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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

#81

Post by skuhn »

twblalock wrote: post #69
ericdykstra wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if the data Marissa looked at was skewed because the corporate Yahoo VPN was atrociously terrible.

People who routinely worked outside of the office, or just wanted to be able to read their e-mail at home without the VPN client randomly panicing their system, had devised various workarounds to get things done.

The corporate VPN is distinct from production, so you could still do actual work without using it too.

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

#82

Post by taneq »

matt4077 wrote: post #19
rdtsc wrote: post #10

> “We believe this process allows our team to develop and do their best work. Our performance-review process also allows for high performers to engage in increasingly larger opportunities at our company" Ok so has that worked out well for Yahoo? Clearly it's been enough time by now to do an evaluation of Yahoo practices looking back and say something like: "Yeah thanks to these great management practices we have reco…

You remind me of that old joke: When a girl fails in math class, it's "women are bad at math". When a guy fails, it's "John is really stupid".

But when someone says "diversity is automatically good so we'll form a maths class with mostly women" and that maths class gets poor grades, it doesn't help further the notion that "more women equals better performance".

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

#83

Post by fenomas »

dschuetz wrote: post #51

Does anyone here even use Yahoo's products or services? I wonder why Yahoo is still significant and why there are stockholders dumb enough to stay. Yahoo is a sinking ship, imho.

Yahoo services (like the core branded stuff, not Flickr etc.) are still really popular here in Japan. News/entertainment content, and yahoo shopping all seem to be well-liked. I don't know any numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if it leads gmail as an email provider.

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

#84

Post by dankohn1 »

hueving wrote: post #74

This is ultimately the result of things like 'implicit biases' training that tell you to accept that you are unfairly subconsciously advantaging majorities and that you should explicitly disadvantage them to make up for your biases. Disgusting.

Implicit bias is a real phenomenon backed up by good studies: http://www.vox.com/2014/12/26/7443979/racism-implicit-racial...

Whether or not reverse discrimination was taking place at Yahoo, it is worthwhile to try to reduce the implicit bias we practice in our own lives.

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

#85

Post by throwaway_exer »

CalChris wrote: post #21
matt4077 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because there are people with opinions that differ from the hn/reddit echo chamber. Nobody denies that yahoo failed, but most people also believe that it's fate was sealed the day it refused to buy google, and that she did about as well as anybody would have. ...but also: she'd get a 60$ million bonus if fired, and considering that yahoo has already lost 90% of its former value and is being sold of, people pro…

Yahoo refused to buy Google? I don't remember that. In 2000, when Yahoo signed the deal to use Google search results, they also made an investment as well. IIRC, they sold that when Google went public. Obviously, Yahoo made a ton on that.

1. The Google founders initially tried to sell Pagerank to Yahoo for $1 billion when Google was just a search research company.

2. Later, Yahoo bought goto.com before Adwords came out. Adwords infringed on goto's patents. Google ended up giving a few hundred million to Yahoo.

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

#87

Post by romanovcode »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #61
leaveyou wrote: post #53

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.

"When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female"

Taken from the article, do you really need more proof?

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

#88

Post by Veen »

dankohn1 wrote: post #84
hueving wrote: post #74

This is ultimately the result of things like 'implicit biases' training that tell you to accept that you are unfairly subconsciously advantaging majorities and that you should explicitly disadvantage them to make up for your biases. Disgusting.

Implicit bias is a real phenomenon backed up by good studies: http://www.vox.com/2014/12/26/7443979/racism-implicit-racial... Whether or not reverse discrimination was taking place at Yahoo, it is worthwhile to try to reduce the implicit bias we practice in our own lives.

It's not reverse discrimination; it's just discrimination.

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

#89

Post by dgudkov »

pcurve wrote: post #20

“..less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” Even if they were not deliberate about it, they must have talked about how this might be perceived by employees. As bad as this issue is, I think hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal. However, I cannot…

>hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal.

And it's not necessarily wrong.

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

#90

Post by dankohn1 »

Veen wrote: post #88
dankohn1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implicit bias is a real phenomenon backed up by good studies: http://www.vox.com/2014/12/26/7443979/racism-implicit-racial... Whether or not reverse discrimination was taking place at Yahoo, it is worthwhile to try to reduce the implicit bias we practice in our own lives.

It's not reverse discrimination; it's just discrimination.

Yes, reverse discrimination[0] is an example of discrimination.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_discrimination

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