Carol Bartz's paycheck reduced by 75% | Hacker News Reader

Carol Bartz's paycheck reduced by 75%

finance.yahoo.com

20 pointsparth1612 comments

Her job should have been to make Yahoo! not suck.

The verdict:

  - Yahoo! Mail. Still sucks.
  - Yahoo! Charts (Finance). Still suck.
  - Delicious. Never sucked. Killed.

These are the only parts of Yahoo! I use, and I have mainly migrated to Google and Bing.

Yahoo! Pipes is not bad.

What about flickr?

Kudos to parth16 for selecting the Yahoo! Associated Press page for this particular link. My first chuckle of the evening.

What does yahoo do? Google does search. Microsoft does consumer and enterprise software. Apple does hardware & consumer software... but Yahoo? Do they 'do' news? Not really. Finance? Kinda. Distributed computing? Yes, but they don't make money from that. BOSS? DDG isn't enough.

I'm stumped. How does Yahoo make money, besides slapping ads on content (as a 2nd-place implementation of AdSense)?

18 billion ad impression per month.

They are a huge media site powered by one of the largest email sites. Paid for with premium display and search advertising.

the 2MM bonus in 2010 for increasing operating income is a harder piece to deal with, especially after reading it was generated by lowering head count.

They hired her away from the runaway success of.... _AUTODESK_.

I detect sarcasm here, however Autodesk is a great success story at least if you look at it from financial point of view.

They managed to built a graphics software empire buying pretty much anything that they could acquire. Think Oracle but in CG space.

Company's revenues and stock prise rose substantially during Bartz's tenure as the CEO.

"They" (the board of Yahoo) did a decent job of finding a suitable candidate for the CEO position. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case where previous success is not producing expected results.

However, it's impossible to predict such things in advance. Lou Gerstner turned around IBM even though came from a consumer goods company and tobacco RJR Nabisco after a long stint in American Express Travel Services.

Would you hire him or Carol to run a software company if you had a choice? :-)

> Yahoo Inc. cut CEO Carol Bartz's compensation by 75 percent to $11.9 million last year as the Internet company struggled to revive its revenue growth, regulatory documents filed Friday show.

Ouch. That's pretty harsh. Down to a mere $12 million. That poor woman. How will she survive? It's hard work picking other people to do all the actual work in the company, and to keep a website property humming smoothly along. How will I cut costs? I know, I'll... I'll... I'll cut jobs! handed $2 million Thank you, that was hard work! Herp derp. (Note: I don't care that she's female. Story could just as easily been about one of the many more male CEO's of similar companies.)

This is yet another reminder why it's a good idea to try building your own business. So you can potentially achieve that level of pay, but without having to go through all the bureaucratic/brown-nosing/sociopathic processes one has to go through to potentially maybe rise through other people's corporate ladders. Bypass all that shit. Just make something other people want and scale it up.

The fact that a cut of 75% reduces her salary to $11M is mind-boggling. How could she possibly ever add even $11M of value to that company? How could any CEO? Steve Jobs, maybe. But his salary is $1/yr.

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