
The real reason Marissa Mayer left Google: She had to - vtry
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/17/marissa-mayer-yahoo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#s:mayer-1
======
rglullis
Am I the _only_ one who is seriously considering about applying to Yahoo, now?

You have a company that is profitable and is known for developing good
technology, but that never had an "engineer mindset" at the top. PG himself
tells how their biggest problem is that Yahoo's top management doesn't think
about "products", but rather about "properties".

Now - after God-knows-how-many "media" CEOs - you have this insanely capable
engineer at the top, whose sole focus is on using the brain power at the
company for creating products, instead of pushing ads or competing in "social"
anything. If she manages to change the culture at Yahoo, I think they will
have a strong comeback - and I'd love to be a part of it.

Actually, I'd love to have Paul Buchheit to chime in. He is the one that
probably got closest to her, and might be able to provide some insight as to
how much of an impact she can have on Yahoo.

~~~
joshAg
I've been thinking the same thing. I'm just worried that the culture might be
too entrenched for her to change it.

------
simonsarris
aside: I like that "OP/ED" is presented very boldly at the start of the
article. I wish other news sites were as clear.

> The one thing she lacked is the sole reason she’s now at Yahoo: Power.

That damn well better be the reason. There really can't be any other reason at
least as far as my feeble mind can fetch.

If you're worth $300 million and you don't plan to take, say, _a year or two_
off to play and connect with your soon-to-be-firstborn child? Not to sound
mean but what could _possibly_ motivate you to do otherwise, than lust for
power?

$300 million and you could be everything to your child but you insist on
attempting to _overwork?_ Jesus that just feels stark to me.

~~~

Wait a minute, didn't Yahoo pass on promoting Susan Decker because they
demanded that they find someone who had been a CEO before? I guess they
dropped that requirement. For the record, Decker resigned when Yahoo announced
that Bartz was to be the new CEO.

Not that Mayer is necessarily a bad pick, I'm not wise enough to say, I just
find the whole Yahoo CEO parade these past four years to be a very odd affair.

~~~
sown
> If you're worth $300 million and you don't plan to take, say, a year or two
> off to play and connect with your soon-to-be-firstborn child?

If she were male, would you say the same thing?

~~~
parfe
HN is the whitest malest forum I'm a member of. Spend 30 seconds in the thread
discussing a charity encouraging black girls to program[1] and it's blatantly
apparent. At least 4chan is self-aware regarding the sexism and racism. Reddit
tries to brush it off as jokes or isolated incidents.

HN on the other hand, a [male dominated] forum of established [white]
professionals and aspiring professionals, exists in a bubble of absolute
denial of these horrible attitudes.

The top voted comment about a new CEO literally questions her fitness as a
mother.

I challenge anyone to find any posts questioning any other CEO's parenting
choices. (Bonus points if top voted for on a story).

That shitty attitude doesn't exist for Gates, Jobs, Page, Brin, or Ellison.
But a woman steps up and suddenly HN cares about her child and votes up a
comment questioning how her decision affects her child and second guessing her
motherly quality.

1 <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619>

~~~
btilly
I admit it. I'm a white male. (I do have 4 half-Chinese half-siblings, but
they are irrelevant.) However I'm married, and the father of two children.

The first reaction that I had when I saw that she was pregnant was, "She has
no idea what she's getting into." I've been there, twice, and seen first hand
what pregnancy and hormones take out of a woman who has a baby. I've
experienced what it is like to go through the first few months. Sure, she has
help. But I know how strong the desire is to connect. And as soon as she does,
I know what amount of energy is required. And if she fails to devote enough
energy, I know what the pain of being rejected by your own child is like.

This applies to some extent to both parents. I personally took much more than
her planned 2 weeks for each birth, and am aware that my performance at work
was directly affected for months. (My ability to work hard has been impacted
for _years_ but that is a more complicated story.)

However all of this applies to women more than men for the solid biological
reason that women are the ones actually get pregnant, go through child birth,
have associated hormone shifts, and produce milk. (Yes, you can give the baby
formula, but if you've read the research there is a significant chance that
feeding your baby formula will reduce IQ. Do you want to risk that for your
child?? However breast feeding is a significant time commitment, and opens you
up for even more hormones.) And this is if everything goes well. It often
doesn't. For instance about 10% of women suffer through postpartum depression,
and being a high-flying exec has no correlation with the biology behind that.
Or you can wind up on bed rest if the pregnancy is difficult - and the odds of
a difficult pregnancy go up rapidly when the mother has external stresses.

Yes, it is PC to claim some sort of absolute equivalence between men and
women. But this is very clearly false when it comes to child birth.

When I saw her saying that she'd only take 2 weeks of maternity leave, the
first thing that I said was, "She has absolutely no clue what she's in for."
When I told my wife the story and my opinion, her only question was, "First
time mother?" I said, "Yes," then my wife laughed in agreement.

Now please disclose your experience. How old are you? How many children do you
have? Have you considered the possibility that parenting might just be harder
than you think, and people who have been down that path might just know
something that you don't know?

~~~
rada
The parent's point was not that these concerns are invalid but rather that
HNers are severely biased since they only apply them to women. To counter, you
proceeded to repeat the same concerns in the same bigoted manner.

 _I've been there._

I am a working, breastfeeding mother and I strongly disagree with your post.
Does my opinion trump yours since I am higher on the been-there scale than
you?

 _About 10% of women suffer through postpartum depression._

Up to 25% of _both_ men and women suffer from post-partum depression.
Wikipedia it.

 _Being a high-flying exec has no correlation with the biology behind
[postpartum depression]._

Numerous studies show that working mothers are less depressed than stay-at-
home mothers.

 _Now please disclose your experience. How old are you? How many children do
you have?_

The Yahoo board, who made their decision with full knowledge of Mayer's
pregnancy, are collectively (and often individually) older than you, with more
children.

 _Solid biological reason that women get pregnant, go through child birth,
have associated hormone shifts, and produce milk._

Please, enough with science and biology as a means to justify frankly bigoted
opinions. The same biology gives _most_ new mothers a noticeable increase in
energy that makes it possible to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule to
accommodate constant nursing and other demands of motherhood. The same biology
makes us different so that there are women like your wife, who finds Mayer's
plan laughable, and women like Mayer herself, with her two comp-sci honors
degrees from Stanford, famously long hours, etc.

Since you like un-PC, factual conversations about hormones, let's turn this
around and talk about you. Fair is fair. Have you ever thought how remarkably
ill-suited _you_ as a male are to system design and coding? How do you, a
highly-hormonal young man who spends an inordinate chunk of his time thinking
about sex, ever get any work done, in a profession where continual focus is
paramount? And is it fair to your two children that you spend so much time on
HN and SO, the time that could instead be spent furthering their IQ?

Edit: FWIW, I know you are an intelligent guy, based on your HN and SO
contributions. If above seems like a personal attack, please consider that
your opinion that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work is _very_
personal to female HN readers like me - and the fact that you are clearly
intelligent only makes it worse. I'd like to think that it's possible for me
to nudge your opinion in a more equitable direction. If nothing else, please
consider that dismissing a set of beliefs as worthless PC garbage is most
often a euphemism for "other people's problems". I'd like to think that most
male hackers don't think of female hackers in "us vs. them" terms implied by
the above, despite the apparent misogynist demographic on HN. Peace :)

~~~
btilly
First, I think that everyone in this thread should read or reread
<http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html> because it is very relevant.

What is my point? It is no more or less than that childbirth takes a huge and
often unpredictable toll out of women. What toll it will take out of any
particular woman is difficult to predict. In most cases the toll is far larger
than the people involved expected. Any woman coming into motherhood,
particularly for the first time, is naive if they think that they can plan to
put motherhood in a box and be confident that it will actually stay there.

This is different for men. If a man with sufficient resources decides that he
does not want his work to be impacted by fatherhood, it won't be. Whatever the
cost to his family or the opinion of his friends, he really can ignore
parenting and continue to work normally. I would not personally choose that,
and men who choose to be involved with their children open themselves up for
some of the same issues that women go through. But I am confident a high
powered male executive who promises that has very low risk of failing to
deliver on that promise.

You dismiss this by calling it bigotry. I claim that I'm on very solid grounds
here based on statistics and biology. I think that having even a casual
acquaintance with the facts, or having some personal acquaintances with some
horror stories, puts me on solid ground to say what I did. (For example I know
one woman who had problems with water retention that caused severe carpal
tunnel. She was unable to pick anything up, drive, use a mouse or keyboard,
etc for months. Good luck with that!) Calling me a bigot invokes a taboo, I'm
a horrible person for thinking those thoughts, but it says nothing one way or
the other on whether I am right.

All of that said, Marissa is a truly impressive woman. She brings a lot to the
table here. There is a reason why she has triggered more discussion than
anyone else in the previous parade of CEOs that Yahoo has had recently. Her
pregnancy is an obvious risk factor for her, and it is silly to try to claim
otherwise. But that is a risk, not a guarantee. Most women do not have
particularly difficult pregnancies. Many women are able to balance babies and
work. But you can't plan on this in any particular case. And she is likely to
get a surprise about how much work it is.

Now let's turn to your attempts to personally attack me.

 _The same biology makes us different so that there are women like your wife,
who finds Mayer's plan laughable, and women like Mayer herself, with her two
comp-sci honors degrees from Stanford, famously long hours, etc._

It seems that you think I have a stay at home wife who has never done anything
in her life. Nothing could be further from the truth. My wife has a PhD in
biology from Dartmouth College, and an MD from NYU (one of the top medical
schools in the country) earned with honors. Can you claim accomplishments of
similar difficulty? Can you honestly claim to have done anything with close to
the effort of a medical internship? If your answer is no, then you're in the
same boat that I am. I have great respect for my wife.

My wife's opinions do not come from an inability to work hard. They come from
her knowledge and experience of what motherhood can take out of women.

 _Since you like un-PC, factual conversations about hormones, let's turn this
around and talk about you. Fair is fair. Have you ever thought how remarkably
ill-suited you as a male are to system design and coding? How do you, a
highly-hormonal young man who spends an inordinate chunk of his time thinking
about sex, ever get any work done, in a profession where continual focus is
paramount? And is it fair to your two children that you spend so much time on
HN and SO, the time that could instead be spent furthering their IQ?_

Thank you for calling me young, at almost 43 I have not thought of myself that
way for years. I also spend rather less time thinking about sex than you seem
to imagine.

As for my children, my wife is right now going through a medical residency. I
therefore am a full-time parent who does part time contracting on the side.
Sure, I spend time on NH and used to on SO, but you may rest assured that my
children are not be compromised by that. (If you go back I said that having
children has limited my ability to work hard, now you know why.)

 _(If above seems like a personal attack, please consider that your opinion
that a woman has to choose between motherhood and work is very personal to
female HN readers like me.)_

Please stop projecting opinions on me that I do not have. Talk to what I am
saying, and not the straw man argument that you think I said.

As my personal life makes clear, I not only do not believe that a woman has to
choose between motherhood and work, but I am personally making serious
professional sacrifices right now to allow my wife to achieve what she wants
to achieve.

If this surprises you, then I highly recommend that you go back and read what
I wrote to try to figure out what I actually think. Because what I'm saying
really isn't that unreasonable.

=======

 _Update_

I wrote that before your edit. Thanks for the kind words. I suspect that my
opinions may be more equitable than you thought, but the opinions that you
don't like are unlikely to change. They are not what I want the world to be,
but are observations of how it actually seems to work.

On postpartum depression, I was looking for a condition that hits lots of
women, and it was the first that popped into my mind, and the first link I
found for it said 10%. Now that I look at it in more detail I find that there
is disagreement on what it is and when people have it, on the frequency, and a
lack of clarity on the causes. Indeed there likely are many factors that
contribute. Many of the causes you'll find in the literature are tied to
hormones and biology. Many are not. That was a bad example.

A better example would be Caesarian section. Caesarian sections are very
common, and the usual recovery time for women is 4-6 weeks. Which is
significantly longer than the 2 weeks that Marissa is planning on. Obviously
being a CEO is not a physically demanding job, if need be she could do it from
a wheelchair. But recovering from major surgery is likely to hamper her
performance.

~~~
rada
_Childbirth takes a huge and often unpredictable toll..._

Sigh. You can continue to talk about birth|breastfeeding|hormones|etc as if my
and parent's point was that those factors don't exist. Of course they do. The
point is - please reread the parent and the grandparent - they exist equally
for both men and women.

 _This is different for men._

If ever bigotry expressed itself more clearly.

 _I claim that I'm on very solid grounds here based on statistics and
biology._

I addressed, and refuted, your facts, point by point. You responded with is,
"I claim solid grounds based on statistics and biology", only to continue with
an anecdote about some woman you know having carpal tunnel related to water
retention. Uh, ok.

 _It seems that you think I have a stay at home wife who has never done
anything in her life._

I neither said, nor implied, anything of the sort. Please reread my post.

 _My wife has a PhD in biology from Dartmouth College, and an MD from NYU. Can
you claim accomplishments of similar difficulty? Can you honestly claim to
have done anything with close to the effort of a medical internship?_

Congrats on your wife having a PhD from Dartmouth. Not going to participate in
your ridiculous fantasy where I am a defendant and you the supreme judge on
whether I measure up to your wife. My proverbial dick is big enough, thank
you.

 _I also spend rather less time thinking about sex than you seem to imagine._

Thanks for making my point for me. You said pregnant women/mothers live in a
hormonal fog that makes them unsuitable for success in business. I turned it
around and made up an example of how same bigotry could be applied to men. Now
you know how it feels when the other half speculates on how your brain
chemistry impacts your abilities, all based on cheap stereotypes. Feels
shitty, doesn't it?

 _As my personal life makes clear..._

Ah, the good old I Have a Black Friend™ defense.

~~~
btilly
I see little point in continuing this discussion. I can respond point by
point, but to what purpose? You will continue to ignore and discount what I
say while accusing me over and over of being a bigot.

In your world, birth, breastfeeding and hormones exist equally for men and
women. There is a basic equivalence.

In my world, childbirth is a very intense and somewhat risky experience that
women have no choice about going through after they become pregnant and choose
not to abort. Breastfeeding is significant experience that women may choose to
go through as well.

In my world, men have a choice about whether and to what extent they we choose
to be involved in parenting. Men who choose to parent will experience
hormones, etc that may catch us by surprise. But we can choose not to parent,
and if we do we will have no hormonal impact.

In my world, an intense and risky experience that you are committed to going
through is in no way equal to being able to choose doing nothing. In my world
acknowledging that something intense and risky is actually intense and risky
is not bigotry. Bigotry would be categorically choosing to not give someone an
opportunity for fear of the risk. But acknowledging that it is real is called
honesty.

Now if you want to actually learn more about the important hormones and their
effects, I suggest that you start with the big one, oxytocin.

You may have the pleasure of the final response. Unless you say something
truly shocking, I won't be bothering to respond to you any more. We've both
said enough that people should be able to decide what they do and do not agree
with.

------
kintamanimatt
I don't quite understand why we're celebrating articles that gossip about her
career and life. This article felt like the nerdy version of a tabloid piece
that also took some cheap shots at entrepreneurialism. I can't properly
articulate why this article (and others like it) irk me, but they do.

~~~
6ren
It's industry news and gossip. It doesn't gratify one's intellectual
curiosity.

------
dlitwak
Good point about the fact that she had gone as high as she could go at Google,
but the disparaging of startup CEOs:

"Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary
journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground
up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks;
that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s
doing it."

I don't get her logic, the entire valley is built on people who did exactly
that at one point. And now shes trying to convince us that well, obviously,
she'd want to go take over a failed company instead of possibly trying to
start her own, who'd wanna do that, that's just ridiculous?

A gazillion execs at companies like Facebook (Asana, Quora, I think), Paypal
(SpaceX, Tesla, etc.) went and started their own company and have plenty of
power.

Not to mention the obvious point that maybe "power" shouldn't be the only
thing someone aspires to . . .

------
monkeyfacebag
"she is known for pulling 130-hour work weeks and trading sleep for a few more
hours in front of a laptop"

Is this even humanly possible? What does that leave, 5 hours a day for
sleeping, even on weekends?

~~~
gwern
((7 * 24) - 130) / 7 = 5.43, actually. I suppose it's possible, although if I
were to seriously contemplate such a thing, I'd want a supply of modafinil or
amphetamines laid in...

~~~
felipemnoa
Now assuming that she commutes, takes showers, eats, bathroom breaks, then
that means that she was sleeping even less than that.

~~~
gaius
Only Americans believe that 130 hours in the office constitutes a 130 hour
working week. Which is why the French work 35 hours a week, yet Airbus is as
productive as Boeing.

~~~
shin_lao
French don't work 35 hours a week, we work much more than that. Only basic
employees do that. I probably have around a 50 hours work week.

~~~
tonfa
But then you have extra vacation days...

------
spaghetti
What did she contribute to Google exactly? Articles like this hand-wave
through actual contributions with "influencing the minimalist and user-
friendly interfaces of Google web search and Gmail" which is extremely vague
and could easily amount to nothing.

~~~
msellout
Executives allocate budget. That's what she did. She chose what things to pay
for. This is pretty much all any executive does at any company with any scale.

~~~
frisco
> This is pretty much all any executive does at any company with any scale.

Totally false. They _do_ allocate budget, but they also recruit, retain, and
motivate the best staff members they can find. They proactively keep an eye on
potential opportunities, order research when necessary and follow up on it.
They keep track of how their business unit is operating (not just "are we
working on the right problems?" in terms of allocation; also: are there morale
problems? are there critical risks that need to be reduced? how will our
market evolve around us as we operate? and more) and care for and feed it.

Don't underestimate how hard it is to keep a heterogeneous group of big egos
all moving in the same direction, together. It's not at all just reading
proposals in a vacuum and deciding what to fund. A company is a human
organization, and the main job of an executive is to align that group of
people towards a common goal.

------
fmitchell0
and if she turns Yahoo's better assets (news, Flickr, dev tools) into the face
of the company while inventing something ridiculously awesome (maybe a dead
simple, language agnostic calendar/scheduling api...lol), she'll be hailed as
a genius.

if you're an entrepreneur and you've already made it, taking the biggest risk
seems like the obvious choice (elon musk, anyone?)

good for her.

------
code51
> She could have run off and been a startup founder and “CEO,” but what kind
> of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a
> handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building
> everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use
> it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a
> gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it.

Portraying visionary people believing in what they do are "beggars" is stupid
way of explaining things.

------
cerebrum
The elephant in the room: why exactly didn't she get a promotion to Googles
top tier? Considering that she was one of the first 20 employees there has to
be some reason for that. I have the impression that there is some piece
missing here.

------
gearoidoc
Terribly misleading title.

