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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

#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 like me because I'm gay and used the performance review process, and eventually put me on an action plan and forced me to quit.

Most of the big tech companies will put you on something called a PIP, which is a "Performance Improvement Plan". It basically means they are preparing to fire you, but they give you an option: quit now, and you can have some severance, or you could try and stay and complete the PIP, but still run the risk of being fired for any reason, and in that case, you get no severance. It's exactly what happened to me, and I decided it wasn't worth the stress to try and stay and fight it so I just quit.

It was the most demoralizing experience ever, and really showed me that these processes are in place so managers can just get rid of people they don't want or like.

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

#54

Anyone who was unkind to Ellen Pao should really be rethinking themselves about now. Edit: Hn thread: why is diversity so important? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576806 Me: if diversity is not important than this lawsuit is a joke and HN should be laughing at this lawsuit.

Funny you should mention her. I'm 100% sure that it can't be coincidence that the only "really bad CEOs" I keep hearing about on social media are Pao, Meyers and Elizabeth Holmes. But people really don't react kindly to accusations of sexism without proof. I wonder how unlikely it is that the 90% of male CEOs in high tech are all exemplary.

Holmes is a bad CEO? She built a 9 billion dollar company using only smoke and mirrors. That just doesn't happen everyday. Imagine how successful Theranos would be if they actually had a product.

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

#55

Anyone who was unkind to Ellen Pao should really be rethinking themselves about now. Edit: Hn thread: why is diversity so important? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576806 Me: if diversity is not important than this lawsuit is a joke and HN should be laughing at this lawsuit.

Funny you should mention her. I'm 100% sure that it can't be coincidence that the only "really bad CEOs" I keep hearing about on social media are Pao, Meyers and Elizabeth Holmes. But people really don't react kindly to accusations of sexism without proof. I wonder how unlikely it is that the 90% of male CEOs in high tech are all exemplary.

Hardly a day goes by without someone complaining what an asshole Travis Kalanick is. Please don't forget basic facts while pursuing your SJW agenda.

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

#56

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 manager can help you do your best despite any existing "cookie-cutter" process.

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

#57

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…

That's not really about the review process, but about making one of the biggest mistakes you can make: After you know your manager doesn't like you, you didn't do everything in your power to either switch teams or change companies.

Nothing good will come out of working for a manager that doesn't like you. You'll get worse reviews than you deserve and worse raises. You'll get less exposure to other parts of the company: Every second you spend in that situation is a second wasted.

That said, I am absolutely not putting the blame on you here. A manager that doesn't like one of their reports should either get over it or do their best to ship them to a place where they'll be better appreciated. The tech industry is full of terrible managers though, and you are probably not going to make yours better.

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.

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

#58

I'm deeply offended by this and personally I will cease to use Yahoo Mail. I urge any self-respecting males to stop using any of Yahoo services as a form of protest for this despicable act of discrimination. And I'm serious; too much is too much.

Yahoo services are pretty much low quality anyway. Flickr is okay but it doesn't really work on mobile w/o installing their app. So why use them anyway? You don't need this as a reason when there are already better services out there. Plus Mayer will probably be pretty much gone soon, since instead of saving what was left of Yahoo, she made it even less relevant than before. It will be probably bought by Verizon.

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

#59
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…

[deleted]

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

#60

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…

Your problem was a manager that did not like you not the performance review process. In a small company without impersonal processes that can be only worse (or maybe better because you'd be fired earlier - fail fast after all - but in the big company you could leave once you learned the fact about your manager on your own).
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