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

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

#211

Post by shepardrtc »

dominotw wrote: post #125
joeax wrote: post #34

I was once a fan of Mayer when she first took over Yahoo, until she led a crusade against remote workers. As a remote worker myself I can tell you this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry. A lot of tech companies (especially outside the bay area) want to emulate the cool kids like Yahoo, Google, and Apple, and even the company I work for started questioning its WFH policies. So no, I don't feel sorry for her…

>this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry Were there any other companies that followed yahoo's lead?

Mine did. But it was a smaller company with about 500 people, who were mostly older with families. We had maybe 1 full-time remote worker (who was actually pretty good), and the rest of the people would simply work from home one day a week. But after hearing about Marissa's crusade, they killed that off. Didn't change performance, but it did kill morale.

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

#212

Post by JoeAltmaier »

talmand wrote: post #194
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No claim. Just astonished at the assumption implicit in this thread, that it can't be correct that 80% of competent managers at Yahoo! are female.

I don't necessarily think the complaint is that they are incompetent because they are female. The complaint of gender bias is still valid even if the people who benefited from the bias are fully capable of the job. If it can be shown that the 80% women were not hired based on gender bias then the complaint is unjustified.

Do we go looking for that gender bias when its 80% men? Again, women have to prove they belong; the assumption is there has to be some bias or they would not be in those positions.

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

#213

Post by ska »

jbmorgado wrote: post #210
ska wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know who is in the wrong or right at Yahoo (or if it's even that simple), but you really aren't thinking about this very carefully. There is a obvious rational path for them to get there. I'm not saying it is correct, mind you, or that the implementation would be a good idea. I'm saying that the statements to the effect of "well obviously it was discrimination" are sloppy. The obvious path looks something lik…

> To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct. And what bias is that? That 20% of woman in Yahoo, actually reflects very well the percentage of woman with expertise in the area, because that's also the percentage of woman that actually took the effort to learn a…

They are two different comments to go with your two different statement, I was perhaps unclear.

1) Most people in a college IT program are not going to end up in management (or at least, not with much responsibility), so using that class as a whole is a poor proxy. Assuming the ratio persists in a subset is too strong to leave without support.

2) Using the previous ratios of something as a baseline is only meaningful if that isn't exactly the thing you are trying to look at changing.

Again, I suspect this is just lack of care in thinking about it.

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

#214

Post by JoeAltmaier »

kelukelugames wrote: post #200
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #163

This whole thread is deeply disturbing. The bald statement in the headline is deeply disturbing. The fundamental assumption that women can't possibly be deserving of management positions. That any objective measure of performance would certainly favor men. That any man that loses his job to a woman has been treated unfairly.

Joe, no need to feel disturbed. HNers are good people. I used to think otherwise, but dang corrected me. The percent of misogynists or racists is far less than 100%. I would say at least 80% of the comments in this thread are not sexist in anyway. Which to be honest is pretty good.

I'd be more comforted if even the not-overtly-sexist comments didn't have an assumption of the truth of the title: its a problem when significant numbers of women are promoted into management.

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

#215

Post by to3m »

Klibarchu wrote: post #141
to3m wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More black people .

Give it a rest. Trumpeting your PC nonsense won't help you. You understood what he meant. Communication successful, despite your protest!

Yes, it's true - sometimes I do go a bit far with my outlandish suggestions :(

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

#216

Post by maverick_iceman »

leaveyou wrote: post #204
omgtehlion wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you were still using yahoo? It's 2016, dude

but dude, what about that extremely common corner case, like if you gave your 2001 yahoo email to a very large number of people and institutions ? what do you do then dude ? no, seriously, how do you migrate and email (because I'm about to try it)?

Forward to gmail.

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

#217

Post by iron0012 »

jimmywanger wrote: post #193
wattt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTFY: the PERSON you go to lunch with...

FTFY, guy and dude are pretty much asexual references for a person you don't know who you had a personal interaction with, at least in California. "Who did you have lunch with? Oh, some dude." Try not to language police here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.

That's not true in my experience, and I doubt it's true in yours. While "guys" is sometimes employed to refer to a mixed gender group of people, it would be very weird for "guy" or "dude" to be used to refer to a woman. Argue in good faith, please. And try not to police PC here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.

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

#218

Post by lazyant »

ericdykstra wrote: post #48
brian-armstrong wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She laid out a good reason for doing it. I think the decision was justified.

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…

and she had a nursery built by her office so she could see her child, pouring salt into the wound

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

#219

Post by JoeAltmaier »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #182
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #163

This whole thread is deeply disturbing. The bald statement in the headline is deeply disturbing. The fundamental assumption that women can't possibly be deserving of management positions. That any objective measure of performance would certainly favor men. That any man that loses his job to a woman has been treated unfairly.

It's not just any man...it was a lot of men. This kind of discrimination could be excused if it brought a tangible value to the company, but this reshuffling did nothing to help this ailing company. Meyer's actions were discriminatory at worst; at best, it was merely gross incompetence.

Lots of companies fail to survive Silicon Valley forever. Yahoo!'s future aside, the conversation was about promotion, not ailing companies.

A lot of women are routinely overlooked in management promotions. Since its 80% (or usually much more) men in every other company in Silicon Valley, we'll have to call discrimination and incompetence at all of them?

The assumption that women can't possibly belong in management is galling. No mystery why Silicon Valley has the reputation it does.

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

#220

Post by bitL »

wattt wrote: post #130
wp1 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTFY: The guy you go to lunch with during your on-site interview @Google is most likely the one who hasn't completed interview training yet .

FTFY: the PERSON you go to lunch with...

You guys should really fix English language. As a non-native speaker whose native language allows properly expressing gender anytime, I find this funny, being downvoted for what is a structural problem of your language :-D
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