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Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

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Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#81

Post by Karunamon »

venomsnake wrote: post #70
bru_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know why you're getting "greyed out", but without writing an essay about it, this

Wild guess - there were so many diversity hopes piled on her, that any mention that she is less than revolutionary outrages some people. She is mediocre at best with nothing to show for it. Her big wins were set in motion before her time, her biggest acquisition (tumblr) is fuzzing out, and her highest profile thing was banning of remote work.

I think there's something to this - the "women in tech" angle was all over the news when she first picked up the reins.

Unfortunately her history at the company has been, in a word, dismal. I'm not sure at this point of that's because of poor leadership, or because the ship was already taking on water.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#82

Post by spikels »

danso wrote: post #60

One of the most visible signs of Yahoo's weakness was its strategy to hire big media stars...I'm aware that Yahoo News brings in a godly amount of pageviews to articles on its site...but that hasn't translated to giving a more noticeable platform for its media stars. Since Yahoo hired Katie Couric, who was once a huge star on network news, the most I've seen her name in the wild is in Reddit ads promoting her intervi…

These hires were part of Yahoo's content creation strategy which also included producing TV shows. They just wrote off $42 million for the TV shows[1]. These expensive celebrities are probably next as I doubt they can justify their cost on a shrinking platform.

[1] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/yahoo-misses-q3-earning...

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#83

Post by someone7x »

allsystemsgo wrote: post #42
VonGuard wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The buzz about their work from home program was that people were abusing it and not doing actual work. I agree, they should be able to work from home, but when she did this, she was basically firing a buncha losers. They should allow people to work from home again, though.

Well not every job is well suited for remote work. As a developer, you know if they're not cranking out code. You miss sprint goals. Sprint demoes are a disaster. You don't see commits. When QA or design work from home, it's not as easy to tell whether or not they're actually working. That's been my experience at least. That said, I think it was a poor choice to abolish the WFH policy.

If QA or design doesn't work, you still hit sprint goals and have non-disastrous sprint demoes?

I would say there's a more universal difficulty of understanding the productivity of jobs different from our own.

Surely a design or QA lead would easily detect when someone is not actually working?

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#84

Post by jonknee »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #78
jonknee wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo has been poorly managed for several CEOs, it's not a new turn of events. She hasn't helped things, but it's not like Yahoo was a rocket ship before she was hired. She had an amazing opportunity to change things while Alibaba was keeping Wall Street happy, but that window has closed and she has nothing to show for it other than making herself very very wealthy. She'll be gone soon.

I missed why Yahoo! divested themselves of their large ownership stake of Alibaba, why did they do that?

They haven't fully, but want to spin it off into its own company so that taxes don't have to be paid. That's not going well for them (the IRS didn't say they were A OK) and meanwhile BABA shares have tanked (ended the first trading day at $93.89 and is currently at $69.75).

tl;dr Mayer can no longer hide behind everyone's hopes and dreams of a monster Alibaba IPO.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#85

Post by talaketu »

biot wrote: post #24
JSeymourATL wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how long should one try to make a new job work? Depends on your mandate going in. Stick-to-itivness is a desirable leadership quality. Most industries consider business cycles in annual terms. If you can't move the needle in 24-36 months, do everyone a favor and move-on. A 3 week stint however, is not worth putting on your CV.

> Stick-to-itivness Tenacity.

Resilience

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#86

Post by nedwin »

sulam wrote: post #48
ufmace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only really matters in the eyes of potential future employers, so consider how it looks to them. Having done interviews and resume screening myself, I wouldn't balk too hard at one quick departure, but I would want to hear a good explanation for why you left so soon. The job and/or company being very clearly something different from what you were told would be a good one. Multiple quick departures in a row are kin…

It matters to the people you leave, too. When people spend a lot of energy recruiting you, doing due diligence on you and you on them, it (hopefully) builds a fair amount of trust and mutual respect. When you leave after a short time, that trust is violated, often in both directions. Barring something somewhat unusual ( cough Clinkle cough ), people are generally going to be very transparent with people they hire to…

I've also seen where people come into a role being promised autonomy and once they start finding that they're stuck into a pre-existing strategy or hierarchy that doesn't want to change.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#88

Post by oldmanjay »

mariusmg wrote: post #20
dave_sullivan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From 2013, revenue sources (quarterly): Banner Ads: $423M Search Revenue: $403M Other: $245M 2014 total revenue for year was 4.6 Billion Apparently they're selling a few billion dollars worth of ads.

Never thought the web ads market is big enough for both Google and Yahoo.

There are very few people with a correct conception of the scale of the web.

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#89

Post by spikels »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #78
jonknee wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo has been poorly managed for several CEOs, it's not a new turn of events. She hasn't helped things, but it's not like Yahoo was a rocket ship before she was hired. She had an amazing opportunity to change things while Alibaba was keeping Wall Street happy, but that window has closed and she has nothing to show for it other than making herself very very wealthy. She'll be gone soon.

I missed why Yahoo! divested themselves of their large ownership stake of Alibaba, why did they do that?

Expected to happen at end of year because shareholders basicly insisted on it.

Yahoo owns a minority stake in Alibaba - a huge fast growing company. Yahoo is worth $30 billion but the Alibaba stake is worth $23 billion* and they also have a minority stake in Yahoo Japan worth $2 billion* and $5 billion in cash.

It doesn't make sense for an operating company to hold investments worth many times more than their core business. Yahoo today trades more on what happens to Alibaba than anything Yahoo management has control over. This has perverse effects like huge management incentive bonuses based solely on Alibaba's success. Not to mention they would have saved billions in taxes if they had spun it off years ago.

*-pre-tax

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/21/yahoos-business-now-worth-les...

Re: Yahoo Talent Exodus Accelerates as Marissa Mayer’s Turnaround Flounders

#90

Post by programminggeek »

Once Yahoo was willing to stop development of their own search engine and ad platform, I knew they were doomed.

Yahoo's ad service was a lot nicer than MSFT Ad Center and nearly as nice as AdWords. They gave up on one of the most strategic positions they had.

There is a pile of other stupidity there before and after that others could speak about, but with Yahoo making a deal with Google, it will only continue to be dumb.

I believe the entire culture, history, and everything at Yahoo is predisposed to failure and is beyond fixing. It's like a losing sports team who has a history and culture of losing. It takes an entire overturning of everything usually to fix it.

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