Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

Post by talmand » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:04 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #127

iamleppert wrote: post #52

Just reading this brought back memories of working at LinkedIn, and why I'll never again work for a company who has institutional performance review processes. That pretty much excludes all big tech companies and I'm perfectly fine with that. The cookie-cutter performance review process is impersonal and has absolutely nothing to do with helping people do their best work. In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't…

I had one large company where performance was really one bit - ranking was on a scale of 1 to 5 and, as I was told, "nobody is a 5 and if you were a 1 or 2 you'd already have been sacked". So everyone was either a 3 (meeting expectations) or 4 (exceeding expectations in some areas). I did manage to persuade my line manager (the CIO) to give me a 5 on something but he then felt the need to mark me down somewhere else…

Post by paulcole » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:09 PM UTC

leaveyou wrote: post #65

ComodoHacker wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you judge mere on the fact that some lawsuit was filed? Without hearing, without proofs presented, without looking into other party's version? Perhaps this is exactly what someone is expecting from you now.

I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.

Post by talmand » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:11 PM UTC

awinder wrote: post #118

ericdykstra wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, he uses Mayer's firing of remote employees as an example of a toxic work culture that values signalling over production. Here's the excerpt: > In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers…

Not only is that terrible management, it's audacious micromanagement that the CEO went to great personal lengths (based on the story anyways) to gather evidence to go after remote workers. That probably paints the best picture for me of why yahoo failed: a company with great institutional and market issues, had its CEO conducting an unscientific survey of the effectiveness of remote workers

Post by ska » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

hueving wrote: post #74

This is ultimately the result of things like 'implicit biases' training that tell you to accept that you are unfairly subconsciously advantaging majorities and that you should explicitly disadvantage them to make up for your biases. Disgusting.

Post by mcguire » Fri, Oct 07, 2016, 2:20 PM UTC

jakobegger wrote: post #96

pcurve wrote: post #20

“..less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” Even if they were not deliberate about it, they must have talked about how this might be perceived by employees. As bad as this issue is, I think hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal. However, I cannot…

But I understand that people prefer to hire friends / former colleagues. It's really really hard to know if people are a good fit for a position from just a couple of interviews. It's much easier if it's someone you've worked with before; you'll know if they can do the job or not.