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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

#151

Post by sfblah »

nostrademons wrote: post #74
Causality1 wrote: post #56

Considering how Mayer absolutely cratered Yahoo I'd take her advice with a grain of salt. Quarterly operating profit dropped by more than 50% during her tenure and she was the driving force behind the acquisition of dozens of worthless companies leading to the write-off of billions of dollars in goodwill value.

"When management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett.

Yahoo is in a business that has fantastic economics. Try again.

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

#152

Post by barry-cotter »

4thaccount wrote: post #49
batty_alex wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to weigh in this way, but yes it's a rare thing to do. Most people don't have multiple offers sitting on the table. It's a privilege. It's rare, that's all.

I'm referring to comparing your existing job to a new one. Everyone does this and it can't be rare. You have to look at quality of work, work life balance, the area, commute time, cost of living, salary, 401k match, benefits, chance of advancement, company culture, job safety, bonus amount, job security...etc. For a lot of people the choice is a no-brainer, but there are comparable and even worse jobs out there. I ap…

You shouldn’t apologise for a personal attack, whether on the internet or in person. Anyone who says you’re privileged is your enemy, at worst, and completely indifferent to your welfare at best.

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

#153

Post by toast0 »

nostrademons wrote: post #139
toast0 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I couldn't find a great description of the deal terms. I did find mention that at least some of the guarantee needed to be paid up front. I suspect the guaranteed payment was contingent on some level of traffic though -- if AOL had turned off the placement, or lost a huge amount of users, then they probably couldn't keep the money.

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

#154

Post by _0nac »

Aeolun wrote: post #113
tamizhar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does your codebase date from 1995? Because some of Yahoo's does. Time to send Jerry a nastygram about not adequately preparing the codebase for arbitrary color changes 25 years ago?

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

#155

Post by antt »

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…

Do you have some resources on novelty functions? Google, like usual recently, is useless at finding something I haven't found before.

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

#156

Post by tyingq »

duxup wrote: post #36
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…

As someone who feels they're from the outside looking in (left college to work, still ended up in the technology but without a traditional college education) one of the most frustrating things is watch folks who I perceive as traditionally trained CS and similar folks ... is their desire to go hyper analytical ... and then REALLY commit to the result as the best choice above all others because of whatever analysis th…

I wonder if they recognize that luck plays a significant role. Right place, right time sometimes matters more than anything you can predict or control.

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

#157

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

VHRanger wrote: post #136
syndacks wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

> Assumptions are fine if they're reasonable

I would assume so...

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

#158

Post by paulbaumgart »

antt wrote: post #155
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…

Do you have some resources on novelty functions? Google, like usual recently, is useless at finding something I haven't found before.

This is a good book on the subject: "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" https://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-Objectiv...

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

#159

Post by antt »

paulbaumgart wrote: post #158
antt wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some resources on novelty functions? Google, like usual recently, is useless at finding something I haven't found before.

This is a good book on the subject: "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" https://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-Objectiv...

Much obliged, that book looks interesting.

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

#160

Post by shostack »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #46

I was also at Google when the AOL deal was signed and remember the decision and outcome quite differently. It was definitely a high risk deal, deliberately so, but in no way was it only "the best-case scenario had us breaking even". Nor was it the case that "all of our models were wrong". The product manager in charge of ads at the time had a clear understanding of exactly how the deal could be hugely profitable for…

Can you speak at all to what sort of modeling work is done around this sort of major partnership? I'm really curious how many people are involved in that sort of exercise at that level and how clean the data is, what sorts of data are used, etc.
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