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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

#221

Post by phamilton »

finid wrote: post #169
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…

>She was the best CEO of all the ones Yahoo had seen So the best CEO Yahoo! has ever seen couldn't turn the ship around. does that say more about the state of Yahoo! or the competence of the CEO?

> Marissa was able to vanquish the chronically poor self-esteem in the organization for a little while, but eventually Yahoo’s organizational depression took hold again.

That summarizes my experience at Yahoo pretty well.

The company was broken when she took over. Deep in its structure, in its hiring, in its middle management, it was broken. Marissa did not break it, but she was also unable to fix it.

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

#222

Post by phamilton »

rhizome wrote: post #207
thehashrocket wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think back to AT&T CEO John Walter who was barely at the job 11 months before he was forced out. He made a nice tidy sum of money plus a new house for his efforts. " Under the terms of his contract, Walter, 50, will receive separation payments totaling about $3.8 million, AT&T said. This is in addition to the $22 million provided to replace salary, pension and bonuses Walter forfeited when he left R.R. Donnelley &…

This is in addition to the $22 million provided to replace salary, pension and bonuses Walter forfeited... Shouldn't investors at any company that does this be angry at having to reimburse executives for opportunity cost?

It's not reimburse. It's just negotiation. Why leave something near guaranteed for something uncertain?

Last time I changed jobs I negotiated hard using my current situation to leverage a decent signing bonus. This is no different.

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

#223

Post by forgetsusername »

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…

Yeah, everyone here criticizes her because she's a woman. We only root for men. Get over yourself.

MM was hyped beyond reason when she was hired, made a ton of money and ended up being an apparently mediocre CEO. And yet, people are still producing articles about the "great" work she did at Yahoo. That's why she is criticized.

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

#224

Post by eikenberry »

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…

"Remote working sucks for anything creative.."

Being creative requires a lot of focus and concentration as well as being in the a good creative space. This seems to be the opposite description of any office I've ever seen. IMO you can do your best creative work when working remotely.

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

#225

Post by gozur88 »

arenaninja wrote: post #151
nsxwolf wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow! She used pine! Freakin' pine! She sent the company down the tubes, but... holy shit did she ever read her emails in a terminal! Also: Way to dogfood Yahoo Mail. Shows how much faith you have in your own products - as CEO no less.

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

The buck stops in the C-suite. Verizon bought Yahoo for a tenth of what Microsoft offered eight short years ago. It's impossible to say this or that person was responsible for Yahoo's demise, but her job was to turn it around and in that she failed.

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

#226

Post by forgetsusername »

pavlov wrote: post #111
GuiA wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, I get that if I were a CEO paid hundreds of millions I wouldn't have much time to feed the fish in my backyard. I just find the glorifying of answering emails at 1am on a a Sunday a little crazy, that's all.

It's the kind of thing that a CEO in a startup will often do because he/she cares and has an overwhelming personal involvement in the company. (I once was in that position for a tiny company of a handful of people, and I would write emails at 1:00 on Saturday night.) It's rare to see that carried over into a tech giant. I imagine Larry Ellison does something rather different at that point of his weekend than respondi…

I think you underestimate how hard a guy like Larry Ellison works.

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

#227

Post by Lagged2Death »

dragonwriter wrote: post #113
Lagged2Death wrote: post #38

I'm no biz-geek, I probably can't name a dozen CEOs. But for years, MM's name was called put in every critical mainstream headline about Yahoo, of which there were many. I do not believe that's an accident. I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way.

> I'm no biz-geek, I probably can't name a dozen CEOs. But for years, MM's name was called put in every critical mainstream headline about Yahoo, of which there were many. I do not believe that's an accident. I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way. IME, male CEOs of formerly-high-flying-but-now-struggling companies are treated the same way that MM has been.

>IME, male CEOs of formerly-high-flying-but-now-struggling companies are treated the same way that MM has been.

Look at the headlines in the ongoing VW scandal.

"Volkswagen Chairman Agrees to Bonus Cut"

"VW Executives to Accept ‘Significant’ Bonus Cuts to Quell Unrest"

These people stand accused of criminal acts, hugely damaging to the business, and they don't even get named in the headlines.

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

#228

Post by gozur88 »

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. The spotlight has always been on her, and her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and pretty?

I'm amazed people get so angry when others point out Mayer failed to turn Yahoo around. Is it because she's a young woman and pretty?

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

#229

Post by ars »

stinkytaco wrote: post #213
jessaustin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I went back to the console for email, I'd probably use pine, just because that's what we used in college.

I used pine until 2004. Then I moved on from where I was and was forced into the world of webmail since there wasn't much else for me then. Inertia is strong in my world, I wonder if I could go back?

Of course you can go back.

I still use pine, it's called alpine now, but works basically the same, and is just as fast as it always was.

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

#230

Post by chris_va »

gozur88 wrote: post #225
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

The buck stops in the C-suite. Verizon bought Yahoo for a tenth of what Microsoft offered eight short years ago. It's impossible to say this or that person was responsible for Yahoo's demise, but her job was to turn it around and in that she failed.

That's not entirely accurate.

Microsoft's offer included patents, Japan, and Alibaba. Today that is all worth more than $45B, so their current exit is technically better.

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