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Comment by praneshp | Hacker News Reader

I worked under Marissa at Yahoo, and am happy to state (with my real name attached to this comment) that

1. She was a good person, and went out of the way at times to make employees feel good.

2. She was a terrible boss, who would pass edicts like "our cubicle walls will be cut to 50% of their tomorrow", and pass it off as "because natural light is better for you".

3. I believed as an employee that she cherry-picked data to support pet beliefs like hiring at selected schools, banning remote work and closing satellite offices.

4. She had a preference for ex-Googlers/ex-Google APMs

She would definitely bring positive change in terms of the scandals, but any competent HR department that has the company's long term interests in mind can do that, no?

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I was going to post about her and "edict" is exactly one of the words I had in mind. I had to deal with one of those while at Google a decade ago. The PM made it clear that this particular UX decision came from up above and there couldn't be more experiments or workarounds, one of which had been prototyped by an engineer. While she's famous for the 41 shades of blue experiment, I saw the occasional arbitrary cherry-picking, too. The semi-randomness made it much more perplexing.

On the other hand, Instant Search was another edict of hers, which required months of massive planning and engineering, until it became usable and wouldn't bankrupt the company, but I'm glad she came up with it.

Ha actually to be fair, one of her "edicts" was "Please everyone switch to git, no other version control, and you have 1 month to do it.".

This was when the vast majority of the company was on git, and the holdouts were typically lazy or understaffed.

Re 2: If you are dealing with anything north of 5 people any permanent decision is likely to upset a percentage of your staff. Just because some dislike your decision that that does not make it less sound.

Re 4: You have your preference as well, so does Google, IBM, Yahoo and the small law firm where I work. Everyone does when it comes to hiring.

Re Re 2: The problem that I am seeing here is the lack of logic and thought put into the justification behind such a drastic change. Noise levels in a typical cubical environment are distracting enough to the average engineer. Same issue with the remote work policy. What it boils down to is a leader who creates "edicts" based on a personal preference or "cherry picked" facts rather than reason, logic, market research, A/B validation testing, etc.

Re 2: That was a real example, and a real reason. If you believe that it is sound logic, more power to you then.

Re 4: I am sorry, I meant to complete that sentence with "when it came to hiring execs, or buying companies".

She hired some (what I saw as) very poor execs who were once at Google, one of whom got a 60m severance package for underperformance.

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