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

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 268 posts

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

#171

Post by Bartweiss »

burkaman wrote: post #124
Bartweiss wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a funny place to cite that concept. The studies identifying it find it in roles like lead counsel or political candidate (which, at a glance, are both limited initiatives with well-defined success conditions). Meanwhile it specifically wasn't found for turnaround CEOs: "A 2007 study of corporate performance preceding CEO appointments showed that women executives are no more likely to be selected for p…

I think the evidence is sort of mixed. Here's an article responding to the study that quote came from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984315... As for explanations that could explain this particular case: Men are more likely to get another chance at a CEO job, so they can afford to turn down a crisis position. When an organization is in crisis, they are likely to look for a candidate as differe…

Thanks, this is a good summary.

I suspect there's probably something to the phenomenon (even in terms of turnaround CEOs), although I'm immensely skeptical of the people who explain this with "women are seen as caring and sensitive so they get positions where morale is bad". That narrative seems like a terrible way to explain many of the other outcomes, like preferring women for hotly-contested political races.

I'm also hesitant about the "afford to turn down a crisis" narrative - certainly it could apply in many cases, but turnaround CEO for Yahoo isn't a job people were running from. Taking or rejecting it was hardly the kiss of death: saying no looks sensible, saying yes either makes your name forever or gets an "at least you tried". (Does anyone think this exit is going to actually harm Mayer's employability?) And indeed a bunch of men also took the role and failed, arguably much worse than Mayer.

I do think the signaling thing is quite true. If things have been going to hell, appointing a radically different CEO shows new direction, and an appointment like Mayer is a great way to produce news stories about your new direction (with big pictures of her in them - it might be a sexist assumption but it's also a very media-friendly one). There's also a claim that it's a way for something like Yahoo to signal "See, we aren't outdated and stuffy! We did an appointment you'd never see at a boring old bank!"

Rambling aside, none of the studies really sold me in either direction (replication crisis and all that) but I can see a lot of reasons this could happen in places where business as usual hasn't been working.

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

#172

Post by twblalock »

drstewart wrote: post #168
ebbv wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, yeah this same excuse is always used to justify insane executive pays but it's baloney. It's a self perpetuating cycle, "Oh WE Have to pay more because companies X, Y and Z are offering $N million!" Executive pay has skyrocketed in relation to worker pay over the last 30 years and it's not for any good reason like executives are so much more important or talented. It's because the executive pay is decided by bo…

What sort of regulation do you propose?

This is the problem. It's very unlikely that regulation will improve the matter.

If executive pay really is an outcome of market supply and demand, regulation will act as a price ceiling, which will reduce the quality and quantity of executives available. In addition to the well known fact that price ceilings create shortages, these executives don't need to work for a living. Mayer was already set for life before joining Yahoo. Why would they work for less money than they currently ask for, especially if they really are worth it according to market demand?

If executive pay is an outcome of nepotism and corruption, and people on boards helping out their buddies, then they will simply continue to do so. If pay is capped, they will find another way to reward their friends. This cannot be prevented through regulation. It can only be stopped when the shareholders decide that they've had enough of it and appoint board members who behave differently.

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

#173

Post by lintiness »

scient wrote: post #118
lintiness wrote: post #90

$200M for handing out free lunch, a self-esteem boost, a poorly implemented personnel ranking scheme, and a few emails at weird hours ... sounds like a pretty sweet deal. sign me up!

Salty about never making a management role, eh?

didn't read the article, eh?

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

#176

Post by kpil »

0xmohit wrote: post #73
deelowe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really sucks when your manager thinks this kind of work ethic is healthy.

I've seen several folks who would save email drafts only to send those later after midnight. [One of them admitted doing so and added that it helps .]

Oh, I usually save my emails as drafts after office hour, and send them during the day, in order to not encourage others to work late.

A culture were you arrive at work and find a 20+ emails back and forth from the previous night is not good.

Especially since decisions are sometimes taken without essential input from people that actually have a life.

In the end, everyone will just be stressed about never being able to look a way from email for more than 20 minutes.

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

#177

Post by smhost »

freyir wrote: post #152
smhost wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's an interpretation based on speculation, not a correction. She might have looked at the turnstile and thought, "This is probably annoying to the other employees, so it has to go." We don't know, and 1024core doesn't know. Or maybe the OP was correct, and an email complaint really did contribute to the decision. Without further evidence, or unless 1024core is actually Marissa Meyer, we simply don't know.

Speculation is how we judge other people, and our social space doesn't have objective truths. Narratives are all there is, so narratives are what matter most. It's legitimate to correct offending narratives that conflict with your version of reality.

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

#178

Post by flavor8 »

exelius wrote: post #46
dominotw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>introducing other employee-unfriendly policies like banning remote work I heard for friends working at yahoo that this was perceived as positive by a lot of employees at yahoo. for years yahoo was so directionless that there were a lots of people who were simply slacking off using wfh as an excuse. This was breeding a lot of resentment among people who were actually doing work. Sure it might have hurt honest wfh wor…

wfh works great if your work is mostly heads-down. Remote working sucks for anything creative and almost everything collaborative -- I can't tell you how many 30 minute meetings I have every day that could have been solved with a 5 minute conversation and a picture on a whiteboard. While that's unavoidable to some extent, you should also try to be physically collocated with the people you work with most frequently to…

> I can't tell you how many 30 minute meetings I have every day that could have been solved with a 5 minute conversation

Buy everybody on your team a $150 wacom tablet. Use uberconference with screensharing. Use awwapp.com. Bonus - now you have a way to save your whiteboards and attach them to your wiki or bug tracker.

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

#179

Post by wehadfun »

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…

Thats probably why.

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

#180

Post by bogomipz »

superuser2 wrote: post #135
ebbv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 attac…

That's a slippery slope right there. I don't care about Yahoo or celebrity CEO culture at all. But I also feel like people should be able to express their opinions on a CEO and not be worried that doing so constitutes being labeled a sexist if the CEO happens to be a woman. There have been many males CEOs that have been derided as well - Bezos, Jobs et al so lets keep this in perspective. Star CEOs with their insanely outsized pay packages and their carefully cultivated public images make them targets for derision, not their sex.
Post reply on HN