RIF

We downsized again recently, 10%, as part of the quarterly announcement. A few people in our office were affected. This included some good people who had made valuable contributions. Luckily for me I managed to survive this cut, like the previous layoffs. It's not real surprising just because tech companies rarely just do one round of layoffs. There's usually at least a second round. Hopefully this will be the last. I'm not sure how many more I could get through.

So there's a new acronym I hadn't heard before for it. Reduction In Force (RIF). That's scary, it's just too close to RIP, which it is the same as on some levels.

So you don't want to get RIF'ed.

Yahoo

I use Yahoo. I like it, it's pretty good. I've never given them any money directly but I've used their games, finance, e-mail (until I switched to GMail). I still use Yahoo as my start page. The recent changes in the personal Yahoo pages with the Ajax and moving the blocks around are really impressive. Very smooth and slick. Nice job Yahoo.

Sometimes I find Yahoo comes across as deceptively simple. A lot of what they do is actually quite sophisticated. The programmers there are working on and solving some extremely difficult problems. Plus they manage to portray themselves with this favorable underdog image against Microsoft and Google.

When I use Yahoo I sometimes think it would be pretty interesting and challenging to work there as a programmer. If I was an elite CS major coming out of a top ranked school like Stanford, then I could pick where I wanted to join among Microsoft, Google, Apple or Yahoo. In that enviable situation I'd give very strong consideration to picking Yahoo. I'd give them an at least an equal chance going in.