperate for talent that you're hiring 17-year-olds (very good 17-year-olds, no doubt) with a $30m hiring bonus instead of a much more reasonable, I don't know, $500k, then what did you do so wrong as to get there?
See, I'm sure there are economic reasons for large companies to buy goofy startups for $7 million per engineer. But that's a sign that either (a) they're all seriously underpaying their people, and it's systemic across the Valley, or (b) their internal cultures are so stifling of creativity that they're desperate for innovation, and the only thing they can come up with is to massively overpay "credible" people from the outside instead of developing internal talent.
I suspect that it's both (a) and (b). In fact, I've been inside enough short-sighted, badly-run companies to know that it is.
It's of personal interest to me. Companies are literally in headline-making death throes because they can't get people like me, and when one of us shows up-- we aren't that rare, maybe 1 in ~100 software engineers-- they treat us like shit. It's bizarre.
Here's a proposal to all the large corporations out there. For a mere $2500 per hour I, Michael O. Church, will tell you how to unfuck your inefficient, talent-stifling culture. CEO of a megalith that can't hire good people without a 5-million-per-engineer acq-hire? (Actually, you probably have good people-- some much better than I am-- but the dopey middle managers keep you from seeing their talents. Fire them. That'll be $175.) I will help you change that. All you have to do is listen to me. After 200 hours (that's a mere $500k) you will no longer to acq-hire at $5-10m per engineer to get good teams. You'll be able to do it for $3m per engineer because people will actually want to work for you. Or, better yet, you'll be able to get good people the old-fashioned way.
Mark Zuckerberg is young and rich, but he actually built a free-standing company. So it's not as ridiculous that he's worth billions, given that the work (possibly not the code, but the ongoing business process) is still in use.