Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

Post by mysterEFrank » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 12:23 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #41

Harj wrote: post #2

Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision: "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up w…

Too much focus on utility functions, not enough focus on novelty functions, even though it's been proven that utility functions decline in usefulness as a search space expands. Given an infinite search space, a utility function can only find local optima, there is no global optima. In such situations, a novelty function that finds a path from one happy local optima to another happy local optima is a better bet than u…

Post by compiler-guy » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 12:27 AM UTC

tardo99 wrote: post #97

compiler-guy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which she crushed, and then she moved on and crushed the master's level courses. And then got a job at Google. Of all the dot-com companies hiring on campus at the time throwing million dollar opportunities at new graduates, she picks the unicorn. At some point it isn't luck anymore. Anyway, I'll agree to disagree here. The post I originally responded to was a question about what is so special about her. I only know…

Fine. It's not luck after college. Then how do you explain her string of failures at Yahoo? It starts being luck again at age 35?

Post by brohee » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

subjectHarold wrote: post #39

dopamean wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. Yahoo was killing it before she showed up?

She pissed off most of the staff. She introduced a weird iteration of "fire the bottom performers every year". She bailed out Dan Loeb (who had hired her but changed his mind after she refused to do almost anything she promised). She didn't get a particularly good price in the eventual sale. She got paid hundreds of millions for nothing (her pay alone was ~5% of the eventual sale price...one person). Terrible acquisi…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 12:35 AM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #100

malvosenior wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks probably perceive that because she was a high profile CEO that ran her company into the ground. Yes Yahoo! was not doing great before her but if you get paid tens of millions of dollars to do a job I would say it’s not unfair to be judged unsuccessful when you fail. She’s still rich after all. Do we also need to unquestionably agree she is excellent? Also she killed remote work at Yahoo! and practiced great hyp…

if you get paid tens of millions of dollars to do a job What do you know about her job description?

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 12:42 AM UTC

ceph_ wrote: post #94

antt wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that she is a queen of self promotion. When she was talking about 140 hour work weeks she conveniently left out the fact she was paying someone else to do her domestic work [0]. Or that most of her days involved meetings, lunches and dinners. I am reminded of the story of Henry IV who stood barefoot in the snow for three days. And through the grace of God not getting frost bite. We have come so far when…

> When she was talking about 140 hour work weeks she conveniently left out the fact she was paying someone else to do her domestic work HER domestic work? There is absolutely no reason why she should or would mention this other than your sexist expectations. Do you expect male CEOs to mention they pay someone to do their laundry and are abdicating their "domestic responsibilities"? Seriously?!