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

71–80 of 237 posts

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

#71

Post by antt »

syndacks wrote: post #55
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…

>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.

Doesn't matter. A 50 dimensional search space with 1000 possible values in each dimension has ~10^1700 possible states. That's a number you can't search exhaustively in the age of the universe even if you turned the whole thing into one computer. And this is not a large problem, you run into similar ones in the average gear wheel design.

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

#73

Post by devoply »

dustindiamond wrote: post #61

She seems like a lucky Elizabeth Holmes type.

Yeah pretty much, I don't see much going on with many of these high status women (and men) other than their network. Especially when their actual performance doesn't speak volumes.

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

#74

Post by nostrademons »

Causality1 wrote: post #56

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.

"When management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett.

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

#75

Post by amaranth »

tardo99 wrote: post #65
hlurhhh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do some reading for f*'s sake. Take a look at this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) Marissa is a fake computer scientist. There are real female computer scientists out there, and very good ones at that.

The woman with a masters in computer science is a fake computer scientist?

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

#76

Post by nintendo95 »

dopamean wrote: post #13
node-bayarea wrote: post #9

She ruined Yahoo! Made stupid acquisitions like Tumblr and shit.

lol. Yahoo was killing it before she showed up?

She isn't that good at all and never have been. WSJ and Barron's complained about her for the longest time possible now.. There are very critical articles of her in serious business press and magazines. Sexism is bad. But granting free pass to every bad CEO when she is a woman just because of her sex isn't smart. These people are CEOs, getting paid millions, destroying businesses and sometimes lives. It is important to keep them to the same scrutiny regardless of their sex.

Firing bottom performers every quarter. Banning remote work. Spending $7m on fashion show she attended with friends.

If this was a man he would have basically no right to criticize any other business especially successful one like Google. She looks absolutely ridicilous in this position. It's like F-grade student giving lectures to straight A's student. Do these people have shame at all?

And examples like this, or even worse like infamous Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, should remind us that we shouldn't give free pass to CEOs just because they are women. CEOs have the highest rate of sociopaths, no matter the gender.

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

#77

Post by antt »

rajeshp1986 wrote: post #10

"I realized that, while I had a very deep understanding of artificial intelligence, I did not yet have some of the basics down. I knew how a database worked. I knew how an operating system worked. I knew how a compiler worked. But I hadn't taken classes on those topics, so I went back for my master's and took the rest of the AI offerings as well as a lot of programming basics. That way, I could actually go and market…

Keep in mind that she is a queen of self promotion. When she was talking about 140 hour work weeks she conveniently left out the fact she was paying someone else to do her domestic work [0]. Or that most of her days involved meetings, lunches and dinners.

I am reminded of the story of Henry IV who stood barefoot in the snow for three days. And through the grace of God not getting frost bite. We have come so far when we no longer believe you need God for acts like this.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/marissa-mayer-who-just-ba...

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

#78

Post by pilsetnieks »

johntiger1 wrote: post #63
empath75 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo was already dying when she joined. Fundamentally the ‘portal’ model was already doomed and there was little she could do to fix it other than buy a social network like tumblr. Yahoo and aol both had levels of technical debt that are hard to imagine from outside of the company.

OK, then why didn't Yahoo just hire me to run the company? Same outcome but my salary would have been MUCH lower :) In all seriousness, just because Yahoo was in a downspin doesn't mean that leadership can't save the company. Look at John Chen and Blackberry

Or they needed someone with experience to do a controlled descent with minimum casualties instead of a fiery crash.

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

#79

Post by tardo99 »

compiler-guy wrote: post #70
tardo99 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've known Marissa since Stanford too, and you're wrong. I'm not sure if you're lying or what, but you're wrong. Edit: Before you pile on, I'm rich too. Not as rich as her but rich enough not to take issue with her for that reason. The reason people remember Marissa is she was pretty. End of story.

Apparently our experiences in her orbit were pretty different. That doesn't mean I'm lying, and I don't think you are either. I have no idea what your experience is, and I have absolutely no reason to lie. I doubt Marissa could pick me out of a police lineup if her life depended on it. But I watched her kick ass at Stanford--both socially and intellectually--and it takes more than a pretty face to do that.

If you went to Stanford in that era, then you know that Symbolic Systems was basically "Computer Science Lite."

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

#80

Post by akozak »

devoply wrote: post #73
dustindiamond wrote: post #61

She seems like a lucky Elizabeth Holmes type.

Yeah pretty much, I don't see much going on with many of these high status women (and men) other than their network. Especially when their actual performance doesn't speak volumes.

Damn, check your biases.
Post reply on HN