What To Learn About Negotiation From Marissa Mayer’s Compensation Package

"Perhaps just as important as your total compensation are the intangible benefits you’ll receive when you take your new position. Those intangibles should include access to and opportunities to join teams or committees that wield real power. A word to the wise: That will typically not include the hiring or diversity committees, both of which can end up being more akin to social work than to business governance.

On the other hand, being appointed to management and finance committees will permit you to take part in making the firm a success. And in return for achieving that, most committee members are well-rewarded monetarily and given positions of even greater power and authority."

Maybe at shitty/big/dumb companies. Not at startups or competent large tech companies.

Hiring at a company like Google or Facebook is clearly one of the most important functions, and even more so at a startup. In contrast, finance (at a software company, or any company without real capex) is probably bullshit/make work for people who need to be on it (CFO, etc.) and idiot climbers without real skills in the line of business. (It likely involves buildings and facilities, maybe headcount as given from other groups, and stupid finance tricks like lines of credit, fundraising, etc.)

Probably the best way to identify the things a company cares about is to find the functions founders handle personally. At Yahoo! for some reason this was "number of servers purchased per project" (which required Filo's signoff), which is probably why Yahoo! is a crappy doomed company. At Facebook, I've read that Zuck takes a deep personal interest in anything involving Newsfeed.