Marissa Mayer Has “Many Enemies” | Hacker News Reader

Marissa Mayer Has “Many Enemies”

slate.com

98 pointsnikunjk79 comments

She's a woman. She's a CEO. She's guaranteed to have a target on her back. See http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/ceo-archetyp... for a description of what is still reality in the working world.

That said, people I personally know who have worked with her are luke-cold. But I'm sure that the same people would prefer her over the average Yahoo exec in a heartbeat. And I'm more optimistic about Yahoo's direction now than I was before she came in. Morale is up, traffic is up, motherhood has apparently not distracted her. (To be honest, I was one of the doubters when she came in. A qualified doubter, but a doubter.)

All she has to do is bring a little of Google (the corp, not the employees) into Yahoo and you should see earnings rise. Anything over is the cherry on the top. If Yahoo can't innovate, then it has a solid, profitable niche in Internet services that are reliable and don't change too much over the years (which has always been Yahoo's clientele.)

>>All she has to do is bring a little of Google...

No thanks. The last thing we need is more tech giants selling their souls to the NSA.

A knee-jerk introduction of the "NSA" keyword to a thread with the "Google" keyword doesn't add much to any discussion.

is there any reason to believe that Yahoo hasn't already shared information with federal agencies?

>>She's a woman. She's a CEO. She's guaranteed to have a target on her back.

I don't think her being a woman is terribly relevant here. All CEOs regardless of gender, race, nationality, etc. have enemies. That's what it takes to rise to the top in corporate politics. People smile in your face and stab you in the back at the earliest opportunity.

One could make the case that she has more enemies due to being a successful woman in technology, but I think that would pale in comparison to the number of enemies she has due to her job title alone.

Read the article again. Notice how many of the ways in which she was being criticized were things you could only really say about a woman?

Having enemies comes with the job. Your enemies will attack you as they can. Being a woman gives them culturally acceptable ways to attack you that they can't use against men.

Not necessarily disagreeing, but if a male CEO was posing in a fashion magazine, he would get just as much criticism.

Missing the point: a male CEO wouldn't pose in a fashion magazine because that's not how we treat men.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/men-ups-manly-men-in-classic...

See how peculiar it looks?

I'm curious. Googling reveals that these posts are fairly common. The funny thing is that there aren't any photos of women in stereotypically male poses. Is that because there aren't any such poses or because no one feels a need to try it out? I'd like to see if those look as ridiculous.

Mayer chose to pose in a fashion magazine. She wasn't "treated" any way in this case.

Really? Like Donald Trump on the cover of GQ? How much criticism did he get for that?

I think you're underestimating the amount of criticism she got. It's been pretty crazy.

a. What's wrong with a fashion magazine? Vogue adds a metric ton more value to civil discourse than most business magazines combined.

b. Given the borderline-soft-porn treatment Elon Musk gets around here, I think we should collectively hold off on criticizing anyone for going overboard on such matters.

Well, yes, but her opponents are also dismissed as "macho loudmouth[s]", which is something you can only really say about a man.

That's not to say that all of the criticism of Mayer is fair or justified. I imagine that very little of it is. But I suspect that she's being criticised much more for having ideas, and the will to pursue them, than she is for being female (say, an 80/20 split). But it's a lot easier for people who don't care about the intricacies of Yahoo's product strategy to talk about her gender than it is to talk about her ideas for Yahoo's products.

I think the language is indicative of an entrenched male culture at the top trying to cope with a strong female leader from the outside. It's kind of the worst of both worlds. Sure, being a woman isn't the only thing, Mayer is also in tech. Top management probably finds that weird, too. However, calling her things like "a princess" or "stuck up" is incredibly patronizing and sexist. Everybody knows those words pretty much don't apply to grown men in a situation like this. That's to say, given the set of circumstances the semantics of these labels are specific to her gender.

I can't help but think people take issue with her gender, and then criticize her on the product front specifically so do they don't look sexist....which is why you see all this criticism that lacks proper justification about her strategy at Yahoo.

I don't think people criticize male CEOs as much for "having ideas and the will to pursue them." You can't say there isn't a gender-based double standard for CEOs obsessed with product to the degree that they sometimes offend their employees. Steve Jobs was known to berate and verbally abuse his employees, but people excused it because he was a "genius" and a "visionary". Meanwhile, the worst Mayer has done is ask work-from-home employees to return to the office and people call her a "princess".

I think it's incredibly relevant. Many of the criticisms she's received seem quite gender biased.

Let's see. One of the big ones is "she had a baby." Well, that's something that only a female CEO could do. And she took two weeks of maternity leave for it; no more than many CEOs take for vacation. That entire criticism seems to be "she's a woman", and wouldn't be applied to a male CEO who took a similar length family vacation.

Time claims that she has a "princess problem". Would any male CEO be described the same way? And they go on to say "She is one of only 21 female CEOs in the Fortune 500. Doesn’t she owe it to us to tell us how she got there?" Um, why would she owe anyone anything just because she's a female CEO?

The problem isn't that she's made enemies in the business sense. The problem is that lots of writers and columnists seem to focus more on her gender, and apply criticisms simply because she's female.

>>The problem isn't that she's made enemies in the business sense. The problem is that lots of writers and columnists seem to focus more on her gender, and apply criticisms simply because she's female.

When I said "enemies" I was focusing on people within Yahoo!. Who cares about what writers and columnists say? They will write anything to get readers.

This article is about what a specific writer says along with a few different talking heads. I think it's totally relevant.

I haven't followed the Yahoo saga too closely, but I thought the baby related criticism was related to her revoking people ability to work remotely while simultaneously building a nursery right next to her office so she could be near her own child. I don't recall any criticism of her 2 weeks of maternity leave.

I remember it. It wasn't as loud (because anyone with half a brain would be ashamed to say it) but it existed.

It's not clear to me that a criticism that is unique to a gender is gender biased. Any person part of a group has things/actions that are unique to that group and criticizing based on those isn't necessarily biased.

Re: princess problem...men have many times accused of thinking they're kings. And if you read the next line regarding "owing" an explanation - it's regarding spreading the word to females about how she has had success. It's about female empowerment and inspiring girls/women.

identity politics, nothing more.

Focus on the inane criticisms of her, things she cannot control or are natural, like child birth, then move onto other criticism that may be valid but with the link established in the readers mind the writer can openly dismiss these as extensions of the previous.

It is an all too common mechanism to deflect valid criticism of a person's actions. First by finding the obviously offensive, linking normally unrelated valid, and dismissing as a whole.

It is almost always seen in politics when a person in power sycophants line up to bemoan criticism. When they find they themselves cannot support the actions being criticized, let alone rationally defend them, they then in turn portray those who criticize of an offensive behavior, belonging to an offensive class of people, or worse suffering from severe personal defect, usually mental.

See it before, will see it again.

I am not saying criticism of her is valid or not, I really don't care. What she has been doing does not affect me in any other way. Being on the top of the pile means you get barbs from every direction, she definitely gets them from both sexes does she not? Its part of the game. The only dishonest people are those pulling the tricks I listed.

Men, on the other hand, face criticism that is never applied to women.

Why even bother bringing this point?

As a man, Its assumed I should OK with anything that comes my way. Almost anything! I mean I've put up with some crazy things in the past. I can only imagine the crap storm that would erupt if a women were to held to same standards or if the same treatment were to meted out to them.

Its assumed that when it comes to freedom, men are supposed to own up its biggest burden called 'responsibility'.

We are judged with a very different definition and standard of freedom.

What if I said you have a princess problem?

Look I'm not saying people don't get discriminated or harassed for their identity. People face this issues all the time, some one because of their gender, some because of their skin color, religion, or ethnicity or anything.

But if you keep justifying all your failures and problems by saying 'Bad things happen to you because your are X'. Replace X by black, women, muslim etc. The problem is very likely with your and not the world.

Having said this I still insist, men are constantly judged by very different standards compared to women.

I strictly believe by repeatedly playing the victim card and asking more benefits based on that, women are actually doing disservice to their original cause.

Who is playing the victim card here?

I'm male, and I'm saying that I don't think some of the criticisms she's received are warranted. There are definitely some legitimate critical points (the work from home policy, for example), but there also seem to be a lot of criticisms that merely revolve around the fact that she's a woman.

You need to distinguish between "playing the victim card" and "calling out behavior which is odious and unacceptable." I think that it's odious and unacceptable to make such a flap about the fact the Marissa Mayer had a kid, or call her a "princess" for not having a better answer for how she got where she was than "worked hard and got lucky."

> 'Bad things happen to you because your are X'. Replace X by black, women, muslim etc. The problem is very likely with your and not the world.

So, if you're forbidden from going to the same school, and having as much opportunity to learn, that's a problem with you? Remember, many schools were both racially and gender segregated until the 1970s; we've only had a single generation grow up into adults since that happened. Do you think that a single generation can be enough to remove all bias?

That's true, but somehow Meyer having enemies is newsworthy whereas for any other CEO it's not really remarked.

is there any reason to believe that Yahoo had not already shared information with government agencies?

"She's a woman. She's a CEO."

The bad news is Carly Fiorina. The good news is Carly Fiorina.

The bad news being she's also a woman leader in tech and the most famous one from a decade ago was a disaster.

The good news being she's a woman leader in tech and after a certain HP CEO a decade ago, she doesn't have to accomplish very much to rise above the bottom of the barrel and raise the bar for those of her kind.

Across any group, half of everyone is always by definition below the median. She seems, at the absolute minimum, to be in the upper half of leaders, so there's not really much to complain about.

Is Carly more famous in tech than Meg Whitman?

But I will say, if a female CEO starts generating public comparisons to Carly Fiorina, that would not be a good sign. :-)

Yet, the Republicans will trot out Carly Fiorina as an example of conservative female success.

From Wikipedia: ...she stated that Palin lacks the experience to run a major company like Hewlett-Packard ... Fiorina later amended her comment, stating that none of the candidates on either ticket had the experience to run a major corporation. Ironically, that assessment should've included Fiorina.

That is because Politicians have only ONE measure of success: How much personal wealth the person has. They care not how or by what means that money was acquired. Money == credibility in the political book.

Lie, cheat, steal, murder, scam and swindle? Bah- those issues are all in the past! Let's look forward to how (I) can make more money (off of you).

I think so, she is actually used as a case study during my MBA.

What was the case study about?

paraphrasing: How not to destroy company culture.

That would be an interesting one to read, any chance it's public?

No, but she's slightly more telegenic.

Mrs. Hauge is a great writer. She should write a book, but I guess she's still too busy. Thanks for sharing that link.

"There was one interesting thing I learned from Carlson’s article: Mayer was inspired in high school when she read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a great teacher. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know it’s about a wary ingénue in the corridors of corporate and imperial power who encounters a grotesque, power-mad egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, who has set up a personality cult around himself despite having deserved nothing of what he’d come into in his career, until he is overthrown by the “brutes” he’d attempted to control and suppress.

Remember that the next time you read a business-press takedown of Mayer."

It is literally impossible to tell what this is supposed to mean. When we remember this, what are we supposed to make of the memory? Is Mayer Kurtz, here, and the business press the brutes? That would sort of make sense, but why would Auerbach say that? Is Mayer Marlow? That doesn't make much sense. Also, what's so all-fired great about being inspired (he doesn't by what, or to do what [1]) by Heart of Darkness?

I respect David Auerbach a lot, but he seems pretty susceptible to Slate Disease.

[1] Elsewhere I was told that she was inspired ... to decorate her classroom in a jungle theme. Whoop-de-do.

He's trying to spin a character, which isn't very useful to someone looking for analysis.

Maybe so, but the characterization makes little sense.

ETA: maybe the idea is supposed to be, since Mayer read this book, she would never succumb to similar sins: she's sure to be cognizant of what she's earned vs. what's simply come to her; she wont be delusional but will rather have a clear head on her shoulders; she won't just attempt to control and suppress her subordinates and won't even think of them as mere brutes.

It would be beyond absurd to draw a conclusion like that based on a person's high-school enjoyment of a novel.

> Maybe so, but the characterization makes little sense.

Sorry, I didn't make it clear that I share this sentiment.

Well she's got everyone talking about Yahoo again and that's something no one else has been able to achieve for 5 + years (unless it was as a footnote to how not to do things)

She's paid by stockholders to improve the value of the company. Not win popularity contests. So that's the way she will/should be judged.

I totally agree. Yahoo has risen back into my mind and before her I was always like 'Meh, it's yahoo...' but now I actually think positively about Yahoo. Well, at least until I signed in the other day and found my account was removed for inactivity. They almost had me back...

" but now I actually think positively about Yahoo" I think that may be a bit of a stretch. Sure they are being brought up which is good since they haven't been relevant for years. They still have a long way before I could say I think positively about them as a company or their products.

> She's paid by stockholders to improve the value of the company. Not win popularity contests.

I'm not sure these two things are exclusive.

Yahoo has been a butthurt-engine for over a decade, the complaints are best thought of as noise.

I hadn't thought the original piece was a takedown - she came across as sharp-elbowed but effective. But well done this author for pointing out how it's basically a grumble piece by the stuffed suits she is deposing.

The piece set itself up as "nuance", but there were a lot of nasty little digs there about the geek who didn't bother fitting into the social club.

When was the last time you read something 'nuanced'?

Why would she bother? I guess, I didn't read those as digs. I don't especially bother to fit into social clubs either. It may be a blind spot.

In some workplaces, not fitting into the social clubs makes you a poor "cultural fit". You have to go to the right meetups, drink the right beers with the right people, and so on. Contract extensions and promotions depend on it. Thank goodness it doesn't work that way everywhere.

I liked this piece, too, but I thought the comparisons to Steve Jobs were misplaced and detracted from the overall argument. I do think that there's a lot to the argument that the tone of much of the criticism about her is a function of the fact that she's a woman who's also a technician.

From what I've read, I had the impression that she has many Jobsian (for lack of a better word) qualities. Especially with regards to product design: apparently she was a perfectionist at Google, going so far as to even care about subtle color differences and the effect these had on people.

As an engineer, I've always had more respect for managers with a technical background compared to managers with "just" an MBA, so in that regard I'm definitely interested in how Mayer's leadership will shape Yahoo - I think I would respect her as manager as I can only appreciate the opinions of people I respect in a work situation.

Good. If you're in the business of transforming and disrupting a business, having "friends" (who are really not friends, but people with shared interests) is a bad thing. A "friend" at that level is someone looking for a quid pro quo. (ie. "You protect me/my fiefdom, and I smile and say nice things.")

If you're an exec and want to try to marginalize your boss in the press by complaining about her "princess" ways, recall that the sword cuts both ways -- in the old days, annoying a princess landed you in the dungeon or gallows.

"If technical women can do the work of male businessmen, we might not need male businessmen anymore!"

Oh come on, as if anybody actually thinks this.

"Jim Heckman knows a lot about sports. He is, according to evidence, a macho blowhard. He wanted Yahoo to be “like a cable TV provider.” He is your worst nightmare as a boss."

I don't know him, and I doubt he is perfect (or anyone is), but this feels like a hit article on everyone who has disagreed with Marissa about Yahoo's direction? This article feels incredibly biased and has gone a good way to making me doubt Marissa's direction for Yahoo if she needs articles like this one to defend her. Not that I have anything (or want anything) to do with Yahoo, so maybe I'm not the target market.

I'm rooting for Mayer. Sounds like she's on the right track. She must have stepped on a lot of toes to get things done. Hope the Yahoo turnaround story is like the Apple turnaround story, and she will go down as a legend in the valley.

She's doing great IMO. This time next year $YHOO will be trading at $50. This company is way undervalued with her at the helm.

> Mayer is portrayed as “robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with detail,”

Normal people saying this about technical people is usually a good indicator that the technical person is doing just fine.

I'm kind of reminded of John McCain choosing Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. Sure it was a great, forward-thinking thing for him to choose a woman, particularly when running against a black man. But that doesn't mean it was a good idea. Likewise, I expect that Mayer's detractors will be dismissed as "Silicon Valley Sexists"... for a while.

Honestly, it seems like Yahoo is more interested in having big names than substance, and Mayer is certainly a marketable CEO. Does that mean she's a competent CEO? Time will tell.

I think it's insulting at best to compare Mayer to Sarah Palin.

Yet another example of gendered criticism of Mayer. How often do male CEOs get compared to inexperienced, hopeless Republican politicans? Just a coincidence I'm sure.

Please. I hate nothing more than a male-dominated work environment. The point I'm trying to make is that there is more to choosing an executive than diversity. Diversity is necessary, but not sufficient. The reason I brought Sarah Palin up is to illustrate that sometimes the results of focusing on diversity above all else sometimes produces painful results.

Beyond that, Yahoo has a history of making bad choices in terms of executive leadership. Perhaps they finally made a good choice this time, but I'm skeptical until I see proof otherwise.

Honestly, I fully expect that Mayer will set equality back.

> The point I'm trying to make is that there is more to choosing an executive than diversity

Oh, thanks for the heads-up.

Anyone know how many people (% of employees) that Steve Jobs fired when he returned as CEO? How did he get rid of the cruft of poor performers that had accumulated? Gradually? Or did he magically turn them around too?

I'm curious because it seems like Mayer has already doomed herself by not raising the caliber of the average Yahoo employee. Nothing hurts morale and productivity like working with colleagues you don't respect, in my experience.

Not sure how you can make this assertion. You don't know how many employees she's let go, how many Jobs let go, and there is no evidence that the new hires Yahoo has made are not high quality employees.

It doesn't seem like too much of a leap to suggest that Yahoo's average (NOT peak) employee quality has waned over the years. I know Steve Jobs believed Apple's had, which is why I'm curious how he solved the same problem so successfully.

If people say Mayer comes off as a bad person and CEO in the Carlson article, you can tell they didn't bother reading it to the end.

This is mentioned in the article, and the author comments that most people will have made up their minds and stopped reading by the time Carlson's article stops being negative.

"... who likes to code."

What language does she prefer? Does she prefer complexity or simplicity? Is her code verbose or terse? So many questions.

Does any of this matter? If you're into coding, then the answer is "Yes", in my opinion. In fact, when it comes to software, I really do not care about what the coder looks like, what clothes the coder wears, the coder's personality type, etc. In evaluating software, these things are all irrelevant to me. I only care about the coder's code sensibilities and tastes, and the quality of the code.

Anyway, can we see any code samples to back up her statement? I will believe it when I see the evidence.

No matter what he says or does in real life, and even if he wears cheap suits and ugly ties, I will always have an appreciation of one well-known, former CEO as a coder. Because lex is one of my favorite programs.

The information you're curious about does not seem to be in the public record. It's not easy to convey things like that through journalists, especially business journalists. Some of it may not even exist: some of the best coders I've ever known don't really have a favorite language. Knew a math PhD from MIT who used to just churn out Perl and C++ all day happy as a clam. I asked him if he'd prefer Lisp or something but he didn't really care - all about the algorithms for him.

Anyway, there are still good indications that Marissa Mayer has kept up both an academic interest in computer science and suspiciously coder-like habits well after her ascension to upper management.

Mayer was still teaching CS classes at Stanford after becoming a Google executive.[0]

She uses a terminal-based email client.[1]

And uses plain text for all her personal organizing.[2]

[0]http://ecorner.stanford.edu/author/marissa_mayer

[1]https://twitter.com/marissamayer/status/327200020128489472

[2]http://lifehacker.com/265651/google-vp-organizes-her-life-in...

I bought some Yahoo stock after reading about Mayer.

"He wanted Yahoo to be “like a cable TV provider.”"

So she's firing aggressive, narcissistic, horribly overpaid morons. Clap, clap, clap...

single page version:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/...

The original title, which you can still see in the URL, is "marissa_mayer_controversy_what_the_negative_coverage_gets_wrong". I wonder why they changed it?

Blessed are those who have a smattering of enemies, for they shall them a (s)hero.

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