I was the Yahoo! News engineers almost 10 years ago. Yahoo! News is working on a 10th year “9/11 Rmembered” http://news.yahoo.com/september-11-anniversary/
This was 5 years ago
http://ycorpblog.com/2006/09/11/five-years-later/
Category: yahoo
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Annual Reviews
It’s one of the most important task people in large organizations need to do. But often we don’t spend enough effort and thought compared with the importance of annual reviews to their careers
Most People Hate Reviews
I’ve been doing my self review for over 12 years now at Yahoo! For the first few years, it was a chore and I didn’t spend quality time working on getting peer reviews and writing self reviews. For the last few years, I’m using the following system and it seems to be working well.
Getting Ready, Way Ahead Of Time
At the beginning of year, I’ve already try to imagine my end of the year review and what I want it to say. Given I have planned ahead, I already have some idea of the responsibilities I want to take on, the things I do not want to take on. I create a note for myself call ‘Annual Review Forecast 2011’
Throughout the year, if I get emails/praise from people, I write it down using Evernote into a note named ‘Annual Review 2011 : praise’, these are the people I’ll use during my peer review feedback when I wanted positive feedback.
Who To Ask For Feedback?
I have a saved search in my email that looks for all emails I ‘Sent’ in the last year or 6 months, depending on if it’s mid-year check in or full year. Then I look at who I sent the most emails to and make a decision whether that person is a good peer reviewer and include that person in my reviewer list. For Outlook, you can look at the ‘Sent’ folder and sort by ‘To” and scan that list for people who you have interacted frequently for potential names.
View -> Arrange By -> To:
View ->Arrange By -> Collapse All Groups -
Today my manager at Yahoo! held an all hands for her engineering group in Yahoo! Media and invited our CEO to take some Q/A.
It was wonderful to have Carol there to talk about why what we are doing in Yahoo! Media is important to the company. It was inspiring to hear her long term perspective.
I had a 10 minute slot to demo how we can use LEGO ( an internal product name ) to launch a fully function site in a day. It was easy with the tools our team have built, it was actually too easy 🙂
Afterwards, Carol asked me what I learned. Thank god I prepared for that one.
1) Consistency, rhythmic delivery is very important when we work across 4 geographical locations and 3 timezones. We deploy every week, on the clock on Tuesdays.
2) Being a hero is not needed, and most times is not good. People get burned out and there is no process. I’ve played the hero for 7 years while working in Yahoo! News, that just didn’t scale.
3) Developers should use the tools that editors use to know first hand the pain points.
4) Fast excution only happens when you plan ahead.
T
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Carlos was first hired in 2007 into the US News team as one of backend engineers to work on http://news.yahoo.com/. He joined when the team was in it’s growing phase (from 2 in 2001, 5 in 2005). He started off working on fixing bugs, adding features to the modules on the web site. Then helped to work on the CMS system. Then taking on the local news component, taking over some of the mail to friend feature for Yahoo!. Taking on a leadership role to lead an entire backend rebuild of Yahoo! News in 2008. He demonstrated a huge capacity to learn, to absorb any amount of work.
Because he was so rock solid, the leadership team gave him 2 of the biggest projects. One was to launch the 2nd content optimization effort in the company after the homepage (www.yahoo.com) in Yahoo! News. Another was to deploy a pet project of mine called 100X to be able to scale up the Yahoo! News capacity by 100X the normal load in case of a huge news spike event. He was left alone to handle everything on the projects and delivered it like they were nothing that challenging. Rock solid performer!
In 2009, he decided to try his hands as an engineering manager and lead a team to transition the entire US News to a Taiwan team. He did this by rallying his team to do hands on training, documentation and 1 month physical shadowing in Taiwan. Again, flawless!
In 2010, he lead a content team to work on the backend of an ambitious project to enhancement an brand new version of a content system which will shape all Media properties at Yahoo! from now on.
After 4.5 years, Carlos has decided to join a start up. I wish the best of luck to him. As he has told me, this is the longest (by 2 times) he has stayed with a company. I thank him for everything he has done for Yahoo!
Top 3 things I remember about Carlos
- One of the few Cal grads I work with and we both did our school proud!
- Hula dancing
- Smart, nice guy to be around. Always positive energy. Adds to whatever team he is on and doesn’t take away energy. Seriously.. always!
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The team was here and finally finished the first phase of their product. We are all very very impressed. Wait for end of June to hear more!
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That was my thought last year… however, I have changed my stance. The most successful way to get children and adults to change is to model the behavior yourself consistently.
If you want people to act a certain way you model it over and over again. Don’t ask them to change though, just act on it. For those who can change, they will slowly follow, for those who do not have the ability to change, they won’t.
You can only accept this, be happy if your behavior changes at least one person.
I have seen this multiple times being successful
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- Be prepare for meetings ahead of time. You will be in the minority and you will get more of what you want
- Have an agenda ahead of time and send it, you will likely get more time
- If you want to a decision to go your way, anticipate the arguments, the fear, convince the decider ahead of time, use the meeting to just communicate
- Be prepare to take on the risks that other don’t want to take
- Don’t walk into meetings without knowing what will be presented
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From Evernote:
Comic Strip Sunday March 20, 2011
C. and I did a time boxed 15 minute strip
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From Evernote:
C’s Comic Strip Sunday March 20, 2011
C. and I did a timeboxed 15 minute strip
