People are talking about it in a bad way. I don't think it's useful to hate or resent a 17-year-old for getting acq-hired (although it's pretty disgusting that he keeps the company of Mark Pincus and Rupert Murdoch; I'll give him till 21 to clean his judgment of character of such) but this reflects really badly on Yahoo.

On the other hand, I can only imagine what kind of internal HR issues these acqui-hires may create for Yahoo.

Well, for fuck's sake yeah.

What Yahoo needs to do, and fast, is get better at discovering talent within. Apparently they have a problem with lazy people. Ok, so make it possible for a not-lazy employee to make a real dent-- important projects, self-direction, lots of autonomy. Give your best people an incentive to bring themselves out and shine. Honestly, if you give your most talented people basic support and autonomy instead of letting them get eaten alive by people they intimidate, you're doing better than 90+ percent of companies.

Any attempt to innovate in corporation is potential career killer. That is how companies work. So many smart engineers are just quiet and they just do what they are told (make they boss happy).

Absolutely, pure innovators dilemma.

Seems Yahoo! tried to solve this with their "brickhouse" program, a new product incubator, but ultimately it seems that was too disruptive and got axed.

As a cynic who is constantly looking for ways for human structures to fall to pieces, I'd be very worried about the large-company politics of a center-of-excellence/"honors college". When you set up a CoE, the rest of the organization feels put out.

If you put some set of people into R&D roles where they have full autonomy, then everyone wants it. The "Real Googler" issue (~10% of engineers have 20%T and the freedom to move around the company; the rest have manager-as-SPOF bullshit) is definitely a source of resentment at the Big G.

If you're going to do that, then have open allocation for all engineers. It's a much ballsier step, but it avoids resentment of the "special friends club" that gets to do cool R&D and that the rest of the company ends up undermining.

Whilst I generally agree with your view on innovation and the whole "special friends club". But 20% time wouldn't counter the innovator's dilemma: there will still be established power structures in place, reaching to the top levels of the business, who have a vested interest in their status quo (and that doesn't mean no innovation - they can still be innovating), who will fight disruptive innovation. Google seems particularly rife with this!

The value in a incubator, new product development group, or "spin out", (don't think any CoE I've seen fits this model...), is that they have top level sponsorship to go outside of normal process for: hiring, sales, tools, platforms, etc. as required, and just build new stuff. If that's disruptive in the short term, C-levels should be pushing it through for long term gains.

You also place a lot of trust in engineers to have Clue about what to work on. Most will have ideas, many of those ideas would be a very poor use of the companies resources. If those guys feel strongly, they should spin out, and pitch to their old senior execs for seed funding. They'll soon find out if their idea has legs...