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).
The dogfood argument is just such bullshit. Just because you make a product, doesn't mean you're the target audience for that product. It's great to dogfood where you can, but that should not get in the way of your productivity if it's not the right tool for the job (and is not meant to be).
I'm reminded of the April Fool's joke a couple years ago where the lead of the Subversion project announced they were switching to git. It was actually a really mature response, I was really disappointed it was just a joke.
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
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.
The buck stops in the C-suite. Verizon bought Yahoo for a tenth of what Microsoft offered eight short years ago. It's impossible to say this or that person was responsible for Yahoo's demise, but her job was to turn it around and in that she failed.
Mind you, I couldn't care less if she used Outlook over Apple Mail. Doesn't matter.
However, her use of _Pine_ indicates many things:
* Non-negligible tech expertise. She is comfortable with a terminal and confortable with an old (albeit powerful) email client WHICH DOES NOT DO HTML MAIL.
* Background: could be anything, but Pine usage is correlated with engineering and university backgrounds.
I could go on. The point is: she is no normal clueless CEO having secretaries printing out emails. And that's depressingly rare these days, even in SV.
People usually judge others based on what they can see ("you are what you eat", but not only). Why not based on what tool they use? It contributes to establish a persona.
In that specific case, Jobs had just come back from NeXT, and Mac OS hadn't yet incorporated elements from NeXTSTEP. It sounds as though Jobs used some early precursor version of Keynote, which may have been more easily ported onto a Thinkpad than onto a Powerbook at the time.
Also, in fairness, the circa 1997 Thinkpad was the best business machine on the market. Period. Macs had to catch up. The Macbook wasn't even a figment of anyone's imagination back then. The Powerbook 3400 (c. early 1997) was faster than the Thinkpad, but the productivity suite available at the time wasn't anything to write home about, let alone use for serious presentations.
All that is to say, I'm not as shocked on reading this as I guess I should be. From everything I've heard, Jobs only took dogfooding so far. If he didn't believe an internal product was the best for a given purpose, he didn't dogfood it. (I would be curious to know if he used Mail, for instance...)
Like you, I also enjoyed the burst in energy when MM landed. I just wish she had not trusted the middle management so much; but these people had entrenched themselves over many, many years like barnacles, and it's not easy to get rid of them.
I'm not sure what you're "correcting" in the original post.
The only difference I see is that the author said Marissa removed the turnstiles after reading an email complaint, and you say she removed the turnstiles after looking at them.
I meant no offense by issuing the correction. I heard it from MM's mouth that she wanted to get rid of these barriers to entering Yahoo. My point, which is minor, is that she evaluated the situation herself and made a decision to get rid of the barriers, rather than responding to someone's complaint.
The framing is different. In one frame she appears to care about the QoL of her employees, in the other she doesn't necessary care about that so much as she cares about efficiency and her personal comfort.
It's an interpretation based on speculation, not a correction.
She might have looked at the turnstile and thought, "This is probably annoying to the other employees, so it has to go." We don't know, and 1024core doesn't know.
Or maybe the OP was correct, and an email complaint really did contribute to the decision. Without further evidence, or unless 1024core is actually Marissa Meyer, we simply don't know.
Actually, I heard it from her directly that she was appalled at the barriers, and wanted them to go. Now, whether it was in a TGIF or in person, I don't recall.
Speculation is how we judge other people, and our social space doesn't have objective truths. Narratives are all there is, so narratives are what matter most. It's legitimate to correct offending narratives that conflict with your version of reality.
> It's legitimate to correct offending narratives that conflict with your version of reality.
You're not "correcting" someone's interpretation simply by stating a different interpretation, unless there's some grounding in evidence and objective truth. Core1024 may have evidence that supports his interpretation, but he didn't present it. As such, it doesn't qualify as a correction.
> You're not "correcting" someone's interpretation simply by stating a different interpretation
But that's how people use the word, that's what politics is. There are no objective truths to social narrative, and facts aren't the only things that have the property of correctness. Perspectives have correctness, as in moral perspectives etc. It's not an objective scale, but people don't have to conduct their lives scientistically.
You've now brought value judgement and morality into the discussion, and neither apply here.
The blogger said Meyer acted on an email complaint about the turnstiles. The commenter said that's incorrect, that Meyer decided to have them removed on her own accord.
There's no value judgement. There's no appeal to moral authority. It's not politics. Core1024 is claiming to be objectively correct about Meyer's internal motivation for removing the turnstile. In this case, it's acceptable to ask: what evidence do you have?
If he says "She told me herself" or "It was a water cooler rumor," then great, we have our answer. If he says, "It's my strong suspicion based on [...]," then he passed off suspicion as fact. And if he says, "There is no evidence, this is a social narrative I've constructed without regard to objective truth," then we have a serious problem.
I've brought neither value judgment nor morality. I merely said that it's legit to think about perspectives as having degrees of correctness, just as it's legit to think about moral philosophies as having degrees of correctness. It's fine if you want say, "I don't believe you," and that would be a valid interpretation on your part. But it is politics in the true sense, and you're participating in it with this conversation. You're attempting to assert that your interpretation of a word or a concept or a situation is correct and that mine is not, even though there are no objective truths to be said about either perspective. As far as I can tell, OP doesn't claim that he is correcting the specific fact-claim about the turnstiles but that he is correcting the anecdotes as a whole. What I believe the OP wants to correct is the framing or the tone of the anecdotes, not any particulars facts inside them.
> What I believe the OP wants to correct is the framing or the tone of the anecdotes
Fair enough. One person frames it as "Meyer was motivated by empathy," and the other frames it as "She was motivated by self-interest." Neither person can prove their claim conclusively, but I assume there's some evidence that led Core1024 to contradict the blogger. The best we can hope for is to hear evidence from both sides, and come to our own conclusion.
It might be common for people to say "You're wrong" without providing evidence or rationale. But unless "You're wrong" is accompanied by some justification, it's devoid of value. All we now know is that somebody on the Internet thinks Meyer is self-serving, and we knew that already.
> it's legit to think about perspectives as having degrees of correctness
Can you provide an example where one perspective on a person is correct (or more correct), another perspective on that person is incorrect (or less correct), and the relative correctness is not based on objective truth or an appeal to moral authority?
> The best we can hope for is to hear evidence from both sides, and come to our own conclusion.
I don't think the principle of evidence-based decision-making applies to most social situations. For one, there usually is no evidence. With the Mayer situation, while everyone might agree that the turnstiles are no longer there, we have no video footage or recorded conversations to examine. So in a real sense, narratives and hearsay are all we have. For another, we care about other people's opinions. Like with online reviews, people find value even in reviews that don't give any explanations, or for food product reviews that amount to nothing more than, "Five stars, because it tastes good."
If someone makes an accusatory statement about another person, I agree that there's definitely a burden of proof. But Core1024's comment doesn't seem to me to be accusatory or an attempt to frame Mayer as a selfish person. I think the comment reframes Mayer's actions as being motivated by efficiency as opposed to empathy, which I think is a much more neutral view.
> Can you provide an example where one perspective on a person is correct (or more correct), another perspective on that person is incorrect (or less correct), and the relative correctness is not based on objective truth or an appeal to moral authority?
Any interpretation you have of a social situation. Any opinion you have of your work environment or social circle. Your beliefs about what defines a certain culture. We understand intellectually that these are all opinions and that opinions are subjective, but there's no sense in which we would ever behave as if our beliefs are not true. Otherwise why would we believe them in the first place? I think it's disingenuous to look for objectivity in social interpretations. And anyway this isn't a criminal trial, or something like that. It's pure gossip.
To answer your question: I heard it from her directly. Now, I don't remember if it was in a small setting, or it was in the weekly TGIF. But I do recall her saying that she wanted these barriers gone.
Probably more about the state of Yahoo. Mayer really was quite talented, by all accounts. But Yahoo's problems really were quite fundamental - down to the fundamental questions of what its line if business could have, or should have been - beyond simply issues of morale and revenue.
So another spin on the whole sage might well be, "If Marissa Mayer couldn't turn Yahoo around -- maybe no one could."
> Marissa was able to vanquish the chronically poor self-esteem in the organization for a little while, but eventually Yahoo’s organizational depression took hold again.
That summarizes my experience at Yahoo pretty well.
The company was broken when she took over. Deep in its structure, in its hiring, in its middle management, it was broken. Marissa did not break it, but she was also unable to fix it.
I used pine until 2004. Then I moved on from where I was and was forced into the world of webmail since there wasn't much else for me then. Inertia is strong in my world, I wonder if I could go back?
It was more a rhetorical question for myself. My (and I think many's) usage of email has changed dramatically in the intervening decade. I get less of it, and what I do get I appreciate having on the go. I don't think I use that much HTML email, so that's not a huge deal, but it would require a major readjustment to how I communicate to make it worth it.
> 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).