WILLIAM KHOE

Last Thursday, while I was heading out for lunch when I ran into a long queue of people lining up for a money machine (you get into a plastic box full of dollar bills, then they pump air while you try to grab as much $$$ as you can). Oh, they provided free lunch as well. The catch: you gotta refer someone to Yahoo! And if that person got hired, you get $6,000 bonus for engineering position. Wow, aren’t we desperate for engineers…and this is after we laid off about 1,000 people about a month ago (although no engineer was affected). Valleywag said Y! is trying to hire more engineers for the new ad platform AMP.

Long story short, I didn’t see any mention of this in any brochure I saw when I was lining up. I got into the money machine and managed to grab $217. Not bad…some people were able to get $500+

UPDATE: This is of course, followed by a round of layoffs a few weeks after. How ironic.

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My “boss” in the product side, Ian Rogers, has left the building for a startup company Topspin Media. A huge loss for Yahoo! You will be greatly missed.

You can read more about it here.

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I was shocked (though it is not entirely unexpected) by the news this morning about Microsoft proposing to takeover Yahoo! for $31 per share, which comes to $42 billion. I am both ecstatic and a little confused. I am happy that the stock shot up almost 48% today; I have about 1/3 of my money in YHOO (don’t ask why). So it’s a HUGE relief to be able to unload them with some profit. On the other hand, I am worried about the future direction of this company is headed to. Microsoft is not really a favorite among yahoos. We try to get away from their product as much as possible and use open source code. Heck, we have the inventor of PHP working for us! If the deal goes through, what kind of change would Microsoft make?

But I guess for a lowly developer like me, all I really care about is the money it brings to my table. The news article mentioned “…the company [Microsoft] emphasized retention packages will be offered to Yahoo engineers and other key employees”. Great! I am ready to welcome our new Microsoft overlord. Resistance is futile!

More reading here

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I have been working on this player for a while now along with 2 other team members and last week it is finally released! Soon after, it got featured on CNET, Wired and TechCrunch! Yahoo! Media Player enhances your web site or blog by creating an embedded player for each audio link. All the links can be played with one click, turning the page into a playlist.

It’s really exciting to see a product you had a hand on being used by other people out there! If you haven’t seen this player head to Aurgasm.us, a music blog with very nice collection of eclectic songs. I think I might do my own music blog soon.

If your hands start to get itchy and you want to try this player out, head to http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com. It really is as simple as adding one Javascript line!

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Meet my new bestfriend, the CEO of Yahoo! Inc, Mr. Jerry Yang! Yes, it’s official, we are BFF!

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