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Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

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Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#131

Just reading this brought back memories of working at LinkedIn, and why I'll never again work for a company who has institutional performance review processes. That pretty much excludes all big tech companies and I'm perfectly fine with that. The cookie-cutter performance review process is impersonal and has absolutely nothing to do with helping people do their best work. In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't…

I had one large company where performance was really one bit - ranking was on a scale of 1 to 5 and, as I was told, "nobody is a 5 and if you were a 1 or 2 you'd already have been sacked". So everyone was either a 3 (meeting expectations) or 4 (exceeding expectations in some areas). I did manage to persuade my line manager (the CIO) to give me a 5 on something but he then felt the need to mark me down somewhere else…

Very common system, I've worked for two companies and both has this exact system.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#132

Just reading this brought back memories of working at LinkedIn, and why I'll never again work for a company who has institutional performance review processes. That pretty much excludes all big tech companies and I'm perfectly fine with that. The cookie-cutter performance review process is impersonal and has absolutely nothing to do with helping people do their best work. In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't…

I got run through a PIP ( at a unnamed company full of Jack Welch devotees - srsly, ex GE ) because I was twice old enough to vote and wanted to stay technical. They were basically lining up a layoff. This worked out long term but it was inconvenient for several months. I'd gotten a LOT of work done; multiple high value contract awards, all on time and under budget, all that. No, our way was to overrun and do Difficulty Kabuki Theater.

Why demoralization? It ain't you, it's them. There will be more people you don't want to work for than that you do want to work for anyway. I thin you'll find that the good people are bright lights in an ocean of darkness.

Also and seriously - there are still people in tech who allow homophobia to affect their behavior to that extent?

Yeesh.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#133

Just reading this brought back memories of working at LinkedIn, and why I'll never again work for a company who has institutional performance review processes. That pretty much excludes all big tech companies and I'm perfectly fine with that. The cookie-cutter performance review process is impersonal and has absolutely nothing to do with helping people do their best work. In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't…

"I'll never again work for a company who has institutional performance review processes." Deming's 3rd deadly disease: Annual rating of performance. “It is purely a lottery” https://youtu.be/ehMAwIHGN0Y?t=298

> Deming's 3rd deadly disease: Annual rating of performance. “It is purely a lottery”

More of a popularity contest than a lottery.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#134
post #99

As a man in technology... this seems fine. The playing field is already tilted against women in tech, so if someone intentionally levels it, that's great! And I don't really care if they tilt it the other direction. Those men will find work elsewhere, no problem. (I am not taking a stance here on Mayer's other management practices, to be clear.) Discrimination against an otherwise unoppressed majority really fails to…

These were not tech (engineering) jobs. The article talks about Media, the divisions Marketing and Yahoo News editors.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She laid out a good reason for doing it. I think the decision was justified.

In the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, he uses Mayer's firing of remote employees as an example of a toxic work culture that values signalling over production. Here's the excerpt: > In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers…

Once a company has hit the ... point of maturity to where signaling is more important than production, there's not a lot you can do about it. Because in that case, the signaling probably is more important.

And I got news for her - you can't visibly tell if I am busy or not short of standing behind me all day.

Still, you get the feeling she was sort of the sucker at that particular poker game.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#137
post #107
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really about the review process, but about making one of the biggest mistakes you can make: After you know your manager doesn't like you, you didn't do everything in your power to either switch teams or change companies. Nothing good will come out of working for a manager that doesn't like you. You'll get worse reviews than you deserve and worse raises. You'll get less exposure to other parts of the compan…

> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one. Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?

My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large company.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She laid out a good reason for doing it. I think the decision was justified.

In the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, he uses Mayer's firing of remote employees as an example of a toxic work culture that values signalling over production. Here's the excerpt: > In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers…

> "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."

Like a boss I had that thought programming was just typing and didn't understand why I:

1) Wrote a lot on paper and whiteboard;

2) Sat back in thought a lot;

3) Spoke with my colleagues.

I became "more productive" in his eyes by hiding in the testing lab to do my thinking. I was actually testing, too, but I didn't watch the test cases closely so I'd be writing/reading/thinking for a few minutes after each one ran.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#139
post #89
post #20

“..less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” Even if they were not deliberate about it, they must have talked about how this might be perceived by employees. As bad as this issue is, I think hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal. However, I cannot…

>hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal. And it's not necessarily wrong.

It's not necessarily wrong, and quite justifiable, at the individual level.

It creates significant inequities when everyone does it at scale.

Leaving aside all questions of legality and punishment (the only reason you care about punishment is if something goes wrong), what is the right way to solve this? How, in an ideal world, do we fix the significant inequity that many people today happen to have homogeneous networks, and hiring from your network means that you perpetuate any homogeneity, while also saying it's totally okay and encouraged to found a startup with a close friend instead of with someone who passes an exam?

And how do we get from here to there?

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you judge mere on the fact that some lawsuit was filed? Without hearing, without proofs presented, without looking into other party's version? Perhaps this is exactly what someone is expecting from you now.

I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.

Going from less than 20 percent female to more than 80 percent female is being exactly as discriminatory, though. You should have been offended all along, right?
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