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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

#271

Post by internaut »

coredog64 wrote: post #190
snovv_crash wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Martin Shkreli, Parker Conrad, Brendan Eich, Jack Dorsey, Steve Ballmer. Even though Amazon is doing well people hate on Jeff Bezos a lot.

Was Bendan Eich really a bad CEO, or is he just extremely unpopular for his donation to a political cause?

The decision to oust Eich is the reason why I would never knowingly hire people who practiced social justice activism.

There is evidence all over Silicon Valley, including this thread, that they just cannot keep their politics and work separated. Indeed they believe it is their job to mix the two.

It would be like hiring a KKK member in HR. Toxic results would be a foregone conclusion. It is the paradox of tolerance all over again. Social justice actvists will never hire rightists. KKK members are never going to hire blacks. And yes this is a valid comparison because social justice groups such as Black Lives Matter do have people in them advocating violence, being involved in riots and even murder with the sniper in Dallas being one example. Eich was a moderate kind of rightist so there is no chance somebody like me would be allowed to exist.

I would have no problem hiring people who disagree with me on every political subject. The problem starts when you begin using your influence to deliberately select members of your 'tribe' to be appointed to positions. That is the trademark 'feature' that should cause you to deselect them, it is no contradiction to discriminate against negative discrimination.

Look at Ycombinator. It has many well known characters who clearly disagree in politics but it does not turn into a problem for their working relationship. That is the kind of pluralism we should want to have.

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

#272

Post by terrywilcox »

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.

If these men were good at the managerial jobs, why was the company ailing in the first place?

Maybe firing them all was the right move, but it was too late to repair the damage.

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

#273

Post by omouse »

harryf wrote: post #47
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…

Don't read "How Google Works", "Work Rules" or "In the Plex" then. Meyer was just repeating the Google playbook which places a high emphasis on getting staff in the same physical space

Cargo cult style.

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

#274

Post by redler »

thedufer wrote: post #123
NhanH wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one. Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?

My experience was that they refused to even talk money before doing team matching. This was less than a year ago; maybe things have changed?

That's such a strange approach. The've marked you as a "hire" but not even discussed a range? Given how long this process sometimes takes, and that good people will have multiple offers (and typically an already comfortable income), how is one supposed to make a career decision?

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

#275

Post by kafkaesq »

coldpie wrote: post #137
NhanH wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one. Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?

My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large company.

Do share, please (if you feel comfortable).

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

#276

Post by ralusek »

orly_bookz wrote: post #112
blazespin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am OK with this. What annoys me is the discrimination against non asians happening in the valley these days. I mean, gee wilikers.

Surely you mean non-whites and non-asians. Caucasians are still a huge portion of the Silicon Valley work force. It's women, hispanics, and african americans who make up some tiny percentage...

Are you so sure that there are fewer women, hispanics, and African Americans in Silicon Valley because of discrimination, specifically?

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

#277

Post by int_19h »

tomerv wrote: post #56
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's the alternative? I assume that you expect companies to promote/fire based on performance. How can you do that without a performance review process? My experience has been that the biggest factor is your direct manager. If your manager hates you, then you have a serious problem, because no matter what kind of process (or lack of process) your company has, they can get you fired. On the other hand, a good manage…

You do it by letting managers decide based on perceived performance, and trusting in their assessments. If the biggest factor is your direct manager in either system (which I agree with), we might as well stop pretending otherwise.

This has the same result as the formal review system, but with a lot less overhead. More importantly, if you're denied promotion out of spite, you know that - they can't just say "well, it's not my fault, it's just how the process worked out".

Yes, good managers can definitely help cut through the BS even with a process in place, it takes time and effort for them - time and effort that could be used on something more valuable. And sometimes, no amount of effort is sufficient to buck the process.

From my experience, by the way, a formal competitive review system (buckets etc) makes it more important to have a good manager, because you absolutely need your manager to play the game well against other managers to yield good results for you, no matter how hard you work. If your manager is indifferent, or can't play the game well, they'll take away whatever was left on the table after the rest, and that's what you'll be stuck with.

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

#278

Post by kafkaesq »

twblalock wrote: post #68
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…

If your manager does not like you, he does not need a formal review process to screw you over. In fact, without a formal review process, it would be even easier to screw you over, because there won't be any paper trail at all.

Apparently they do, in larger companies. It's an expensive, and time-consuming process, and large companies generally don't do those things company-wide without a good reason.†

† The reason may not be immediately evident of course. But when you unwind the bureaucratic logic, ultimately there's almost always a reason behind these phenomena.

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

#280

Post by int_19h »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #180
gruez wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because men outnumber women in that field

Not at Yahoo! Not any more. When give a fair playing field, the women outnumber the men.

I think what's he saying is that the field of candidates - before Yahoo even gets to make a pick of hires - is skewed in favor of men. So a 100% impartial selection process would just propagate the same gender imbalance.
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