The biggest problem in Yahoo! is not lack of engineering talent, but, the middle managers, who do not understand either business or technology and whose main agenda is to produce metrics and hollow graphs to VP and Execs. These are the people who cover up failed projects. As if it is something to be ashamed of. As if it were their own personal failure. Instead of saying, “What we created did not work. Let’s figure out why?” “Our project is a great success but the market has changed or some junk.” They continue to work on the failed project for months till the numbers get untwist-able, they then move to another project, to ruin it too.

They suck up considerable developer time, asking them to give worthless numbers and manual reports. While tools for the same reports exist, they lack the ability to understand them and someone has to email a “summary” to them every week/day. There are engineers part who’s primary job is to send these metrics to them.

I can imagine that the people who’ll get “let go” would be the talented engineers and not the middle management.

I’m sick of hearing about how Jerry is so nice and he and Sue is so smart. Are you kidding me? Their track record in recent years indicates the precise opposite. Why nobody seems to hold them responsible for any of this is beyond me. The problems go much deeper than Semel. It takes a whole upper management team to screw up this much. It’s appalling to realize that those responsible are still running things.

The only thing that would make the unemployment line bearable would be to see those responsible out of their jobs. Given American corporate culture, there’s almost no chance of that happening.

Vince Broady is a smug one who does not play well with others. After achieving some mild success at Gamespot early in his career, he has delivered one failure after another for CNet and Yahoo. I advise anyone considering this hire to get candid references from his managers, his direct reports, and his peers.

As a yahoo shareholder I wonder if they have the financial and human capital to battle it out over the next 2-4 yrs. against Google or Microsoft? You gotta wonder how this all happened so quickly — only 2 short years Yahoo!

The same is happening to the Yahoo search team, you said. Where is the search team getting consolidated? U.S. or EU?

Answers team going to Delicious – but what exactly is Delicious up to? I haven’t seen much new from them in moooonths.

And Jason, Techrunch is not a gossip rag. And even if it was, it’s funny that your reading it anyways.

I heard the same about eBay, but on a larger scale. Significant layoffs, and word is the CEO will be leaving the company. With the earnings outlook this quarter (and remaining ones), this maybe the year eBay gets absorbed by Microsoft unless there is a merger with Yahoo.

Get the company down to 5000, then you’ll make some progress.