Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says

    You're either the job creator or the job filler.

Haha...

I'm happy you believe this. No sarcasm; it just made me wish that I still did.

In this world, merit is judged by more than ability. Motive, if not aimed perfectly, is a burden that will decrease your chances, not increase them.

Background is so important. My family was totally broken, like one hundred percent shattered. There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven.

Why can't I meet the right people? Because of what I say when given an initial opportunity. And why am I not able to say the right things? Because of the background and context I grew up in.

And I'm not talking about appealing to some rich person and asking for an opportunity. I'm talking about meeting peers, or building a team, or any of the things that really matter.

One could argue that this situation is mutable, and that it's mostly my fault for what I say. Obviously, yes, it's my fault for the things I say.

But when your whole life has been spent being trained in a certain way, by being in the river of society that pushes us all along, the slipstream that you end up in as a child pretty much makes or breaks your ability to learn how to do anything close to what you're suggesting. To play that game you mention.

Enjoy being a job creator. It's an opportunity that you should make the most of, in the stead of all the people who can't.

That's a very simplistic view. Doing the work and making the stuff also create jobs. How many right here have jobs because developers - not execs, not investors - created the technology we use? Yes, even at Yahoo. Like Hadoop. The idea that the people who contribute money create jobs and the people who contribute labor (in our case via code) don't is utterly, obviously, dangerously wrong. It's self-serving claptrap from those who have no ability to participate in acts of creation instead of arbitrage. No hacker for which this site is named should accept it.

The HN Hivemind that I've witnessed as of the last 18 months or so is decidedly supportive of founders giving up much much more equity to employees, owing to ease of fundraising and low capital startup costs, combining to derisk the once very personally risky endeavor of starting a company.

In that sense the hivemind currently loosely follows the words of Sam Altman who is the present overmind of YC, so it is rather apt.

American CEOs get paid obscenely cartoonishly evil amounts of money for running companies into the ground. Even when the company does really well and they get massive stock grants, the rank and file get nothing.

As you say, anyone can found a business. Getting hired as a CEO is entirely to do with contacts; it's not usually a job that's advertised and you can apply for.

The first mistake the Yahoo board made was to decide that product innovation would save them. In reality, they should've brought in an ex-consultant or ex-banker who could chop off pieces of the business and sell them to the highest bidder (essentially, what's going to happen now).

The second mistake they made was that they decided the right person to execute on a product strategy was Marissa Mayer, when in reality that isn't her strong suit.

Could anyone possibly done worse? She makes Elop look competent.

The opposite is zombie companies.

If you were building such a project from scratch, would you just not get anything off the ground without hiring 12,500 full-timers first? Most likely you would.

There are several structural inefficiencies to Yahoo!, most of them rely on 1990 processes in areas such as ad sales (which are still strongly salespeople-driven, try to buy a premium ad with your credit card, for example), low investment in automation and tooling, low amount of shared code across the Web properties (no common UI element library, for example, just guidelines), and structure that lends itself to hiring as many product managers as possible to coordinate all those inefficiencies across various products.