back to article Yahoo! begs world+dog for free engineering

After announcing last week that it will lay off 1,400 employees, Yahoo! managers have birthed a new strategy that could recoup much of its soon-to-be-lost engineering talent: Get somebody else to do the work for free. Today, the Sunnyvale-based stagnant engineer pond officially released what it's calling Yahoo! Open Strategy ( …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wow, this financial meltdown sucks and all...

    But is sure is great to see people and companies that you've hated for so long go down in flames. BTW, Great article Ted!

  2. jake Silver badge

    Nice to see ...

    ... that Yahoo no longer warrants the !bangs! in ElReg subject lines ... Not that they ever did, mind.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Open the management!

    fire them and let the community manage Yahoo!.

    Simple really, I rather enjoy managing things, and whilst I enjoy coding I am fairly selfish when it comes to giving that away :) But, I am open to managing things for free, that's right you heard I will manage things for free.

    I am sure they will find a lot of people who will want to manage Yahoo! for nothing, that's the open strategy they need.

    Right first port of business manage the Yahoo home page, I am thinking minimal, with links that start to coalesce into sites the user maybe interested in, perhaps with an 80 20% split of old and new. Oh, I am happy to write the code for that but alas it won't be open, only the management will be open!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    'In the rest of the world, we'd call that a JOIN'

    No, we'd call it a correlated subquery. Not a join. If anyone cares, really.

    Which they don't.

  5. What's in a name?
    Boffin

    A join? where

    >>SELECT * FROM social.profile WHERE guid in

    >> (SELECT guid FROM social.connections WHERE owner_guid=me)

    >> In the rest of the world, we'd call that a JOIN,

    I'd call a join something that joins multiple tables. I'd call that a sub-query, but doubtless there will be DBAs along soon to give us the correct term.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    I was thinking more along the lines of:

    SELECT * FROM social.profile WHERE guid in (SELECT guid FROM social.connections WHERE owner_personality = 'slutty' and owner_sex = 'female' and owner_age < 50)

  7. Chris Bradshaw
    Joke

    @ AC: I was thinking more along the lines of

    I'd be interested in the official DBA-approved technical term for that 'JOIN' :-)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re joins

    I think the point is that a half decent writing of that query would have used a join (in the SQL world).

  9. Paul Murphy

    So they get rid of their engineers and open the servers?

    What could possibly go wrong with that?

    I hope the sand-boxing is strong enough so that disgruntled ex-employees don't wipe the databases or anything.

    Reading this it seems to me that Yahoo are rather desperate - though as long as they make a profit they should be able to stay in business I would have thought, just tell the shareholders that there won't any dividends for a few years.

    ttfn

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re: 'In the rest of the world, we'd call that a JOIN'

    Correcshun: it is a subquery, but unlike wot I wrote it may or may not be a correlated subquery depending on where the variable 'me' comes from. If it comes from the outer select then it's correlated. Elsewise it isn't. Eitherwayswise it ain't a join.

    Does this mean we can swear at Ted now? Really strong swears, too, like his? And call him a Fail?

  11. Eddie Edwards
    Boffin

    JOIN etc

    I don't remember reading that syntax in C J Date's book, which is my only exposure to the relational model and SQL (thus making me an expert :)

    IIRC you'd use a JOIN on guid and then filter on guid being me. That's the "proper relational" way to do it, but it's declarative in nature. If you run that JOIN naively (i.e. without a heavy-duty optimizer on the DBMS) it will take about forever.

    Seems to me that Yahoo!'s method allows you to do the same thing in a more procedural way. That means a naive implementation will do it fast or that the optimizer works less hard.

    It makes sense that you probably wouldn't expose JOIN to the hoi polloi. Otherwise the hoi polloi would regularly crap on your servers.

    Or, maybe they aren't using an RDBMS for this, and have their own query engine that simply doesn't support JOIN.

    ... now all the experienced DBAs can tell me how wrong I am :)

  12. Terry
    IT Angle

    Borrrring

    This story was so boring I couldn't finish it. Not bad writing, it's just such a ho-hum subject I couldn't care less. No, really, I tried to care less and found I was already at the absolute limit of apathy.

    So I guess yahoo and especially their social site junk has actually reached 0 Kelvin. There's probably jokes there about the LHC or the warmth of women on yahoo social sites, but the sheer lame-ality of yahoo stories have driven the will to try out of me.

    The comments were far more interesting. And yes, Correlated sub-query is the proper term.

    "IT?" because I'm not sure what yahoo has to do with IT. Please don't explain it to me though.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @What's in a name?, @AC 11:03

    It is indeed a non-correlated subquery, but no doubt the query optimiser will promote it to a join. Provided that it isn't fired first.

    Of course, we have to hope they are careful about what data is exposed...

  14. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Bring! back! the! !!! for! Yahoo! article! titles!

    It is a mandatory feature.

    Shame on the editor for not catching it.

  15. Solomon Grundy

    Who's Surprised?

    Yahoo doesn't have a business model, so they may as well join the open sores movement and have a big "we don't have a business" party!

    Yahoo had their chance to sell to MS but the didn't, now they can't afford developers and are quickly going to dry up and die. I'm glad. No one really needed them (or social networks) anyway.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    omfg

    without the swearing it's just boringly factual (and possibly factually incorrect, given the learned comments above about joins/subqueries and so on ...).

    I for one, felt cheated and so to misquote the master: get back to the swearing, cockbite

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like