Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz got characteristically irked off this week when asked by a reporter if the media "is too obsessed with change at Yahoo." According to the San Francisco Chronicle Bartz replied, "When you get outside of New York City and Silicon Valley, everybody loves Yahoo. . .I mean, why are you cynical about us? Be cynical about frickin' Google. Leave us alone."
Well, well, well!
Cue the folks at Glassdoor.com, a company I've written about many times which allows employees to anonymously rate their companies and their CEOs (assuming the employees are are whom they claim to be). Glassdoor decided to see how Bartz is faring compared to her predecessor, Jerry Yang, as well as Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Bottom line, Bartz is doing better than Yang, with a 55 percent approval rating compared to Yang's 34 percent when he left. But she' not doing as well as Eric Schmidt's 87 percent approval rating. Impressive! But here's the hitch: Glassdoor says Schmidt's 30-day trailing average is at its lowest level ever. You can see in this chart that his rating has taken quite a fall in the last month. So has Bartz's.
Click here to view Glassdoor CEO chart.
Google as a company also still rates higher than Yahoo, 4.0 versus 3.3 on a scale of 1 to 5. But as you can see in this second chart, Yahoo's numbers have generally moved up this summer, while Google's have generally moved lower. Frickin' what??
Click here to view Glassdoor Yahoo chart.
What are employees of both companies saying?
"Jerry and Sue were the wrong people to lead the company," someone claiming to be a Yahoo VP writes on Glassdoor. "That's fixed now."
"Yahoo! is often spoken of in the shadow of Google--even though Yahoo! is the prime internet portal," writes a purported software engineer. "Also, management is not always transparent, for e.g., with the recent Microsoft-Yahoo deal."
Comments from people claiming to be Google employees sound reminiscent of Microsoft workers a decade ago:
"Google is a big company that provides a comfy job but none of the burning desire to go that extra mile because they aren't making the effort to take you with them," writes someone identified as a senior engineer.
Another writer claiming to be a Google product manager says, "The company is getting really big. Products and infrastructures are huge now. Launching new products is getting really hard. Persuading people to go for a new idea can be an endless round of futile meetings."
Finally, from an account manager, "Google is a large corporation, and that is starting to show more and more due to the economy."
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