The Death of Corporate Culture at Yahoo

Takeover threats loom, poison pills are adopted, allies are found, and enemies are fought off.

This is pretty standard M&A stuff, as far as I can tell.

But what I want to tell you about is a guy that for the sake of this story, I'll call him a suitably common Western man's name, "John". John is not John's name, but John's name will not be terribly important as you learn a little more about him.

John might be your typical systems administrator at Yahoo; he's strict, rigid, and not overly endowed with a sense of humor. He is one of the administrators of the Yahoo internal bug tracking system (yes, we use bugzilla and are mentioned doing so on the bugzilla website), one of the central repositories for all that is wrong with the world of Yahoo.

(You might think that being in charge of a system of only what is wrong with your company's products may color your world view a tad; you wouldn't be far off the mark in such thinking according to some experts somewhere on the Internet)

Why, you may ask, am I telling you the story of John? After all, John is only the kind of minor character you find in a story that might attempt to block our protagonist from fending off the evils of the underworld, or whatever the current epic calls for s/he to be doing (ensuring the carrier pidgins carry their April Fool's jokes to the Sunday Post in time? Rescuing maidens from the narcissistic terrors of the nail salon during the last bastion of free time, the weekend? Finding new ways to restructure debts against the growing US credit crisis before the April 15th tax deadline?)

About a week ago, slightly ahead of the April Fool's holiday, I had what I thought was an interesting thought over a beer at Yahoo's de facto watering hole in Hong Kong. The thought ran that our bug tracking system didn't have its own unique user database of users with permission to receive and send bugs - it probably took the valid access information from our regular intranet, dubbed "backyard". Our CEO, Jerry Yang, has a backyard ID just like any other Yahoo. But wait, does that mean we can assign bugs to Jerry?!

Against the protestations of my coworkers who overheard my mad rantings, I raced upstairs to my corporate authenticated laptop to test this theory. I happened to know just exactly the perfect bug that should be assigned to Jerry, if one could ever hope to assign one's ultimate boss any bit of work; but this made sense, on the provision that our masters are ultimately the servants of all, fearlessly captaining our collective ship through the gloom of raging storms all around, competently vanquishing our foes and commanding by their austere presence the dedication and loyalty of the rank of file. "Oh captain my captain," I wished to cry, and share with our CEO what I thought was a good bit of fun.

The bugzilla new ticket entry screen stared back at me from my 15 inch LCD, awaiting my instructions. The mouse moved almost of its own accord as the "Assign To" blank seemed to illuminate itself, perfectly understanding my desires.

"Je"

(my heart rate increased slightly)

"r"

(the pulse now perceptible in my fingertips above the nicely springy depression of the keys)

"r"

And then, auto-completion took over, and a list of five Yahoos appeared. Sure enough, "Jerry Yang" stood out with his backyard ID photo in stark relief against the flat white background of the web page.

I paused a second to consider the audacity of the act, but still, the reasoning seemed true. Jerry was more than our father; he was our founder, the maker, the visionary that built this company alongside Filo in a trailer somewhere in California, and at one point, he must have been coding with the best of them, and that meant he had to have some part of the hacker's sense of humor.

I tore through the remainder of the ticket entry form, heart rate now a bit accelerated in a most un-Jason-Bourne-esque fashion. My coworkers alternately switched between scandalized excitement and covering their eyes with hands (while leaving a crack to peek through) as they watched a train wreck move through towards its ultimate completion.

I marked it as a bug of type "Task", QA contact my own team, and priority 0 - Critical.

The words in the summary read "Please stop the Microsoft takeover".

The full text of the bug description read "Best of luck Jerry ;)".

And of course, the steps to verify were:
" * Review previous Microsoft acquisitions
* Review recent core Microsoft product releases (Vista)
* Review OS systems and semantics from Microsoft (Note the backslash in particular)
* Consider "Microhoo" is probably not a good name ;)"

With a last ditch thought for the sanity of the act, I clicked submit before my rational facilities could abort the action. The coffin was nailed shut, the bug was filed. Ticket #183XXXX was submitted and assigned P0 to Jerry Yang himself.

I'm not going to tell you much about what happened next, since it involves the actions of other Yahoos based on things I didn't come up with out of the office while sipping a Hoegaarden. In very general terms, I can tell you that I did miscalculate slightly; P0 tickets are a bit too important for them to wait for the assignee to respond. Yahoo is a good company, and the global network operations center which is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.24 days a year YNOC was on that ticket before Jerry could ever have possibly seen it. P0 - Critical is not taken lightly here, as it shouldn't be.

The intervening travails aside, I eventually downgraded the priority, but left it in the hands of Jerry. Other Yahoos chimed in, spotting the good bit of satire in its unadulterated form and adding on the bits of intended-function-misuse which is the cornerstone of good hackery to make the whole bit even better.

Until we get to our friend, John.

John didn't close the ticket, make some comment about please not doing this, or even contact me directly to let me know while off the record this may be funny, we couldn't do this sort of thing, and everything would have ended. What a good sysadmin with a good sense of hacker world views and how to really effectively get things done at a company would do. That wasn't really enough for John.

John cleared out the bug summary. Actually deleted it. Cleared out the steps to verification. Cleared out absolutely every field that he could clear out, as a matter of fact. Then closed the ticket, CC'ed my boss, and wrote a rather insulting replacement to be shown for the rest of the bug's history in the system - basically saying that bugzilla is not a toy.

Now any hacker knows that just about anything is a toy, even more so if it has any kind of digital existence. The list of precedents for this type of use of a bug tracking system are actually far too numerous to contemplate. Needless to say, various people at the company did not agree with the actions of John, and now that he had made himself a target, began to express themselves (in non-offensive fashion) generally that this wasn't a toy use of a bug tracking system, in their minds.

This isn't the cultural revolution in China; the scholars were not asked for their comments and then summarily disappeared a few months later. Ok, maybe what I did wasn't strictly speaking what I should be doing with a bug system, but trust me from perusing the other bug reports, there are vastly less "corporate" uses of bugzilla going on regularly all over the system. And if Jerry really had a problem with what I said, no one doubts his authority to remove a peon like me with the barest flick of his hand as a small kid might stomp out the multitudes of ants storming out of an anthill; yeah, I banked on his sense of humor, but there are certainly far more career oriented productive things I could have done than to send this particular bug to our CEO.

Which really made me wonder why John had even gotten involved.

Ok, perhaps it had been mistakenly assigned to him, or maybe this was at the insistence of Jerry unbeknownst to me. Fair enough, but leaving the bug in that state just seemed patently inappropriate.

I reassigned it to me, reopened it, made a comment to try to smooth things over with John, and removed him from the CC so that we would stop bothering him and his department. I also mentioned that anyone who wants to play with the bug, fair game, but please don't change the assignee or the product so that we don't bother people who don't view this as a good statement of what many Yahoos would agree on as an important task, and have many more important things to be doing with their time.

The people agreed, the bug went on in its muted semi-censored form, with Jerry no longer the assignee. And the story probably should have ended there.

But it didn't.

John came back with a vengeance soon after. Once again, he cleared out all the fields that he possibly could. Once again he reset the display titles and summaries. And once again he left his mildly insulting message about toy use of bugzilla. But that wasn't enough for this keeper of the company's problems (er.. bug reports).

He wrote to my boss again. And then he escalated to his own boss the contents / nature of which I'm not aware. But what I am aware of is that his boss then went to my boss and my boss' boss, claiming somehow that (in other words) I was the root of all evil for this sort of thing.

That really was unnecessary.

I had already ceased and desisted and closed the bug the first time my boss brought it to me. I would have even apologized at the time to John, because while I didn't agree with him, administrating that system was his job, and nobody needs extra work - the fun was done, and now it was time to make up and move on in my mind.

But John or someone in the escalation path felt that that wasn't punitive enough. I came in to work the next day and attempted to check in some of the programming code that I had written into the Yahoo code repository, as befits my job as a senior programmer. We have some auditing requirements on code submissions / changes as any large company probably has, as told to me, in conformance with our Sarbanes-Oxley compliance guidelines. In order to submit new code or a change, you need to document what you did and attach a bug ID from bugzilla indicating the problem / enhancement / change you were solving.

They had removed my access from the bug tracking system.

Now I'd like you to note at this point, I haven't been fired, I've already written a soft apology and gloss-over that our bug admin was copied on, and stated the intent of the bug (before the last John edits) of just being an expression of internal desire to the guy who can do something about it that at least some of us are not big fans of the takeover attempt.

And now, per corporate policy, he (or whoever removed the access) was blocking me from doing my job.

Territorial pissing match aside, at no point did I somehow make it impossible for our friend John to do his job. At most, he looked at a bug he (in his own opinion) deemed irrelevant (which he was never assigned anyway) and initiated a lot of extra effort instead of just closing it and quietly requesting that we don't do that anymore. Any extra work he did with this was wasted effort that he decided was justified, plain and simple.

I've been batching up my work submissions now through coworkers and a shadow bugzilla / code repository system that I was able to set up in less than an hour, since I don't find those types of tasks particularly challenging from a workload perspective, to keep in compliance with corporate policy. And it has now been 3 days, and I still don't have access. Thank you for embracing the spirit of One Yahoo, John, one of Yahoo's big bets.

And you want to know the sad corollary? For all the trouble, I never heard a word from Jerry :(


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* By the way, these are my own views, certainly not Yahoo's