Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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Marissa is pretty good (she was the exec sponsor for several of my first projects at Google). Very large ego, but she really is very smart and exceptionally hard-working. She was responsible for some of Google's more innovative org-structure decisions (eg. the APM program), and IMHO Search and Maps really benefitted from her UI restraint while she was there.

I know a few people at Yahoo, and the good employees (i.e. the ones who didn't just do 15 minutes of work a day while "telecommuting") tended to speak highly of her too.

I think what you're really seeing is Warren Buffett's aphorism, "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." People tend to overestimate the effect of a CEO on the business's returns. Usually the prime drivers of a business's success are external to the business itself (eg. customer preferences, technological shifts, competitive landscape).

You can draw your own conclusions about what that should mean about CEO pay, but unfortunately human beings are hard-wired with a cognitive bias to ascribe effects to people, rather than to systemic factors.

(As a side note: I wonder if this is what'll happen to Musk regarding Tesla. As amazingly innovative as Tesla has been, the auto industry has a reputation for terrible economics.)

Musk may ultimately fail at Tesla, but he can hardly be considered a one trick pony after Paypal and SpaceX. If you would have asked me to pick two industries with very high barriers to entry and an existing cozy-with-regulators clique I would have picked rockets and transaction processing.

On the other hand, I tried to short Tesla recently and couldn't get any shares.

If I had to justify ending a telecommuting program in order to influence engineers to leave willingly before a large round of layoffs were planned, I would tell all my remaining employees that those telecommuters were lazy and only worked 15 minutes a day. Seems like business-cult behavior to label some employees as "the good employees" and everyone else as "the bad employees" where "good" employees work weekends and don't take vacations and so forth. Slippery slope.

The only people who don't like me are jerks and morons.

I knew people at Yahoo before Marissa took over, and they already knew those telecommuters were lazy. Work seemed very unevenly distributed at Yahoo. Coming from Google c. 2009-2014, most of my coworkers were reasonably hard workers - there were some variations in individual productivity, but most people pulled their weight, and the ones who didn't were fired. The stories I heard from Yahoo friends & acquaintances were that they were pulling 10 hour days + weekends because their teammates would work 2 hours, or that their teammates would telecommute and AFATCT never actually do any work. That bred a lot of resentment, and indeed made a lot of Yahoo's more-hardworking employees jump ship.

I appreciate the insight I wish stories like these could have been present in more of the discussions regarding Yahoo that I've been reading. Maybe ending telecommuting was the right call. But it seems to me that systemic laziness in engineering circles are not the product of location but rather the product of process, review, and so forth. Perhaps also recruitment and management were very ineffective as well.

I would argue that systemic lazyness is usually the product of employees realizing that everything they do is pointless, and hence not bothering to do anything. And so Marissa's top priority at Yahoo should've been to find a reason for the company to continue to exist. Unfortunately, this is hard enough in a small startup where you need to convince 2-3 people to commit quickly to a choice of action and follow through on it, let alone a large one where you need to convince 20-30K, most of whom have already checked out. And so unfortunately, the first thing any turnaround CEO has to do is get everyone who's not committed to the company's success off the bus. (Oftentimes, you're doing them a favor anyway through this; coasting through life in the hopes that you won't be noticed is not a winning strategy long-term, and this frees them up to take other jobs where what they do actually does have a purpose.)

I still think it was probably done badly though. Using performance reviews to do this for example is probably a bad idea.

I was there when it happened; it felt like the right call to me and my team. In fact none of the performance related terminations had us scratching our heads.

I was a part of a startup (interClick) that got acquired before MM became CEO and our experience of the rest of the org was pockets of smart dedication drowning in a mass of serfs passively resisting the will of the fiefdoms to which they belonged.

It seemed to us that what MM should have done is broken up the fiefdoms and dismiss the feudal lords that reigned before revitalizing the suite of properties and expanding mobile/video.

So why not start firing people? Seriously.

If I'm a hard worker, and I see people doing nothing all day, nothing would motivate me like firing them.

eg look at people working remotely, check vpn logins, and if they weren't logged in while working remotely, ask them for a reasonable explanation (maybe they were working entirely locally, but probably not), then terminate.

IIRC she did.

Edit based on your edit: Probably not quite as abruptly as you suggest - usually you need a pattern of underperformance to fire without risking a lawsuit. But Yahoo underwent several rounds of performance-based lawsuits. I think her big mistake there was not cutting once and cutting deep - multiple rounds of layoffs are much more demoralizing than getting rid of all the underperformers at once - but hey, Monday-morning quarterbacking. We aren't the ones at the top making the call.

I thought she just gave remote workers an ultimatum. Surely there were some workers there actually working?

Or maybe I missed the firings...

The ultimatum was: if you can't convince us that you're productive remotely, you must start coming in to office. I know a couple of excellent techies who continued to work remotely after.

Or judge them by what they contribute to the project -- not by how often they log in, or how long their butts sit happily joined with their chairs.

(Fine-grained) surveillance breeds distrust. The moment I hear that a company I work for is aggressively using surveillance-ware to evaluate employee performance is the moment I start looking for another job.

Oh so you heard? Sounds authoritative.

I'm not sure why your comment needs to be so dismissive. The poster made it clear that this is something they heard second hand. I imagine with a company as large as Yahoo we will never get an authoritative answer to exactly how much value the telecommuting employees were adding.

I don't know a single person at Yahoo and I don't work there but I remember reading articles when MM implemented the new rules for telecommuting and if I remember correctly most painted the policy negatively. I'm glad to read another perspective on the topic even if it is coming from someone with only second hand knowledge.

It's obviously good to be skeptical of second hand experiences but I'm not sure they should be dismissed wholesale. I imagine part of the point of HN is to share our personal experiences. I've never worked at Boeing or Northrup but I have enough friends/colleagues who have or currently do that I can form some informed opinions on what it's like working there.

I worked there, and I agree with him. Is that authoritative enough for you?

as did I and that's my feelings as well.

I was in Yahoo long before Marissa joined. And I saw her in action for 3 years. Some of those "work from home" people were very good, and were all given exemptions to continue working from home. But the lazy ones, some who I knew to be lazy, were told to shape up.

I experienced Marissa's ire firsthand too. But despite that, I give her high marks for trying. Yahoo had been ossified long before she got there; read PG's essay on Yahoo's culture. Blaming her for Yahoo's troubles is like blaming Dönitz for Germany's loss in WW2.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz

Good comment. And to your side note: I think TSLA goes to zero in the next 5 years.

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