Marissa Mayer On Turning Around Yahoo 167
An anonymous reader writes For the 20th anniversary of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer discusses how she's trying to reinvent the company. In a wide-ranging interview, Mayer shares her vision for fixing the company's past mistakes, including a major investment in mobile and a new ad platform. Yet she's been dogged by critics who see her as an imperious micromanager, who criticize her $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, and who fault her for moving too slowly. The company's executives explain that the business could only return to health after she first halted Yahoo's brain drain and went big on mobile. As one Yahoo employee summarized Mayer's thinking: "First people, then apps."
Brain drain (Score:5, Insightful)
How did cutting telecommuting across the board and thus forcing many talented engineers to go elsewhere stop the brain drain?
Re:Brain drain (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure it saved a lot on salaries and packages.
Re:Brain drain-Meyer will win, no matter what (Score:5, Interesting)
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"SIlicon Valley"? Pretty sure you just described the vast majority of human history.
Re:Brain drain (Score:4, Insightful)
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flex time and telecommuting used to be part of the SV culture, and tied to the desk slave was the old fashioned way to run an office back East.
Everything old is new again I suppose.
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When was that part of SV culture? Even if you go back to the old-school SV firms, they were pretty negative on telecommuting, and ran regular offices. What era and kind of company do you have in mind? If you go back to the '60s-'90s even, Silicon Valley companies like Intel, Sun, Apple, SGI, Oracle, etc. required regular office time. You could certainly shift your schedule at many of them (e.g. come in at 10am, not 8am, as long as you stay late too), but you couldn't work from home, or get away with less th
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I worked at both sun and sgi (that you mentioned in your list) and neither one required us to be at our desks. I was telecommuting about 99% of the time (even though my office was about 10mi from where I live, all my co-workers were 'remote' and all our meetings were on the phone, so there was no real reason to 'be' there). I stayed there 5 years and had a great time, did good work and enjoyed being at sun. well, up until oracle bought them and all hell broke loose...
at sgi, same kind of deal; I was allo
Re:Brain drain (Score:5, Interesting)
yes, silicon valley culture USED to be about the employees. I worked at SGI and I remember them allowing dogs into the offices, so that single folks who don't have anyone to watch over their pups can avoid having to kennel them during the day. we had hardwall offices, with doors (!) while managers had 'cubes'. it was the opposite of how most of the rest of the valley was, and it helped make sgi one of the best places to work at.
I also worked at sun. also had a hardwall office.
I was at fore systems (west coast) and many of us had offices with walls and doors.
now, the bad news. the last 10 or so years, I've seen a move to 'open offices' and so, you don't even get a cube anymore! ;( really really bad move, HR morans.
every place that had an open office, sucked. everyone felt that way but HR, who would never admit they made a mistake (like politicians, never admit you were wrong, sigh).
if someone gets sick, YOU get sick, too. isn't THAT nice??
plus, the new trend is to not hire f/t but only hire contractors. guess what: contractors don't get sick time off, so they HAVE to report in and make everyone else sick.
I have never been at yahoo, but it sounds like I would hate it there if I went.
as for their products, their email is the worst/slowest and loads the most CRAP when you give it permission. its also the most unfriendly html/js code to filter on (on purpose, no doubt). adblock has a harder time with yahoo content since they intentionally make every fucking variable name unique! ;( really unfriendly, which I'm sure they could care less about. obscurring the 'content' that gets downloaded via yahoo pages is part of what makes yahoo, well, 'a yahoo'.
taking away telecommuting - all the while, SHE has a private room next to her office for her little ones - that would be the most insulting thing to me if I was working there.
the sooner yahoo fails, the better. the whole internet would be better off without them, at this point.
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Out of all the SV companies I've worked at, the main thing they have in common is they want to do things differently than everyone else. It seems like some wanted cubes only, others want engineers in offices and managers in cubes. Some companies bend over backwards for employees, and other companies bluntly tell employees that if they aren't already happy they should leave.
(if someone insists on my citing sources, I might be willing to do that privately, but not publicly)
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I'm not seeing much choice, anymore. the last few years of interviews (off and on) have shown me that the bay area is swallowing the 'open office' idea, hook line and sinker.
my last gig was at cisco and they are converting (slowly but surely) to an all OO environment. and again, no one I talked to, there, was a tiny bit happy about it. they all talked about working from home (cisco still allows that) or just plain leaving.
make no mistake, companies do this to save money, save space and they don't care at
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I'm not seeing much choice, anymore. the last few years of interviews (off and on) have shown me that the bay area is swallowing the 'open office' idea, hook line and sinker.
I agree that's the trend in the valley these days.
When I was at Cisco 10 years ago most of my BU (MCEBU) had tall cubes. It was pretty reasonable, but I'm not surprised that Cisco is moving to more open plans.
My current employeer gives me a long bench with 3 ft partitions between my neighbors, a hallway and another bench is immeidately behind me. If don't have my chair pushed up close to my desk people will trip over the legs of my chair.
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Re:Brain drain (Score:4, Funny)
Why can't I spout unsourced "facts" and get 5 karma?
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so, what level of manager are you?
first line, middle mgmt or maybe c-level?
you are clearly not a working stiff like most of us, here...
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so, what level of manager are you?
first line, middle mgmt or maybe c-level?
you are clearly not a working stiff like most of us, here...
That is correct. He's probably speaking from personal experience.
Managers are usually the least productive telecommuters I know.
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flex time and telecommuting used to be part of the SV culture
Although it wasn't popular, Marissa was right to end the practice at Yahoo.
I STRONGLY believe that the greatest benefits of having a fantastic team is when everybody is in the same office and have all sorts of serendipitous interactions. Things that can't be scheduled on an outlook calendar. it doesn't happen when people sit at home in their underwear doing skype chats.
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I believe there can be a balance to this.
My belief that Mayer was right IN THE SHORT TERM to curtail telecommuting policies.
If your office is in serious need of re-vamping, then you are correct, there needs to be some storming-forming-norming going on that can't be done via people on phones all the time.
Especially if people believe, as I do, bonding is built over social interaction, such as talking about the game, or people's kids, or the weather, or a game of golf, or going out and smoking cigarettes. Tel
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Especially if people believe, as I do, bonding is built over social interaction, such as talking about the game, or people's kids, or the weather, or a game of golf, or going out and smoking cigarettes. Telecommuting is not conducive to any of that, and for better or worse, networking is best done in person.
Not everyone feels that way, and for a lot of people, especially in tech, it's unnecessary overhead. I hate having to pretend I care about someone's personal life or what happened in sports over the week
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flex time and telecommuting used to be part of the SV culture
Although it wasn't popular, Marissa was right to end the practice at Yahoo.
I STRONGLY believe that the greatest benefits of having a fantastic team is when everybody is in the same office and have all sorts of serendipitous interactions. Things that can't be scheduled on an outlook calendar. it doesn't happen when people sit at home in their underwear doing skype chats.
And I STRONGLY believe that anyone who unironically uses the word "team" when they're not on a football pitch is a person I dona't want to work for.
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so few projects are REALLY collaborations, that old horse gets trotted out far too often.
in my 25+ years in software, I don't know of any single time that I've collaborated, NEEDING or even benefiting from an open office with all the noise and distractions it brings.
if we want to brainstorm, we go into a conf room, whiteboard, take notes and then go back and do our brainwork.
if you talk to me, I get annoyed. I'm deep in concentration. each time you bug me, you break my concentration.
what's so hard to GET
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To be fair, about 20% of an in-office staff also tends to be completely unproductive.
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For at least 10% having zero productivity would be a major improvement. Mostly middle managers and suck ups looking to get into management.
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"Telecommuting was a nice experiment, but it doesn't work for people whose work is not easily quantified."
And who are those people? I've always quantified my home working staff's work based on results. Have they got done what I've expected them to do in the time I expect them to be able to do it? It's not really rocket science.
"In theory, it may be possible to identify the people that are more productive, but that takes a lot of management effort"
Yes, it's so effortful to determine who is and isn't pulling
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The problem is there are as equally unproductive amounts of people as your pulled out of thin air numbers in the office too.
Some of the lazy bastards even take time to read and post on internet forums while they're supposed to be working in the office. Un-fucking-believable...
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I was thinking the same whilst I was both reading and posting in this thread.
It did cross my mind that whilst the GP was complaining about home workers being unproductive that he was quite probably sat in an office himself being, well, unproductive :)
Re:Brain drain (Score:5, Interesting)
Well... maybe there's some kind of model in which you would actually look forward to seeing your colleagues in person.
Personally, I've done in both ways. When my partner and I sold our business to a company that was on the other side of the country, I no longer had a two hour a day commute, which was awesome. I also didn't have a team I saw in person every day, which I very quickly grew to miss. And I'm not the most sociable person in the world. I'm more than glad to spend a few days or even weeks working by myself. But as weeks stretched into months, with only emails, teleconferencing, and the occasional cross-country flight, I grew to hate telecommuting. It's great to be able to do it even a couple of days a week, but if I had the choice of woking in bathrobe in the spare bedroom ALL the time or spending two hours in the car EVERY day, I'd go with the commute.
If I were starting another company, I think one of my priorities would be to make being there fun, stimulating, and personally rewarding. I'd make it possible to telecommute, but if people began to see it as their primary mode of working I'd consider that a red flag.
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It seems like a good compromise might be to allow telecommuting three days a week: tuesday, wednesday, and thursday, and have mondays and fridays be in the office. That way you still get to interact with your team, and talk to the people you need to talk to, but you are spared 60% of the time and expense of commuting, and all the in-office distractions on those days.
Um, for most people it's on Mondays and Fridays that you want to be "telecommuting". You get a nice long weekend that way, ifyouknowwhatimean.
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You've nailed it - make the office a fun place to be. Make it so people look forward to spending a quarter of their lives there.
I've worked at places where beer starts appearing in people's hands around 4:30 - 5 o'clock. That was not only a fun place to work, but more productive than it would appear.
Example: I'm still standing around, not working, drinking and gabbing around 5:30, and there is a design group still working to make a morning deadline. Of course the proofer/print server goes haywire, and norma
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Oh, and damn those people that want to insist that I get overtime for every moment I spend at the office after hours.
Yeah, I really hate getting paid for the work I do too. If it wasn't for my wife and kids needing to eat now and then, I'd probably pay just to be allowed to come into the office.
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Everyone likes getting paid. And all things being equal, everyone likes getting paid *more*.
But one thing I've noticed is that the people who are most dissatisfied with their current pay also happen to be the most dissatisfied with their working conditions overall, particularly how they feel treated. The feeling seems to be that if they ought to get more pay to put up with this shit.
Now I wouldn't suggest to any employer, particularly in tech, to economize by offering low salaries. You want to attract an
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However if you have no idea about what you are doing and were previously able to hide your incompetence behind others, getting everyone back in the office is the best way to steal their ideas and claim them as your own. All they managed to do was lose a lot of their most expensive staff, so with lower revenues there are still better returns, OK, in the short run but in the long, a sure route to collapse.
Jumping into mobile and claiming it as a significant improvement is really stupidly lame ie it is obvi
Several stories say Marissa Mayer was demoted. (Score:4, Interesting)
Marissa Meyer was demoted, according to an L.A. Times story that has now been deleted, but is available at another site. [manager-magazin.de]
Quote: "But when Page took over as CEO in April 2011, he did not make a spot for her on his senior leadership team. Instead, she took over the company's location and local products, fueling speculation she would leave Google."
Do you think someone can be CEO and take care of a baby at the same time? [bostonglobe.com]
Back in 2006, before she joined Yahoo, there were questions about how much she thinking she could do, considering her work habits: How I work. [cnn.com]
Quote: "I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight. I almost always have the radio or my TV on."
Another, earlier quote: "I use Gmail for my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast."
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Telecommuting sort of sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in an office where you can work at home. It's much, much better to work in the office. There's a lot of cross-talk, which makes our product(s) better.
That said, WFH is good when you need to get stuff done that's task-specific.
As a blanket policy WFH can work, but if everyone works from home then you have strong online collaboration tools. For a place the size of Yahoo WFH across the board is a "I don't feel like working" policy.
Yahoo was stagnating for years, so it's unclear what these people who were WFH were actually doing. If they were kicking out killer shit than the policy would be justifiable - but they weren't.
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My office has telecommute days where coming in is optional and more often than not, I make the trek through LA traffic to work in the office. Not as many distractions and, because many of our devs work from home, the office is nice and quiet.
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Yahoo was stagnating for years, so it's unclear what these people who were WFH were actually doing.
They were doing nothing. She checked the logs to make sure, people weren't logging into work.
Problem: Not telecommuting, but bad management. (Score:2)
After Terry Semel, and before Marissa Meyer, there were 5 Yahoo CEOs who stayed less than 2 years each. [wikipedia.org]
Nothing has changed, apparently. Marissa Mayer's second-in-command 'leaves with $109m' on being fired from Yahoo after just 15 months. [dailymail.co.uk] The rapid changes in management continue, that time with a $109,000,000 loss for Yahoo. (What management arrange
Criticism (Score:2)
Perhaps what should dog her is the fact that thus far, she has failed utterly. Not that I blame her. She was handed a steaming pile of shit, so the odds were always low.
Yahoo has about as much reason to exist as Blackberry. Both are dinosaurs of a previous age.
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Yahoo has about as much reason to exist as Blackberry.
Yahoo has a tactile, physical keyboard that many of us miss dearly in the iPhone age?
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Your definition of "many" isn't a big enough number to be a viable source of income for keeping a smartphone manufacturer alive.
Actually the problem is more with the value of "miss," than it is with "many." Many of us miss the keyboard, but not enough to give up all the other features and apps ecosystem of a modern smartphone.
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all the other features and apps ecosystem of a modern smartphone
Porn in your pocket when you go for a dump at work is the killer app of the Smartphone, as far as I can see.
Apart from that, everything else is easier with a reasonable sized laptop.
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Both are dinosaurs of a previous age.
Apple must be three or four ages old. They ended up outlasting Sun, Palm, Nokia and soon HP. They might even outlast Microsoft.
serious question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:serious question (Score:5, Informative)
From a monetary, stock-price perspective, at the moment the main value in Yahoo is that they own a significant stake in Alibaba, a huge Chinese conglomerate. Their stake in Alibaba at current prices is worth about $34 billion, and Yahoo's current market cap is ~$40 billion. Even assuming a discount on their Alibaba stake due to some overhead that would be involved in unwinding it, it still represents more than half of Yahoo's stock value.
Re:serious question (Score:4, Insightful)
I still use yahoo email as my I don't care what happens to it address. Spam filter works well so I haven't seen a need to change.
Once she took over they redid the my yahoo homepage and broke literally everything about it. The sports feed has mostly become functional again but the weather... my god the weather... completely and utterly useless. The widget on the homepage can't keep track of where I am or even what day of the week it is. Everything else is more likely to give you a gateway timeout or other error than actual information.
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excuse me??? spam filter works on yahoo?
ha!
I get nothing BUT 'indian tv' and 'indian flix' and other stupid spam. uhm, I'm not indian and don't speak the language, don't know the people and actually, don't even watch (broadcast) tv anymore. marking them as spam never stops them. clearly its spam but yahoo won't stop them from appearing in my yahoo inbox. I've given up on yahoo mail and only check it a few times a year. (it takes about that long to load those stupid web pages, too, even with adblock!)
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Same for the movie page, keeps forgetting what location I set, despite having a Favorited theater; and when I enter a zip code it pulls every theater in my city, not just the nearest ones to my zip.
And now their Chrome extension will change your homepage and search engine to Yahoo, with no option to undo it unless you uninstall the extension, and it has shit reviews as a result.
Re:serious question (Score:5, Informative)
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I thought they were down low on the post on life support, I cant think of anyone who I know who goes out of their way to use any of yahoos products. ill have to check out the fantasy sports they are using.
Re:serious question (Score:4)
I thought they were down low on the post on life support, I cant think of anyone who I know who goes out of their way to use any of yahoos products.
A clear example of selection bias: people who surround you are like you.
Re:serious question (Score:5, Insightful)
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The difference IMO is that those companies while they acquire, they still innovate. I am ignorant of yahoo post 2004 or so but i havent seen any real innovation from them, even on their acquisitions. Years ago i used to LOVE yahoo games. simple layout, easy to get in. Sometime though it seemed that the yahoo home page turned into its own geocities page. too muc
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The one exception to that may be OSX/iOS. While it's true that Apple the company didn't do it, the creator, and possibly the soul of the Macintosh, did create it from scratch. (Well, as scratch as one can get in this area)
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thanks for that information. but other than the mail, none of that is anything they did. they bought out other companies. I mean thats great for them, flickr is a good platform, im sure tumblr as well. but buying a company and innovating are 2 different things.
Most big companies are like this.
Look at Microsoft, their history is full of purchases: Powerpoint, Hotmail, Visio, Dynamics, Skype, Nokia, Bungie,
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Their Groups website has been useful for long tail applications where users can get help and exchange information. One advantage is the single website with the same UI. It's convenient to leave open/scroll through the latest updates from a few groups on the same page.
Alas some of the vendors/developers are setting up their own forums, so you now you've got to go to each website, login and deal with each UI. More effort so it's easier to skip. Too bad Yahoo's not put more effort into it.
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not sure about flickr 'going strong'. I joined flickr when it first came out and most of the people I 'knew' back then are no longer active on flickr and their updates have stopped years ago.
each time flickr changes their site, it breaks stuff, features get dropped that were useful and stupid things get added that are of NO value at all.
I did have a paid membership to flickr but I had that just 1 year, flickr started to suck and I let the paid thing lapse. now, I post a few photos a year instead of the do
Thanks for saving me the trouble (Score:2)
Thanks for saving me the trouble of rolling out my canned reply on the topic. That question gets asked and answered every time the topic of Yahoo! comes up...
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The fact that few people seem to know this could be part of Yahoo's problem. They just don't seem to have a strong corporate identify. I'll bet that just about anyone here could tell you what products and services Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, HP, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, and other companies are best known for. For Yahoo, I probably would have answered "mediocre e-mail, crappy search, and some decent services like news and Flickr", but beyond that, I really had no idea.
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have gone from Zero to a Billion dollar ad business under Mayer.
so they are an ad company now. ok
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have gone from Zero to a Billion dollar ad business under Mayer.
so they are an ad company now. ok
Google is also an ad company.
New mobile mail (Score:4, Insightful)
If the new mobile mail app is part of their big push, then they're in trouble.
That thing is DOG slow on a Nexus 5 (a quad core phone with 2gb RAM). I can't even imagine how crap it is on anything older. Every time they push it back on me, I have to go to settings->classic mail experience.
Not to mention the fact I have to use the browser version instead of their app due to mysterious random "oops your battery is dead" moments and the ridiculous number of permissions their app wants.
And can we talk about reliability? 50-50 whether the desktop site loads videos correctly, they seem to have 4 different commenting systems with the same backend (one of which never shows comments), and constant "oops, server error" issues. This last block I'm separating because the crapitude predates her, but Yahoo can't seem to code its way out of a wet paper bag.
Re:New mobile mail (Score:4, Insightful)
So what you're saying is.. the Dice crew and the Yahooligans get together, drink Balmer tier amounts of booze, then stay up all night playing laser tag -- and in the pale light of a hungover morning; push changes to production without testing?
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The Gmail app supports POP and IMAP accounts now. Just use that and evict the Yahoo app.
To her credit... (Score:3)
I like yahoo, use it more than google (Score:2)
I always figure more search engines are good. We don't want the web to end up with just one search engine to rule them all. The only downside I say Yahoo or Google have is its hard to tell which website
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Thing is, yahoo doesn't do search anymore, remember? They outsourced search to bing, so you might as well go there for your search. Using yahoo does not contribute to a healthy search ecosystem in any way.
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Yahoo has a great news thread that somehow custom tailors to you without you doing anything.
Are you suggesting that the Singularity has appeared at Yahoo, and a vast AI is in control?
Oh God the Lens Flare, the Blur (Score:3)
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130 hour weeks and "people first"? (Score:3)
"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." Ref: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ar... [entrepreneur.com]
I don't think Yahoo is a place I'd like to work at. And come to think of it, she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google, which says something about working at Google too?
Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"? (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who claims to work 130 hour weeks is quite simply a liar. There's no way that person is producing anything resembling 'work' for more than 18 hours per day, 7 days a week. She may have been in the office for that long, but she sure as hell wasn't working. What is it with this fetishism about long work weeks? What's next, claims about a 170 hour week?
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Yes, it basically means she never washed, and so was incredibly unhygienic, she never ate and so was suffering from severe malnutrition, or never slept which meant she was suffering the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation.
It has to be one of these things, because no one is super-human and can actually live under those conditions and still be healthy and useful.
So even if she did "work" for 130 hours, she'll have been a horrendous employee to have around, either smelling like crap and likely always gettin
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Anyone who claims to work 130 hour weeks is quite simply a liar. There's no way that person is producing anything resembling 'work' for more than 18 hours per day, 7 days a week. She may have been in the office for that long, but she sure as hell wasn't working. What is it with this fetishism about long work weeks? What's next, claims about a 170 hour week?
Goddammit yes, if it takes 170 hours a week to get the job done, then I expect my people to work 170 hours a week!
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You do know math right? Your 18/7 claim is only 4 hours shy of hers.
You do know reading comprehension, right? OP was not "claiming" 18/7, he was pointing out that that's what a 130 hour week means, and it is palpable nonsense.
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Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"? (Score:5, Informative)
she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google
She was dating Larry Page.
http://gawker.com/214051/utter... [gawker.com]
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com.au]
She is very ambitious, thus she constantly self-promotes herself.
Claiming to work 130 hours a week is part of this self-promotion.
Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"? (Score:5, Insightful)
"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." Ref: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ar... [entrepreneur.com]
With access to free showers, free laundry service, and free extra yummy food outside of regular working hours. I could also see myself never leaving my workplace and sleeping 130 hours a week.
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With access to free showers, free laundry service, and free extra yummy food outside of regular working hours. I could also see myself never leaving my workplace and sleeping 130 hours a week.
You see yourself sleeping 130 hours a week? Good luck trying to fit in the showers, laundry and food!
Sleeping 130 hours per week? You must be lion. (Score:2)
Google supports Yahoo! (Score:2)
If Google weren't afraid of "monopoly" accusations — and the resulting regulatory scrutiny — and started treating Yahoo! as a real competitor, Ms. Mayer's company would've gone the way of Radio Shack and Woolworth years ago.
I suppose, it is good for the rest of us while it lasts, but the moment Yahoo! actually does start performing (if that ever happens), Google may decide to take the gloves of...
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Nonsense. Everywhere but Gmail* that Google has tried to take on Yahoo - they've gotten their hands burned. Google does exceedingly well at buying startups and entering businesses where there's little to no competition... But (outside of search where they really did have a clear new idea), their record of taking on entrenched competition is mixed at best.
* Which was aimed as much at Microsoft as Yahoo!, and took a long time and (essentially) forcing Android users to have a Google account to best either
She can demonstrate competency to me... (Score:2)
... by hiring Doug Crockford back.
Why would anybody let that happen?
Hm (Score:5, Funny)
A good way to tell if your company has been thus afflicted is to look at the quality of the coffee now compared to the quality a couple years ago. At one such company that I worked at a few years ago, I one day remarked to my test minion that the coffee at the company was so good that you hardly even minded the urine. After the VC's took over and replaced it with, I want to say, "Peet's Coffee", the coffee there was so bad that the urine was an improvement!
Re:Hm (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the answer seems to be that CEOs are incompetent, talk corporations into giving them huge pay packets (which is done with the help of other CEOs), and generally don't have a clue of what they should be doing.
The compensation of a CEO is not tied to performance, so they can be as idiotic as possible, ruin the company, and still have their huge payout.
Basically, CEOs have hoodwinked the world into believing they're extra special people with valuable skillsets, even when they don't.
Essentially being a CEO is a great scam, funded by the shareholders and the employees. Being a CEO has to be the easiest fucking job in the world .. because no matter the shit job you do you still make a huge sum of money, and people subsequently are willing to hire you in other companies on the assumption that, having been incompetent to be a CEO already, you're qualified for the job.
In my experience and observation, your average CEO is either a failed business person, or an engineer who got lucky in another company and now has an MBA ... they're just chimps who get paid vast sums of money if they win or lose.
And, of course, since the people who hire and fire CEOs are just as incompetent, and in on the scam, they will never decide to tie compensation to any meaningful level of results.
Cynically, I believe this is just a massive scam being perpetuated to make a bunch of assholes even richer, while not giving a crap what happens to the company or the stock price.
Me, I'd be an incompetent CEO for half the price ... and I'd probably do no better or worse, and then I'd get my severance package and retire.
A fucking drunk chimp could do as good of a job as most corporate CEOs. This is just another example.
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A fucking drunk chimp could do as good of a job as most corporate CEOs.
agreed.
we had one as a president of the US for 2 terms. and half the country still thought 'things were fine'.
the value of leadership is HIGHLY over-rated. the workers are still the ones who do the real work, in ANY corporation.
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Actually CEOs were somewhat different 15yrs ago. Remember the $1/day salary? There's very few CEOs nowadays that follow that paradigm... Today, there's so much VC and Wall Street influnence, and the social network, aka "club" mentality from the kiddies coming out of the universities--it's much a unfair racket as any other Wall Street business.
"Empire of the Rising Scum" (Score:5, Insightful)
From a 1990 essay comes the insight
"The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating- organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them-- apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, 'The scum rises to the top.' "
http://bobshea.net/empire_of_t... [bobshea.net]
It is as insightful in its own way as "The Mythical Man-Month".
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From a 1990 essay comes the insight "The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating- organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them-- apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, 'The scum rises to the top.' "
http://bobshea.net/empire_of_t... [bobshea.net]
It is as insightful in its own way as "The Mythical Man-Month".
What is so interesting is that in many (large) organisations, this is pretty much codified in their HR structures, so that in annual appraisals rather than being scored at what you've actually done in your job, it's all about how you have developed a network of trusted colleagues, attended negotiating and presentation courses, volunteered to run the sports club, and absorbed the company Mission Statement.
Yahoo is already a zombie (Score:2)
Yahoo is already dead, and just can't accept the fact.
Over a year ago, they pushed an unholy abortion of an email interface that takes over 2 MINUTES to load on a 6.5 megabit link.
Now they've pushed an interface for their main news page that doesn't even render or refresh properly with Iceweasel/Debian.
While other sites are developing slick HTML5 interfaces, Yahoo seems hell-bent on creating the most UNUSABLE interfaces to hit the web since the days of AOL.
Quite frankly, when they die, it will be "
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I just loaded yahoo mail on a clean browser and it took just under 2 seconds. Not ideal, but perfectly usable (and about the same as gmail).
who says yahoo turned around? (Score:2)
They're at best treading water.
Turning around, or spinning in free-fall? (Score:2)
Selling 20-30% of the news slots to click-bait farms and advertorials was a start at turning things around.
Making the Tech and Politics news pages unreadible by adding humongous pictures ... another step downward.
Swiftean slide (Score:2)
In the U.S., also. (Score:2)
It amazes me that technically knowledgeable people choose names that limit their success.
TeX is 3 letters from another alphabet!
Gimp means: Usually Disparaging and Offensive. A term used to refer to a person who limps or is lame. [reference.com]
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I've read a dozen articles about Marissa Mayer describing her as a "brilliant engineer" but I've never seen or heard what she's actually designed, implemented or improved.
Anyone got citations?
I'm not entirely sure, but I think she was the one who invented pron, so we should really all show a bit more respect.