I believe Yahoo! definitely had 'culture' in the early days, they were pretty much synonymous with end-user content on the net and the Y! employees and their users were the ones that showed us cool offices, a different kind of company and neat things to do with the web. I think they went downhill since the .com crash and never managed to recover. The final remnants of that were buried in the last two years, now Yahoo! reminds me of an oiltanker with the captain and the rest of the crew below decks. Time will tell if they can turn it around or not but with giants this size even dying will take a long long time.
I don't think you can blame Bartz for culture lost since the "early days". She wasn't even there for three full years. I don't think Carol really hurt the culture much during her tenure. If anything I think she improved it, at least in terms of focus.
To answer your question, though, I started three years ago and some months ago. I came in just a bit before the Microsoft deal fell through.
I believe Yahoo! definitely had 'culture' in the early days, they were pretty much synonymous with end-user content on the net and the Y! employees and their users were the ones that showed us cool offices, a different kind of company and neat things to do with the web. I think they went downhill since the .com crash and never managed to recover. The final remnants of that were buried in the last two years, now Yahoo! reminds me of an oiltanker with the captain and the rest of the crew below decks. Time will tell if they can turn it around or not but with giants this size even dying will take a long long time.