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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

I think that's easier said than done when a company is going down, as we've witnessed through Yahoo. That's exactly what she tried to do by hiring bunch of startups but failed, probably because the board became impatient. I know people criticize her saying she did a half assed job of dealing with acquired companies but I'll bet that it's not entirely because of her decisions but because of lack of support from the board.

> 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?

Google turned this up:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2006/12/07/saving-w...

I believe this is it: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/08/fa...

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.

Was OS/2 bad? :-|

Everybody I knew who used it said it was better than Windows, but that's sort of a self-selecting crowd. More to the point, OS/2 wasn't a M$ product, so that sort of success for it would have been bad for M$.

It was a MS product (even the early OS/2 2.0 SDKs from the 1990 period). The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, partly because of how horrible and unethical it was.

Could you point some reading about it?

One of my favorite readings is http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011.... Notice that they did not mention the problems with the "32-bit Windows extenders" for example. On the later attacks, look up "Microsoft Munchkins" and "Steve Barkto" for one example of them.

That could explain the anti work from home policy but what about buying that pre-teens app for like $15M. What did that accomplish?

That was probably some favor to the guy behind the teen, some VC IIRC. They might not be able to give each other money directly, so they use a useless acquisition for money transfer. Probably what Larry did today.

I think that was the only way at that point to bring in fresh creative talent. No creative person probably wanted to quit their existing job and leave for Yahoo at that point.

And why would they? If you're really talented, you could either go work for Google/Facebook/etc. (if you want a stable life), or start your own company (if you're adventurous). Yahoo was stuck in the purgatory somewhere in between.

I don't really buy this argument. There are reasons for acqui-hires, but it's usually to bring on board a strong existing team, a world-class domain expert, or a tech base with employee support.

Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support that could turn out a bold new product within Yahoo.

I know nobody wants to go work for Yahoo, but they spent 30 million dollars. Hire 10 self-directed, expert devs for $1,000,000/year. I promise you can find good people at that price.

> I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good

What does that even mean?

It means that if you're acqui-hiring, you're paying a massive premium to get good talent you couldn't get another way. I'm saying that nothing about Summly suggested that it was worth spending $30,000,000 for 18 months of the sole employee's time.

I wrote it that way to point out that I'm not calling D'Aloisio a bad hire or a bad developer. He's got a good reputation, and Yahoo News Digest (his big project there) was actually really well received.

Rather, it wasn't worth the commitment Yahoo made for him, because he wasn't taking on the kind of sweeping rework or major new project needed to help with the death spiral. It fit into the general pattern of grabbing shiny new things at high prices, without really chasing the outcomes in users or revenue that might have mattered.

That it doesn't matter how good they are; their skill could not explain the reason to spend that much money.

> Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support that could turn out a bold new product within Yahoo.

Summly was not D'Aloiso's product in terms of development. He may have had the idea, but the technology was SRI's (the same guys who developed Siri), and IIRC, Summly had exclusive use of that. So please stop demeaning it as "some 17-year-old's app".

I'm... not sure where I was demeaning it that way? I certainly never said the quoted thing, and I didn't intend it.

I don't think that Summly was a bad product, and I don't think D'Aloisio is a bad dev. I specified him alone because as far as I know he's the only one Yahoo acquired - SRI is great but Yahoo didn't acquire their devs or exclusive rights to their tech.

The question at hand is whether Yahoo got their money's worth, and I'm claiming that they didn't bring on enough relevant tech or expertise to justify the expense. That holds even if Summly, SRI, and D'Aloisio are all fantastic.

I'm one of two ex yahoo engs who integrated Summply summarization algo into Yahoo home page. More specifically it was (is?) a large personalization platform that would carefully pick which news to show you and in what order. It only took us a couple of days. It was mostly invisible for an outsider because Yahoo already had a decent summarization algorithm, but was a clear improvement.

While I don't know if all these dictionaries and calibrated weights of parameters were really worth $15M, I'm positive that such an IP was major reason of the acquisition.

How has working from home/remotely imply being a team player/enthusiastic yes/no?

I work for a non-IT company. Loads of people work in the office. There are a few which do not. They're really good at their job (it is somewhat measurable), are a team player and take their work very seriously. This in a big company where they have a dress code, etc.

IMO the problem wasn't the employees.

The CEOs one job is to set the direction of the company. To create a vision of what a successful Yahoo looks like.

In this article, it talks about Mayer being responsive to email, turnstiles, food, etc. These are things a mid-level manager takes care of, not the CEO. And these things definitely are not a strategy.

All the way up until recently Yahoo wasn't even sure what type of company it is--media or tech. This is not possible if the CEO is clearly communicating what Yahoo is and should be.

If you want a company full of team players.. forget about this idea of dividing them into 1x vs 1000x. Make the vision of the company clear, so that people know what they're doing and what success looks like. When you get buy in of your strategy from the employees, it doesn't matter if they're 1x or 1000x developer. Everyone is working toward the same goal.

I strongly agree with this.

It seemed more like "playing CEO" rather than actually being CEO. I read many interviews over the years with her, and there was never any kind of thesis or anything I would ever take away from the conversation that was had.

I don't remember a single thing she has said or done aside from what's in the main headlines about Yahoo.

To be fair, the confusion between media and tech has existed for as long as Yahoo has. Marisa didn't bring that with her. IMO her job was just to stop the bleeding to allow Yahoo to divest Alibaba and sell off the rest of the company. Without Marissa, Yahoo is a flaming dumpster fire a la Sun -- where the value of the company was in patents alone. She allowed the company to retain some effective talent and keep the lights on until they could find a viable exit -- definitely a win for the Yahoo shareholders.

And realistically, what options did Yahoo have? They didn't have the cash flows to aggressively invest in content to become a media company and they didn't have the cash reserves or engineering talent to aggressively invest in R&D to become a tech company. What vision should Yahoo have invested in? I'm not really sure they had any good options; so she rolled the dice with her best ones and lost. Can't fault her for that IMO.

I get your point about wanting people to be all-in. (Must make for a good sign for everybody to stop being it, but yes, it's a point.) But this:

> 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.

Committees don't save failing companies. They also don't steer successful companies.

In fact, the one thing you can expect from a committee is business as usual. And if your company is already failing, that's failure.

To be fair, I can't think of any significant tech company coming back from near death, except Apple. But we all know that's an exception.

IBM has been there too.

Big companies in general do not come back from near death. But the surest way to guarantee that this small chance won't be taken is betting everything on "team playing" and antagonizing every "bad team player" that thinks differently from the main line.

>introducing other employee-unfriendly policies like banning remote work

I heard for friends working at yahoo that this was perceived as positive by a lot of employees at yahoo.

for years yahoo was so directionless that there were a lots of people who were simply slacking off using wfh as an excuse. This was breeding a lot of resentment among people who were actually doing work.

Sure it might have hurt honest wfh workers but saying all companies regardless of their situation should allow wfh is not fair.

wfh works great if your work is mostly heads-down. Remote working sucks for anything creative and almost everything collaborative -- I can't tell you how many 30 minute meetings I have every day that could have been solved with a 5 minute conversation and a picture on a whiteboard. While that's unavoidable to some extent, you should also try to be physically collocated with the people you work with most frequently to reduce the overhead of interaction with them.

Also, wfh can be a bad thing if the company has a paranoid, avoidant, passive-aggressive culture like Yahoo did. Life situations that require flexibility can seem like extended absences to coworkers who aren't in the loop, which in turn spawns rumors, misinformation and resentment among employees.

By the time she took over, Yahoo had been in a death spiral for years. Most of their best employees were already gone, and everyone left was mostly punching the clock. You've gotta make changes when that's happening, and scaling back wfh is reasonable in that context. I'm sure they made exceptions on a case-by-case basis anyway.

> I can't tell you how many 30 minute meetings I have every day that could have been solved with a 5 minute conversation

Buy everybody on your team a $150 wacom tablet. Use uberconference with screensharing. Use awwapp.com. Bonus - now you have a way to save your whiteboards and attach them to your wiki or bug tracker.

"Remote working sucks for anything creative.."

Being creative requires a lot of focus and concentration as well as being in the a good creative space. This seems to be the opposite description of any office I've ever seen. IMO you can do your best creative work when working remotely.

This was breeding a lot of resentment among people who were actually doing work.

Serious question: what work? Everything tech at Yahoo seems to have been in maintenance mode at best for a decade. New products that never saw the light of day?

> The rest seems more like a COO would do and not a strategic CEO.

Yeah, which of these are tasks a good CEO should see to, and which would be more appropriate or acceptable to delegate to a COO?

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