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Comment by distortionfield | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious how god awful these CEOs are while still apparently being worth $23MM in severance.

We were told at Yahoo! that it was pointless to compete with Google and Microsoft at search because Yahoo! were not willing to put in the money to have their own search engine. At the time they were still the most popular webpage on the Internet. What really irritated me about this was the idea you could just look at a spreadsheet and decide if you'll be successful at search or anything else for that matter, startups constantly prove that resources don't automatically equal success... it sort of summed up the jail Yahoo! and Carol Bartz created and the thought process involved in that company's demise. MBAs have a lot to answer for IMO.

How do people deal with such poor leadership? One of the founders of Lucene worked at Yahoo for a time so Yahoo certainly could have done something distinctive in the search space.

They don’t. They leave. When enough of them leave a negative spiral sets in, until most of whose left are people who have nowhere else to go.

You would think that kills a company, but a big company can survive decades in that mode, just slowly riding the elevator all the way down.

The Dead Sea effect?

You give feedback, they ignore it, and you leave. Most engineers don't want to spend their times fighting politics instead of doing their job. And if leadership doesn't have confidence in your job, why should you not seek a place that does? Not like there's really much employee retention factors these days.

Doug worked at Apple on v-twin [0]. He has a long history of building search related products.

By the way, after co-founding Jakarta, I was the one who brought him and Lucene into the ASF and the rest is history.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting

Resources don't equal success, but both startups and incumbents need business plans: how they'll turn success into revenue.

I'm too young to remember, but was there a clear business plan supporting search at the time? Obviously Google has since proven that capturing a major chunk of the ad industry has made competing on search very worth it, but I don't remember if that was evident at the time. But I feel like the ad leverage came later in Google's life.

Then if you're trying to decide whether to bet on search at the time, the payoff may not be as evident without that insight.

Hire the best (search) people, give them all the resources you can and leave them alone. They should come up with the plan, not the CEO.

It's far from guaranteed even then for the executives to have the skills necessary to determine who is best, or even qualified, within a given timescale of operational metrics.

Fail objectively, get a huge payout, move on to the next company, crash the company, repeat. Being a CEO must be nice.

And despite the fact that the CEOs are all able to have like five different side hustles, they still get to drone on endlessly about how hard they work, and do not see the hypocrisy with making all the employees sign overly broad "non-competes".

And then a lot of CEOs with their side hustles claim that remote work is "morally wrong" or whatever.

Well, sure! We're untrustworthy plebes who would certainly drain company resources to support our "side hustles". The people who become CEOs are virtuous hyperperforming knights who always do everything right. /s

Probably the most trouble I got into when I was at Apple was when I emailed a VP directly asking if I could maybe contribute some code (in my own time, on my own hardware, at home) to an open source project.

The VP didn't just say "no", but also ratted me out to like the six managers between me and him, and each manager thought it was a good use of company time to schedule half-hour meetings explaining to me that I needed to go through the proper bureaucratic channels because the VP's time is "extremely valuable". Honestly kind of poisoned the entire job for me.

I also heard you’d been having problems with your TPS reports. Didn’t you get the memo?

My wife basically made the Office Space joke when it happened, how I had like six half-hour meetings in one day to explain how I screwed up on some arbitrary rule.

Six. Six managers Bob.

Haha, what's funny there is the idea that if they paid the VP less maybe it would be worth this time to engage with his employees.

Sounds like that happened a long time ago, my condolences. Non-competes don't mean shit and 99% of them in CA are illegal these days unless you are extremely high up (having 6 managers between you and a VP doesn't seem to satisfy that).

Hope you did it anyway. No one should be able to tell you what you can do in your spare time.

This was early 2020; is that a long time ago? Time has no meaning after COVID.

I mean, I wasn't worried about them suing me for contributing to open source (it would be pretty hard to prove any real damages), but I think being fired would have been on the table.

Why would you ask that? It’s literally your time and resources.

Apple made it pretty clear that they viewed pretty much any code that I wrote while I was employed by them, by default, belonged to them. If I contributed to an open source repo without legal's explicit approval, it was grounds for termination.

It was ridiculous.

I've encountered this sort of clause in about 2/3 of the employment contracts I've been presented with. Every time, I object to it and request that it be removed and replaced with wording to the effect of "I won't use company time, resources, or information in side projects".

Every time I've done this, they've agreed to the change. If they don't, then I don't take the job.

Yeah, seriously. If you were in early with a hot company and that company hits hyperscale, people for some reason assume you're competent running a much larger legacy organization. I see very little parallels or overlap, but perhaps I'm blind.

Mayer was an engineer, and for some reason people thought she'd be a great CEO. Surprise, she wasn't.

Wasn't she really disliked within Yahoo!?

But "its so difficult to find competent people", "it's just that hard", "you don't get it", and my favorite: "you think you could do a better job?".

At least I could crash the company without costing the company hundreds of millions.

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