I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer's "overpay" as CEO and outrage over her "golden parachute," while HN (a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40 comments and I've only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several comments praising her job in the role.
Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section.
Why is this? Is this because she's from Google? Because she's a former engineer? Because she's a female CEO? Is she just a politically polarizing topic ala Elon Musk?
IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absolutely ludicrous to most Americans. She's an easy target for people who want to claim that she only got the job for being an attractive female.
I think HN readers remember a bit more about the state that Yahoo was in when she took over (hint: not good.) I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo. I think she succeeded on that front: the market was probably undervaluing Yahoo's other assets, and she was able to sell those to Verizon for a fair price after divesting the Alibaba stake.
tl;dr: Yahoo was long dead before she arrived. WSJ readers forget that. HN readers don't. Plus she's an attractive woman, which will always paint a target on your back as an executive.
> I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo.
If that was the case she never would have been given the job. That's something any old bean counter could do and they wouldn't require hundreds of millions of dollars for the babysitting job.
She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?).
Some examples:
* Tumblr - $1.1b with the majority of that later written off because they have only figured out how to keep losing money
* Polyvore - $230m A fashion search engine run by people she used to mentor at Google
* Summly - $30m to a teenager for a news app that was shut down and never heard of again
> She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?).
Well, it's no small thing to divest a big chunk of equity like that without crushing the value. There are a few ways you can do it, but you need someone empowered to actually execute on it for the board. That's the CEO's job. She did a good job in that.
And yeah, she made some bad acquisitions. But most of these types of acquisitions fail (it's not like great companies put themselves up for sale -- just look at Microsoft's or HP's acquisition history) and the losses on those acquisitions were more than made up for by the additional amount she was able to get for the combined Alibaba + Yahoo. She basically ended up spinning off the entire value of the Alibaba stake plus $4.5 billion -- which is about $5 billion ahead of where the company was at when she started (remember the articles basically saying Yahoo's operations were worth negative money?)
>... She basically ended up spinning off the entire value of the Alibaba stake plus $4.5 billion -- which is about $5 billion ahead of where the company was at when she started
The market value of the company almost always is not equal to what the company could sell itself for to another company. In this case, the board would have likely gotten much more for the shareholders by spinning off Alibaba and selling the rest rather than hire Mayer.
For example:
- She did some very bad hires such as Henrique de Castro who in 15 months got over 100 million in salary, stock and severance.
- She wasted billions on acquisitions that did not add value.
- Most of the comments from Yahoo employees since she was hired were never very good, and her behavior with employees was said to sometimes be somewhat bizarre (such as reading a children's book at a comm meeting) or essentially throwing a company party where she is the guest of honor.
I don't know the numbers for sure, but with the security breaches, web site redesigns and inability to get ahead of technology trends, I think user engagement with the site is likely less than when she started.
So here is what Yahoo did: It "aqui-hired" a team of people, led by a 17-year-old living in London, that cannot claim to have invented a cool technology OR to have built a cool app. Yahoo does own the technology SRI invented for Summly, but it doesn't own SRI, so it hasn't acquired the team that can scale the technology for Yahoo.
This comment only shows that those who talk most online about how people are mistreated based on gender are the ones who are the most sexist.
Step back for a minute and think about how this relates to sexism at all. It is you who associated these two concepts together. You are the one who's being sexist. Once you take off your sexist glasses and see things clearly, you'll realize you are making as huge logical fallacy as the one you're criticizing.
Sexism needs to stop but comments like this are what makes it hard.
Yahoo doesn't break out the numbers so we don't know how much revenue any of the companies they acquired are bringing in (profit would be even more difficult because of shared resources). Regardless, none of this has anything to do with gender. I chose a large, medium and small example from a list of Yahoo's acquisitions.
You may think it was MM's primary job to sell Yahoo for parts, but I don't think she did. Look at the initiatives into media, big-bet acquisitions, reinvestment in search. I think it's clear she was trying to reinvent Yahoo, and that's the story she told the board. She even did a rebrand right away, a rather dubious logo designed by her and some associates over a weekend.
I was optimistic when she came on board, because Yahoo really needed a strong product vision and someone who had a touch of ruthlessness. But maybe it was unsalvageable.
Yahoo did need a visionary but if you look at her bio on wikipedia it tells a different story. It mentions she is known for her attention to detail and she is a usability leader. She joined google as employee #20 after school. She was involved in many important google projects over the span of her career at google overseeing core key project in many cases. Very well rounded person.
To me that sounds like the wrong person to bet my money on. The employee who plays it safe is not right person to transform a dying company that needed radical change. You need a bolder person. Someone with a burning passion or an act to grind.
If you are google employee 20 and you haven't cashed out to build something you always wanted to but didn't have the resources yet I don't think I want you leading the transformation process. I would rather have employee 21 who quit and tried something else and failed.
Also, her experience running hundreds of projects and experiments at another billion dollar tech company is exactly what they wanted. Not whether she does all-nighters and knows Rails. I'm not going to argue that the Yahoo board made the right choice, but you would definitely have made the wrong choice.
I am of the opinion that Ms. Mayer was hired partly as a way for Yahoo's investors to hedge their bets [1]. Its a bit of a dark view on silicon valley culture, perhaps, but I think a valid one.
Anyways, I agree with your point that Yahoo had already suffered most of its damage. In many ways, its latest CEO did the best that could be expected of anyone in that position.
>IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absolutely ludicrous to most Americans. She's an easy target for people who want to claim that she only got the job for being an attractive female.
Who said that? The non-existent, hypothetical people?
The funny part about your pushback is that Mayer is pretty much identical in behavior to any number of other male CEOs who have received golden parachutes without comment. There's literally nothing she's receiving that others haven't before.
"Marissa Mayer's replacement as CEO of Yahoo, Thomas McInerney, will get paid twice as much as she did—for a job basically doing nothing."
"After all, the company that McInerney will run will not be an operating business like the one Yahoo is today, but rather an investment company not all that different from a mutual fund."
"In short, McInerney is getting paid a huge amount to sit atop a fund that basically runs itself. The way Yahoo describes McInerney's responsibilities in a filing Monday makes it sound like he will be little more than a glorified trustee, the way a retiree might occasionally check in on the status of the family nest egg."
The comment above is false, it if ignores the value of equity. Fortune was pushing a bullshit sexism narrative. Mayer made 10x in equity what McInerney made in salary
These are potential golden parachutes. As in they have not received this compensation... because the majority of them are still running their companies.
Your comment reads a little disingenuously, or maybe you didn't understand the article.
The pushback is due to the perception that the incentives are misaligned. Right or wrong, people feel she ran the company into the ground. In that light, they feel the compensation is undue.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with the perception that she is a charlatan.
When she was hired, I thought, "she's qualified." And then I watched and listened during her press tour on the morning news shows and conference interviews... she spoke like a visionary -- someone with all the ideas to turn Yahoo around. And I thought, "that's awesome, let's see how she does." And now, here we are.
I've seen the same pushback against Shai Agassi -- a male -- for being a visionary charlatan... for somehow falling into great fortunes with little to show.
Exactly. Trot out the old argument "If we didn't pay that, we couldn't find qualified candidates!" Yahoo had to hire her away from a senior leadership position at Google. She was young, sure, but she was definitely qualified.
The difference between her and others is that she runs a silicon valley tech company - so of course you're going to see her name on HN and not the CEO of McKesson. Yahoo is a recurring, popular topic on this forum. So what is your point exactly?
Personally, I assumed that all CEO's are massively overpaid and that they all negotiate substantial "golden parachutes". I think I'm a bit numb to the dollar amounts as they all seem inconceivably large to me. It all strikes me as buisiness-as-usual.
I don't know. I think for instance that Steve Jobs was really underpaid. His work (even surrounded by smart minds) and his leadership with his vision were a real launch pad for Apple. I can see a few CEOs like that who seem to be overpaid but I think are underpaid compared to their value they bring for their company.
Look at Satya Nadella. His new vision for Microsoft and all the key decisions he made are really what you see in its stocks. From +12 years of nothing to twice its valuation.
In the case of Apple the CEO is the public face of a fantastic team Steve built. I assume Microsoft is similar, Satya just knows how to get out of the way better than Ballmer did.
I think Satya comes from a dramatically different cultural and professional background than Ballmer and has a correspondingly different set of priorities and ideas.
The difference is like night and day. Ballmer was all about monopolization, vendor lock-in, ruling the developer community with an iron fist, and funneling all business into the proven profit centers. Nadella understands the value of interoperability, evangelizing your own tech while trying to advance community efforts, embracing open source, and developing new lines of business independent of legacy products.
Also, Satya doesn't act like a clown in public (Developers, developers) or drops unqualified statements about products from the competition (Ballmer about the iPhone).
> I think for instance that Steve Jobs was really underpaid.
Care to guess what job (or, equally likely, what prison) Steve Jobs would've found himself in had he not stumbled into Steve Wozniak? Because without Wozniak, Jobs' best chance at success would have been a cart full of hot dogs after some ball game. Or, knowing his cult-like charisma, maybe a few old ladies he could've conned for money.
I'm not trying to be gratuitously mean, I genuinely would like you to think about this. If the "visionary" would not have had this head start, i.e. Wozniak creating something amazing; suppose Wozniak would've never existed, do you still think Jobs would have actually been in any way successful?
Wow I didn't think I would be down voted so much.. Is it because I spoke of Steve Jobs?
You can look all the problems a bad CEO can do : Kenneth Lay with Enron, Theranos, Twitter, Caterpillar 2 years ago even thought he said he didn't know. But it was his job to know... And now Travis Kalanick with the culture he created at Uber and now the damages it makes.
And you can look at all the value a great CEO can do too.
I think you are absolutely right about Jobs. He took a company on the brink of bankruptcy with less than 5% market share and made it the most valuable company of the planet. If by happy accident or by masterplan design I don't think any other person could have done that.
Though that is not normal. You wouldn't expect a new CEO of a small bank to overtake JPMorgan Chase.
> If by happy accident or by masterplan design I don't think any other person could have done that.
Let me give you some insight that you might be unaware of. When the iPhone was announced, there were a few offices in Nokia where people were crying more than they would at their relatives' funerals. You know why? Because they had that exact technology and prototypes similar to the iPhone, except that the Nokia execs didn't believe something like that would succeed, for multiple (and seemingly valid) reasons. Since Apple didn't really have much to lose they launched the iPhone, a phone that despite being initially inferior to other phones (multiple reasons which I'm not going to get into) managed to get a huge market share eventually (never underestimate people's desire to show off fancy new trinkets; I think it's called fashion).
Anyway, arguably one of the biggest reasons for iPhone's success were the apps. Now, this isn't mentioned often because it risks spoiling a nice fantasy, but did you know that Jobs was actually against the concept of developer-written apps, as the ones that you find in the App Store? Yeah, there were some people who came up with the idea and had to work very hard to convince the "visionary" that this would be indeed a game-changer. He reluctantly had to concede, because in the end money is better than ego.
So yeah, judging by everything that I read, and by the fact that I don't go building shrines to any person associated to with a successful project, leads me to believe that the Jobs success story was a simple accident. Simple example - look at the huge market share that Mac's have. Oh wait, that's right; they don't. And not for lack of trying, also. Jobs lucked out with the iPhone, just as he lucked out when he bumped into Wozniak and managed to somehow be in charge without actually putting in too much work. Actually, dodging work without being caught was probably one of his most developed features (I know, fanboys will say it's a good thing; sure it's good, if you're a parasite feeding off other people's work).
I know a lot of Americans believe in the American dream and that if they work as hard and are brilliant as Steve Jobs, they too could be successful like him. Heh. Funny.
As for MS, Ballmer laid that foundation. Nadella is capitalizing, but MS is mostly capitalizing on it's position and not so much offering a ground breaking direction.
I think any CEO that takes $1M/week out of a failing company and claims credit for a predecessors' good bets is going to get some negative attention. Add a little dash of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do workplace policy making, some obviously stupid acquisitions, throwing huge parties where you're the guest of honor, hiring retirement-age network news anchors to spruce up a new media play, and you're infamous.
>Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section.
Uhh.. What are you talking about? Everyone complains about the pay scale of CEOs. Especially CEOs of failing or under performing companies. That's been a thing for years. She's a failed CEO. She was brought in to turn Yahoo around and didn't.
She is a rising star before joining Yahoo, and she basically turns Yahoo from a 20B company into a 5B one, and rewarded with a huge chunk of money for leaving the company.
And among all those astounding achievements, you only think people are judging her because she is a female, you must being living in a bubble.
I disagree that her criticism is gender motivated.
I doubt that Yahoo worth negative value with all the engineers they hire and assets they control, without Alibaba's stock. From another perspective, she doesn't really bring Yahoo back on track, that market thinks it is worthless without Alibaba's stock. As a CEO and a high profile one, that is a definitely a failure.
> I doubt that Yahoo worth negative value with all the engineers they hire and assets they control, without Alibaba's stock.
That's not a matter of opinion. The worth of the company and the worth of the Alibaba stock it held were common knowledge, and subtracting one from the other resulted in a negative number.
>..I think it is probably more correct that she grew the value of Yahoo significantly, ~0 -> 4.5B
The market value of the company almost always is not equal to what the company could sell itself for to another company - sometimes more, sometimes less. If you think the value of Yahoo’s assets were actually negative back then, do a thought experiment - let’s say 4 years ago Yahoo decides to sell the Yahoo assets to another company - do you think they would have to pay another company to take the Yahoo front page, mail etc? In this case, the board would have likely gotten much more for the shareholders by keeping Alibaba and selling the rest rather than hire Mayer. I don't know the numbers for sure, but with the security breaches, web site redesigns and inability to get ahead of technology trends, I think user engagement with the Yahoo web sites is likely less than when she started.
>"I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer's "overpay" as CEO and outrage over her "golden parachute," while HN (a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40 comments and I've only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several comments praising her job in the role."
A CEO's compensation is used to retain and motivate that talent to create value for the company. If investors feel dissatisfied with how much they paid for the level of value creation they received on a particular asset that is very much a capitalist sentiment. There is nothing even remotely anti-capitalist about that.
Those hundreds of millions of dollars in CEO pay have to come from somewhere and that somewhere is increasingly company stock. Company stock is an asset that belongs to the company and that company is owned by shareholders. Money spent on "rock star CEOs" is money that could have otherwise been used to deliver more value to shareholders, an example would be returning money to shareholders in the form of dividends.
> Company stock is an asset that belongs to the company and that company is owned by shareholders.
I think this is the key to the confusion: seeing the shareholders as the true "owners" (and therefore controllers) of a corporation is, more and more, associated with socialist undertones: people recognize in phrases like "the shareholders are more important than the CEO" the sentiments of people who call for labor unions and co-ops, which want to assert not only employee shareholdership, but also shareholder primacy.
The current form of "capitalism" that exists in most Western countries, has a corporate structure that's a bit like the Bureaucracy of ancient China: we have self-perpetuating Boards of Directors that—while being nominated by the voting shareholders—also control the opinions of the same shareholders. Where the ideal corporation would be a "representative democracy of the shareholders", the current structure is more akin to a "plutocracy of the directors."
This is the hidden war that is being fought using the proxy of "CEO pay": Board-of-Directors-plutocracy corporate-model-ists like cronyist CEOs that are in their own pocket, doing things that serve the board in particular at the expense of the shareholders generally. They're willing to pay high premiums for this—and, also, when the CEO "comes from" their stock, to throw money at them "just because" (hoping they'll get their own turn to be thrown money at later on.)
Meanwhile, the representative-democracy corporate-model-ists resent CEOs that have any sort of elevated position; they see a CEO as a necessary evil—a general and strategist to serve with skilled experience their civilian representative who does not have those skills. To them, the CEO isn't a buddy, but rather a risk to be managed—a sort of genie, who the board (as the trusted elect) must do its best to keep in its bottle, even as they demand wishes from them.
Each side of this confrontation calls the other "anti-capitalist." But, as I hope should be obvious, neither of these sides really represents "capitalism" per se. Instead, one values the sort of concentration of wealth and power that anarchocapitalism enables; while the other side values the power of the corporate charter in an almost patriotic way.
>"I think this is the key to the confusion: seeing the shareholders as the true "owners" (and therefore controllers) of a corporation is, more and more, associated with socialist undertones: people recognize in phrases like "the shareholders are more important than the CEO" the sentiments of people who call for labor unions and co-ops, which want to assert not only employee shareholdership, but also shareholder primacy."
No, there is no "confusion", share holders are in fact the owners of a publicly-traded company[1]. There is no need for quoting the word owners either.
The phrase "the shareholders are more important than the CEO" was not used by either myself or the OP. The discussion was also not about organized labor. Why you have chosen to invent a quote and introduce the topic of organized labor is just bizarre.
There is nothing at all socialist about equities as an asset class.
It's more complicated than that. There are situations where there's a class "A" share and class "B" share where class "A" has no voting rights. So the ownership by class A means close to nothing. Then there are institutional owners, like pension funds, who vote on behalf of the people who actually put the money in the fund.
The rights of minority shareholders in public companies, like you and me, needs to be protected/regulated by law. If someone wants to pay their CEO $1B an hour they can take their company private. Otherwise what happens is that the average shareholders gets screwed (like I was for example when I held GM shares as it went bankrupt).
I understand about "dual class" share structures but that doesn't mean a shareholder has any less ownership. They may have less influence or power but not not less ownership.
Influence and ownership are somewhat orthogonal concepts in the context of a corporation.
People like you and me are protected. Both CEOs and the Board of Directors have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders - all shareholders. And breach of fiduciary duties can incur both criminal and civil penalties:
The value of a piece of a corporation stems from a claim to said corporation's future profits. If you have no influence then you may not be able to stake that claim. For example, if you don't have equal vote on whether the corporation should pay dividend out of its profit then you may never get paid.
When is the last time a CEO was on trial for share buybacks where clearly he has conflict of interest with the shareholders due to the $$$'s he makes in compensation?
Or I scratch your back you'll scratch my back kind of arrangements in boards?
And what got us here, the outrageous CEO compensation and other benefits. When a CEO is paid x100 the President of the USA you know something isn't right. Since any given company may claim they have to pay more to be competitive the only way to stop that looting is to force them by law to control those salaries.
I agree that in theory we're in a good place but in practice I think we can still make progress... Fiduciary duty apparently is insufficient.
>"The value of a piece of a corporation stems from a claim to said corporation's future profits. If you have no influence then you may not be able to stake that claim."
No, If buy the stock I have a contractual right to future profits. This is true whether I am a small individual investor or whether I personally know every member of the Board of Directors. The stock represents that claim. Influence is completely orthogonal to the legal contract that the stock represents.
Doesn't this entire discussion demonstrate it ain't so? If the company has a revenue of $1B and pays the CEO $1B then it has zero profit. So how does the contractual obligation work out here? If you don't get a say on whether the CEO gets $1B in salary then what exactly is going on here?
There are other situations like the company taking on debt, issuing more shares, bankruptcy, acquiring other companies, share buybacks, dividends. If you don't have control there are ways for the company to "steal" your share of the profits.
> The rights of minority shareholders in public companies, like you and me, needs to be protected/regulated by law.
They are - the law requires the board to act in the fiduciary interests of shareholders of public companies. If the board didn't act as such, then you would have legal standing and be within your rights to sue.
It's not so much that the law needs to do a better job protecting shareholders, and more that the legal system needs to make it easier/cheaper/more accessible for common people to assert their rights.
See my reply to bogomipz above. I think the law could do more. Fiduciary duty is hard to prove but we do have fairly common practices that fairly clearly have negative influence on shareholders. I think the law should regulate those explicitly. Back to my GM example, there was some sort of class action lawsuit I signed on to, I believe all the money went to the lawyers. The bankruptcy laws are biased against the "small" shareholders. The large shareholders typically negotiate some terms that aren't available to the "little guys". Usually because they are also bond holders or hold some convertible instruments or preferred shares. A corporation like GM can effectively erase the small shareholders, start over, while pouring millions (of government money) into the pockets of the large shareholders. That shouldn't be legal.
(Edit: GM today, which is basically the same company that went under and then got Government $$'s is now worth $50B dollars. I didn't lose that much money but what pisses me off is that the dice was clearly loaded here. 80% of GM shares are held by institutions and funds and they're laughing all the way to the bank ... well, they are the bank!).
I am not sure that a 'generic' CEO would have had a different result.
Broadly there are commentators who seem nostalgic for the 'old' Yahoo (and by that I mean the turn of the century Yahoo) and they often express angst in 'over paying' the CEO more along the lines of "we could have used that money to may Yahoo! great again" rather than pay it to some CEO.
Then there are people who have some idea of the level of change Yahoo! has gone through and the number of founding assumptions that didn't work later in its life. Those people understand what Mayer was up against at least.
And there are a number of entrepreneurial folks who made lifestyle businesses out of one or more of the many Yahoo! APIs that powered a lot of web sites over the years.
My point is that the opinion of the commentator will often have more to do with their relationship to Yahoo! and less to do with how well or poorly Marissa did her job.
Yesterday there was a post about Marissa resigning, and it was nothing but "I can't believe she has been payed this much for sinking Yahoo".
My pet theory is that the first comment or so sets the mood, and the opposing camp can't be bothered to participate where their opinion will be met with critique.
One other thing I noticed is that every time there is a post about her here, everyone calls her Marissa, or Marissa Mayer, or Ms. Mayer (seriously!)... never Mayer. I might be "attributing to malice" but dudes never get called "first name", only "last name".
It might just be the way it is in the US, but I can't help read it as a way to depower someone. I dunno if "depower" is the right term, but it feels something like that.
Again, that might just be a cultural thing that I'm not aware of.
Elon Musk is frequently called "Elon"
Steve Jobs is never called "Jobs"
Bill Gates is rarely if ever called "Gates"
You're trying to make a point out of nothing. Some names are simply more prone to be called using the first name, the last name only, or both, because it might just "sound" better or be sufficiently recognizable.
Of course no one would call Steve Jobs "teve" since it's such a common name. "Marissa" and "Elon" are more rare and directly identify the people they refer to
I think it's something we inherited from the Brits. I don't believe it would be 'proper' to call a woman by her (unadorned) family name. But generally yes, it's a way to disempower women built into our language.
How is being called by your first name, your last name, or your full name more disempowering than being called by your last name only? Care to explain?
I'm really not the person to talk about styles of address, current or historical. Referring to someone solely by their surname is typically a male-only thing as far as I am aware. I believe that it's especially prevalent in english schools. Women might technically not have an independent right to their names as they would take up their husband's name upon marriage. Being called by one's first name is familiar and in the context of a public figure demeaning. Consider the effect when someone refers to Obama or Trump -- no one needs to disambiguate who these names refer to. We refer to Marissa Mayer because she's not notable enough to simply call her Mayer. That would be my uninformed take on things, at any rate.
> but dudes never get called "first name", only "last name".
Mayer is a really common name. The only way to distinguish her from the 15 Mayers I know is by full name. But in a conversation about her, I'll use whatever's shorter.
But let's also address the partial vs full name argument that commonly comes up. I hear that argument a lot. Warren Buffett is a good example. Nearly every time he's mentioned, it's by full name unless you're already talking about investment. Using his full name adds a bit of gravitas.
Partial name usage over full name is usually indicative of a few things:
1. Familiarity: The speaker feels familiar with the person - either through personal contact, proximity or extensive exposure.
2. Uniqueness within context: There's only one person with that last name that people would think of when you mention the name. If you're talking about operating systems, saying Gates or Torvalds is often enough to understand. And if you're on stage sweating and awkwardly chanting at a tech conference, people will understand that you're "pulling a Ballmer".
3. Brevity: If you talk about a person long enough in a monologue or discourse, or over a long period of time you'll get tired of mentioning their full name. Last name is usually preferred culturally unless there's a chance of confusion with another person.
4. Personal preference: Sometimes some names roll off the tongue better than others. If a speaker finds a name hard to pronounce or spell, they might pick another.
5. Cultural unfamiliarity: Nadella was easier for me to remember by his last name than his first name "Satya".
6. Rhetoric: You might be trying to appeal to a well-known authority by their most common reference to add panache (e.g. "Gandhi" vs "Warren Buffet"). And this reference can depend on whether you're trying to put a positive spin vs. a negative one. "Barack Obama" vs "Obama" is a good example, with the first/last combo being used more frequently by supporters and just the last name (or the first/middle/last combo) used by detractors.
On the other hand, long names might be preferred due to alliteration or rhyming ("Marissa Mayer" and "Rami Rahim" just flow really well), possible confusion with regular nouns ("Elon Musk", "Steve Jobs"), or that's how they were introduced ("Tim Cook").
Finally, insiders (employees and/or industry partners) will refer to a person differently than outsiders.
So, no, it's not about sex. Sex might be a contributing factor to familiarity or rhetoric depending on the person. But there are plenty of famous men that are referred to by their full name with respect (Buffet) or scorn (Ballmer).
Sex might be a contributing factor to familiarity or rhetoric depending on the person.
This. As I noted in a sibling, at the time I first responded to the comment, the use of just "Marissa" far outweighs the use of any form that includes her surname.
What are the chances the HN user-base is actually more familiar with Meyer? Sure, she came out of the SV world, but I don't see Musk referred to as "Elon" much on HN.
> but I don't see Musk referred to as "Elon" much on HN.
Nearly every time the people I interface with introduce him into a discussion, he's referred to by full name. His first name sounds a bit weird to me out of context - all strong vowels. But I hear his employees refer to him by first name. It'll differ from place to place.
> What are the chances the HN user-base is actually more familiar with Meyer?
There's also the fact that these huge comment trees are linked to articles and have titles that usually include the person's full name or company at the top. In every case we're talking about someone on Hacker News, we're immediately susceptible to the brevity exception as everyone reading and commenting already contextually knows who you're talking about.
Using a full name in contextual discussion sounds weird to me, honestly. I knew a person who would call me by my full name as I was leaving parties and other social engagements and it was weird and awkward because it was overly formal and I used to date that person. And I didn't appreciate the loud, immediate attention.
Which name you use when referring to strangers is kind of random. I have some people who call me by last name, others by first. A lot of it depended on how they were introduced to me, or whether I lived in a place where that name was uncommon. People like to categorize, and often the more unique a name, the better.
It's important to always assume good faith when someone does something that's weird to you. I've been recently working a lot with social services, which has a lot of good examples of deescalating situations. Like with abused children - when the come into care they will quite commonly interact in an uncomfortably familiar or even sexual fashion because they've lived in situations where those lines weren't very clear. It's not bad behavior - it's just the survival skills they've learned. In those cases, it's most important to just not freak out and calmly talk your way through things. Adults who attempt to read motive out of their behavior tend to start a lot of unnecessary conflict.
I'm a bit weird because I actually bought etiquette and flower arrangement books. This stuff is interesting to me, although the changing landscape of social etiquette frustrates nearly everyone. Just keep in mind that a lot of the words we speak, as well as the way we speak them and the way that we refer to each other is based on unspoken rules that subtly alter between generations and across cultures. There's no one rule for interactions anymore. Even though we like to pretend that there is when someone crosses our own boundaries.
I think I've seen Microsoft and Google CEOs just called by Satya and Sundar before. Makes sense. Their names are super rare in the West. Marissa is not common too. As the other comment said same with Elon. It feels natural to just say Elon.
IMO it's because she was intentionally not a generic CEO. The high profile approach to publicity was part of her plan, and brand, to turn around Yahoo. It just failed.
Because she made big PR how she will make yahoo new again and then did super tiny things thay changed the logo, made random acquisitions and removed remote workers, which will absolutely change a failing company.
I was expecting a new revolutionary product, a complete refocus of the company, such as Apple. She sure must have had this in her plan or she probably actually didn't.
Sounds to me like someone didn't know what they were doing instead of someone who really has a plan.
CEOs are often also capitalists, and often specifically major capital holders in the firms of which they are CEO, but, as CEOs, they are elite, highly-compensated employees.
HN may be less pro-capitalist than the WSJ (though it's still pretty pro-capitalist, overall), but if anything it's more pro-elite-employee than the WSJ.
I'm a capitalist and think that some CEOs are overpaid and that golden parachutes for failed CEOs are obscene. That doesn't mean that I want the government to do something about it. Shareholders are getting ripped off and that's their problem ultimately. Caveat emptor.
Definitely. When the government steps in, it's always the boards and executives who hire the lobbyists who write the laws and regulations. They don't do so with common stock investors' interests in mind. The system will not solve the problems with the system.
I don't know if being a female CEO has much to do with it. She was making a lot of money because she was supposed to turn things around and save the company. Instead Yahoo made a ton of huge blunders, sold off Alibaba and then finally sold the company to Verizon for a fraction of what it used to be worth.
Some stake in Alibaba was required to be sold off during be IPO. The person she hired to be the liaison with Alibaba was able to keep over 100 million extra shares. And the deal to sell a huge stake was before she came on board. So that's not her fault at all.
I don't know what gave you the impression that HN isn't capitalist-friendly. We have long had a whole lotta kool-aid going around here about markets, entrepreneurs, etc. In many ways startup culture is the embodiment of capitalism.
How is HN less capitalist-friendly? Articles about high valuations, venture capitalists, raising rounds, praising mega corporations like amzn, fb, Google, etc. often get to the top without many criticizing remarks. Many HNrs benefit greatly from capitalism and its mechanisms like raising capital or stock market while working for very large corporations.
I'm not so sure it completely boils down to her gender. I mean, I'm sure that's an issue for some folks... but I can't say that explains 100% of the vitriol. She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. That was a douche move. Any CEO that plays the "us and them" policy with their workers vs execs rubs me the wrong way. I'm not at all bothered that she got 23 million as a "thank you". She had an extremely hard job. The pressures she dealt with are nothing I could understand. So by all means, reward her for it! But I'm still kinda chapped about the work from home thing.
> She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had.
Google does not have a WFH policy. She killed the policy because internal audit showed that many people were just not working when they claimed to be; VPN and sign-in logs turned up many slackers. There were some who were allowed to WFH. So it wasn't a blanket "no one's allowed to WFH", but more a "justify your need to WFH and show that you're doing a good job".
> Then she promptly built a nursery in her office.
She did not take much of a maternity leave at all. She came back within 2 weeks of giving birth via a cesaerean(sp). She just converted a cube nearby to where she kept her kid.
Also remember that by the time she killed the WFH policy, Yahoo had been circling the drain for a long time. When your best folks can easily find new/better jobs, they do; and you're left with a company full of people who are having a hard time finding anything else. It's one thing to kill a successful WFH policy at a thriving company; it's another entirely to do it with a company that is having problems.
Google is also among the companies I wouldn't want to work for. It's just a deal breaker for me. Having a policy and then rescinding it would be another deal breaker. I get that there were slackers, but when it comes to developers, were team leads really not seeing this? They had to have an audit? How does this type of slacking even work? "Oh, I'm working on this thing that should have taken a few hours for the third day in a row".
My point was that I don't think she afforded the "bring your infant to work" policy for developers. One main reason I might choose to work from home, is that I would be able to look after an infant while my significant other ran errands. All kudos to heading right back to work especially after that tough of a procedure. (although I'd argue SHE should have worked from home at that point)...
Because she’s A female CEO? Any evidence? Lockheed, Duke Energy, IBM – all female CEOs and they don’t get near the scrutiny of Mayer – probably because they are competent and don’t engage in bombastic grandstanding.
Mayer was a bad CEO – take Alibaba out of the equation and Yahoo became materially worse off expressly because of the decisions she made. Look at the ridiculous acquisitions, look at the brain drain. What the hell is Yahoo’s product? Email? They can’t even keep that secure – compromising a BILLION accounts. They were warned about MD5 in 2008. Yahoo’s Security team was treated like second class citizens – requests being denied because of cost too much or they were considered a low priority. Who set those priorities? Mayer. A a billion accounts got compromised as a result. There is a direct cause-effect.
Complaining about her salary is completely valid – not because it was “high” but because she got such an incomprehensible salary for running the company into the ground. Nobody complains about Tim Cook’s salary because nobody cares – Apple is extremely profitable, which is the entire point of a CEO. Tim Cook is a liberal gay man – so if the idea that people are harder on Mayer is because of her sex – imagine how hard they should ostensibly be on Cook. Yet Cook is actually doing a good job. Nobody cares what someone has between their legs if the share price is good.
Mayer is criticized because she was horrible, ineffective and engaged in substance-poor grandstanding and she got paid enormously for essentially crashing the ship into an iceberg before Verizon came along like the Carpathia. Sure, Yahoo was the Titanic before Mayer arrived, but she knew that and yet still went full-ahead sailing Yahoo into the ice field or irrelevancy.
Thank you for laying it out so well. I am a female executive and I am so sick of everyone saying that she's only getting criticized because she's female. So what, we can't get criticized if we do a horrible job? If we treat our employees unfairly? If we don't do what's best for our companies? She was a bad CEO and she deserved to be fired long ago.
> She was a bad CEO and she deserved to be fired log ago.
On what basis are you claiming that? Do you have any idea about how the other CEOs before her did?
Disclaimer: I worked at Yahoo for several CEOs, including Mayer. I think she was the best CEO at Yahoo in a long time. So please, enlighten me why my impression of her is incorrect.
These are all outsiders second-guessing and, in many cases, just making shit up.
I was there. I saw the sea change she brought into the company. Morale skyrocketed, after the company was just drifting around for years. Compared to Carol Bartz, she was a CEO extraordinaire.
I'm thinking I'm going to listen to the many, many outside experts, plus what I see myself reported by other insiders, vs. one anonymous insider I run across on a site who worked for her and appears to have bias.
That is your prerogative, and I wish you all the luck. I didn't work for her, I was 3 levels below her and experienced the sea-change when she came. After suffering through the likes of Semel, she was a huge, positive change.
> Because she’s A female CEO? Any evidence? Lockheed, Duke Energy, IBM – all female CEOs and they don’t get near the scrutiny of Mayer – probably because they are competent and don’t engage in bombastic grandstanding.
All B2B industrials; not consumer tech companies that get reported on ad nauseam in the media. Lockheed's product lifecycles are measured in decades; Yahoo's in months. I don't think it's a fair comparison.
Agree that Yahoo had really shitty product focus, but that was true 10 years before she joined. Like you said, Yahoo had been warned about MD5 nearly a decade ago -- security had obviously been deprioritized for years before she arrived.
What did she do? She stopped the bleeding long enough to get a sale done. She basically acted like a private equity CEO. If you view her job as extracting the most value out of Yahoo, she did a pretty good job of that.
Without a doubt, there are a ton of extremely capable female executives who are rightfully recognized for their contributions.
The criticism against Mayer was due to a combination of her age, gender and "celebrity" status (celebrities tend to be attractive, successful and wealthy). A man would not have had a media circus around him due to the fact that he chose to start a family while being a CEO (a choice that she informed the Yahoo board of before taking the job). Mayer also looks about 10 years younger than she is in most photos; which IMO leads to a lot of armchair executives criticizing her as inexperienced (lol, she was a key member of the team that built the product that destroyed Yahoo, so I'm pretty sure she's experienced).
IMO Mayer is a great example that having kids doesn't have to derail your career as a female executive. While she may set an unrealistic standard for other women (damn Stanford overachievers!) I can't fault her for figuring out a way to make the various elements of her life work for her.
What I am really looking forward to is to hear how Marissa Mayer will frame her time at Yahoo in hindsight.
Will she show humility for failing at turning the company around? Will she claim success for a coincidental share price increase she had nothing to do with? Will she claim nobody could have done better? This will allow for a better judgment of character.
Lisa Su of AMD is another female CEO I can think of. I don't think I've seen anyone bash her. I mean she is extraordinarily competent and has 3 degrees in EE to boot.
the "has agreed to pay out $1.55 million in a class action lawsuit settlement for lying to customers about a chemical they claimed was absent from their products" Honest company?
Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard is another female CEO (and before her, Carly Fiorina). Both have certainly come in for their share of criticism. So would I, if I had to be responsible for HP.
Wasn't here tenure at Yahoo almost a mirror image of Stephen Elop's at Nokia? He was put in place to save their mobile division but couldn't turn the company around and it was eventually bought by Microsoft. It seem self-evident that failing companies are hard for CEO:s to save.
And if any CEO should be burned at a stake, shouldn't it be that guy that refused to sell Yahoo for 47 billion to Microsoft?
Elop trashed a company that dominated the world featurephone market, but was clearly going to start falling behind as smartphones took over. Elop accidentally announced that they were going to abandon the featurephone market, killing the business. He then scrapped their well-regarded smartphone experiment, and announced that they were going to switch to the marginal smartphone platform of a company with a history of failing at smartphones.
Mayer joined a horribly failing company with no core purpose for existing, experimented wildly in an attempt to shake things up and turn it around, then after failing, unwound the thing and sold it for far more than it was worth.
Because when she was brought in to lead Yahoo, it gave a huge hope the same way people hoped when Jack came back to Twitter. But there's also a conspiracy theory I like that she was primarily brought in to be made the scapegoat and being criticised while Jack still being admired as a visionary (While I'd argue DC is a better one to do lead Twitter, but he faced the same fate as MM)
In the days when Mayer was at Google, Silicon Valley was one of the few places in America with a relatively meritocratic labor market and its firms (including Google at the time) had risen to prominence by upsetting incumbent industries and not through corporate welfare and cronyism.
A lot has changed. Schmidt weaponized Google's offering and helped sell to DC, turning Google into the Halliburton of information.
I think the typical notion of capitalism is too broad (and encompasses the gamut of disruptive businesses, traditional "crony" capitalism, rent-seeking, and borderline fraud). The WSJ caters mainly to establishment ("crony" and rent-seeking) capitalist readers. HN includes more classically liberal views.
Also, I think few people realize that Mayer's comp package was an exercise in leverage and risk reduction for both parties. Taking the helm of a project that has failed under a handful of seasoned practitioners is certainly not something most people would feel comfortable doing in their own line of work.
I just don't get it personally, I would think HN being about startups would be more capitalist. I mean, she did her job, she didn't to my knowledge do anything unethical. She negotiated her salary based on her credentials and the board gave her that salary. My capitalist opinion is, fucking good for you, I hope to be in that position some day.
It's the result of cognitive dissonance. Many closeted capitalists don't want to admit, even to themselves, that the pursuit of money far outstrips other incentives and especially the vague Gavin Belson-esque promises to "make the world a better place". Seeing someone actually make a fortune will thus evoke strong and conflicting feelings almost immediately.
The WSJ has gone way downhill after the Newscorp acquisition. The WSJ is now a tabloid. The misinformed comments on the Yahoo deal are just a symptom of readers who are not really involved in finance or public company governance, and do not understand what MM was hired to do. She served the shareholders very well. Yes it is extremely disappointing to see all the delightful little tech properties that are now part of the Evil Empire. But, they already sold out, and furthermore, that has nothing to do with MM's performance. Seems like most people here agree she did a great job or at least did not screw up a good deal for Yahoo's shareholders. It may look easy but I suspect there were very difficult corporate politics to navigate. Maybe someone will write a nice book about this deal in a couple years and we can get the juicy gossip then.
I agree about the polarizing part. I think she is paid pretty similar to most CEOs, but she seems to get much more hate because she stands out.
This page does have more complementary comments than normal, I think startup world likes a clean exit, but maybe its just people have given up moaning about her and are over it.
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a CEO get extensively criticized on HN for their pay. I feel like this needs at least a single anecdotal comparison from both the WSJ and HN for the question to get any sort of real answers.
I think you're comparing general population with technical population at HN, many of which are in leadership roles and would naturally be more sympathetic because they understand the struggles of growing a company. People who don't get it simply don't understand the situation and wonder why Yahoo isn't dead already or why they have insane payouts for a CEO which essentially finished the downward spiral.
I can't claim to have any insight into group psychology here so I'll only speak for myself. I'm much more interested in the aspect of the story that has Marisa Mayer failing to save a sinking ship than I am interested in the ludicrous golden parachute. There is something interesting to discuss about the former but nothing interesting to discuss about the latter.
Yes for sure. I'm much more interested in the former as well. I have read and commented on a number of Yahoo and Mayer comments but yeah seems like I'm always only interested in the failing ship part
> a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet
Since when? It's a pro-capitalism, free-market, libertarian, Ayn Rand, love-fest in here most days.
Talking against those points is a great way to be voted down unless you happen to be commenting in a thread that has attracted the smaller left-wing side of HN.
The CEO's salary, even if absurdly high, will generally pale in comparison to the revenue of the company. So long as salaries and other expenses aren't absurdly high across the board, a high CEO salary will only have a marginal effect on the company as a whole. Since her compensation only really affects her, those saying it should be lower aren't concerned for yahoo, but rather jealous of her. They think they could have done what she's done, and don't know why she's getting paid so well for it while they aren't. Capitalism (at it extreme) takes as an assumption that things are distributed fairly, and that merit is what achieves a reward. Deviations from this are therefore a source of ire to capitalists.
I remember in previous posts Marissa Mayer's salary was already discussed to death. I think this discussion just focuses on the new information in this post.
maybe it's because over her watch a legendary company died? and at the same time she got paid a lot. not that it's completely her fault. i think reactions would be the same regardless of gender. if anything, people are more scared to question her for fear of being labeled sexist
Tangent: pleas me can we stop with "social justice warrior" nonsense? Us Europeans are getting mighty tired of the polarisation of American domestic politics leaking out online ;)
Europe is more divided that you seem to realize. Ire toward dogmatic progressivism isn't consigned to US domestic politics - it pervades the West. Just look at the UK, Hungary and Australia right now.
Maybe because HN readers are slightly more tuned to the relationship between numbers (in terms of magnitude)? In other words they feel instinctively her pay is a numerical irrelevance given the context?
> Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section.
That may be true, but it doesn't make the comments about her being overpaid any less valid; or analysis of what happened with Yahoo any less interesting.
I think the special outrage over Mayer has an element of misogyny (how can it not?), but I honestly think it's mostly fueled by the fact that most of her public decisions (ending remote work, etc.) seem like changing uniforms on the staff of the Titanic as it sinks.
When someone does a terrible job I don't think they should get paid more money than most people will ever see in their lifetime. I think a lot of people feel that way. Mayer is not unique in this, there's plenty of terrible executives who are wealthy, she was just a really visible one.
I don't know. If you replace Marissa Mayer with a generic CEO, and Yahoo did just as badly under that CEO, there might be just as much anger and/or contempt. See Steve Ballmer for an example - and Microsoft didn't do badly under him, just less great than it did under Bill Gates.
(Yes, I know that lots of the vitriol aimed at Ballmer was for various weird public antics. But he was also regarded as a dud of a CEO, and roundly criticized for not actually knowing how to run Microsoft.)
> If you replace Marissa Mayer with a generic CEO, and Yahoo did just as badly under that CEO, there might be just as much anger and/or contempt.
But Yahoo was doing a much worse job before she got there! How many articles have you seen on HN about Scott Thompson? About Carol Bartz? About Terry Semel?
Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section.
Why is this? Is this because she's from Google? Because she's a former engineer? Because she's a female CEO? Is she just a politically polarizing topic ala Elon Musk?
Genuinely curious. Anyone have any ideas?