What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold • Hacker News Board

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#191

Post by twblalock » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:22 PM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #65

exelius wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a certain workaholic personality that excels at executive-level positions. I'm convinced they simply have better genetics than the rest of us -- after 10 or so hours of work, my memory is garbage and I wouldn't feel confident dealing with anything important but some people are totally fine. Plus, you couldn't work that hard for any amount of money unless you loved the work. I'm not sure I want to be a CEO for…

I work with high level executives at a well known company regularly. Most of them are normal people. Hard working, smarter than the average? Sure. Answering emails at 1am on a Sunday with a newborn? Certainly not. In fact, my director just took a month off when his second child was born, and is taking another month off soon. There is no "better genetics" or "sleeping 4 hours a night". That's just the media and tech e…

There are reasons to believe that there are people who have a genetic characteristic that enables them to get by on that little sleep. This is a link to the study referenced in the parent post's BBC article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2884988/

Furthermore, human genetic variation being what it is, there is no reason to dismiss "better genetics" in general. There are many genetic differences that make people better or worse than others at performing certain tasks. Some are obvious, some less so. But its certainly plausible that they exist, and dismissing them as part of an "echo chamber" is unjustified.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#192

Post by twblalock » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:27 PM UTC

burkaman wrote: post #126

seanalltogether wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This explains the seemingly easy path Theresa May had to becoming Prime Minister following the Brexit vote.

It's definitely a reasonable explanation. Her only real opponent was a woman as well.

Mainly because her potential male opponents stabbed each other in the back until they were no longer viable.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#193

Post by twblalock » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

excitom wrote: post #112

stinkytaco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value. I think it's very clear that the goal when she was hired was to sell the company and get the shareholder's some payout. Considering where the company was when she came in, I'd say she did an admirable job at this. You might say that's not success, b…

> the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value. It always bothers me to see this, as I feel it is the reason many companies decline. The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second rule should be "keep the employees happy" since happy employees help implement the first rule. If rule one and two are achieved then as a side effect shareholder value is maximized.

If companies operated like that, people would not invest in them. Why would you invest in a company that does not put your share growth as a priority, when others will?

Besides, the shareholders own the company. Why shouldn't a company prioritize those who own it? The shareholders take on risk by providing capital to the company, and they deserve to be compensated for that risk.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#194

Post by fragola » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

IMO Yahoo was just unfortunately not salvageable and MM gets a lot of criticism from a lot of directions (I've seen a lot of articles by women criticizing her for not taking "enough" maternity leave, for example). I feel like she's just a favorite target.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/03/marissa-may...

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#195

Post by twblalock » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:32 PM UTC

pfarnsworth wrote: post #163

iopq wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second rule should be "keep the employees happy" if you burn through your cash reserves doing those things and now you don't have any money, that doesn't do anything for you since you burned all your cash - even if employees and customers are happy the first rule should be "make money", the second rule should be "spend less money than you make" if those two…

Not true. Sometimes shareholders want metrics like Return on Equity, which forces the hand of management to sell profitable parts of the business... but not profitable enough. That's the insanity of trying to maximize shareholder value.

That's only insane if you assume the success of the business is the goal, rather than the success of the shareholders.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#196

Post by prodigal_erik » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:33 PM UTC

kalsk wrote: post #167

collyw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FFS. Judging people based on their email client?

The only thing that should matter is which text editor she uses.

She did not use the text editor with its own email client(s), which is all we really needed to know.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#197

Post by FussyZeus » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:37 PM UTC

1024core wrote: post #91

It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years. The spotlight has always been on her, and her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and pretty? I was at Yahoo from 2004 through 2015. I saw some seriously stupid CEOs. One of them being Terry Semel. He made more than $200M in just one year (and even more, according to rumors). Here…

Agreed, from everything else I've read Yahoo has serious internal issues that no CEO is going to be able to fix without a lot of help from those inside the company, and those inside the company seemed to be just riding the ship down to the ocean so they didn't need to jump.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#198

Post by tmd83 » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:37 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #145

sokoloff wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Executives have [employment] options. If you believe you need a talented executive to have a chance at turning around your company and your company is in dire straits, you may very well have to offer a golden parachute package to have any hope of engaging the services of the talented exec you seek, particularly when that's the norm at that level. Failing to offer such terms amounts to forfeiting any chance to hire th…

Yeah, yeah this same excuse is always used to justify insane executive pays but it's baloney. It's a self perpetuating cycle, "Oh WE Have to pay more because companies X, Y and Z are offering $N million!" Executive pay has skyrocketed in relation to worker pay over the last 30 years and it's not for any good reason like executives are so much more important or talented. It's because the executive pay is decided by bo…

I think this looks to be the more plausible reason for massive executive pay than anything else. I remember watching a documentary about F1 and there was a comment about Bernie Ecclestone made everyone understand that they have to work together to make the pie (F1 earning) bigger so that everyone's share become bigger.

It seems that executives are essentially doing the same. Making and perpetuating the myth of extreme compensation being essential and justified for such responsibility. I would agree that it can be an extremely complex responsibility to bear and be compensated similarly. Depending on the company I can understand 5-10 times the salary but 10s of millions sound absurd.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#199

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:48 PM UTC

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #162

marcosdumay wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point about wanting people to be all-in. (Must make for a good sign for everybody to stop being it, but yes, it's a point.) But this: > When a company is going down, a 10x or 100x or even 1000x developer (whatever that means) won't be able to save the company alone. Committees don't save failing companies. They also don't steer successful companies. In fact, the one thing you can expect from a committee is…

To be fair, I can't think of any significant tech company coming back from near death, except Apple. But we all know that's an exception.

IBM has been there too.

Big companies in general do not come back from near death. But the surest way to guarantee that this small chance won't be taken is betting everything on "team playing" and antagonizing every "bad team player" that thinks differently from the main line.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#200

Post by pfarnsworth » Thu, Jul 28, 2016, 8:48 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #195

pfarnsworth wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. Sometimes shareholders want metrics like Return on Equity, which forces the hand of management to sell profitable parts of the business... but not profitable enough. That's the insanity of trying to maximize shareholder value.

That's only insane if you assume the success of the business is the goal, rather than the success of the shareholders.

Success of the business and success of the shareholders is not a zero-sum game. You can usually have both.

What is insane is sacrificing the success of the business for the success of shareholders. That affects employees, and you end up getting situations where entire towns get fucked because the profitable-but-not-profitable-factory gets shut down because of some obscure metric.