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

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

#91

Post by hlurhhh »

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.

Don't tell me to do some reading for f*'s sake, I know about Margaret Hamilton and Grace Hopper. Mayer is current, successful, and stylish. I like her. I'm trying to explain to you why there might be a 'cult of personality' around her.

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

#92

Post by puzzle »

compiler-guy wrote: post #57
ProAm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 revolutiona…

I remember Larry saying that in reality for a long time the homepage was spare because Sergey's HTML sucked (or vice versa).

I worked on a project that fell under her umbrella. I have seen up close some of the things she gets blamed for. She was demanding, a workaholic and stubborn in some of her choices. E.g. there was this one change that she —through her PM— insisted on, without any knobs, even if we pretty much knew that a vocal minority were going to be unhappy.

On the other hand, she did pick good people to lead the project, even if I wasn't enthusiastic about every single decision taken by her or them. Because she worked so much, it was easy to get feedback from her, too. :-) I also appreciated that she gave props to our team at a public event when we least expected it.

Overall, she wasn't a perfect leader, but she wasn't as bad or just lucky as some claim.

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

#93

Post by utopcell »

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.

Was it necessary to bring up gender ?

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

#94

Post by ceph_ »

antt wrote: post #77
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…

> 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

HER domestic work? There is absolutely no reason why she should or would mention this other than your sexist expectations.

Do you expect male CEOs to mention they pay someone to do their laundry and are abdicating their "domestic responsibilities"? Seriously?!

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

#95

Post by hlurhhh »

thenaturalist wrote: post #22
tardo99 wrote: post #5

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

Wholeheartedly agree, and I think it comes down to "signalling by association". For sure she is a workaholic and that gets you far, but to me it seems like she is filling the gap of providing confirmation to insecure overachievers after she - being one herself - made mistakes and reflected on them. Mistakes that could have been avoided had you taken out the ego in the first place. In contrast to my hypothesis: If you…

I wrote this somewhere else in this thread, but I like her because she's one of the few (current) 'well known' women in tech that's successful and stylish. She's exactly the kind of representation I need and want.

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

#96

Post by antt »

ceph_ wrote: post #94
antt wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 HER domestic work? There is absolutely no reason why she should or would mention this other than your sexist expectations. Do you expect male CEOs to mention they pay someone to do their laundry and are abdicating their "domestic responsibilities"? Seriously?!

I liked the part were you called me sexist for making the complaint the mothers in Yahoo made against her when she cut their rights to work remotely.

You of course would know this if you read the link I provided, instead of the first line of my post.

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

#97

Post by tardo99 »

compiler-guy wrote: post #89
tardo99 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which she crushed, and then she moved on and crushed the master's level courses. And then got a job at Google. Of all the dot-com companies hiring on campus at the time throwing million dollar opportunities at new graduates, she picks the unicorn. At some point it isn't luck anymore. Anyway, I'll agree to disagree here. The post I originally responded to was a question about what is so special about her. I only know…

Fine. It's not luck after college. Then how do you explain her string of failures at Yahoo? It starts being luck again at age 35?

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

antt wrote: post #71
syndacks wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by tomhoward »

dustindiamond wrote: post #61

She seems like a lucky Elizabeth Holmes type.

Elizabeth Holmes is facing fraud charges.

Marissa Mayer was an accomplished engineer and then a senior executive at Google through its transition from startup to behemoth, then took on the impossible task of rescuing Yahoo when no comparably experienced man wanted to step up to the plate, and facilitated a solid outcome for shareholders [1].

Reasonable people can debate the merits of her performance and impact at both companies, but these kinds of one-line dismissals of her entire career from armchair quarterbacks are disgraceful.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-market-cap-over-time-2...

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

#100

Post by rhizome »

malvosenior wrote: post #35
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.

Folks probably perceive that because she was a high profile CEO that ran her company into the ground. Yes Yahoo! was not doing great before her but if you get paid tens of millions of dollars to do a job I would say it’s not unfair to be judged unsuccessful when you fail. She’s still rich after all. Do we also need to unquestionably agree she is excellent? Also she killed remote work at Yahoo! and practiced great hyp…

if you get paid tens of millions of dollars to do a job

What do you know about her job description?

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