[getsiu]

As a former employee of Yandex I totally disagree with what you said about 'not that good' developers and their loyalty.

It seems to me that the most common reason for leaving the company is immigration, which has nothing to do with Yandex itself. All my ex colleagues who left Yandex work abroad at Google, Facebook, MS and etc. Also I've seen many very good developers who cared a lot about their products. So my impression is somewhat opposite to what you described.

[dmix]

The OP doesn't seem to work there and seems like an outsider who thinks he knows how to run a company better than the people on the inside. This obviously misses a lot of moving parts and internal incentives (which yes may ultimately created a bad product). But I'd personally rather hear the experiences of people directly involved with the company.

I don't see anything wrong with training people on their tech stack either. That's not a scam, that's a highly valuable skillset if it gets you a job and experience. You can always learn other languages on your own, which is 10x easier after you know one.