Yahoo vs Google: why Yahoo lags behind?

You wanna know why Yahoo lags behind Google? Look at the image below that I took from Yahoo’s careers site today (WW10.4). It shows all open reqs, sorted by date (descending).

As you probably noticed (follow the arrows please! ), the sort hasn’t happened properly. How did the coder miss this? No unit tests funda in Yahoo engineering?? How did the QA team allow this page to go online?

Does this show that Yahoo’s technical pool lacks the depth usually associated with Google’s? I believe not. I think you will find dumbos everywhere. I am pretty sure I can find at least one Google engineer who was not aware of dynamic programming before he got hired. With 16,805 employees worldwide, statistically it is impossible for Google to have everyone in it’s payroll to be the best or even above average. Oops, I am digressing…the topic of the post is not “Hype behind Google” (but that is a nice title…may be I should make a post on this topic one day…hmm!) anyway.

I see a similar trend here in Intel. Intel is huge. Worldwide, it is around 86,000 in number, which is understandable because of all the cool fabrication units and ATMs that Intel owns and operates. Though the average standard of the Intel employees (persons involved with SW/HW) looks good, I have seen some Intel groups really lacking the depth. I have met lots of brilliant and really talented engineers here, and an equal number of (or more!) dumb engineers too. I think when a company grows, especially by acquiring other small companies, it’s initial talent pool will keep getting diluted till it becomes just another company. I believe that is what has happened to Yahoo and that is what will happen to Google (or any other, for that matter) one day.

BTW, the above image is from this link (note that the results may vary now, new reqs get posted daily; Yahoo! India is hiring a lot recently. If you want to dilute the pool, do jump in…just kidding! )