Life at Yahoo
Friday, August 10th, 2007I meant to post over a month ago about my new job but I just now getting around to it. About 2 months ago I started as a Frontend Engineer in the Small Business unit of Yahoo. I relocated to Sunnyvale and left the Las Vegas lights behind. I didn’t know what to expect working at such a large company as I’ve worked at fairly small companies until now. The work environment here is much different than what I’m accustomed to; there’s much more going on from a day-to-day basis and sometimes it can be quite distracting. There always seems to be some event going on, such as a tech talk or training session and after breaking your concentration on a task, it’s difficult to reacclimate.
In the past, I’ve thought of HTML and CSS as being simple and easy. Well, since starting here, I’ve learned otherwise. Developing for all of the A-grade browsers and obtaining pixel-perfect pages can be quite difficult. On top of that, Yahoo’s policies highly encourage doing optimizations such as CSS sprites and some other techniques (see ySlow).
As for the future, who knows. I’m not certain how long I want to stay in this industry or how long I want to stay in the area. I’m very interested in doing a startup or joining a newly founded one. That may be where my future lies.