Pros
First, I like working at Yahoo! because I get to see the results of my work in use by millions of people every day. By and large I think most of my fellow Yahoo!s really do work hard to live the company's values and truly love what they do. In the ranks of employees that I usually work with, the spirit of collaboration and willingness to share knowledge rule over all else, and being part of the solution rather than simply restating or avoiding the problem are things they excel at. I have experience in banking, financial services, healthcare, and consulting so I have a wide range of companies to compare my impressions to. After all of this time - some of it with companies considere among the very best of the best in their industries - Yahoo! is the first company I have worked with during my twenty year career where I wake up on most days and actually look forward to going to the office!
Cons
Of course there are challenges with working at a large company, such as lengthy decision-making processes and too much beauracracy, or senior managers who know - by choice or by ignorance - very little about how to really get things done or manage anything very effectively. But I have found these people at every company I have ever worked with. Yahoo! is no different, except that perhaps there is less of that here. No one should expect any company to be perfectly free from incompetence. Few companies I know can say they don't have a fair share of poor managers sprinked throughout their ranks, who seem to last far longer than they should. Given this, I think that the management team at Yahoo! is doing a decent job of holding things together in light of changes at the very top of the organization, and a significant amount of reshuffling and re-prioritization of projects needed to return our focus to things that will result in long-term value creation. It may be that these changes came too late, but there have been very positive developments, internally, over the last six to nine months. Unfortunately, this message is not getting across to shareholders and the public in spite of numerous attempts to offer proof that things have changed (for some reason - maybe it's like the boy who cried "Wolf!"?). And this is the only caution I would throw to anyone thinking of working here. The recent M&A-oriented publicity and Icahn's corporate raider trouble-making has posed more of a threat and distraction for us and our shareholders than Google's business model. That we are still delivering anything is something of a testament to management's ability to keep us focused on what we've been hired to do, for sure, but it is much more likely that we're still at it because most Yahoo! employees really care about their work and love this company.