What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by Nadya » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #166

superuser2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misogyny on the internet recently with the MRA b.s. but personally my objections to her pay are the same as every other executive. I can't speak to anyone else's motivations.

>I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misogyny on the internet recently with the MRA b.s.

I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misandry on the internet recently with the feminist b.s. but personally I have no objections to her pay in particular, I feel CEO''s in general are completely overpaid. She took a sinking ship and tried to right it and failed - I don't really think anyone could have realistically turned around Yahoo anyway.

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

#182

Post by jonnathanson » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #144

arcatek wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Steve Jobs famously used a Thinkpad after returning to Apple. A Time interview from August 1997 confirms that: http://allaboutstevejobs.com/sayings/stevejobsinterviews/tim...

In that specific case, Jobs had just come back from NeXT, and Mac OS hadn't yet incorporated elements from NeXTSTEP. It sounds as though Jobs used some early precursor version of Keynote, which may have been more easily ported onto a Thinkpad than onto a Powerbook at the time.

Also, in fairness, the circa 1997 Thinkpad was the best business machine on the market. Period. Macs had to catch up. The Macbook wasn't even a figment of anyone's imagination back then. The Powerbook 3400 (c. early 1997) was faster than the Thinkpad, but the productivity suite available at the time wasn't anything to write home about, let alone use for serious presentations.

All that is to say, I'm not as shocked on reading this as I guess I should be. From everything I've heard, Jobs only took dogfooding so far. If he didn't believe an internal product was the best for a given purpose, he didn't dogfood it. (I would be curious to know if he used Mail, for instance...)

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

#183

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #155

arenaninja wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I get your point on pine, but I think the jury is still out on whether she was the cause for Yahoo's demise. I think the media definitely overhyped her, but Yahoo was in pretty dire straits when she took over in 2012

True, but, it seems that much like US presidents, CEOs want all the credit for good results and excuses for the bad ones.

It'd probably be a more accurate version of reality to accept that CEOs and Presidents have relatively little to do with either kind of results. That'd require that we give up the very human tendency to believe in Great People and force us to believe in Ordinary People involved with Great Things.

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

#184

Post by overcast » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

excitom wrote: post #112

stinkytaco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value. I think it's very clear that the goal when she was hired was to sell the company and get the shareholder's some payout. Considering where the company was when she came in, I'd say she did an admirable job at this. You might say that's not success, b…

> the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value. It always bothers me to see this, as I feel it is the reason many companies decline. The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second rule should be "keep the employees happy" since happy employees help implement the first rule. If rule one and two are achieved then as a side effect shareholder value is maximized.

Unfortunately that is not a reality. Once you go public, the entire focus of a company is paying out to shareholders. Everything else is secondary.

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

#185

Post by mdip » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

Interesting discussion and I wanted to call out a particular part: The CEO's willingness and constancy in responding to employees.

I worked at Global Crossing during the entire time that John Legere (of T-Mobile fame) was CEO and he had a very similar policy, though I can't say for sure he didn't fire folks for writing him things he didn't like[0]. He swore up and down that he reads every message sent to him and that employees are always welcome to write him. I did so in the later evening on Christmas Eve (I'll admit I had a few beers in me) about some finishing touches I was putting on an application we were deploying to production the following week. I received a reply just after midnight on Christmas, clearly sent from a Blackberry. I can't remember the contents (it was something along the lines of "nice work") but I remember feeling quite good that the CEO was willing to take some time to reply to me on a holiday at a very odd hour.

As "employee engagement" goes, this certainly improved mine.

[0] I honestly don't know. Global Crossing had a total of "zero" good years in that every six months or so another 10% of the staff would be let go. Did some of that originate from a bad message sent to the CEO? No idea, but they were looking for reasons to get rid of anyone they could throughout my tenure. Though I'd written him a few times, I'd written him a few times but never in a manner that would have had cause to get me fired.

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

#186

Post by pharrington » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:09 PM UTC

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…

Very few people on this forum spend alot of time looking into the leadership of the myriad of ineptly run companies. Mayer is deliberately high profile, and the company she runs is a household name. Criticism of her is the low hanging fruit; its precisely because most of us can't be assed to get interested in inept CEOs that the ones we do criticize are already the most (in)famous.

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

#187

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #58

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…

There's a certain workaholic personality that excels at executive-level positions. I'm convinced they simply have better genetics than the rest of us -- after 10 or so hours of work, my memory is garbage and I wouldn't feel confident dealing with anything important but some people are totally fine. Plus, you couldn't work that hard for any amount of money unless you loved the work. I'm not sure I want to be a CEO for…

Mayer reportedly has the gene that lets you get by on 4 hours of sleep a night:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150706-the-woman-who-barel...

http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-people-who-barely-...

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

#188

Post by jelenaw » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:14 PM UTC

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…

Hayyyyyyyyyyy. Just found this & created a realname account to say hello...

I don't know who you are from the 1024core username but if you were a d-r'er I certainly trust your corrections! I'll place a note in the article.

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

#189

Post by twblalock » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:17 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #127

freyir wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoffs suck, but in some cases they're necessary. It doesn't really have anything to do with being nice or mean. The alternatives include treating people poorly and laying them off, or treating them well and not performing the tough part of your job as CEO. Neither is better.

I know. But look what she did to Yahoo, doesn't seem to me like a bunch of people losing their jobs did help anyone.

Frankly, Yahoo had a lot of dead weight that should have been cut years before she got there. It was a dying company for a reason.

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

#190

Post by jelenaw » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:20 PM UTC

bdavisx wrote: post #57

Her performance ranking program was so badly implemented by Yahoo’s ugly layers of middle management that it deserved every bit of the mocking and criticism it got, both on devel-random and in the tech press. I think one thing that could possibly "save" Yahoo would be to fire every single middle manager and above immediately (and probably most of the 1st line management as well), and then rebuild the management from…

I've actually said exactly this several times including in a convo with an exec-level ex-Yahoo last night. I don't think it's ever really been possible even for Marissa - the company is public and if you fire thousands of people you are likely to scare the board and shareholders. But I can't think of a middle manager I knew at Yahoo who deserved to stay.