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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

#61

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.

So you judge mere on the fact that some lawsuit was filed? Without hearing, without proofs presented, without looking into other party's version?

Perhaps this is exactly what someone is expecting from you now.

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

#63

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…

That's how corporate culture works - it does not necessarily reward actual work, but it does reward being visibly "busy" as in quickly responding to e-mail, attending meetings etc.

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

#64

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…

That's horrible management. It's the busy body mentality.

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

#65

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.

So you judge mere on the fact that some lawsuit was filed? Without hearing, without proofs presented, without looking into other party's version? Perhaps this is exactly what someone is expecting from you now.

I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.

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

#66
post #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 compan…

[deleted]

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

#67

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.

You could add Carly Fiorina to that list, to continue the theme.

Or Charles H. Keating, Jr. (Lincoln Savings & Loan). Or Albert J. "Chainsaw" Dunlap (Sunbeam). Or Bernard Ebbers (Worldcom). Or Kenneth Lay (Enron). Or Bernie Matoff (self). Or Angelo R. Mozilo (Countrwide Financial). Or Richard Belluzzo (SGI). Or Dick Fuld (Lehman Brothers). Or Maurice R. Greenberg (AIG).

I don't even remember the executives, but from a Quora listing of SV failures: PayByTouch (John Rogers, convicted felon), SpotRunner (Nick Grouf and David Waxman), Homejoy (Adora & Aaron Cheung), Joost (Mike Volpi), DashMobile (Jamyn Edis), Cuil (hey, one I actually remember: Tom Costello), SearchMe (Randy Adams), Friendster (Ganesh Kumar Bangah), Digg (Jay Adelson & Kevin Rose), Reatrix (Robert Hoffer), and Color Labs (Bill Nguyen). All but one were run by men. Cumulatively they lost over $1 billion in funding capital with nothing to show for.

Or you could look at Yahoo itself: Ross Levinsohn, Scott Thompson, Tim Morse, Carol "Fuck You" Bartz, Jerry Yang, and Terry Semel have all guided, spurred-on, or frantically tried to halt its descent, to little effect. Only Bartz is female.

I'm quite unimpressed by Mayer given news of the past few weeks. I never thought she had much of a chance of salvaging Yahoo, and thought the company was walking dead, with my estimate a year or two back that it likely had about three years to live. The Verizon deal looked like a least-bad exit, and I was willing to give credit for that at the time. Rolling forward, I'd be willing to argue that Mayer has all but scuppered one of the few lifeboats she might have scampered into through mismanagement.

But that's on her. And there's plenty other failure to go around.

Truth is: business, startups, and infotech are tough gigs.

https://www.quora.com/What-has-been-the-biggest-startup-fail...

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

#68

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.

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

#69

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…

VPNs are used for a lot more than checking email. They are used to access source control, build/CI systems, QA servers, etc.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, Yahoo stopped being a "cool kid" a decade ago. That's really messed up if your company actually thinks it should emulate Yahoo because it's a cool company.

While that's generally been true since the late 90s, when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo did have quite the honeymoon period. Yahoo genuinely became "cool" for at least a year or 2, and everyone was glowing about Mayer being one of the best CEOs in the tech world.

Maybe that's what yahoo should do to get out of their short term problem at the moment, hire another female CEO to get some hype back in the company.
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