Chan's Personal Blog

Well, pretty much everyone at work told me what a good time it was to join Yahoo. This week coincided with the end of quarter meeting with the division. The morning started off with a huge meeting. The big cheeses were there presenting major accomplishments for the quarter and managers were introducing their team members. It was a good way to see how everyone fit into the organization, and I got a good high level picture of all the cool stuff that was going on.

The next thing on the agenda was a Dim Sum lunch at a Chinese restaurant. At first when I heard that we were all going for Dim Sum, I wondered... why would we choose Dim Sum? For those who are unfamiliar, Dim Sum loosely translates to "order to your heart's content." The meal format is that you sit down at a table, and servers come by with carts of food (usually relatively small portions), and you pick what you want. In either case, the reason I was surprised we were going for Dim Sum was because usually you can get some authentic, scary, exotic Chinese food. Anyone for chicken feet? How about jellyfish? Congealed pigs blood anyone? I think these items would scare away some westerners. That's when I discovered at the meeting that 95% of our division was Asian, so suddenly everything made sense An exotic meal to us would be burgers and fries.

Before I progress any further, I have a photo album of the trip for those who are impatient.

Well, today was my first day working at Yahoo. The day consisted of many different people giving orientation talks, and we got a tour of the Sunnyvale HQ which is pretty massive. The coolest thing that I saw was the operations control center. People working there had to make sure that all systems were operating fine by monitoring them. They have massive plasma screens on the walls which shows the status of every important system. Along the top wall, they had many clocks set to different time zones, and lots of computers generating fancy graphs and what not. It reminded me of a mission control room from NASA, or a military war room. The entire room is observable because they have glass walls. I think it'd be really interesting to watch the control center in action while a real system emergency took systems down.

In either case, I won't bore you with the details of orientation. By the end of the day, I was pretty exhausted because of the deluge of information being spewed at me. But, while I was walking to my car in the parking lot, I saw two familiar people in a car. I did a double take, and sure enough, it was Jerry Yang (CEO & Co-founder of Yahoo) and Terry Semel (former CEO of Yahoo). They were just pulling out of their parking spot, and I just stood there starring in awe. I'm sure this was quite awkward for them because I knew who they were, but they had no idea who I was. Eventually, I made eye contact with Terry, and he gave a strange look, and then they drove off into the sunset. It's definitely a new experience by being able to bump into high profile people just like that in Silicon Valley.