I completely agree with you. Those are all very fine and nice technologies.

But I'm not a back-end engineer and I haven't dealt with web technologies at all. The only one of those things I've ever considered using is Hadoop and I didn't even know Yahoo had anything to do with it. Needless to say, none of those technologies are things I would be working on.

I typically write embedded and high performance C/C++ applications and I specialized in video at the time. I'm not going to jump ship for a position in some also-ran fiefdom in a directionless corporation writing embedded JVM UIs.

And that's the problem. Most people who are good in that niche aren't going to risk it with Yahoo vs some other firm or by starting their own company. Simply put: Yahoo can't win at that game because they can't attract the talent. So why do they even play at it?

First it was no "self-respecting engineer", now it's "embedded C/C++ applications", well I guess Yahoo just isn't for you dude. No biggie. Yahoo has had some great engineering talent well past it's time on top, and still even retains some today. If Facebook can attract talent to work on "Timeline" and "App Center" then I'm pretty sure Yahoo just needs to fix the fucking poisonous culture.

That's where the 'self-respecting' part comes in. If these engineers are so good, why don't they jump ship to Facebook or Google or JP Morgan? There's no way the culture could be any more poisonous, even in investment banking.

The only respectable answer I've heard concerns loss of security of changing jobs when you already own a house in the valley, send your kids to private school, lease a Lexus, etc.

Maybe they enjoy the work they do, despite the poisonous culture. If you put time and effort into something and believe in it, then as a 'self-respecting' person you probably wouldn't jump ship that easy.

YUI makes my life easier.

I think the point here is that the OP (of this comment thread) would likely NOT be working on anything nearly that interesting. Yahoo's bread and butter is generating as many 'destinations' for its content and ad network as possible, and all those other tech projects are just byproducts of that.

Those people worked at Yahoo once. How many of them work there now?

At this point I must know 50 ex-Yahoos, but I don't know a single person there anymore.