It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Whatever conference room Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and his lieutenants are huddling in these days must feel a lot like one of Zork’s dark caverns. Down one tunnel lies Microsoft and its takeover bid. Down another, Google waits with all eight arms open. And from the other passages comes only deathly silence or hideous growling of unknown origin. It is not a happy place to be.
Yahoo’s hopes for rescue by a white knight are dwindling. In another memo to the troops, Yang again urged them to stay strong and focused despite any temptation to bail out. And now there’s another complication. When Microsoft made its semi-hostile bid on Friday (see “Microsoft to Yahoo: Let us prey“), it was valued at $31 a share, or $44.6 billion. Now, because it’s a half-cash, half-stock offer and Microsoft’s stock has shed $10 percent since its bid, the value has dropped to about $29.50 a share. If the situation holds or deteriorates, that means either Yahoo stockholders would have to swallow a shrunken offer, or Microsoft would be pressed into rejiggering the formula to bring the value up to the original offer, something Microsoft’s own shareholders might not be crazy about. And the longer things drag out, the happier Google is.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington paints this bleak picture: “Whatever happens, the salad days for Yahoo are long gone. 2008 will be the year Yahoo ceased to be one of the big independent Internet heavyweights. They’ll almost certainly become an operating subsidiary of Microsoft, or Google’s whipping boy. And if by some chance the government puts a stop to either deal, they’ll have a short reprieve before facing similar decisions next year or the year after. The world is an unforgiving place. Yahoo is cute, cuddly and likable, but they did not execute the way Google did. And because of that they are quickly turning into collateral damage in an epic war that is really just beginning between Microsoft and Google.”
wanted to forward you this email that i sent personally to Jerry Yang at Yahoo! the other day, concerning my experience with Yahoo! as an employee. I feel you should know about this as it dictates the kind of decisions Yahoo! is making and not in a good way. Its these kinds of decision and actions by Yahoo! that have taken it from its glory days.
Please enjoy the read.
Thanks
Mark Hannah II
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Mark Hannah II
Date: Feb 5, 2008 9:24 AM
Subject: A disgruntled Connected Life T3 Agent that just quit
To: jerry@yahoo-inc.com
Cc: cpearson@yahoo-inc.com, kathyc@yahoo-inc.com, lauran@yahoo-inc.com, sdecker@yahoo-inc.com, yuzon@yahoo-inc.com, cc-team-access@yahoo-inc.com, jgray@yahoo-inc.com
Hello Jerry,
Sorry to bother you, and I apologize for troubling you with this, but I felt my story needed to be heard by someone who holds Yahoo! as close to their heart as I imagine I do.
My name is Mark Hannah and I, up until yesterday, worked for the Tier 3 Broadband Connect Life Support Team in Hillsboro Oregon. This Team is managed by Ted Yuzon.
Yesterday, I quit. I started working for Yahoo! through Workforce Logic in Sept of 07. I was previously working for another company in Vancouver Washington, making about $5.00 more an hour than the $11.50 I was making working for Yahoo!/WFL. My resume was referred to Yahoo! and Ted Yuzon through a friend of mine, Jon.
I was excited about coming to work for Yahoo! as my personal Yahoo! ID, Nevermore781, has been active since 1999. I even met my girlfriend through Yahoo! Chat over 7 years ago, so Yahoo! is very near and dear to my heart and I write this email now with the utmost contempt for what happened to me.
When I was first told about this job, my friend, Jon had told me about his experience. How he had been rolled to perm employment with Yahoo! in less than 90 days and they had a position open as the last person had moved on to another position within the company. I decided to give him my resume and have him drop my name to the manager in the hopes I could get perm employment with Yahoo!. They were interested in me and my skills based on my resume and I was brought in for an interview. I explained to both Ted and Nick my team lead when I was interviewed about my situation. The pay cut I was taking. I explained to them I was interested in the position based on what I had heard from Jon about being rolled over before 90 days and was told that I would more than likely be rolled over before 90 days if not at 90 days.
Now as I stated previously, I left a job paying me 5 dollars more an hour. I wasn’t happy at the job making more money, it was about an hour drive each way to and from work, and there wasn’t much room for growth from my position and Yahoo! Hillsboro being only about 10 minutes away, well I did the math and I figured as soon as I was rolled over to perm, the dollar difference wouldn’t be much anymore due to the time and gas savings, plus, its Yahoo!. As I said previously, Yahoo! was already near and dear to my heart, so the opportunity to work there was just amazing to me.
So I put in my 2 weeks at my previous employer and started working for Yahoo! on Sept 3rd after passing the background check. Everything was great. I loved the position and I took to it quickly. If you check the performance for the team since I started, you will see exactly how quickly. I was told by my manager that I was “raising the bar” and was complimented on my end of day reports so frequently that other team members were getting offended by the way this performance was singled out by Ted Yuzon.
My end of month totals for YCAMS tickets processed for January alone eclipsed the rest of the team by over double. If memory serves me, I was over 200 tickets ahead of the next closest agent with the same level of access to tools and systems. I don’t quite remember exactly the data from December and previous months, but I’m sure my performance and numbers for previous months put me in either 1st or 2nd position for each month. I had good QA’s and good CareSATs on my tickets too. Please Check! I think you’ll find the numbers interesting.
I’m stating the numbers for fact, not to brag about them. The members of this team are amazing. The team lead is probably the best direct supervisor I have ever had, so I don’t mean to make to make the numbers sound as if they did anything wrong. Basically, the numbers only contribute to my frustration with this situation.
September goes by, and by the end of November, I start feeling the $5.00 difference in my bank account pretty hard. I told this to Ted, and he explained to me about the hiring freeze and how they’d like to roll me over but the hiring freeze and they had no firm date as to when it would be lifted. Since there was no way to get hired at the time, I asked if there would be any way to increase my pay through Workforce Logic. Ted asked the powers that be and was told that the paperwork for getting a pay increase through WFL would be just as long of a process as waiting for the freeze to end would be.
December comes and I am literally praying that the freeze ends so I can be rolled perm. I wrote an email detailing my situation to Ted and I believe he did forward my concerns on to his boss. I had to move back in with my parents to be able to afford my bills on the $11.50 an hour I was getting paid, so you can probably imagine the strain put on me through that alone.
January comes, I keep asking and dropping comments about when is the freeze going to be over and how bad I need to be rolled over. Pleading. I asked my manager time and time again for information and “no news” was the answer I was given most of the time. I was kept in the dark about what was going on.
So Yesterday, I contacted Workforce Logic to try and see if they had any information as to when the freeze would end, hoping they may know something or have more information than “no news”, but unfortunately, they didn’t. That was my limit and I quit. It’s not what I wanted. I don’t like it. I am not happy about it at all.
I wanted Yahoo! to be the place where I made a career and not just another job. I owed Yahoo! a lot I felt. I wanted to make a difference within the company, and now, I am so distressed over this, and I feel like deleting my account and never having anything to do with Yahoo! again.
Again I apologize for having to bother you with this, I just felt like you deserved to know what happened to an ex-Yahoo!
Thank for your time,
Mark Hannah II
Mark, thanks for the personal note. As someone who has worked for the Federal Government, big companies (Lucent in its heyday), medium companies, and now a startup, I can relate to the situation where management appears to be frozen and powerless to keep key employees happy. It’s sad to see a company like Yahoo become impotent, but it happens all too often as companies progress from small to medium to bloated.
Quitting was the right decision, IMO.
I really loved the title of this post. That is all.
Correction: As originally written, this post said Microsoft shares had dropped by $10 — it should have said 10 percent. Sorry for the error.
John
Love your opener… “It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”
Brings me back not only to the days of Zork, but to the earlier days of D&D on a PDP-11/70.
Goota love those (us) old computer farts.
It will be intersting to see what if anything that Yahoo can do, but there are not many of us rooting for them anyway. Either option (Google or MicroSoft) would be a better option for the masses than Yahoo.
-s2-
Mark Hannah, perhaps you would be better served by using all the time you’ve been putting into copy-pasting your letter everywhere (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10586;http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/06/decision-time-for-yahoo/;
http://valleywag.com/353285/leaked-yang-memo-calls-for-hard-work-commitment-and-anybody-but-microsoft)
toward finding a new tech job that makes up that 5-dollar difference, huh?