241–250 of 315 posts
CEO Training 101 Multiple rounds of layoffs destroy company morale. Better to do one big one, and then hire back if necessary.
This is how you lose all the good people.
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It's incredibly sad when something like this happens. And I sure hope anyone who's found themselves out of a job, success in finding another. Even the "lower performers" still need to work. What I do hope for Yahoo, is that they're taking a solid look at who they consider expendable. Are self-important big shots also losing their jobs? Or are they too important to fire? When I see any company start to get rid of thei…
These sort of comments always annoy me. If you work at declining companies like Yahoo, HP, etc you should already consider your job lost. Just show up for the paycheck while planning your next move. This has to be what >90% of people are doing as-is. People aren't that stupid... are they? This is CERTAINLY not the last round of layoffs at Yahoo as it positions itself for sale. Same goes for every declining business i…
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No, the "best and brightest" at a company are interested in the company investing in them at the expense of the dead weight. They are also not very interested in training, because they don't need it. They want to work on cutting-edge projects. "Training" is something that the poor performers are going to flock to, because it benefits them. Which is the polar opposite of what the top performers want.
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-s…
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This, IMHO, is the crucial point: what exactly is Yahoo's business? As an outside watcher I have no clue (I am also stupid). Hopefully people working there have better insight than myself.
They don't have a business, at least not one that can support the number of employees they have. Their business is actually worth negative dollars. The only thing that was keeping their value high was their Alibaba investment.
If you assume zero discount of the Alibaba stake due to taxes or other uncertainty, then Yahoo has zero or negative value.
However, there is >0% chance that the Alibaba stake will be taxed or that Yahoo leadership will sell and spend the money instead if returning it to the shareholders.
The more accurate statement is that the uncertainty a "core" business brings outweighs the value of said business. Part of that uncertainty is the tax treatment issue of BABA shares, the other part is a vote of (or lack of) confidence in Yahoo leadership.
Yahoo itself has plenty of value. Probably not 10B, but probably more than 1B.
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That's a much more fun thing to say than "person tasked with impossible job fails to do the impossible". From the comments on this part of the thread, you'd think Yahoo was some kind of Internet colossus before Mayer took their reins, rather than an overgrown relic kept alive and profitable through sheer inertia.
Remember Apple when Jobs took it over? 90 days from bankruptcy, and written off by most people. Getting the right CEO is enormously important, and not impossible.
What Apple lacked was a clear focus on what their business needed to be, which was selling hardware, not licensing the OS or making business software, or any of the other bad ideas they had from trying to compete with Microsoft directly.
What no one here or anywhere else seems to have an answer for is "What is Yahoo's core business". It used to be the Yellow Pages for the Internet, and now it's basically a Media company with some legacy stuff like web email.
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It's incredibly sad when something like this happens. And I sure hope anyone who's found themselves out of a job, success in finding another. Even the "lower performers" still need to work. What I do hope for Yahoo, is that they're taking a solid look at who they consider expendable. Are self-important big shots also losing their jobs? Or are they too important to fire? When I see any company start to get rid of thei…
These sort of comments always annoy me. If you work at declining companies like Yahoo, HP, etc you should already consider your job lost. Just show up for the paycheck while planning your next move. This has to be what >90% of people are doing as-is. People aren't that stupid... are they? This is CERTAINLY not the last round of layoffs at Yahoo as it positions itself for sale. Same goes for every declining business i…
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Marissa was explicitly and publicly hired to turn around the company. She's being paid to take the personal risk of career-ending failure. It's a way for her to hedge the bet she made that she could turn the company around. This goes for all CEOs, the high salary is not compensation for labour, it's a risk premium the shareholders pay to get someone to take the job. For example, in many jurisdictions, the CEO is pers…
Sure; I accept the explicit reason, my above was just to enumerate a few of the most common ways I saw people thinking about her/any CEO's position in this sort of situation. Your final line re: network/inflated premiums seems to agree with the broader sense of what I was saying, unless I'm misunderstanding?
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That's still not close to 100MM/yr and it's contingent, but look, we probably all agree that Yahoo's investors didn't get their money's worth on a marquee CEO. It is, however, weird to me that everyone's so quick to blame Mayer for that. She didn't make up the game. The game stays the game. If it wasn't Mayer presiding over the decline of Yahoo --- probably still after acquiring Tumblr! --- it'd've been someone else.
> we probably all agree that Yahoo's investors didn't get their money's worth on a marquee CEO Disagree. If you bought YHOO in mid-2012 before Marissa joined, you'd have doubled your investment by now. I understand there's the option value of having invested in some better stocks, and YHOO's correlation to BABA, but one could still do a lot worse than doubling the investment. https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&ch…
If someone offered me a shitload of money to run a sinking ship, I would have taken the job, just as she did. With this level of compensation, she's all set for life, does not need another job ever. But, with her connections and name recognition, she will have no trouble finding one - trust me. It is a systemic problem with boards of directors hiring incompetent (but well-known) executives who keep screwing up one company after another. All about connections.
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It's incredibly sad when something like this happens. And I sure hope anyone who's found themselves out of a job, success in finding another. Even the "lower performers" still need to work. What I do hope for Yahoo, is that they're taking a solid look at who they consider expendable. Are self-important big shots also losing their jobs? Or are they too important to fire? When I see any company start to get rid of thei…
> Melissa Marissa > I wonder how easy it'll be for her to find a job Marissa's net worth is well into nine figures. I wouldn't worry about her too much. And she can always run for president as a Republican.