Yahoo's revenues may be down and its employees grumbling about not being allowed to work from home, but CEO Marissa Meyer has succeeded in one big way: the engineers who write the code that makes the company work are more optimistic about their future than any of their counterparts in the Valley.
A full 68 percent of the engineers at Yahoo expect things to get better over the next six months, according to Glassdoor, a web site that publishes insider assessments of life at thousands of corporations. The percentage that believes things are getting worse? It's 29 percent at Yahoo, 38 percent at Apple.
It's a sign that Marissa Mayer is making the right moves to keep her engineering staff happy, says Scott Dobroski, a Glassdoor community expert. Mayer has made some controversial moves, like cutting back on work-from-home privileges. But still, engineers at the company are remarkably optimistic.
"They're very impressed by Marissa Mayer's leadership," says Dobroski. "They appreciate her cutting some of the under-performing engineers [and] she's rewarding software engineers very handsomely."
Yahoo's stock has doubled during the past year, but revenues -- $1.09 billion for the most recent quarter -- are down. In fact, a year into Mayer's tenure, the best thing Yahoo has going for it remains its 24 percent stake in Asian e-commerce giant Alibaba. It's expected to IPO next year.
You might expect Apple engineers to be a bit more excited, but the fact fewer than four in 10 of its engineers are bullish about the future may be a case of a very successful company having no way to go but down. CEO Tim Cook is no slouch, of course. Though the Cupertino company's stock has dropped in the past year, Apple continues to rake it in with its iPhones and iPads, and it's reportedly working on a new television and smartwatch. "Apple still has a very high company rating and a very high CEO approval rating for Tim Cook," says Glassdoor's Dobroski.
But Mayer is paying her engineers better. The average base salary at Yahoo is $130,000. At Apple, it's a bit less than $125,000.
To Yahoo's sunny 68 percent things-will-get-better rating in perspective, 41 percent of Oracle engineers expect a business improvement over the next six months. At Cisco, it's 37 percent; at Microsoft: 31 percent. Over at struggling HP: 29 percent.
Yet HP is not the company with the bleakest outlook, according to Glassdoor's data. That dubious distinction goes to Juniper Networks, an old school maker of switches and routers. Last week, we reported that they employ some of the best-paid software engineers in the technology industry.
Well paid though they may be, a remarkable 58 percent of Juniper's engineers expect things to get worse at the company over the next six months. Just 19 percent expect things to get better.
Glassdoor gets its numbers by surveying engineers who want access to the job information on its website. These job outlook numbers come from companies where at least 35 engineers filled out these surveys over the past six months.
Yahoo didn't want to talk about what it's doing to keep its engineers happy, and Apple didn't get back to us. But one of the engineers who responded to Glassdoor's questions put it this way: "It's a big company, so it takes a while for your products to become live. But Yahoo is definitely getting a lot better at this thanks to Marissa."
