Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

triplebyte.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 237 posts

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#51

Post by erobbins »

Harj wrote: post #2

Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision: "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up w…

> "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there."

This absolutely drives me crazy in design/engineering decisions. Very commonly there are a lot of good solutions and one great one, and the good ones are good enough. Yet all the brilliant intellectuals want to find the VERY BEST METHOD EVER instead of just getting stuff done.

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#52

Post by pcmaffey »

tlb wrote: post #47
lkrubner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too much focus on utility functions, not enough focus on novelty functions, even though it's been proven that utility functions decline in usefulness as a search space expands. Given an infinite search space, a utility function can only find local optima, there is no global optima. In such situations, a novelty function that finds a path from one happy local optima to another happy local optima is a better bet than u…

How would you prove that? Here's a simple counterexample to what I understand your theorem to say: consider an infinite search space: 𝕽∞ and a utility function: 1-|x|. There's a single global optimum at (0, ...), and the gradient of the utility function would find it quickly.

You missed the point that there is no global optimum. The GP’s novelty function is optimized for novelty, that’s all.

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#53

Post by kayhi »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #46

I was also at Google when the AOL deal was signed and remember the decision and outcome quite differently. It was definitely a high risk deal, deliberately so, but in no way was it only "the best-case scenario had us breaking even". Nor was it the case that "all of our models were wrong". The product manager in charge of ads at the time had a clear understanding of exactly how the deal could be hugely profitable for…

What does that type of deal look like?

AOL had ad inventory and Google had to get enough eye balls?

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#54

Post by JohnFen »

batty_alex wrote: post #33
4thaccount wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a rare thing to do. I've done it and so have co-workers. A simple pro/con chart is really all you need.

Sorry to weigh in this way, but yes it's a rare thing to do. Most people don't have multiple offers sitting on the table. It's a privilege. It's rare, that's all.

> Most people don't have multiple offers sitting on the table.

Maybe not (although I don't think that's vanishingly rare).

But don't most people do something like this when deciding what they want to do next even if there aren't any active offers on the table at all?

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#55

Post by syndacks »

lkrubner wrote: post #41
Harj wrote: post #2

Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision: "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up w…

Too much focus on utility functions, not enough focus on novelty functions, even though it's been proven that utility functions decline in usefulness as a search space expands. Given an infinite search space, a utility function can only find local optima, there is no global optima. In such situations, a novelty function that finds a path from one happy local optima to another happy local optima is a better bet than u…

>given an infinite search space

There's no such thing.

I understand the point you're making, but these gross assumptions aren't how the world works. Reminds me of econ models with ridiculous assumptions that don't pan out when reality is a constraint.

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#56

Post by Causality1 »

Considering how Mayer absolutely cratered Yahoo I'd take her advice with a grain of salt. Quarterly operating profit dropped by more than 50% during her tenure and she was the driving force behind the acquisition of dozens of worthless companies leading to the write-off of billions of dollars in goodwill value.

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#57

Post by compiler-guy »

ProAm wrote: post #50
kaikai wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the term "glass cliff," if you want an explanation of why some folks perceive her as a failure despite her successes.

> despite her successes Only going by what I've read she was never extremely successful at Google, only hired early and managed to stay, but never incredibly impactful. Honest question because I likely only know half the story what are her real successes at Google?

She was very successful at Google. Her taste drove much of Google's early design aesthetic. Why is the landing page mostly blank? In large part because Marissa insisted.

"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."

She said that in 2005. And a clean design was quite revolutionary at the time--yahoo and all the other internet portals were cluttered and sticky.

She isn't solely responsible for this aesthetic of course, but it really was her driving much of the theory.

See also, eg, https://daringfireball.net/2008/03/kahney_jackass (the original citation has fallen off the net, unfortunately) where Marissa is cited as being the driving force behind most product look and feel.

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#58

Post by codingdave »

paganel wrote: post #40
tardo99 wrote: post #5

The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.

At one point she was seen from the outside as the 3rd most powerful/influential person at Google, after the two founders and even ahead of Schmidt, I remember articles praising her decision of leaving the Google front-page almost empty with only two buttons on it (I think this was around 2008-2010). Then she went to Yahoo and drove it into the ground and as such I'm surprised that people still take her business-relat…

It is a question of perspective. She was the head of a sinking ship, yes. But did she cause the sinking, or did she recoup the most returns possible for the investors before it sank?

I wasn't there. I don't know the inside story. I'm not going to take sides. But neither am I going to assume that she has poor business skills just because she headed up a shutdown effort.

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#59

Post by dustindiamond »

paganel wrote: post #40
tardo99 wrote: post #5

The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.

At one point she was seen from the outside as the 3rd most powerful/influential person at Google, after the two founders and even ahead of Schmidt, I remember articles praising her decision of leaving the Google front-page almost empty with only two buttons on it (I think this was around 2008-2010). Then she went to Yahoo and drove it into the ground and as such I'm surprised that people still take her business-relat…

Well, Mark Cuban has a TV show, and we would not be talking about that if it weren’t for Yahoo.

Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

#60

Post by hlurhhh »

tardo99 wrote: post #5

The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.

I like her because she's one of the very very few 'famous' women in tech who's not Alexa or Siri (https://www.fastcompany.com/40547212/people-were-asked-to-na...).

Running companies and being featured in Vogue? Iconic.

Post reply on HN