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Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

Man, I'd run a company into the ground for half of that

I assume she's waiting on a call from Uber now. She has an established specialty of piloting ships already headed for the rocks.

Edit: And she's probably a good candidate to purge the misogyny problem.

That's a very interesting idea of her heading to Uber... I wonder how she would fare there. It would do a lot to have a woman running a company to rid the "misogyny problem" but she might also be able to grow the company. Uber is not a bad company, it just has bad leaders. If Uber were run by someone with more tact, accumen, and ethics, it would be a great company.

Travis Kalanick doesn't seem like the kind of person who would voluntarily give up his position. I don't think Marissa Mayer would be interested in anything less than CEO. I wonder if he'd be open to a co-CEO, bringing her on to clean up all the garbage.

Those do seem to be the gigs where boards are most willing to take a chance on a woman CEO.

Indeed - this is actually a phenomenon with a name: the "glass cliff". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

I am familiar with the concept of the glass cliff, but when things are going smoothly, why would a company (which we already know are statistically mostly run by men) change leadership? If leadership mostly changes during times of turmoil, and the female population in leadership is growing, wouldn't the two correlate quite strongly irrespective of motive?

There may be something to that idea, but the Wikipedia article mentions several studies that cannot be explained that way. For example, the study discussed in "Origins" looked at companies who were adding new board members, and discovered that they were more likely to add a woman if the company had been performing poorly in the preceding months. If the glass cliff phenomenon is simply a result of increasing availability of women in leadership, then you would expect that study to show no difference between companies performing well and companies performing poorly.

Yahoo had a female CEO before Mayer, I think. Carol Bartz (from Autodesk) ran it from 2009-11.

Uber is heading for the rocks? What did I miss?

"It would be more accurate to say rocks are being thrown."

No, considering their brazenly illegal and proudly criminal behaviors, they exist in a rock pit of their own digging.

If you build a company by digging a ditch labelled "screw the law", you can't complain when you're neck deep in legal troubles.

There seems to be a new scandal every day currently, and has been for a few weeks now since the Susan Fowler story broke: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

Is anyone aware of these outside of the HN/SV tech bubble? When I mention them to non-tech people here in Paris I found absolutely no one aware of these daily scandals.

The New York times article a few days ago was pretty bad, and I expect that made the scandals much more mainstream

My aunt which comes out of the fashion world and is trading at the stock market told me that uber is dead. She mostly trades in fashion stocks and the obvious blue chips. So this is probably well known in the finance world.

It would be more accurate to say rocks are being thrown.

She deserves some compensation for managing to make Yahoo salable, which was mission impossible when she took the job. I'm not in a position to evaluate the actual sum.

wasn't Microsoft (and maybe some other bidders) considering buying Yahoo for like $40B at one point prior to Mayer's era?

Turning down that deal was what got Yang booted. He hates Microsoft for historical reasons (as did we all) and refused to take what was an obviously great deal. Afterwards, Microsoft decided to compete and the offer was never available again.

IIRC that was many years prior, like before Bing.

4 years prior to Mayer becoming CEO.

Yes, but then you have to look all those people you fired in the eye while you pocket your payday.

In Yahoo's case, it seems like the die was already ̶s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶k̶ cast. Employees had strong signals that it was time to start looking.

Firing people isn't fun, but it seemed clear that was coming.

The die was cast. You can't strike a die unless you are a jeweler. You can also strike a coin if you are a mint (using a die) but that would be an unlikely idiom.

Thanks. Not sure where/how that phrase stuck in my brain, but it's still there. Fixed.

For 186 million, I think I could manage a sneer or two, even.

close an already dead for years crap company and make 93M$? come on man. these people will find new jobs, new employers understand they weren't individually fired for sucking if the whole company shut down

do you really think she even cares for those 'thousands' of poor souls?

i think i can do it

Ever fired a person? Single breadwinner for a family of four with a mortgage and a dog? Slept well that night? Now multiply by a few thousand.

The thing is that when it's that many, the CEO isn't the one doing it.

Also, when you fire someone I hope it's not to be cruel but for the greater good of the company that pays the other breadwinners.

I'm not saying it's easy and I get your point -- it is a really good point. Sometimes, though, to be a leader of many you have to adopt a utilitarian approach and aim for the greater good (yes there are a lot of slippery slopes).

A girl who I once dated taught me a very good lesson: when you break up with someone, it frees them to find the right person for themselves. Sometimes that same approach can work when letting someone go from his/her job. I've seen too many people who aren't good at their job being kept around because the manager couldn't bear to not be "nice". It was bad for everyone, including the person who tries so hard. One of the best essays I've read on a related subject is this:

https://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice...

A CEO or manager needs to aim to be good, not nice.

"A million is a statistic."

People have literally murdered for less, or risk their lives for less. US military enlisted gets around 30k per year +30k to 100k sign on bonus. Officer level around 60k/yr. mercenaries around 30k/month. Firefighters and police officers 50-100k year in most places in US. And many of them probably don't sleep well at night. Firing a person from a job is relative, the ones above would probably prefer it over the extremes of what their jobs asks of them.

Everyone has a price. For that many millions, lots of people would do it, especially if the alternative was someone else getting the millions and everyone getting fired anyway.

> especially if the alternative was someone else getting the millions and everyone getting fired anyway.

That's such a lame excuse.

I don't really think so. Different moral frameworks maybe? Or maybe different moral values assigned to the act of laying someone off?

Well context matters. It is much harder for a boss to close down the local factory and fire employees whose kids grew up together than a boss to fire some folks they've known for less than five years and is an outsider too.

I mean it isn't painless, nobody likes to fail and failing in newspapers around the world sucks more, but there are degrees of suckiness in life

I imagine you are speaking from the interpersonal experience, which I know to be a terrible one. Once you're in "management" teams and entire divisions become numbers in your P&L, not humans. What's more, once you've done something enough times, you become desensitised to it anyway (in this case firing people).

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