Yahoo seems downright incapable of keeping its best people motivated enough to stay on in Sunnyvale.
The latest person to jump ship is Utkarsh Srivastava, who has resigned from his position as Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research to join micro-sharing sensation Twitter. Louis Gray caught wind of the new hire at Twitter early, keeping tabs on the company’s own Twitter list of employees.
Now Srivastava has confirmed the news by means of, evidently, a tweet.
Srivastava, a Ph.D graduate in Computer Science from Stanford University, did brief research stints at Microsoft and IBM before joining the Yahoo! Research team now more than 3 years ago.
During his tenure at the Internet giant, he became one of the original designers and developers of Pig, a high-level language for data processing over Hadoop. He is also one of the lead architects and developers of PNUTS, Yahoo!’s internal large-scale key-value store.
Like Gray said, a ton of data flows in and out of Twitter on a daily basis, and it’s precisely that gigantic data set that gives Twitter a competitive advantage and turns it into a potential moneymaker (it’s what interests investors so much). Hence, it makes all the sense in the world for the company to recruit data management specialists, although it’s not clear if Srivastava was hired to streamline current Twitter projects or rather to develop new ones.
Time will tell, 140 characters at a time.
Great article!
Nice title Tech Crunch “It is all about the data”. Congrats Utkarsh, we wish you the best and look forward to your innovation over at Twitter. Guias Local, loves Twitter!!
Many capable and accomplished folks jump ship every day… Why is this news?
Because this is probably the 4th major Yahoo employee jumping ship in one week.
how did you determine a “Senior Research Scientist” is a major yahoo employee? its not like this guy invented php
He is the inventor of PIG – used by many companies for data analysis. Its used by Twitter itself!! That’s huge I think! His accomplishments are impressive! Phd in 4 years from a place like Stanford is not a joke.
What will Yahoo do now? They’ve lost 1/10th of the PIG team!
http://hadoop.a...g/whoweare.html
Techcrunch likes to spam because that makes them money. Otherwise this news is totally random. What I dont understand is why do they not make an automated blog post for every linked in status update? Maybe I can help write them that software. Oh maybe that is what they are heading towards…
So you come here to read and comment on our posts, but you deem them spam at the same time? Somehow, your logic escapes me.
Why does the logic escapes you? Reading and commenting on something does not mean that it is not spam? I read something assuming it was not spam and discovered it was. What I don’t like is you guys don’t respect quality. You indeed have some very good posts and that is why I am a Techcrunch reader but you have no bar on quality. This is customer feedback take it for what it is worth.
This post isn’t spam. It may not be a big story in and of itself, but it’s a newsworthy in the fact that it documents the continuing saga that is Yahoo’s long kiss goodnight. This post is best understood in the continuum of that drama. Regular readers, like me will appreciate this info. If you’re not interested in this level of granularity then Yahoo News might be more your speed.
its not Yahoo’s fault. Its all about real time these days, so employees want to get in on the excitement
It shows lack of loyalty in his part to the company and his field. I agree with the above poster, we all want to jump “get in on the excitement”.
Disagree.
The onus of keeping your employees motivated is on the company. Why would anyone work at a place where they didn’t feel compelled to work at?
Save for the people that:
A) Support family/friends
B) Use the job to support their true passion
It’s entirely up to the employee to do what he or she wants…Twitter may be hype, but it’s a challenge as well (taking it from hype to a solid product). That’s pretty exciting. What has Yahoo! done other than make a new front page that gets 37% more traffic (wow!).
i’m sure Utkarsh is a smart guy but is this a material hire? what’s next? Yahoo’s catering company and landscapers have jumped ship and are now feeding and tending the plants at Twitter.
The homeless guy who used to panhandle in front of Facebook’s HQ is now in front of Twitter HQ? Oh the symbolism.
Nice photo of him though, doubt he will get to see the outdoors much with his new position
“doubt he will get to see the outdoors much with his new position” – HUH? Why is that even important?
Yahoo is left in the cold after all these departures. This is not a good sign. I hear bad things from my friends in US, they call Yahoo, poor man’s Google.
Why Yahoo doesn’t outsource its jobs, then. There is talent outside. Carol Bartz is right when saying, Yahoo is still known well in the middle America and anywhere outside west and east costs of US.
The word incapable is too harsh though, I think.
i think you are over exaggerating the significance of these hires.
senior researchers at yahoo are a dime a dozen, as area stanford phd infolab graduates. no doubt, utkarsh is a top guy, but this is really not deserving of a full article.
For the same reason that a UX guy from Digg joining Twitter made the news a few weeks ago, we see articles like these too. (http://www.tech...es-diggs-ux-guy). Now, why is that more/less important than this one?
Its not always top execs who leave a company that are the true heros behind a company’s success. Its because of smart people like Utkarsh that keep innovation going. Also, he is THE guy behind open source projects like PIG – that is being adopted by companies big and small. For instance, Twitter itself uses PIG. I am much more interested in knowing about news like this rather than some senior VP of Ops at Y! leaving another company.
Its important enough that Luois Gray, a top tech blogger in the valley, blogged about it here:
http://blog.lou...ement-guru.html
sherry, there’s nice foliage in the background of his photo (i.e., outdoors)
you’re right, the cogs in make the wheel go around and it’s the foot soldiers that really add value to the company. . this guy probably added a lot more value than some political hack like garlinghouse but who’s to know. C and SVP level movements are material and affect stock price.
Y! sucks without you dude! Sherpa (PNUTS) is doomed without ya! We really need you back!
140 at a time.