Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

bizjournals.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 140 posts

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#61

Post by spitfire »

heurist wrote: post #56
namelezz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder the same thing. Why do CEOs get paid too much?

It was explained to me this way: in the US executive boards are unevenly weighted toward CO interests. In countries where wage experts and workers are more likely to sit on boards the ratio isn't absurd because boards are less likely to vote for higher executive wages (Japan and Europe have reasonable CEO wages).

In Japan at least a large fraction of the compensation comes in non-monetary "perks". Ex: Company car, use of company plane, etc. Similar things happen in Europe.

Though I'm sure it isn't as insane as it is in the US.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#62

Post by eru »

tamana wrote: post #49
eru wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Releasing the workforce from an unproductive company is exactly what society needs. The opposite is zombie companies.

Unproductive is not the same as unprofitable.

Indeed. It's the job of a good regulatory environment to make the two coincide as much as possible. (Including a tax system that internalizes externalities. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax)

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#64

Post by rms_returns »

w1ntermute wrote: post #55
andrewvc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and disagree with your point. It's incredibly hard to determine how much good a new CEO has done, and how much is inertia. I think that's a strong argument against the incredibly high CEO pay in contemporary companies, it dramatically underestimates the importance of the work of the rank and file. That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else…

> That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. In reality, they should've brought in an ex-consultant or ex-banker who could chop off pieces of the business and sell them to the highest bidder (essentially, what's going to happen now). The…

> The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them.

If they had given some proper direction to their innovation, perhaps that could have saved them. One stupid decision they made back in 2006 was to shutdown geo-cities. The data hype hadn't even begun at that time and with some vision they could have turned geo-cities into a thing similar to what cloud-hosted services like aws are doing today.

Again, yui and yii were (and to some extent still are) great frameworks created by Yahoo. They should have tried to capitalize on that front, maybe offered paid support or created CMSs on top of them like eCommerce and/or web-based CRM systems. I know there is competition in this field, but a high quality web-based product coming from Yahoo Inc. would have been very well-received by the industry.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#65

Post by [deleted] »

w1ntermute wrote: post #12
Esau wrote: post #9

Don't worry people; I am sure the CEO will be okay.

Mayer will be walking away with a $158M golden parachute[0], and will undoubtedly have another nice executive position lined up in no time. It's amazing how much respect she's garnered in the tech community. From all the public info on her, she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optim…

[deleted]

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#66

Post by jfoutz »

namelezz wrote: post #54
jkot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is not if CEO is good, but if CEO is worth her/his salary.

I wonder the same thing. Why do CEOs get paid too much?

In a global economy it's winner take all. .05% better might matter.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#67

Post by frik »

w1ntermute wrote: post #55
andrewvc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and disagree with your point. It's incredibly hard to determine how much good a new CEO has done, and how much is inertia. I think that's a strong argument against the incredibly high CEO pay in contemporary companies, it dramatically underestimates the importance of the work of the rank and file. That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else…

> That being said, if you ARE going to judge her by contemporary CEO standards, the question is, would anyone else have done better? The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. In reality, they should've brought in an ex-consultant or ex-banker who could chop off pieces of the business and sell them to the highest bidder (essentially, what's going to happen now). The…

The biggest mistake was to shutdown their own search engine, and pay for Bing search results. And their Ads-deal with MSFT wasn't that long-term successful. Yahoo had the biggest Hadoop cluster back in 2009, the were at the forefront of big data and contributed to many open source projects. Then everything went downhill.

Now Yahoo has what? Flickr, Tumblr, Mail, ...? Right, they own a stack of Alibaba (China), and now close or sell everything else. Sad, hopefully Flickr, Tumblr and some other good services survive.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#68

Post by endtime »

namelezz wrote: post #54
jkot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is not if CEO is good, but if CEO is worth her/his salary.

I wonder the same thing. Why do CEOs get paid too much?

No board wants to admit they have a below average CEO, so they all have to pay them above average, which of course raises the average.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#69

Post by binarysolo »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20
Alupis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Well... what do you expect? You're either the job creator or the job filler. If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. > Their fault for not cultivating the right connections. And yes, knowing the right people is part of that game. And yes, sometimes the job creators must d…

If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job. Haha... I'm happy you believe this. No sarcasm; it just made me wish that I still did. In this world, merit is judged by more than ability. Motive, if not aimed perfectly, is a burden that will decrease your chances, not increase them. Background is so important. My family was totally broken, like one hundred pe…

Can totally understand where you're coming from, but finding and recognizing your agency amidst all the mess and noise is kinda the beautiful thing about life.

The journey sucks a lot, but at the end of the day that's all we got, not the different destinations we traverse to and from.

Re: Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

#70

Post by xenadu02 »

kzhahou wrote: post #41
notacoward wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, all the "wealth creators" at the top will do fine. It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Their fault for not cultivating the right connections.

I'm surprised by the support you're getting, because the HN hivemind fully supports it when founders exit with 50-10000x what rank and file gets. I wonder if HN doesn't see a problem with founders because they all hope to be a billionaire founder themselves one day, but they don't personally relate to hired or big-company CEOs.

Except when a startup founder fails at their job the company is usually shut down or the acquihire leaves them with a small payout. When a startup makes it big, many of the rank and file have large payouts as well.

American CEOs get paid obscenely cartoonishly evil amounts of money for running companies into the ground. Even when the company does really well and they get massive stock grants, the rank and file get nothing.

Post reply on HN