
What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold - jessaustin
https://medium.com/@jelenawoehr/what-marissa-mayer-brought-to-yahoo-that-cant-be-bought-or-sold-4ee82382e4ee
======
1024core
Heh, I remember Jelena from discussion on devel-random. I would like to
correct (mildly) a couple of anecdotes in her article, because I was there and
closer.

> _A friend relayed this story: The Sunnyvale campus had a building with
> redundant turnstiles, which required a badge scan seconds after employees
> had scanned their badges to open the main doors. People complained about it
> when the building was remodeled years before, and kept complaining through
> several CEOs. After Marissa read an email griping about the turnstiles, they
> were gone the next day._

I remember it a little differently. This was Building D, where the executives
sit. Before Marissa got there, there were plans to put an additional set of
card-activated turnstiles inside the door. (This building is also where the
Yahoo store is, and the main reception desk). Yahoo was plagued with leaks,
and some people thought that adding an additional turnstile will keep people
from tailgating in.

When Marissa got there, she took one look at the turnstiles and said, "this is
stupid", and ordered them removed. Not only that: there were card-activated
gates in the parking lots, and those were gone too immediately. She didn't
want barriers to coming in to work.

And about devel-random, or "d-r": I was pretty active on that. No one told
Marissa about d-r, but just a couple of days after she got there, on a
Saturday IIRC, she responded to someone on d-r. This sent shockwaves
throughout the upper echelons, and soon senior management were clamoring to
get on d-r. Most of them dropped out, exhausted by the volume; but she stuck
around.

Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails. That increased her stature
in my eyes, and those of quite a few other engineers.

It's the small things that mattered a lot to the battered egos at Yahoo; and
Marissa did a lot of good. She was the best CEO of all the ones Yahoo had
seen, bar none (OK, I wasn't around during Koogle's tenure).

~~~
outworlder
> Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails. That increased her stature
> in my eyes, and those of quite a few other engineers.

Ok, now that is amazing. That speaks more about her culture and background
than a hundred random actions.

~~~
nsxwolf
Oh wow! She used pine! Freakin' pine! She sent the company down the tubes,
but... holy shit did she ever read her emails in a terminal!

Also: Way to dogfood Yahoo Mail. Shows how much faith you have in your own
products - as CEO no less.

~~~
arenaninja
I mean, I get your point on pine, but I think the jury is still out on whether
she was the cause for Yahoo's demise. I think the media definitely overhyped
her, but Yahoo was in pretty dire straits when she took over in 2012

~~~
nsxwolf
True, but, it seems that much like US presidents, CEOs want all the credit for
good results and excuses for the bad ones.

~~~
nostrademons
It'd probably be a more accurate version of reality to accept that CEOs and
Presidents have relatively little to do with either kind of results. That'd
require that we give up the very human tendency to believe in Great People and
force us to believe in Ordinary People involved with Great Things.

------
1024core
It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or
thereabouts) earnings over 4 years. The spotlight has always been on her, and
her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and
pretty?

I was at Yahoo from 2004 through 2015. I saw some seriously stupid CEOs. One
of them being Terry Semel. He made more than $200M in just one year (and even
more, according to rumors). Here's an article from around that time; I wish I
had time to dig up more: [https://3qdigital.com/analytics/terry-semel-you-
owe-1000-yah...](https://3qdigital.com/analytics/terry-semel-you-
owe-1000-yahoo-employees-200-million/)

But you never hear his name ever brought up. Because he was a white, male CEO?

~~~
ebbv
> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or
> thereabouts) earnings over 4 years

Why? That is $50mil/year which is an _insane_ amount of money for any one
person to receive. Yes you can point to tons of examples of people earning
even more, but that's still way more money than most people will ever see in
their lifetimes _per year_ to fail.

It's a total cop-out to say that "Well Yahoo was already failing when she came
in and nobody could turn it around!" She was hired to turn it around. She did
fail at the job she was hired to do. It doesn't matter if it was impossible,
she took it on and she's getting tons of money despite failing. For me her
compensation is one thing but the truly objectionable part is the $50mil
golden parachute. And it's not just her, tons of execs that fail at their jobs
get these golden parachutes and it's awful. She's just the latest high profile
example.

If I take a developer position at a company with terrible project/team
management, terrible culture, nasty legacy codebase, etc. and I do a bad job
I'm still going to get fired. I'm not going to get a massive golden parachute.
I _might_ get two weeks severance. I'm not going to get a full year's
severance.

Combine that cushy parachute with salary that is so out of sync with what the
average person makes and yeah, people are going to go "What the fuck?" It
shouldn't surprise you.

~~~
superuser2
>She's just the latest high profile example.

She's attracted an order of magnitude more vitriol than any of the other "tons
of execs." It's her that HN chooses to complain about. _It matters_ which
instances you choose to be vocal about.

And it's _extremely_ suspicious, to say the least, that an industry which
insists it has no sexism problem because men are just better at it, spends a
great deal of time and energy attacking a woman who presides over a collapse
but glosses over or barely acknowledges the men who have done the same.

~~~
bogomipz
That's a slippery slope right there. I don't care about Yahoo or celebrity CEO
culture at all. But I also feel like people should be able to express their
opinions on a CEO and not be worried that doing so constitutes being labeled a
sexist if the CEO happens to be a woman. There have been many males CEOs that
have been derided as well - Bezos, Jobs et al so lets keep this in
perspective. Star CEOs with their insanely outsized pay packages and their
carefully cultivated public images make them targets for derision, not their
sex.

~~~
ethbro
I think this issue the other poster is referring to is whether we should act
to decrease sexism (their argument) or ignore sexism (your argument).

There's no right answer, but the other commenter has a point that _if_ sexism
is what causes Mayer to appear more often in stories about underperforming
CEOs with exit packages (sexism), and we comment negatively on all stories of
the like (neutral), then we become complicit in generating a sexist culture.
Essentially because sexists chose the only things we saw to comment on in the
first place.

------
zekevermillion
From a non-insider perspective, it certainly looks as if MM accomplished the
mission. Stock price went up, and she locked it in with a well-timed sale. Her
compensation package appears to have been designed to produce exactly this
outcome. It's not Steve Jobs' return to Apple. But she did help the investors
salvage a respectable outcome.

~~~
collyw
Was it down to luck more than anything else? She made a few bets. Most failed.
One did spectacularly , yet seems to have very little to do with Yahoo as a
company.

~~~
zekevermillion
She inherited a depreciating asset in core yahoo, managed to hold the line on
further losses. She is also managing a "strategic transaction" that could go
very wrong if done poorly. I would guess that (if successful) this deal will
be thought of as a success, and probably comes as a relief to the board and
officers. But again, I only know what I read on the Internet which surely is
missing some important facts.

------
GuiA
_" if I’m ever in a position like Marissa’s, I want to be the kind of CEO who
answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on
a Sunday morning, even when she has a new baby in the house."_

I'm grateful for this article reminding me why I never really will fit in with
the techie fanatics. Yesterday I went home at 5p, after a very productive day,
and trimmed plants in my garden, not checking my work email until the next
day.

(Well maybe for $200M over 5 years you could convince me to do that. But then
it's back to books and gardening and developing pictures)

Also oddly reminiscent of this post from yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168718)

~~~
exelius
There's a certain workaholic personality that excels at executive-level
positions. I'm convinced they simply have better genetics than the rest of us
-- after 10 or so hours of work, my memory is garbage and I wouldn't feel
confident dealing with anything important but some people are totally fine.

Plus, you couldn't work that hard for any amount of money unless you loved the
work. I'm not sure I want to be a CEO for that reason -- I treasure the
ability to turn off 'work mode' for a little while every day.

~~~
GuiA
I work with high level executives at a well known company regularly. Most of
them are normal people. Hard working, smarter than the average? Sure.
Answering emails at 1am on a Sunday with a newborn? Certainly not. In fact, my
director just took a month off when his second child was born, and is taking
another month off soon.

There is no "better genetics" or "sleeping 4 hours a night". That's just the
media and tech echo chamber doing its thing.

~~~
exelius
I work with major company C-suite guys on a regular basis, and while not
_everyone_ is the "4 hours a night" type, they're definitely overrepresented.
Keep in mind I don't see this as a positive thing -- I think it's unhealthy
and sets a bad example for your employees. But there are some people who just
have more stamina, and that's something I've had to accept. I have less
stamina, so I need to be more effective with the time that I do have and
delegate work to others.

------
Lagged2Death
I'm no biz-geek, I probably can't name a dozen CEOs. But for years, MM's name
was called put in every critical mainstream headline about Yahoo, of which
there were many. I do not believe that's an accident. I do not believe a man
would have been treated the same way.

~~~
1024core
> I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way.

This. Larry Ellison fucks around on a sailboat. Larry is busy with "X" for
years. And no one bats an eye.

~~~
smacktoward
Oracle and Google both make astonishing amounts of money. Nobody (least of all
shareholders) is marching on their headquarters with torches and pitchforks.
So nobody cares what the leaders of those companies do with their time -- _so
long as their companies continue to make astonishing amounts of money._

If the money dries up, rest assured that the line of people demanding that the
leaders start paying attention to the business would rapidly become quite
long.

~~~
dexterdog
Exactly. Ellison seen on a mega boat tells you how well he is doing and thus
the company. MM answering low-level employee emails in the middle of the night
says she doesn't know what's going on.

------
pboutros
That's a good read. Just goes to show that it's important to remember people's
humanity, especially when all the cards are stacked against them. People have
said some really ugly stuff about MM.

~~~
mankash666
Yes- it's important to stay human while thousands of employees get laid off
and the CEO makes a few hundred million for the valiant effort of letting good
employees go

~~~
scient
"Good" tends to be very subjective. Actually good people rarely get let go,
unless there is a very good reason. At the same time almost everyone who gets
laid off thinks they are a very good employee, which obviously is not the
case.

And execs get paid for the expectations and responsibility. You are just being
salty right now.

~~~
bisby
Sometimes the reason doesn't need to be "good" in the sense that it's a great
reason, but in the sense that it was the right decision.

I worked as a engineer at a huge billion dollar company in a newly created
slot. There was 2 on the team and I was the third. Then massive layoffs.
Thousands of people let go. I was one of them. Was I "good people" ? I don't
know. I like to think I was, that's why I got the position. Of the 3 people on
the team, I was the right choice though, least experience with the company's
infrastructure, etc.

The real issue at hand was the disconnect between the team manager (who found
out he had to let me go the morning it happened and was quite upset about it)
and upper executives. Why was adding my position approved by upper executives
in the first place if they knew that a month later they would be laying off so
many, you would think they would have had a massive layoff of that size in the
works for more than just a few days.

So there was no "good reason" other than "cutting cost" but if someone had to
be let go, the 2 others on the team deserved the job more than me.

~~~
richman777
But that's the point. You weren't a "good" employee if you're judging on one
metric: experience with their infrastructure.

You were clearly good enough to get hired but all things considered you were
the correct person the let go.

The distinction, and you seem to understand, is that it wasn't a personal
thing. People say stuff like "let go of good people". What does being a good
person have anything to do with running a business?

Not saying any of this is right or wrong but more musing over what drives
business decisions and how people will often mix personal feelings into non-
personal decisions.

------
colmvp
While her great experiences illustrate a caring and hard-working person, I
still can't forget writeups describing someone who was unable to develop a
product strategy / roadmap in a timely manner, resulting in a lot of
miscommunication and execs left in limbo (see the Forbes article written in
early 2015).

There's no doubt that it was extremely hard to turn that ship around, so I'm
not at all attributing the company's failure to her. But as a product person,
at the end of the day, my best experiences with CEOs has never been about
whether they've rejuvenated a certain company culture but rather their ability
to help provide vision and strategy (among other things).

Furthermore:

> But I know that, if I’m ever in a position like Marissa’s, I want to be the
> kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from
> herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning, even when she has a new baby in the
> house. I want to be the kind of person who has time to hear people out, even
> when they’re saying things that hurt me.

Honestly, I'm happy when my CEO answers e-mails at reasonable hours and has
work/life balance (as much as a CEO can get).

------
jelenaw
Thanks for all the great discussion here & thank you Jess for submitting my
article to HN. (In case anyone is curious, Medium currently credits this post
with 13,362 views on my Medium post.) I have another HN account--sadly
underutilized, I have to admit--but didn't want to tie it to my real name, so
here's a brand new baby account for this thread...

I'm glad to see a few comments here from other ex-Yahoos who felt the same
thrill I did when Marissa came to Yahoo. It really was like night and day.

I've seen a lot of discussion here, on Twitter and on Medium critiquing the
way I responded to Marissa's late-night email habits. For a lot of people it
seems late emails from an executive are a negative and demonstrates an
expectation that others also be on email at 1 AM. I was surprised by that
because I've always really enjoyed working for workaholic/fanatic CEOs, but I
understand because I've also encountered some toxic personalities who do use
late night email runs to demonstrate that they're "working harder" than
everyone else (when in reality they're only putting more work into playing the
game, not into deliverables). Because that was never remotely the case with
Marissa, I didn't even think about it while writing. With Marissa, hearing
from her late at night sent the message "I'm always thinking about what you
need from me," not, "I'm always thinking about what you should be doing FOR
me."

Of course, I'm a little bit of an unhealthy fanatic workaholic type myself,
which is definitely part of why Marissa is such a powerful role model for me.
She doesn't pretend that her sleeplessness or fanaticism is the most healthy
or balanced way to live, and she doesn't advise others to be exactly like her.
She just demonstrates that being naturally that sort of person is survivable
and is compatible with having love and happiness in your life. That alone was
huge for me. If I can be who I authentically am and survive it and have people
around me who love me anyway, even if I shorten my life and don't necessarily
have human relationships that are AS fulfilling as a Type B personality might
be able to have, I'm ok with that outcome.

------
boterock
I have to admit that when she started in Yahoo, they tried to do their best to
not suck that much, but I think it was too late. In a time where internet and
word of mouth can punish very hard bad PR/bad UX, they tried with Tumblr
showing they weren't going to screw up anymore, but still they couldn't go
back to what they were before.

~~~
burkaman
Yeah, Marissa Mayer is how I was first introduced to the concept of the glass
cliff:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff).
I don't think she ever had a chance.

~~~
seanalltogether
This explains the seemingly easy path Theresa May had to becoming Prime
Minister following the Brexit vote.

~~~
burkaman
It's definitely a reasonable explanation. Her only real opponent was a woman
as well.

~~~
twblalock
Mainly because her potential male opponents stabbed each other in the back
until they were no longer viable.

------
bdavisx
_Her performance ranking program was so badly implemented by Yahoo’s_ ugly
layers of middle management _that it deserved every bit of the mocking and
criticism it got, both on devel-random and in the tech press._

I think one thing that could possibly "save" Yahoo would be to fire every
single middle manager and above immediately (and probably most of the 1st line
management as well), and then rebuild the management from the ground up.

Yes, Yahoo would be a mess for a year or more, but it already is a mess and
has been for years - and it seems like a common thread is the entrenched
management that isn't willing to change and has a lot of incompetency. Time to
throw out the baby with the bath water.

~~~
jessaustin
Haha it would be great to see a troubled company try that. One suspects that
we'd _hear_ it more than see it however, as the great wailing and gnashing of
teeth by PHBs would be audible on other continents. It would have to be a
completely vendor-driven company, however... er, excuse me, "a company that
concentrated on its core competencies". After all, the paychecks still have to
go out, for the peons left after the great firing, and you can't just give the
bank accounts to some random person.

------
wehadfun
Off topic but what would the selling price for Yahoo have to be for MM to be
considered a success? 20B, 100B,..

~~~
scholia
Success would have been growing revenues, instead of watching them decline.

Success would have been at least one really successful mobile app.

Success would have been not selling Yahoo....

~~~
stinkytaco
Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the
shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize
shareholder value.

I think it's very clear that the goal when she was hired was to sell the
company and get the shareholder's some payout. Considering where the company
was when she came in, I'd say she did an admirable job at this.

You might say that's not success, but I think the (shareholder elected) board
had the company on that trajectory before she was hired. She came in to finish
the job.

~~~
excitom
> the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder
> value.

It always bothers me to see this, as I feel it is the reason many companies
decline. The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second
rule should be "keep the employees happy" since happy employees help implement
the first rule. If rule one and two are achieved then as a side effect
shareholder value is maximized.

~~~
iopq
>The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second rule
should be "keep the employees happy"

if you burn through your cash reserves doing those things and now you don't
have any money, that doesn't do anything for you since you burned all your
cash - even if employees and customers are happy

the first rule should be "make money", the second rule should be "spend less
money than you make"

if those two are achieved, THEN shareholder value is maximized

~~~
pfarnsworth
Not true. Sometimes shareholders want metrics like Return on Equity, which
forces the hand of management to sell profitable parts of the business... but
not profitable enough. That's the insanity of trying to maximize shareholder
value.

~~~
twblalock
That's only insane if you assume the success of the business is the goal,
rather than the success of the shareholders.

~~~
pfarnsworth
Success of the business and success of the shareholders is not a zero-sum
game. You can usually have both.

What is insane is sacrificing the success of the business for the success of
shareholders. That affects employees, and you end up getting situations where
entire towns get fucked because the profitable-but-not-profitable-factory gets
shut down because of some obscure metric.

~~~
stinkytaco
I think a culture has developed -- in the United States specifically -- where
we expect companies to act according to some undefined ethical principle.
We're upset when they don't pay taxes, close factories, pollute the
environment or whatever. The problem is these principles are always moving
goalposts and more often than not, immeasurable. A business exists to make
money. That is a concrete and measurable goal and thus one that the
organization is made to pursue. If a business it not in it to make money, it's
something else: perhaps a non-profit, an NGO, a union, a cooperative, etc.
There are places for organizations that don't exist to make money, but
publicly traded exchanges are not it.

It's really the responsibility of communities to plan, governments to regulate
and enforce and people to rationally choose the best for themselves and their
community. As pointed out above, there are a variety of ways to do this, it's
a matter of choosing the right ones.

------
mdip
Interesting discussion and I wanted to call out a particular part: The CEO's
willingness and constancy in responding to employees.

I worked at Global Crossing during the entire time that John Legere (of
T-Mobile fame) was CEO and he had a very similar policy, though I can't say
for sure he didn't fire folks for writing him things he didn't like[0]. He
swore up and down that he reads every message sent to him and that employees
are always welcome to write him. I did so in the later evening on Christmas
Eve (I'll admit I had a few beers in me) about some finishing touches I was
putting on an application we were deploying to production the following week.
I received a reply just after midnight on Christmas, clearly sent from a
Blackberry. I can't remember the contents (it was something along the lines of
"nice work") but I remember feeling quite good that the CEO was willing to
take some time to reply to me on a holiday at a very odd hour.

As "employee engagement" goes, this certainly improved mine.

[0] I honestly don't know. Global Crossing had a total of "zero" good years in
that every six months or so another 10% of the staff would be let go. Did some
of that originate from a bad message sent to the CEO? No idea, but they were
looking for reasons to get rid of anyone they could throughout my tenure.
Though I'd written him a few times, I'd written him a few times but never in a
manner that would have had cause to get me fired.

------
fragola
IMO Yahoo was just unfortunately not salvageable and MM gets a lot of
criticism from a lot of directions (I've seen a lot of articles by women
criticizing her for not taking "enough" maternity leave, for example). I feel
like she's just a favorite target.

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/03/marissa-
may...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/03/marissa-mayer-s-two-
week-maternity-leave-is-bullsh-t.html)

------
ecmermaid
Always several sides to any story - super appreciated this one. Whether
Marissa failed or not - this piece was well written and worth the read.

------
urmish
> Yahoo may be a failure but Marissa was a success

This is low tier bait. I am convinced the author is trying to ruse anyone who
reads his garbage post.

------
caycep
The problem with this is: this means MM is a very good executive regarding
technical details, daily operations and the like. However, she wasn't hired to
be HR or COO. She was hired to be CEO, in a company that faced deep
existential challenges in a market that was rapidly making its products
irrelevant. When she took over, I wasn't sure what value Yahoo really provided
other than a "yet another portal and email provider" type of thing, far from
being a peer of FB and Google that it aspired to be. The company needed to
execute a pivot of epic proportions and in this, we have heard very little.
And maybe there were some projects in their skunk works that may yet get
written about, which never saw the light of day.

Morale of the troops? great. Making employees' lives better? great. But it
doesn't mean squat if your company still doesn't have a viable product at the
end of the day...

------
the_improbable
I was a Yahoo for a couple of years before getting caught up in the recent
layoffs. When I talk about my time there, I use the term "organizational
inertia". It's amazing how people will fight for products, methodologies, and
workflows that are clearly not going to be feasible if the company is going to
survive. A company that's been around for as long as Yahoo has, and has locked
in to a certain way of doing things, is hard to turn around no matter how good
the CEO is.

------
forgetsusername
> _the company was also stacked with some of the least motivated._

Every company has unmotivated people for the CEO to deal with. Yahoo is not
unique in this regard.

------
uvince
"on a Saturday IIRC, she responded to someone on d-r. This sent shockwaves
throughout the upper echelons, and soon senior management were clamoring to
get on d-r."

So, basically Marissa ruined devel-random, too? Nice. Is there anything
Marissa can't do?

------
bastijn
Great story, thanks for the different perspective on things. I did giggle at
the title here on HN though.

"... That cannot be bought."

I guess MM, being an acquired CEO could be considered bought. It just didn't
give the result they wanted..

------
bitL
Sorry, so she raised comfort of some employees (which developer "on a mission
to save a company" really needs free food instead of interesting challenges?)
and decreased the ability to hire top talent by introducing other employee-
unfriendly policies like banning remote work, i.e. working while living on
Hawaii, giving superb motivation to stay at Yahoo and see it prosper. The rest
seems more like a COO would do and not a strategic CEO. It is still fact that
a little team of 5 can accomplish huge things, yet they weren't able to
recruit any, while blowing insane money on useless acquihires. And also
looking at technical decisions like replacing Netty with node.js in their
infrastructure and resulting 4x slowdown and probably increasing operating
costs reeks of following useless fads and really useless management.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
I may get downvoted for saying this since it's not fashionable to say things
like this but I will anyway:

When a company is going down, the type of people you need is people who are
enthusiastic and team players. The last type of people you need are competent
yet not so much of a team player. It's because:

1\. Pampering these people will only result in lowering rest of the team's
morale. 2\. When a company is going down, a 10x or 100x or even 1000x
developer (whatever that means) won't be able to save the company alone.

In a sense I think she was trying to filter out people who were not "all-in",
because that's what it takes for a sinking ship to have even 1% chance of
coming back up.

~~~
bitL
I believe what you actually need is to hire 2-3 teams of 10x
developers/artists including a few visionaires and let them figure out
projects that might one day become cash cows keeping company afloat (and give
them massive stake in success). You need to both expose them to problems of
the company so that they feel pressure as well as completely isolate them from
toxic culture that brought down your company, so that they can give an all-out
effort.

Imagine if that lone guy at Microsoft didn't figure out trick with 286
protected mode that allowed Windows to survive and wasn't heard by top
management - we would all be running OS/2 10 now.

~~~
sluukkonen
> Imagine if that lone guy at Microsoft didn't figure out trick with 286
> protected mode that allowed Windows to survive and wasn't heard by top
> management - we would all be running OS/2 10 now.

I haven't heard this story before. Got a link?

~~~
f393921
I believe this is it:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/08/fa...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/08/faster-
syscall-trap-redux/)

The IBM way required IBM BIOS and an absurdly long time (as I recalled it was
hundreds of milliseconds, not just milliseconds) to re-enter real mode.

The motivation was to be able to run DOS real-mode programs as well as
protected mode programs.

------
dudul
Do Yahoo employees really call themselves "Yahoos"?

~~~
a_small_island
No different than calling yourself a Googler.

~~~
bitwize
Which itself has silly variants, like Noogler gor new employees or Doogler for
dogs. (Google is, explicitly, a dog company. Dogs are welcome at Google
facilities. Cats are officially strongly deprecated.)

~~~
Practicality
Interesting given the number of cat videos this "dog" company distributes. ;)

~~~
RileyKyeden
They're cats. They have to feel they're unwelcome before they want to be
there.

------
tlogan
> Yahoo is a Failure, but Marissa is a Success

I have to be living in some alternate universe. Because in my universe, if you
do not accomplish the goal (revenue grow) you failed. It could that the goal
was too hard to achieve, maybe the goal was impossible to achieve, etc. But,
at end of the day, she failed.

And as result of her failure people will lose their jobs :(

~~~
mkagenius
> And as result of her failure people will lose their jobs

They will most probably get jobs again like they did earlier. Life is full of
ups and down, you can blame one person for that..but try not to.

~~~
pfarnsworth
She gets paid $50M/yr for the sole purpose of being held to blame and credit
for everything that happens.

------
ucaetano
I remember that is was usually claimed that Yahoo's valuation (net of
Alibaba's stake) was either zero or negative.

She was able to sell it for $5B.

That sounds like an amazing success story.

~~~
CptJamesCook
It turned out that after taxes and other factors, Yahoo's core value was worth
more. I doubt she had a significant effect on it, other than the ~700 mil loss
they took on Tumblr.

------
draw_down
I guess I don't think it's particularly good that she was an email junkie, to
the point of being on email a couple hours after giving birth? But beside that
I can understand why some took her as an inspirational figure.

------
lintiness
$200M for handing out free lunch, a self-esteem boost, a poorly implemented
personnel ranking scheme, and a few emails at weird hours ... sounds like a
pretty sweet deal. sign me up!

~~~
bbcbasic
You could use this same argument for any CEO. Pick 3 things then say $X m for
a b and c that's a pretty sweet deal. Sign me up.

~~~
lintiness
another non-reader. i picked out the main points the writer specified.

~~~
bbcbasic
I read it. My point is you can make the same class of argument - pick one or
two trivial achievements and a fuckup for almost any CEO or indeed
professional and make it sound like their job is easy.

