My current yahoo id was registered on Mon Mar 24 17:41:20 1997.
I remember when I was working at SGI back then and our lunch conversations were alway about how we thought Yahoo does it’s magic. How it was always up, always fast. We were a bunch of geeks in awe of what we saw from the outside.
Then in May 1999 I decided to leave SGI and come to work for Yahoo. It was a very exciting environment where the term ‘control chaos’ was often mentioned when referring to our engineering code management. Often knowledge for an entire product would reside in the head of this one person. Things get done and knowledge get passed down when you go into the person’s cube and force yourself to sit down with the person for a few hours of ‘brain dump’.
An engineer’s reputation was everything back then. You don’t want to be known as the person who messes up, or your email and phone calls go unanswered. It’s a good way to weed out the weak link.
We have come a long long way, Y! engineering. It’s awesome, I’m still in awe.
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