Death. Taxes. Talented people leaving Yahoo. The certainties in life these days.
Today, yet another key employee announced he is leaving the company. Kellan Elliott-McCrea had actually been with Yahoo for over 4 years, working on Flickr the entire time. His role was officially “Flickr Architect,” but don’t let the vague title fool you. From what we hear, he was “vital” to the service, and was one of the last people remaning who knows how the service scales.
Elliott-McCrea’s exit follows the exit of Jonathan Trevor (builder of Yahoo Pipes), Gary Gale (director of geo engineering), and Tom Coates (head of product for Brickhouse) — and that’s just in the past three weeks. These exits are the least in a string of high profile exits from the company over the past couple of years (including Flickr’s co-founders) . Why? Some have blamed the attempted Microsoft takeover. Some have blamed the subsequent shakeup at the top. But more recently, some are saying that a strong shift to an “MBA-heavy structure” has lead to departures.
June 18 will be Elliot-McCrea’s last day, and there’s no word on where’s he’s going yet. You may notice that back in 2005, he worked at Odeo for a little over a year. Odeo was the the podcating company that Evan Williams was building when a little side-project, Twitter, took over and became the focus. There’s no indication he’s going there — but that company is aggressively hiring.
[photo: flickr/disrupsean]