How Marissa Mayer fell asleep and kept ad executives waiting for hours | Hacker News Reader

How Marissa Mayer fell asleep and kept ad executives waiting for hours

blogs.wsj.com

15 pointsanigbrowl21 comments

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Seen on Twitter, sounds about right to me:

RT @cjc "Male Executive Late to Meeting" -- headline you'd never see

srsly this is like a "mean girls" at work post

For men: being late is a status symbol

For women: OMG lets gossip about her

>For men: being late is a status symbol

Really? For who exactly is being late a "status symbol"?

Maybe for someone who doesn't need the deals and everybody else is dependent upon him.

But even those kind of people are frequenty marked as "arseholes" if they are constantly and arrogantly late.

The idea is that being late is a credible signal that you have high enough status to show up late and get away with it.

It only works if you get away with it, of course.

It's disrespectful in any event.

The thing about being fashionably late is you have to be fashionable about it. Meyer apparently disclosed to someone that she was late because she had "fallen asleep." She wasn't late because she had, say, decided to take an impromptu meeting with some power player, something you could plausibly write off as benefitting the company. And ultimately, that's what this piece was about -- an executive's performance as an executive:

>"If it were an investor meeting, a board meeting or a potential acquisition, I am sure she or someone from her team would have woken her up,” said one top executive in attendance.

> “It is another instance where she demonstrated that she doesn’t understand the value of clients, ad revenue or agencies,” the person added"

Certainly.

Larry Page late to meeting might be one though.

I haven't personally noticed any articles about Larry Page being late to meetings. Have you? Do you think it's more likely that he is not late and never suffers jet lag, or that it's not reported when he is?

Don't act like Marisa doesn't revel in all the attention she gets. She loves it.

In Meyer's case it seems to be part of a pattern. Also, it's a bit notable because she recently fired Yahoo's CMO and took on his portfolio, but has missed several face-to-faces with CEOs of major advertisers. I don't think it's a gender issue at all.

If it was a CEO of a large company in major need of ad money, and had blown a meeting with ad executives, yes, you'd very much see a headline about it.

Actually, one of the oldest lores of IT is the famous story of a male executive (Gary Kildall of Digital Research) failing to appear on a meeting with IBM executives who would have made his company the supplier of the OS for the IBM PC.

Plus, it's not like tons of profile pieces on Meyer, epspecially on her Google days, weren't written precicely because she is a woman in tech.

If it has to do with the PC, it's decades past "the oldest lores of IT" :-P

Well, the IT industry. Not much of an industry before then. I think their market cap in toto was below the Peeble watch today :-)

A smaller industry, to be sure, but an industry (and a fairly important one) - albeit entirely B2B. DEC was founded in 1957 (PDP-1 in 1959, PDP-11 in 1970), and of course IBM was founded in 1911 from three companies each of which made things that were arguably "information technology" although I've no trouble with drawing the line somewhere substantially later than that.

Could you link to a case where that has happened? Even in a similar industry?

Didn't I just devote a whole paragpraph for an exact case where that has happened?

What else do you expect from someone who claims to work 14 hours a day?

I don't work nearly that much and I dozed off in my coding chair three times today ...

Dude, fuck Mondelez. Me and others at the company I worked for at the time won their "hackathon" (against Salesforce and Google) which was supposed to turn into additional contract work, but they waffled for a while and then ditched us. Yahoo probably wouldn't have gotten anything out of them anyways.

Seems like at pattern for Mayer. And seems to be a pattern with some powerful people (ex. Bill Clonton is regularly described as "always late") - I guess because they can get away with it so often it becomes a habit.

http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-has-a-bad-habit...

Seems like a normal case of jet lag. 6000 miles east, +9 hour time difference between San Francisco and Cannes. When the sleep wall hits, it hits hard.

she needs to get fired, yahoo is just atrophying under her watch

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