Kevin's Weblog

After nearly 6 1/2 years, on Monday I gave notice at Yahoo. After next week, I’ll be moving on to new things (to be described in a later post). The short version is that I was not finding happiness or the career opportunities I wanted at Yahoo any more. The long version... well, you’ll have to come buy me a beer or two if you want that.

I’m off early in the morning for Webmaster World in Las Vegas. I don’t actually get there until noon, but we’ve got to drop the little one off at grandmom’s first. (First overnight without her!!!)

I’ll be in the audience for the YPN lunch, then hanging around for a bit after that. I’ll also be at the Yahoo party at PURE. I sort of wanted to make the SuperSession with Barry, Jeremy, etc, but the timing just isn’t going to work out for that. I’m not sure exactly which sessions I’ll attend on Weds, but a couple look interesting.

Today was my last day in the Pasadena office. Tomorrow I’ll be in Sunnyvale, then on Monday we move into the new Burbank office. It was pretty odd packing up the desk that I’ve worked at for the last 3 1/2 years. That’s the longest I’ve ever had a single office / desk.

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading down to Anaheim to represent YPN at SEW Forums LIVE!. It looks like I’ll be the only developer there, so I hope I won’t get too overwhelmed with questions.

JenSense just posted something perpetuating the idea that some types of rotation between AdSense and YPN may “confuse” the YPN crawler / analyser. From the inside developer perspective, there’s no reason to believe this ought to be the case. Unfortunately, this rumor seems to have been started by a support engineer here, although it’s been disclaimed by Paul, both in his blog and in comments to Tim Flight.

Jen’s suggestion that there might be an issue with how he was rotating (per-view) compared to how she and others are rotating (per-user), doesn’t really hold up, since the crawler looks like a new user every time it visits. Most likely, the reason that Tim saw more RON ads was simply that the semantically targeted ads for his content are not as high value as those for the SEM/SEO crowd, so RON ads are more likely to get swapped in.

Today in WTF? news, we arrived at work to find posters everywhere, and flyers on our desks, for Perfect Match, our new referral incentive program. So for the next three months, for each person I refer, I get a free Starbucks coffee. There’s just a couple problems here:

1. I already get a couple thousand bucks if someone I refer gets hired. But, you know, with the coffee, that pushes it over the edge.
2. I have to enter the referral into the system myself, so I have to ask myself, is 10 minutes spent doing that really worth it for a cup of coffee?
3. There’s free Starbucks coffee in the breakroom all the time.

Okay, to be fair, I would also get entered into a drawing for some more substantial prizes, like a week for two in Tahiti. Which would be nice if the kid was old enough to be left with the grandparents for a week, but is actually sort of worthless to me.

So, with full awareness of the irony, this seems like a reasonable place to mention that my team is hiring (along with pretty much all of our division). Bill posted the job description. I won’t cut-and-paste it here because, honestly, I think it sucks. But, don’t hold that against us, please. The job is cool, and cutting-edge, and the sort of thing where hundreds of millions of people will see your work every day.

With our office relocating soon, there’s been a lot of talk about what the desk layouts will be like and whether it will be more like our wide-open layout or more like the traditional cubes in Sunnyvale. Yesterday definitely helped me gel my feelings on the matter.

I spent the morning working in an unoccupied cube. It was a little wierd because I had no idea who was around me, what they were doing, etc. But, I could also concentrate and bang out code.

In the afternoon, I borrowed some space in a conference room that’s been turned into the office for a 4-person team. In this case, there was a collegial atmosphere where there was almost constantly conversation at a low-level. Despite that, I actually found it fairly easy to withdraw when I was coding, then drift back in while waiting for a build or test run to complete.

I’m not sure which of the two I preferred, but I definitely found both superior to our setup, which is essentially 300 people in one big room. For whatever reason, I find the discussions there much more distracting. Also, it leaves you exposed to all of those 300 people deciding they need to walk over and talk to you about something. My conclusion is that this is what comes from startups growing up and failing to realize that their office layout doesn’t scale. 4-8 people in a room together, all working closely on one thing, is fun and productive. 300 people in a room together is a recipe for massive productivity loss from communication overhead and constant distractions.

It’s been one of those rollercoaster weeks at work. I really need to figure out how to get my zen on. It’s suddenly become clear to me that the turf wars being fought are much bigger than I realized and that probably no amount of reasoned argument from us down in the trenches will have any impact. Possibly coding like mad will, but I’m not sure; it might just lead to coding like mad in a different direction later. At any rate, it may well be best for my sanity if I just duck my head down for a couple weeks, ignore it all, and get shit done.