She was very well compensated for her time sinking Yahoo. I think this kind of tone policing is unhealthy.
I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
And what's unhealthy about tone policing? I'll leave aside the way you've negatively framed my attempt to steer the conversation in a more positive direction, and just say that I don't see what the purpose of publicly bashing a well-compensated CEO who didn't have much success is.
Who is this unhealthy for? For her? For us? For future boards of directors who may be trying to attract a CEO to turn their company around?
To me it's because she wasn't taking a risk, she was getting paid massive amounts regardless of what she did. Why celebrate someone who enriched herself as the company imploded and had to lay off thousands of people? There are so many other people worth accolades.
She had all risk removed when they hired her.
It silences discussion by subtly and indirectly labeling any critics as bad guys.
Not all tone policing is bad, HN is the king of good tone policing, I don't think this makes it.
For example, I like your non-tone related points, and I'm glad they were able to come out!
It's simply the issue of gratuitous executive pay. If her pay hadn't been >>100x what a typical SV worker makes I think she'd get significantly less flak. The idea of someone being granted enough money so their great-grandchildren never have to work a day when that person did a poor job after only 4 years on the job just makes people sick. Don't forget some bad stuff happened on Mayer's watch; like 1B user accounts being compromised.
The payment and bashing might be slightly related, but I tend to think it's a minor factor. People focus on financials so much because that's what the western culture is built upon. The American Dream, if you will. However bashing, complimenting, or mentioning someone at all comes with fame. I'm fairly certain people would talk a lot about Marissa Mayer regardless of whether she got paid anything. The ratio of criticism-to-compliments tends to go hand-in-hand with the person's perceived success-to-failure ratio. Marissa Mayer wasn't that successful, and thus she'll mostly get criticism.
Intuitively this seems accurate. Wondering if you know of actual research regarding this though?
To add to that, I think people have a hard time assessing relative success. Imagine being dropped in as the captain of the Titanic after it's hit the iceberg. If you manage to delay the sinking for an extra hour, which allows more people to escape, you are successful even if most people do drown. You're successful relative to some expected value. But drive-by armchair analysts will just see that the ship sunk and a bunch of people died and blame you.
Obviously this situation is much more complicated, since opinions will differ about whether Yahoo was in fact inevitably sinking, or whether a different captain could have helped it survive.
I believe the financial compensation angle is that because she was particularly well compensated, she is perceived to not have much skin in the game. As an aside, I don't think this is especially productive because it is incredibly rare to find someone running a company who isn't deeply emotionally invested in that enterprise, but the perception remains.
Obviously, though the crowd wants to excoriate Mayer I think if folks have a problem with her compensation they should look to the board.
Because it reveals the tenuous relationship between executive pay and company results, and people prefer to take it out on the obvious cases rather than accept that there's little evidence they correlate very well.
I think that it's unjust when people are paid crazy money for doing poor job. As well as when people are paid little money for good job.
EDIT:
>somewhat indirectly
No, he directly called her a cunt.
> and I'm hesitant to use it myself for fear of being banned).
Literally no-one on HN has ever been banned for using the word cunt. It's only a problem if you call other people cunts. Here's the relevant mod post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016665#10019003
While name calling is completely childish it is most certainly tolerated by other users on HN (Do a search for "is a [insert derogatory word]" site:news.ycombinator.com. Steve Jobs is called an asshole in every HN thread.
For sure ochurch stepped on toes here but one thing he was passionate about is improving the profession of software development and in general the tech industry and he saw MMs actions really harming the profession and the industry. I obviously think HN is worse off without his commentary.
That may well have been the case, but if those odds are 1% and 2% I wouldn't want my compensation to depend on me saving the probably-doomed company.
What if you were the best qualified candidate?
Would it be unethical then?
I don't know if you share my vision, but for me in that moment it felt like the house was on fire, the firetruck was on fire and the fire was on fire.
I don't know if a better job could be made, but at least some public face was saved, and the shareholders bought it until the last day.