Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units

I don't think it's fair to say that it's the polar opposite of what they want, or to imply that all top performers feel the same way. Even the most talented junior developers could use some training, and if done properly it saves me time doing ad-hoc training/mentoring. A company's willingness to invest in its employees via training in particular is a positive indicator for me. Obviously this doesn't apply to early-stage startups and such.

> Yahoo's problems have absolutely nothing to do with Mayer having a "nursery" put into her office.

Of course they don't. That's not the point. Putting a nursery in her office was not a boneheaded blunder because the cost of the nursery (or her salary) made the difference between the company succeeding and not. It was a boneheaded blunder because at the same time she put the nursery in her office she also rescinded all telecommuting. That had an understandably (and predictably!) devastating effect on morale. The message was: I (Marissa) deserve to have this perk that makes my life more convenient, but you, silly rank-and-file employee, do not. I don't even care if you can demonstrate that you can be productive from home, I don't have time to sort that out. I'm much too busy and important for that sort of trivia. So you're just going to have to suck it up and deal with your commute.

> her first order of business should have been a significant layoff

Could be. Whatever it is she should have done, she manifestly hasn't done it yet.

> I have doubts as to whether a good CEO could have done much to change the outcome here

People were saying the same thing about Apple before Steve Jobs came back. Sadly, in this case we will probably never know because that experiment will never be done.

Well that may be a better idea but they actually have to do it. What I meant was, if they don't behave that way, people will increasingly leave - when they can.

I have a lot of disorganized thoughts on this issue. Please bear with me as I try to gather them together.

For the sake of exposition, let's say Mayer makes some $$MM/y, the exact number isn't really important to my point past a certain level, which she most certainly is.

What is she being paid that amount for? Let's explore each of the obvious options I see, and an expected common reaction (Had written logical, but that's not what I meant, since many common reactions are far from logical).

- To restore the company.

This clearly did not happen, if this was her job, she failed at it, and for most "normal people", getting paid that $$MM/y seems very off compared to what we might receive in such a failure.

- To as you say, preside over the decline. (age gracefully)

The argument I'll pose for the anti-Mayer sentiment in this case can be applied more broadly, but is most fitting here. One might expect this sort of role, in parity with firings, would include policies of waist tightening at all levels. I'm not even making a stance for or against these things in this argument, but the press about a slew of very exorbitant and very material benefits when paired beside firing of boots on the ground (again, not taking a stance, just observing the contrasting sentiments) give the _PERCEPTION_ of "let them eat cake", to put it glibly.

- To as you say as well earlier, be a face for the markets.

If we chose this explanation, realize the "figurehead effect" is a two way street. A famous CEO makes markets look positively on the company (is the thesis) regardless of the company, so if a company is doing badly, should not that emphasis also be on the CEO? It seems disingenuous that the CEO gets the credit for success but not for failure. I'm not saying this is logical, but it is consistent to placing significant value on a figurehead.

This last argument is the weakest, given that the markets probably take into account perceived CEO skills as part of "figurehead" status, but the BROADER market (sentiment of the people) likely can't inspect that deeply. So if the financial market loves kingmaking, the people get to see a king, and have their own expectations which do go both ways (in terms of lionizing success c.f. elon musk, and demonizing failure)

At the end of the day, each of these universes results in a very negative sentiment towards Mayer, thus my not being as surprised at that outcome.

Are you looking for someone to argue that Marissa Mayer was Steve Jobs? I'm the wrong person for that.

I'm saying something simple. You claim that Mayer had 4.6B of cash flow to play with turn around Apple. My response is simply (a) no she didn't, and (b) to the extent she had real revenue to work with, it was an encumbrance: she was tasked with turning around a company for which 30% of its income was people routing their search queries to Yahoo. It's hard to think of big moves you can make that don't somehow jeopardize that revenue stream. She's boxed in.

(Then you look at the activist shareholder critiques of her tenure, and it's like, "she spent 10MM buying iPhones for everyone on her staff", and I'm like, it's fucking 2014, almost nobody but Apple has figured out how to make huge amounts of money on mobile but pretty much everyone thinks it's the most important thing in the world to do, and she's, what, buying the staff computers to do that with? Sheesh.)

Did she rise to the occasion and do something unprecedented in business history, like Jobs did? No she did not. Executive hired to do the impossible fails to do the impossible, film at 11.