Sounds good, but I seriously doubt this Marissa person would be interested in doing that and essentially putting herself out of a job, and also making herself look incapable.

Hmm. You seem to have a good point here.

Of course, every single one of those seems to be a Google acquisition. Does Yahoo have any similar successes to point to? I doubt it.

Isn't that true of lots of companies from that time though?

Really, I think Apple was an exception, one which very few people could have predicted accurately. "slashdot_commenter" is right; their fortunes really didn't turn around until the iPod.

No, because history shows that big corporations buying start-ups never turns out well. The big corp has no idea how to effectively use the new start-up, and its potential (assuming it had any) ends up being wasted.

Of course, most start-ups go nowhere too. But of those lucky few that succeed, we do get things like Google, Yahoo (back when they were successful), and Facebook (ugh).

No, it just wouldn't make any sense, just like calling a man a "bimbo" wouldn't make any sense at all. Calling a woman a "bimbo", and a man a "bozo", is fine; you're just alleging that the person in question is not very competent.

Yes, that may very well be, but if she were a male, you wouldn't call her (him) that. A stupid male you might call a "bozo" (or just a moron or idiot), but never a "bimbo"; that's reserved for women. I'm only pointing this out because it loos like PlastikMissle has some kind of problem with the usage of the word "bimbo". I'm just pointing out that it's entirely appropriate.

Dating? Do they even still do that? I remember Yahoo Personals in the early-mid 2000s, but it was a disaster, because most of the "women" on there weren't real. They eventually shut it down, as I remember.

Google would have to do some serious foot-shooting to make their product more crappy than Yahoo mail. Yes, Gmail's new UI sucks donkey balls, but it's nowhere near as bad as Yahoo's gaudy crap.

And why hasn't someone made some Greasemonkey script or extension to fix Gmail anyway? Surely it can be done somehow.

Because she's a female. If she were a man, we could call him an "overrated bozo". You wouldn't call a woman a "bozo", since that's a reference to Bozo the Clown, who was a man.

There's always an exception somewhere. Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, was a uniquely talented individual, and if Apple hadn't brought him back the way they did, they would indeed have died years ago. I seriously doubt this Marissa Mayer is this sort of uniquely talented person. Moreover, Apple has always had a bit of a cult around it due to the qualities of its products (remember, their whole goal was to make computers that regular people could use for work and everyday tasks, hence their extreme focus on UI and UX from way back when Jobs toured PARC). Yahoo doesn't have anything like this; its whole claim to fame was that it was a web portal back in the days before Google and search engines; essentially it started out as a giant web directory. This whole concept is totally obsolete now, so they tried to pitch themselves as a "front page" to the internet, but not many people care about that any more.

The only way I see them surviving is if they use the cash they still have and re-invent themselves into something different, mostly abandoning this "web portal" crap. I have no idea what that would be, however, and since really revolutionary ideas (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) never come from large, established corporations, but rather from tiny start-ups, I think their days are very numbered.

There are no "good" companies out there; that's the thing you don't seem to understand. There aren't any companies which are going to give you a generous raise each year (at least enough to match what you'd make at another job elsewhere, i.e., keeping up with the "market rate"); that's just not the way companies work any more. Companies treat workers like dirt because they're shortsighted, and because a fair number of employees (like you, it seems) put up with it because they're afraid of losing their jobs, and are willing to work 60-hour weeks for years on end just so they can be seen as "loyal", even though company management doesn't give a shit and will sack you as soon as it helps them make this quarter's financials look better.

A killer stereo and huge TV don't cost anything, BTW. You can get a huge TV now for under $1000; to someone making 6 figures, that's really not a lot of money. Nice stereos cost quite a bit less than that these days. And it's not like you're going to buy a new one of these every year. If you want to point at things which Americans usually waste a lot of money on, it's 1) car (with giant car payments), 2) cable/satellite TV (worse if you get the stupid sports packages), 3) alcohol (not really expensive from a store, but at bars and restaurants it's insanely overpriced). Living in a "ritzy" area is not a waste of money, because the alternative is living in a ghetto and getting shot at or robbed on a regular basis. Thanks to the housing boom, a decent house still costs $250k-500k in many cities, even after the housing bust (prices went down, but not that much) (yes, decent houses are much cheaper in other places, but these are generally non-tech cities where Slashdotters are not going to have an abundance of jobs to choose from, and consequently salaries are far, far less, even less than half as much).

As for your cousin, what was his field and his specialty, and where did he live? He was doing something seriously wrong if it took him 10 years to find steady work again. Was he one of those people who became a "web developer" in the dot-com days, with no degree or credentials whatsoever? If so, well no wonder he couldn't find any work after the bubble popped. People with degrees and real credentials and experience haven't had that problem. Moreover, was he one of those people who absolutely refused to move from whatever little city they (and their extended family) have lived in their whole lives? That's a career-killer too. You can't be a professional and be unwilling to move to where the work is, and do well. If you're dead-set on living in a certain place, then you need to forgo education altogether, and just get a job out of high school doing something that's in high demand in your local area (like working as a grocery cashier for minimum wage), or perhaps get an education in something that there's plenty of jobs in your area for (like medical technicians; every little city has several hospitals and lots of medical clinics). Don't bother getting a college degree if you don't want to move to where the work is.

Anyway, sorry about the asides, but the point is, if you have a good education and experience in the software field, and you're willing to move to where the work is, there's plenty of jobs open for software developers, regardless of the economy. I got laid off in 2009 when the economy sucked (along with my entire team; company decided to toss out the whole department because it didn't think its profit margin was high enough, even though it had customers lined up with guaranteed high volumes for years), and I had another job in a month at a 20% increase in salary. Combined with the 4-month-equivalent severance package, it was a pretty sweet deal. And I'm no rock-star performer either. All that stuff you read about high unemployment and no jobs doesn't apply to software people.

That guy probably needs to move to a different city. That's the only way to break that cycle.

But yes, this is a good illustration about why you should always avoid changing your mind after formally accepting an offer.

If you don't more or less have the employer by the short and curlies they wouldn't have counter offered.

If you're a skilled employees, chances are you do have the employer "by the short and curlies", in a way: they have a schedule they're working towards, and if one employee up and leaves, that's going to screw up their schedule, and make the boss look bad. They don't have extra employees sitting around ready to take your place at a moment's notice (and most likely they're chronically "understaffed" anyway), and there's little chance they're going to find someone qualified within 2 weeks (assuming you give them that much time, rather than just walking out; they might also have a dumb policy of kicking you out as soon as you resign).

So, it's entirely to their advantage to go ahead and give you a raise to keep you around for a little while longer, until they can find your replacement. Then they'll get rid of you, when it's convenient for them.

This is why you should never accept a counteroffer. If it were a good company, they would have given you a raise already. The sad truth is, you can't stay at any company too long, because (with rare exceptions) they'll always keep your salary at whatever it was when you first joined, plus perhaps some very meager inflationary raises. Within a few years, you'll always find that you can make more money by jumping over to a different company and doing the same job.

My list, if I still lived in Arizona, would include all my neighbors who have dogs and let them bark for hours on end every day. And all my neighbors who have pit bulls that "get loose" every few days and attack people.

Luckily, I moved out of Arizona to the northeast, and no one here seems to have out-of-control barking dogs or pit bulls. In fact, for the first time in about 2 decades, I actually like all my neighbors. It's sorta like Mayberry up here, completely unlike the total ghetto that was Arizona.

If Florida is anything like Arizona, no.