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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

#261

Post by exoromeo »

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…

I worked for a company with this same process. When I became middle management there, I was told I couldn't give all 5s even if I felt they were earned because "there's always room for improvement".

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

#262

Post by detaro »

st3v3r wrote: post #260
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…

What companies have ever given you severance if you quit? I've never worked at a place where I'd get anything more than a "See ya!" if I quit.

I think the argument was more "If they are likely going to fire me without severance, there is no gain in waiting it out, better quit first"

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

#263

Post by sageabilly »

cmdrfred wrote: post #237

I have been told the feminism is truly about egalitarianism, I will patiently await the feminist outcry.

Woman here: If it turns out to be true, then yeah, that is absolutely sexist and is absolutely 100% bullshit. That's the point of wanting equity for everyone: being a woman or being a man should have no bearing on whether or not you can do the WORK, so if that starts to be a point of consideration then yeah, that's kinda inherently sexist. Just like men getting the side eye when they want to be elementary teachers or women in stockrooms getting asked if they need help carrying something.

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

#265

Post by hellofunk »

doublescoop wrote: post #192
IndianAstronaut wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone at HP who suddenly had to go in to work. This put him in a situation where he had to pay thousands for day care and he threatened to leave until they finally let him work from home again.

So, an employee was doubling as a full time care giver for his children while remote working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives remote work policies a bad name in the first place. If I found out one of my employees was taking care of his kids while working at home, you better believe it would result in a conversation and a possible revocation of his use of the remote work policy.

So, an employee was found at their desk chatting with the office mate all afternoon while working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives on-site work a bad name.

If I found out one of my employees was using their office as a social lounge while working at my company, you better believe it would result in a conversation and possible revocation of their on-site privileges, forcing them to work in solitude at home instead so I could see real results.

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

#266

Post by st3v3r »

yuhong wrote: post #256
amyjess wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much bigger reason is to demoralize you and convince you that you deserve to be fired, so you won't even think about a lawsuit. PIPs aren't really good documentation of bad performance; in fact, a badly-written PIP can actually backfire on the company because the wording is usually full of holes a good lawyer can drive a truck through. Basically instead of the company having proof you were a poor performer, you now…

Not that I like anti-discrimination or wrongful termination laws anyway, though I am willing to compromise. I suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.

That's a pretty silly distinction. Why should one's job title determine whether or not they can be discriminated against?

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

#267

Post by snuxoll »

Jtsummers wrote: post #138
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…

> "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive." Like a boss I had that thought programming was just typing and didn't understand why I: 1) Wrote a lot on paper and whiteboard; 2) Sat back in thought a lot; 3) Spoke with my colleagues. I became "more productive" in his eyes by hiding in the testing lab to do my thinking. I was actually testing, too, but I didn't watch the test cases…

> thinking

This is something that always bothers me when I'm forced to pair program. I constantly feel pressured to put code on the screen instead of sitting back and thinking about how to tackle a problem. When I am tasked and allowed to do something on my own I often spend more time thinking ahead about the problem then actually implementing the solution, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Programming is as much an art as it is a science, you can bang a keyboard all day but without putting thought into it (which typically requires pause or maybe a change of scenery even) it can often result in a worse product.

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

#268

Post by yuhong »

st3v3r wrote: post #266
yuhong wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I like anti-discrimination or wrongful termination laws anyway, though I am willing to compromise. I suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.

That's a pretty silly distinction. Why should one's job title determine whether or not they can be discriminated against?

It has to do with how the lawsuits work. It would still be wrong regardless of whether it was actually illegal.

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

#269

Post by int_19h »

bitL wrote: post #220
wattt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thing is, most languages that do that don't just allow properly expressing gender, they require it. And that's not necessarily a good thing.

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

#270

Post by omouse »

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've been on a PIP before and they're 100% political. You're absolutely right that they're trying to fire you without immediately firing you. They'll probably also try and get you to sign extra legal documents. If you quit, you get shitty severance, if you are fired you get better severance.
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