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

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

#111

Post by bookofjoe »

erobbins wrote: post #51
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…

> "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there." This absolutely drives me crazy in design/engineering decisions. Very commonly there are a lot of good solutions and one great one, and the good ones are good enough. Yet all t…

Do an anesthesiology residency. I love how, when residents with engineering backgrounds as undergrads run up against the immutable fact of 5 minutes of hypoxia = brain death, they quickly abandon their old way of thinking in which finding the optimal solution is paramount in favor of whatever works, however kludgy.

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

#112

Post by antt »

tardo99 wrote: post #5

The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.

> The cult of personality ~~around Marissa~~ is just confusing ~~to me~~.

Lest we forget Elizabeth Holmes, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and for those old enough to remember Bill Gates in the 90s.

If you're lucky you die before you start making terrible decisions. A quote from Napoleon that he supposedly said while in exile "Had I been hit by a canon ball on my entry into Moscow I would have been remembered as the greatest statesman and general the world had ever seen".

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

#113

Post by Aeolun »

tamizhar wrote: post #104
codingdave wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a question of perspective. She was the head of a sinking ship, yes. But did she cause the sinking, or did she recoup the most returns possible for the investors before it sank? I wasn't there. I don't know the inside story. I'm not going to take sides. But neither am I going to assume that she has poor business skills just because she headed up a shutdown effort.

> But did she cause the sinking A captain that demands changing colors of the sinking ship on a whim may not be the cause of the sinking but certainly isn't addressing the sinking. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-wh... For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly co…

I don’t know, but I can change the colors of all our products from one single place in the code. If you have to do it in multiple places something is probably wrong.

Excecutives change their minds on a whim, you are much better off anticipating that.

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

#114

Post by JudasGoatse »

compiler-guy wrote: post #89
tardo99 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you went to Stanford in that era, then you know that Symbolic Systems was basically "Computer Science Lite."

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…

So she completed a second-rate major and luckily joined the fastest-growing company in US history ... that makes her smart and capable? Like OP, I know several people who knew her at Stanford (I didn't go there) and she was regarded with uniform disdain by everyone who was technically sharp.

I know several people who worked with her at Google, and she was fairly disliked there. She got frozen out and would have been eventually run out of the company had Yahoo not foolishly come calling. I WAS at Yahoo with her and I can verify that she did a terrible job there. Random decision making, company-wide initiatives that whipsawed from quarter to quarter, billion-dollar impulse acquisitions that almost immediately got written down. And let's not forget Polyvore - the 200m indulgence that she paid to her former assistant against the recommendations of the M&A team; that was just straight cronyism and corporate malfeasance.

True, Yahoo would have been a challenge for any CEO. But there were rational strategies that could have yielded some success. Marissa, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction and recklessly destroyed billions in shareholder value while pocketing hundreds of millions herself. Read the Kara Swisher articles on her at Recode. They were spot on. I heard a Business School professor on MSNBC argue that Marissa Mayer was the single most overpaid CEO in history. As a Yahoo employee who got to observe her tenure up close, I can't disagree. She's a terrible example for women in tech.

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

#115

Post by maxxxxx »

jkaptur wrote: post #29
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…

Sheryl Sandberg described a similarly thorough weighing of her decision to join Google. Mayer: "I had a long analytical evening with a friend of mine where we looked at all the job offers I had received. We created a giant matrix with one row per job offer and one column per value. We compared everything from the basics like cash and stock to where I'd be living, happiness factor, and trajectory factor—all of these d…

"I had a long analytical evening with a friend of mine where we looked at all the job offers I had received. We created a giant matrix with one row per job offer and one column per value"

I think this is a luxury problem. How many people have competing job offers that are even close to each other in attractiveness?

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

#116

Post by salty_biscuits »

antt wrote: post #67
tlb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you prove that? Here's a simple counterexample to what I understand your theorem to say: consider an infinite search space: 𝕽∞ and a utility function: 1-|x|. There's a single global optimum at (0, ...), and the gradient of the utility function would find it quickly.

Counter example: R^1 with a random function. There is no algorithm that can find a global maximum other than checking every point in R^1, of which there is an uncountable number.

Not all cost surfaces are equally likely to occur in real problems... Also depends on the constraints, linear assignment (i.e. one job to one worker with a big matrix of cost for job to worker and you minimize the sum) has a polynomial complexity solution.

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

#117

Post by ceph_ »

antt wrote: post #96
ceph_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?!

I liked the part were you called me sexist for making the complaint the mothers in Yahoo made against her when she cut their rights to work remotely. You of course would know this if you read the link I provided, instead of the first line of my post.

You can't justify sexism with "hey look she did something bad for mothers". The merits of the article have nothing to do with what's wrong with your comment.

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

#118

Post by JudasGoatse »

antt wrote: post #112
tardo99 wrote: post #5

The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.

> The cult of personality ~~around Marissa~~ is just confusing ~~to me~~. Lest we forget Elizabeth Holmes, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and for those old enough to remember Bill Gates in the 90s. If you're lucky you die before you start making terrible decisions. A quote from Napoleon that he supposedly said while in exile "Had I been hit by a canon ball on my entry into Moscow I would have been remembered as the greatest s…

Elizabeth Holmes is the only appropriate comparison here. Those others were worshipped because they actually created value. Marissa never did that. In fact, like Holmes, she destroyed quite a bit of it.

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

#119

Post by praneshp »

antt wrote: post #96
ceph_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?!

I liked the part were you called me sexist for making the complaint the mothers in Yahoo made against her when she cut their rights to work remotely. You of course would know this if you read the link I provided, instead of the first line of my post.

> she cut their rights to work remotely

Do you have a citation that mothers at Yahoo complained? Or that mothers at Yahoo were non-trivially worse off than other companies in their situation at that time?

disclaimer: ex yahoo

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

#120

Post by JudasGoatse »

hlurhhh wrote: post #95
thenaturalist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wholeheartedly agree, and I think it comes down to "signalling by association". For sure she is a workaholic and that gets you far, but to me it seems like she is filling the gap of providing confirmation to insecure overachievers after she - being one herself - made mistakes and reflected on them. Mistakes that could have been avoided had you taken out the ego in the first place. In contrast to my hypothesis: If you…

I wrote this somewhere else in this thread, but I like her because she's one of the few (current) 'well known' women in tech that's successful and stylish. She's exactly the kind of representation I need and want.

She's not successful, she's wealthy. There's a difference. She got a lottery ticket at Google and cashed in, then proceeded to run Yahoo into the ground. She's widely considered a failure in tech and business circles, and for good reason (I was with her at Yahoo and can testify to her strategic incompetence). If Marissa is the role model you want - stylish but incompetent - then I feel bad for you. Much like Elizabeth Holmes (another destroyer of billions), Marissa should be considered an anti-hero for women in business.
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