ryan kennedy's blog

I’d like to dedicate this to a young man who doesn’t think he’s seen any morale today – JR Conlin, this one’s for you.

Danke Shoen, darling Danke Shoen
Thankyou for all the joy and pain

– Wayne Newton

Many people may have taken a recent post of mine and read it to mean that I’m not happy at Yahoo!. When I wrote it, even I thought I wasn’t happy at Yahoo!. A day after I wrote that post I had a 1-on-1 with my manager. It was scheduled before I wrote that post, we didn’t meet because of the post. We both agreed that things had been a bit slow lately with the new project spinning up and quickly remedied the situation by throwing me a meaty design problem to sink my teeth into. Almost instantly, I perked up. Boredom fled and any notions of me being unhappy at Yahoo! quickly evaporated. I had a sudden epiphany:

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass
and I’m all out of bubblegum.

– Nada

Like Rowdy Roddy Piper in his kilt, I had come to Yahoo! to chew bubblegum and kick ass. I’ve been out of bubblegum since I left EarthLink back in 2004. So for the last two and a half years at Yahoo! I’ve been doing nothing but kicking ass. When I switched projects recently, the ass dried up. The new project was slow to get started and the fun/hard problems hadn’t started flowing down the pipe yet. No bubblegum + no ass + bubblegum chewing ass kicker = bored bubblegum chewing ass kicker.

I’m sure you’re wondering when I’m finally going to go all Ferris Bueller in this post and do a little Twist and Shout on the float with the Bavarian beer maidens. I’m getting there.

You can’t go!
All the plants are gonna die!

– John Winger

Back in April I was approached by a nearby competitor. It doesn’t matter who it was, some of you know and I’m sure the rest of you can guess. I interviewed with them and was extended an offer. It was a fair offer to work with a great team on a fun product. I hadn’t really set out to look for a new job, but the idea was enticing. A healthy company, good environment, smart people, fun products. The choice ahead of me was pretty obvious. So obvious that I threw caution to the wind, declined the offer and stayed at Yahoo!. Why? In the end, I know that Yahoo! is still a great place. Fantastic people (like you, JR) make coming to work every day worthwhile. Hell, I enjoy the place so much that I uprooted and moved back to the Bay Area just so I could be in the office more often.

I got something to tell you
I got something to say
I’m gonna to put this dream in motion
Never let nothing stand in my way
When the going gets tough
The tough get going

– Billy Ocean

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s rough going right now. We get smacked around by the media. It’s been a while since we had a really big, notable win. I think morale at the company is low, the future uncertain and the food still sucks (although, I’ve had worse). But despite that, we had a record turnout for our last internal hack day. We had so many people with ideas that we had to completely change the format of the event because the campus could no longer scale to meet our demands. There is still plenty fight in this company and we have no shortage of asses to kick. So lace up all you Yahoo!’s…the ass won’t kick itself.