So Exciting? — The Close Down of the Yahoo Beijing Center
If you read news about the shutting down of Yahoo Beijing in a US media, you are not getting the right picture. They have no idea what is happening. It’s not a normal layoff of 300 people. Instead, it is a lot more dramatic and exciting. It’s like a spectacular reality show, still going on as of this moment. The theme of the show? Fighting for talents! The best of the internet companies are going after the 200–300 yahoo employees, within hours and minutes, in their most creative outfits.
I was in an xYahoo wechat group formed Wednesday morning, same time as Yahoo was releasing the news. It grew to 400+ people within hours. I found 500+ new messages in the group after stepping out of an one-hour meeting. People were throwing offers with red envelops (yes, money), hoping that someone would pay attention.
It was fun to watch how quickly companies react to this news. First there were individuals — mostly x-yahoos — offering introductions to their own companies. Within hours, the group was loaded with targeted messages built by companies, with warmly designed posters lining up yahoo logo together with theirs, and show casing their excellent pay, bright future, and free food. Wednesday afternoon, a few companies start to host sessions in coffee shops downstairs of Yahoo office. Then, on Thursday (today), hiring groups from all major companies physically showed up — multi-nationals like Microsoft, the local giants BATs (Baidu, Ali and Tencent), and HUGE numbers of medium to small sized internet companies. No one misses. Within 24 hours, if an internet related company has not shown up, people are wondering what is wrong with it.
A few other companies sent pretty girls and alien outfitted models to the front gate of Yahoo building, trying to grab attention. There were inquiries from other cities as well as other countries. There were flying model airplanes. A designer leaked her contact and got 10+ invitations within one minute. A group formed for hiring was filled/full with five hundred HR hiring managers and head hunters within hours. Thursday (today) evening, another group focusing on startups was formed. The rule was only Yahoo employees, startup founders and HR heads were accepted. The group again grew to 300+ within a few hours — still growing as of this moment of me writing (mid-night). If one third of these people were startup founders, that’s 100+ of them. There was not even as much employees in the group. So, it soon became a sharing place of new products, opportunities and ideas.
I left Yahoo in 2012. The past two days I was bombarded with messages and calls about reaching out to my ex-colleges and team members, all coming with promises of iPhone 6s and goodies alike. Who are these employees? They are basically good developers (and product managers and designers) who worked on internet products — advertising, search, mobile products, cloud platforms. They mostly came from the best computer science departments in China’s top universities, and played with machine learning, data, large systems, and similar fashionable stuff.
No wonder for some of my friends, ‘exciting’ was the word they use to describe their state-of-mind since yesterday. Many internet companies in all shapes and sizes are doing extremely interesting work, in particular in mobile internet and related fields. So the skills of these workers are in higher than high demands.
When I learned about the closing news, my first reaction was: Yahoo did not know the value of its people. They are probably valued three if not ten times more the moment they are released to a larger world. Then I thought about it again, maybe it is the other way around. Because these people will now be out there, they will soon take larger roles and challenges, and release ten times more energies to show that much value.
Just like in the Silicon Valley, the impact of x-Yahoos in the China internet industry will go much further beyond today. In fact, it is a great start today!
