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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

#141

Post by shalmanese »

tlb wrote: post #132
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.

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.

All models are wrong, some are useful. GP presents an interesting way of framing real life decision making processes. That it happens to not be 100% accurate in all aspects is mostly trivia.

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

#142

Post by shalmanese »

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…

Doesn't putting the criteria in rows disallow (easy) sorting? Spreadsheets are designed to sort by column.

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

#143

Post by peteretep »

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?!

My reaction to the post you’re replying to was different to yours, and you’ve helped me notice a subtle bias I had there. Thank you!

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

#144

Post by JudasGoatse »

antt wrote: post #128
JudasGoatse wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hardly, they are worshiped because they have good spin doctors and are/were attention whores. Value creation is a dangerous proposition to measure people by, after all today's value is tomorrow stock market crash.

Really, are you arguing that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did nothing but spin? Their companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars decades later. If you think that's just an illusion then I hope you're smart enough to have someone else manage your money ... and possibly everything else in your life.

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

#145

Post by JudasGoatse »

jhwang5 wrote: post #129
JudasGoatse wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

TIL Jess Lee was Mayer's assistant

Oh right, protege not assistant. She was an APM at Google.

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

#146

Post by hnuser355 »

thundergolfer wrote: post #14
rajeshp1986 wrote: post #10

"I realized that, while I had a very deep understanding of artificial intelligence, I did not yet have some of the basics down. I knew how a database worked. I knew how an operating system worked. I knew how a compiler worked. But I hadn't taken classes on those topics, so I went back for my master's and took the rest of the AI offerings as well as a lot of programming basics. That way, I could actually go and market…

She's talking about foundation CS courses. She talk 7 (!) AI courses in Undergrad but apparently missed out on core CS courses. In Masters she got to cover those off. I think her majoring in Symbolic Systems not CS meant she missed out on compilers, DBs, etc..

I did a CS undergrad and skipped compilers, O.S., DBs, and many others cause I just took as many crosslisted math/CS electives as possible (at least a theorems or math heavy course like automata if I couldn’t do better), then the minimum CS requirements to graduate

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

#147

Post by antt »

JudasGoatse wrote: post #144
antt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly, they are worshiped because they have good spin doctors and are/were attention whores. Value creation is a dangerous proposition to measure people by, after all today's value is tomorrow stock market crash.

Really, are you arguing that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did nothing but spin? Their companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars decades later. If you think that's just an illusion then I hope you're smart enough to have someone else manage your money ... and possibly everything else in your life.

Gates broke the law and nearly destroyed his company. Had he been less well politically connected the appeal would have gone another way and we would have had at least three Microsofts today.

Like I said, 'value' is a dangerous proposition to measure anyone by.

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

#148

Post by Jach »

praneshp wrote: post #119
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.

> 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

Yes, the link 'antt posted goes into it by the third sentence.

"This upset many employees – mothers in particular."

As for other companies, well, my employer existed at that time, had and still has a work-from-home culture that's more friendly towards mothers, and is routinely highly rated in most innovative company beauty pageants. The link from the link also details basically every other company in 2013 having a non-trivially better situation with flexible WFH policies.

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

#149

Post by sfblah »

hlurhhh wrote: post #88
tardo99 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. Regurgitating stuff you read is very different from being someone who actually knows how to build things. I don't think Marissa even pretends to know how to code at this point. I think in the past she did pretend to, which was sort of a problem.

> I don't think Marissa even pretends to know how to code at this point. I think in the past she did pretend to, which was sort of a problem. I don't know what your problem is with her but holy shit I'm pretty sure she can code.

Prove it.

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

#150

Post by draw_down »

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…

I don’t understand thinking about one’s actual life in these terms.
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