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What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

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Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#131

Post by bisby »

scient wrote: post #115
mankash666 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes- it's important to stay human while thousands of employees get laid off and the CEO makes a few hundred million for the valiant effort of letting good employees go

"Good" tends to be very subjective. Actually good people rarely get let go, unless there is a very good reason. At the same time almost everyone who gets laid off thinks they are a very good employee, which obviously is not the case. And execs get paid for the expectations and responsibility. You are just being salty right now.

Sometimes the reason doesn't need to be "good" in the sense that it's a great reason, but in the sense that it was the right decision.

I worked as a engineer at a huge billion dollar company in a newly created slot. There was 2 on the team and I was the third. Then massive layoffs. Thousands of people let go. I was one of them. Was I "good people" ? I don't know. I like to think I was, that's why I got the position. Of the 3 people on the team, I was the right choice though, least experience with the company's infrastructure, etc.

The real issue at hand was the disconnect between the team manager (who found out he had to let me go the morning it happened and was quite upset about it) and upper executives. Why was adding my position approved by upper executives in the first place if they knew that a month later they would be laying off so many, you would think they would have had a massive layoff of that size in the works for more than just a few days.

So there was no "good reason" other than "cutting cost" but if someone had to be let go, the 2 others on the team deserved the job more than me.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#132

Post by dexterdog »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #95
GuiA wrote: post #43

"if I’m ever in a position like Marissa’s, I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning, even when she has a new baby in the house." I'm grateful for this article reminding me why I never really will fit in with the techie fanatics. Yesterday I went home at 5p, after a very productive day, and trimmed plants in my garden, not checking…

Of course, with a new baby in the house, it's possible she was going to be up at 1 AM anyway ...

Do you really think she had to get up with the baby? I'm sure even her help had help.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#133

Post by collyw »

zekevermillion wrote: post #24

From a non-insider perspective, it certainly looks as if MM accomplished the mission. Stock price went up, and she locked it in with a well-timed sale. Her compensation package appears to have been designed to produce exactly this outcome. It's not Steve Jobs' return to Apple. But she did help the investors salvage a respectable outcome.

Was it down to luck more than anything else? She made a few bets. Most failed. One did spectacularly , yet seems to have very little to do with Yahoo as a company.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#134

Post by Chlorus »

1024core wrote: post #91

It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years. The spotlight has always been on her, and her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and pretty? I was at Yahoo from 2004 through 2015. I saw some seriously stupid CEOs. One of them being Terry Semel. He made more than $200M in just one year (and even more, according to rumors). Here…

Ah yes, pretty young women have it the worst in our society. Also 41 is young?

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#135

Post by superuser2 »

ebbv wrote: post #129
1024core wrote: post #91

It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years. The spotlight has always been on her, and her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and pretty? I was at Yahoo from 2004 through 2015. I saw some seriously stupid CEOs. One of them being Terry Semel. He made more than $200M in just one year (and even more, according to rumors). Here…

> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years Why? That is $50mil/year which is an insane amount of money for any one person to receive. Yes you can point to tons of examples of people earning even more, but that's still way more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes per year to fail. It's a total cop-out to say that "Well Yahoo was already…

>She's just the latest high profile example.

She's attracted an order of magnitude more vitriol than any of the other "tons of execs." It's her that HN chooses to complain about. It matters which instances you choose to be vocal about.

And it's extremely suspicious, to say the least, that an industry which insists it has no sexism problem because men are just better at it, spends a great deal of time and energy attacking a woman who presides over a collapse but glosses over or barely acknowledges the men who have done the same.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#136

Post by sokoloff »

ebbv wrote: post #129
1024core wrote: post #91

It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years. The spotlight has always been on her, and her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and pretty? I was at Yahoo from 2004 through 2015. I saw some seriously stupid CEOs. One of them being Terry Semel. He made more than $200M in just one year (and even more, according to rumors). Here…

> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years Why? That is $50mil/year which is an insane amount of money for any one person to receive. Yes you can point to tons of examples of people earning even more, but that's still way more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes per year to fail. It's a total cop-out to say that "Well Yahoo was already…

Executives have [employment] options. If you believe you need a talented executive to have a chance at turning around your company and your company is in dire straits, you may very well have to offer a golden parachute package to have any hope of engaging the services of the talented exec you seek, particularly when that's the norm at that level.

Failing to offer such terms amounts to forfeiting any chance to hire the talent you think you need. Offering such terms is totally rational under that set of (reasonable, I think) assumptions.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#137

Post by dexterdog »

smacktoward wrote: post #102
1024core wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way. This. Larry Ellison fucks around on a sailboat. Larry is busy with "X" for years. And no one bats an eye.

Oracle and Google both make astonishing amounts of money. Nobody (least of all shareholders) is marching on their headquarters with torches and pitchforks. So nobody cares what the leaders of those companies do with their time -- so long as their companies continue to make astonishing amounts of money. If the money dries up, rest assured that the line of people demanding that the leaders start paying attention to the…

Exactly. Ellison seen on a mega boat tells you how well he is doing and thus the company. MM answering low-level employee emails in the middle of the night says she doesn't know what's going on.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#138

Post by arcatek »

collyw wrote: post #130
outworlder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails. That increased her stature in my eyes, and those of quite a few other engineers. Ok, now that is amazing. That speaks more about her culture and background than a hundred random actions.

FFS. Judging people based on their email client?

People usually judge others based on what they can see ("you are what you eat", but not only). Why not based on what tool they use? It contributes to establish a persona.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#139

Post by smhost »

freyir wrote: post #121
1024core wrote: post #37

Heh, I remember Jelena from discussion on devel-random. I would like to correct (mildly) a couple of anecdotes in her article, because I was there and closer. > A friend relayed this story: The Sunnyvale campus had a building with redundant turnstiles, which required a badge scan seconds after employees had scanned their badges to open the main doors. People complained about it when the building was remodeled years b…

I'm not sure what you're "correcting" in the original post. The only difference I see is that the author said Marissa removed the turnstiles after reading an email complaint, and you say she removed the turnstiles after looking at them.

The framing is different. In one frame she appears to care about the QoL of her employees, in the other she doesn't necessary care about that so much as she cares about efficiency and her personal comfort.

http://i.imgur.com/LRGZRTO.jpg

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#140

Post by CptJamesCook »

ucaetano wrote: post #32

I remember that is was usually claimed that Yahoo's valuation (net of Alibaba's stake) was either zero or negative. She was able to sell it for $5B. That sounds like an amazing success story.

It turned out that after taxes and other factors, Yahoo's core value was worth more. I doubt she had a significant effect on it, other than the ~700 mil loss they took on Tumblr.
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