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Comment by product50 | Hacker News Reader

Are you serious you don't know about her Google demotion? Here read this and get enlightened: http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/17/marissa-mayer-yahoo/

Also you didn't know about Henrique de Castro catastrophe? Here read this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercov...

If Yahoo was a capsized ship, why did they have to hire a very expensive exec for the death march? Obviously, the expectation was that Marissa can bring about some improvements.

Apologies for being snarky in this comment as I had a difficult time appreciating your ignorance.

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I appreciate that you've cited some sources (however questionable). The tone is fine, it's sometimes hard to maintain composure. Especially when someone points out that you're wildly making things up.

Any response to selling something for money which was, for a time, of negative value according to the market?

Edit: I just realized the first source is an op-ed with as much conjecture as your original post. Nice.

I don't know how much evidence this is, but I can confirm Mayer getting demoted as I was an engineer on maps during the time that reorg was going on.

She no longer reported to Larry directly, she reported to Huber who took over all of Geo, which subsumed maps.

Internally, I don't think many people liked working with her. She had a coterie which did her bidding, but most people were not impressed, and there was much rejoicing when she joined Yahoo.

I have heard that people didn't care for working with her. I don't find that surprising given her espoused views on work ethic.

I wouldn't say capsized ship as much as "capsizing". Yahoo had a revolving door of CEOs. She was the 4th CEO in a decade. The one before her lasted 4 months (and made $6 million for his trouble). And in that time the stock price had gone from $40 to $16. Just because Yahoo was sinking doesn't mean it was sunk. Yahoo still had revenue, people, and products, but it had been declining for a long time.

It wasn't a death march, it was hail mary to see if Yahoo could be saved. The majority of her compensation was tied to stock price.

The snark doesn't bother me, but people want to hang the failure of Yahoo on Mayer. She did not take a vibrant, innovative, and successful company and drive it into the ground.

The stake in alibaba helped Mayer give her a windfall of cash she wouldn't have had otherwise. Her incentives were tied to stock price NOT performance. Start bashing the board for tying her compensation to the wrong metric.

This is a fair point that the board is really the one who set her objectives, and it seems she met them.

Many people don't realize that you can increase share price by "killing" a company if you can either let shareholders come out ahead as a result, or even just minimize their downside from what could have been a much larger loss.

For every CEO out there who makes hugely unpopular decisions that don't appear to be doing what the masses consider to be "the right thing" to get the company back on track...ask yourself if the board might have given direction that led down this path. Ultimately they are the ones the CEO reports to.

Pretty sure the reason they had to spend so much to get a new CEO is that no one wanted the job, it was perceived as a very difficult turnaround.

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