Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by antt » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:06 AM UTC

ceph_ wrote: post #117

antt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't justify 140 hour work weeks with accusations of sexism.

At some point you need to face the fact that you are a useful idiot to the lizard class by only seeing sexism, even when women are being worked to death by other women.

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

#132

Post by tlb » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:06 AM UTC

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.

Sure, some functions have no global maximum. But the comment I replied to claimed a theorem that every utility function on infinite search space has no global maximum, which isn't true.

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

#133

Post by jhwang5 » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:07 AM UTC

hlurhhh wrote: post #91

tardo99 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do some reading for f*'s sake. Take a look at this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) Marissa is a fake computer scientist. There are real female computer scientists out there, and very good ones at that.

Don't tell me to do some reading for f*'s sake, I know about Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper. Mayer is current, successful, and stylish. I like her. I'm trying to explain to you why there might be a 'cult of personality' around her.

Why is being stylish so important in this context? If she were not stylish or conventionally attractive, does that detract from your opinion of her?

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

#134

Post by antt » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:09 AM UTC

salty_biscuits wrote: post #116

antt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are not talking about real problems here. Reality is so far from linear, so path dependent, so temporally dependent that by the time you gather 10 data points to try and match some function to the function is already outdated and error prone.

This is infinitely truer for when you try and find absolute maxima and minima and not just local ones.

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

#135

Post by wesammikhail » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

dustindiamond wrote: post #59

paganel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point she was seen from the outside as the 3rd most powerful/influential person at Google, after the two founders and even ahead of Schmidt, I remember articles praising her decision of leaving the Google front-page almost empty with only two buttons on it (I think this was around 2008-2010). Then she went to Yahoo and drove it into the ground and as such I'm surprised that people still take her business-relat…

Well, Mark Cuban has a TV show, and we would not be talking about that if it weren’t for Yahoo.

Mark Cuban has a TV show?

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

#136

Post by VHRanger » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

syndacks wrote: post #55

lkrubner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>given an infinite search space There's no such thing. I understand the point you're making, but these gross assumptions aren't how the world works. Reminds me of econ models with ridiculous assumptions that don't pan out when reality is a constraint.

The point of simplified models is to organize thoughts.

The only perfect model of reality is reality itself. Assumptions are fine if they're reasonable

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

#137

Post by antt » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #126

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 [0] This is such an odd post. Who expects someone working 140 hour weeks to do all of their own house work? Sure, they're working 20 hours a day but they ordered chinese takeout and drop off their laundry! Then, you link to child care as an example of "her domestic work"? Who complain…

This is such an odd post. Who expects someone to work 140 hours a week?

>Who complains about someone leaving their kid in daycare?

The mothers in Yahoo who can't work from home any more and can't afford the $300 a day daycare in SF.

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

#138

Post by omot » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

I'm always irked by hns attitude towards women leaders. There so many comments trying to discredit her or trying to shame her for self promotion. In general, there's always a sexist undertone, and I feel like the anonymity of hn brings the sexism of the tech community to the surface.

In regards to Marissa, I personally believe that the Glass Cliff is real. It's inspiring that she was integral in creating one of the most valuable company in the valley. Likewise, I find it impressive that she was able to climb the political ladder of a generally sexist industry.

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

#139

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #124

kayhi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that type of deal look like? AOL had ad inventory and Google had to get enough eye balls?

Inventory is slots to put ads. AOL had the eyeballs, Google had the platform to turn eyeballs into money, better than AOL was doing by itself. Google provided a guaranteed rate (cpm? cpc?) so that AOL would have confidence it wasn't bait and switch. See also the Yahoo/Bing deal which didn't work out as well. Microsoft didn't end up actually hitting the targets, and convinced Yahoo to take less; and Yahoo also didn't…

"guaranteed rate (cpm? cpc?)"

It was guaranteed revenue IIUC, something like "If you do not make at least $150M from this deal, Google will pay you the difference." That makes the deal a no-brainer for AOL, but puts Google on the hook for any shortfall, which could have potentially ended up bankrupting the company.

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

#140

Post by pm90 » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 2:35 AM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #90

subjectHarold wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From everything I know about Marisa Meyer's tenure at Yahoo!, it seems like she was truly terrible. What I'm curious about, though: what was her tenure like at Google? How did she move up so fast and get such a high profile job so quickly?

> In Silicon Valley, it is widely known that Mr. Page had dated Marissa Mayer, one of the company’s first engineers who later became chief executive of Yahoo.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...