14 DAY TRIAL // When you're struggling to fight back on every front, you can't afford to lose any good soldiers on the battlefield or, even worse, you can't have them deserting to the enemy. Based on that, I find Yahoo's decision to let about two thousand people go before the holidays and it losing one of its Chief Staff Generals, Steve Souders, rather hard to swallow.
Say the firings were done with a clear reason, to improve the low profit margins, to raise the average strength of Yahoo's management team and so on, but losing the Chief Performance expert is? to say the least, one of the worst things to let happen. It's true that Yahoo! cannot help but glare pointlessly at Google's top spot in the most desirable workplaces in the United States and wish that maybe, some day? But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Souders, who has also wrote the Firefox extension YSlow, has announced on his web site that as of January the 7th he will be joining the Googlers and, by the looks of it, the ones over at the Code, Gears and related projects, where Dion Almaer is in charge of things. Dion says on his personal blog that: "It will be great to start working with Steve, even if we differ on some points. For example, he prefers the non-Ajax versions of maps as he thinks they are too slow. Are you kidding me? Do you never move around in the map then?"
The camaraderie seems to have already been there, but it is true that geniuses acknowledge each other and can spot one another across a crowded room. Let's just hope that the work that the two of them will be doing together will be well received and, most of all, let's hope that it will help us.