6 ms·

"if I’m ever in a position like Marissa’s, I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sun

by GuiA 10y ago

"if I’m ever in a position like Marissa’s, I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning, even when she has a new baby in the house." I'm grateful for this article reminding me why I never really will fit in with the techie fanatics. Yesterday I went home at 5p, after a very productive day, and trimmed plants in my garden, not checking my work email until the next day. (Well maybe for $200M over 5 years you could convince me to do that. But then it's back to books and gardening and developing pictures) Also oddly reminiscent of this post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168718

deelowe 10y ago
It really sucks when your manager thinks this kind of work ethic is healthy.
- GuiA 10y ago
  Yes. I am very lucky to have a manager that will frequently tell me to just leave if I stay too long after 6p, and actively encourages me to do less work (which I find quite frustrating - I feel like I'm already not doing that much!). I work at a very profitable, well known company FWIW, in a fairly core role with plenty of people depending on my productivity.
  - exelius 10y ago
    In general, people aren't productive working more than 10 hours a day. Unfortunately, some people are -- and those people very often find themselves in executive positions, surrounded by other people with exceptional stamina who wonder why everyone below them is so lazy. Fortunately, a lot of companies have realized this and started making employee retention a metric (because recruiting is expensive, especially for tech positions.) Keeping people happy is still important.
    - Kluny 10y ago
      Coding is different from normal work though, isn't it? I mean, if I have 3 hours of data entry ahead of me, I get in the zone almost instantly and crack through it at high speed with little difficulty, take lunch, then go on to the next thing. I've never had 3 hours worth of emails or administrative work to do, but I imagine it to be the same. 3 hours of solid code, on the other hand, takes a special day of the office being unusually quiet, at least half an hour to get in the zone, and at the end of it, I'm done for the day. It's not just my own arrogance, is it, to say that "code" work and "admin" work are two completely different categories that ought to be evaluated differently?
    - likeclockwork 10y ago
      I think you're right and people aren't productive working 10 hours a day. Occupants of executive positions aren't expected to actually produce anything.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      Most people are lucky to squeeze 3 hours of actually-useful work into a single work day. In your average office, the rest of the 8-or-10-hour work day is burned on socializing with colleagues, responding to and reading emails, attending interviews, trainings, or other rote meetings not specifically related to one's job, traveling around the building, eating, taking restroom and Facebook/reddit breaks, and so on. I don't think this number goes up as you expand the requisite work hours or push people against their will. I think people just find increasingly creative ways to avoid real work while still filling the butt-in-chair requirements.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      I think even in the case of people who appear to be productive that long (and I'd argue most people aren't productive more than 4-5 hours a day, if that) in executive positions only appear as productive as they do because of extensive support networks. It's a lot easier to be productive long hours if you e.g. has executive assistants that manage your calendar so you don't need to think about it, people to delegate all the menial stuff to, staff at home ensuring you don't need to worry about coming home to a messy house that needs cleaning and so on. Doesn't mean it won't still be hard, but it's not as hard as it may seem when looking up from a position you have to handle 100% on your own. Another factor is that while e-mailing late nights when you're low down the hierarchy generally means you are working long hours, e-mailing late nights when you're high up the hierarchy can mean that, and it can also mean that you have sufficient freedom to structure your day that you've chosen to e.g. spend that day taking a long lunch and chill in the afternoon and catch up on e-mails late at night instead, possibly realising that this ironically will make it seem like you're working harder. A lot of people who are not used to have that freedom automatically assume it's the former, and then end up falling into trying to live up to that. My advice is don't. Carve out time. Appear busy. Seeming busy ironically often makes you seem harder working even if you just say you are and use it to give you breathing room to work less.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  I've seen several folks who would save email drafts only to send those later after midnight. [One of them admitted doing so and added that it helps.]
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    I've seen folks have emails stream out starting at 4am so they could leave at 1 as well.
  - kpil 10y ago
    Oh, I usually save my emails as drafts after office hour, and send them during the day, in order to not encourage others to work late. A culture were you arrive at work and find a 20+ emails back and forth from the previous night is not good. Especially since decisions are sometimes taken without essential input from people that actually have a life. In the end, everyone will just be stressed about never being able to look a way from email for more than 20 minutes.
stinkytaco 10y ago
I think this has less to do with the tech industry and more to do with a culture where your value is strongly tied to your work. Work more = have more value.
pavlov 10y ago
The difference is that she was getting paid tens of millions each year to do that job. (Sorry if I'm making a wrong assumption about your salary!) The original post makes Mayer sound like one of the most people-centric CEOs in the business. The contrast to someone like Léo Apotheker at HP is stark (just to pick a random tech CEO who seemed like the exact opposite).
- GuiA 10y ago
  Oh yeah, I get that if I were a CEO paid hundreds of millions I wouldn't have much time to feed the fish in my backyard. I just find the glorifying of answering emails at 1am on a a Sunday a little crazy, that's all.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    It's the glorification by the people making 8 figures that gets the people making 5-6 figures to do it too. The profits flow to the top.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    It's the kind of thing that a CEO in a startup will often do because he/she cares and has an overwhelming personal involvement in the company. (I once was in that position for a tiny company of a handful of people, and I would write emails at 1:00 on Saturday night.) It's rare to see that carried over into a tech giant. I imagine Larry Ellison does something rather different at that point of his weekend than responding to individual worker bees' concerns.
    - forgetsusername 10y ago
      I think you underestimate how hard a guy like Larry Ellison works.
  - Mendenhall 10y ago
    I could completely understand that feeling. Right now im nowhere near her scale but I answer emails at 1 am on a sunday. For me now it is just how I am wired, I want to do it. I also see a difference between being a ceo/owner and "working". I can make decissions all day and answer questions, to me it doesnt feel like work. Now to sit down and design\illustrate for 15 hours straight every day forget it, I burn out. Its like no one who does hard physical labor for 10-12hours a day answers emails at 1 am on sunday lol. For me there is a difference in the "work" being done.
exelius 10y ago
There's a certain workaholic personality that excels at executive-level positions. I'm convinced they simply have better genetics than the rest of us -- after 10 or so hours of work, my memory is garbage and I wouldn't feel confident dealing with anything important but some people are totally fine. Plus, you couldn't work that hard for any amount of money unless you loved the work. I'm not sure I want to be a CEO for that reason -- I treasure the ability to turn off 'work mode' for a little while every day.
- GuiA 10y ago
  I work with high level executives at a well known company regularly. Most of them are normal people. Hard working, smarter than the average? Sure. Answering emails at 1am on a Sunday with a newborn? Certainly not. In fact, my director just took a month off when his second child was born, and is taking another month off soon. There is no "better genetics" or "sleeping 4 hours a night". That's just the media and tech echo chamber doing its thing.
  - exelius 10y ago
    I work with major company C-suite guys on a regular basis, and while not everyone is the "4 hours a night" type, they're definitely overrepresented. Keep in mind I don't see this as a positive thing -- I think it's unhealthy and sets a bad example for your employees. But there are some people who just have more stamina, and that's something I've had to accept. I have less stamina, so I need to be more effective with the time that I do have and delegate work to others.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    There are reasons to believe that there are people who have a genetic characteristic that enables them to get by on that little sleep. This is a link to the study referenced in the parent post's BBC article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2884988/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2884988/ Furthermore, human genetic variation being what it is, there is no reason to dismiss "better genetics" in general. There are many genetic differences that make people better or worse than others at performing certain tasks. Some are obvious, some less so. But its certainly plausible that they exist, and dismissing them as part of an "echo chamber" is unjustified.
deleted 10y ago
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AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Of course, with a new baby in the house, it's possible she was going to be up at 1 AM anyway...
- dexterdog 10y ago
  Do you really think she had to get up with the baby? I'm sure even her help had help.
ufmace 10y ago
That's what stuck out to me the most. I'd rather work for a CEO/manager that communicates through actions that it's perfectly fine to go home at 6 and ignore work until you come in the next morning.
- telesilla 10y ago
  The right kind of CEO does that by not requiring that you copy her behaviour. It is her prerogative to work all through the night - I had a co-founder who was similar, but I work best in the mornings. It did take us a while to come to a mutual agreement on who was working "more" but once we did it was smooth sailing. We never, ever asked staff to work outside of hours unless in emergencies or with paid overtime and mutual agreement. And in fact, they pressured us back to take time off, and worked with us to make sure our own work was covered (where possible). It was a great environment I am fostering further: hard work comes in small, rewarding bursts, the rest of the time is to support others doing that hard work or having some mental downtime with less challenging work.
jazzyk 10y ago
>I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning Perhaps she should have gotten a good night sleep and be refreshed to come up with a viable strategy for the company, rather than worry about emails at 1am?

by GuiA 10y ago

deelowe 10y ago

It really sucks when your manager thinks this kind of work ethic is healthy.

GuiA 10y ago
Yes. I am very lucky to have a manager that will frequently tell me to just leave if I stay too long after 6p, and actively encourages me to do less work (which I find quite frustrating - I feel like I'm already not doing that much!). I work at a very profitable, well known company FWIW, in a fairly core role with plenty of people depending on my productivity.
- exelius 10y ago
  In general, people aren't productive working more than 10 hours a day. Unfortunately, some people are -- and those people very often find themselves in executive positions, surrounded by other people with exceptional stamina who wonder why everyone below them is so lazy. Fortunately, a lot of companies have realized this and started making employee retention a metric (because recruiting is expensive, especially for tech positions.) Keeping people happy is still important.
  - Kluny 10y ago
    Coding is different from normal work though, isn't it? I mean, if I have 3 hours of data entry ahead of me, I get in the zone almost instantly and crack through it at high speed with little difficulty, take lunch, then go on to the next thing. I've never had 3 hours worth of emails or administrative work to do, but I imagine it to be the same. 3 hours of solid code, on the other hand, takes a special day of the office being unusually quiet, at least half an hour to get in the zone, and at the end of it, I'm done for the day. It's not just my own arrogance, is it, to say that "code" work and "admin" work are two completely different categories that ought to be evaluated differently?
  - likeclockwork 10y ago
    I think you're right and people aren't productive working 10 hours a day. Occupants of executive positions aren't expected to actually produce anything.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Most people are lucky to squeeze 3 hours of actually-useful work into a single work day. In your average office, the rest of the 8-or-10-hour work day is burned on socializing with colleagues, responding to and reading emails, attending interviews, trainings, or other rote meetings not specifically related to one's job, traveling around the building, eating, taking restroom and Facebook/reddit breaks, and so on. I don't think this number goes up as you expand the requisite work hours or push people against their will. I think people just find increasingly creative ways to avoid real work while still filling the butt-in-chair requirements.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    I think even in the case of people who appear to be productive that long (and I'd argue most people aren't productive more than 4-5 hours a day, if that) in executive positions only appear as productive as they do because of extensive support networks. It's a lot easier to be productive long hours if you e.g. has executive assistants that manage your calendar so you don't need to think about it, people to delegate all the menial stuff to, staff at home ensuring you don't need to worry about coming home to a messy house that needs cleaning and so on. Doesn't mean it won't still be hard, but it's not as hard as it may seem when looking up from a position you have to handle 100% on your own. Another factor is that while e-mailing late nights when you're low down the hierarchy generally means you are working long hours, e-mailing late nights when you're high up the hierarchy can mean that, and it can also mean that you have sufficient freedom to structure your day that you've chosen to e.g. spend that day taking a long lunch and chill in the afternoon and catch up on e-mails late at night instead, possibly realising that this ironically will make it seem like you're working harder. A lot of people who are not used to have that freedom automatically assume it's the former, and then end up falling into trying to live up to that. My advice is don't. Carve out time. Appear busy. Seeming busy ironically often makes you seem harder working even if you just say you are and use it to give you breathing room to work less.
0xmohit 10y ago
I've seen several folks who would save email drafts only to send those later after midnight. [One of them admitted doing so and added that it helps.]
- Spooky23 10y ago
  I've seen folks have emails stream out starting at 4am so they could leave at 1 as well.
- kpil 10y ago
  Oh, I usually save my emails as drafts after office hour, and send them during the day, in order to not encourage others to work late. A culture were you arrive at work and find a 20+ emails back and forth from the previous night is not good. Especially since decisions are sometimes taken without essential input from people that actually have a life. In the end, everyone will just be stressed about never being able to look a way from email for more than 20 minutes.

stinkytaco 10y ago

I think this has less to do with the tech industry and more to do with a culture where your value is strongly tied to your work. Work more = have more value.

pavlov 10y ago

The difference is that she was getting paid tens of millions each year to do that job. (Sorry if I'm making a wrong assumption about your salary!) The original post makes Mayer sound like one of the most people-centric CEOs in the business. The contrast to someone like Léo Apotheker at HP is stark (just to pick a random tech CEO who seemed like the exact opposite).

GuiA 10y ago
Oh yeah, I get that if I were a CEO paid hundreds of millions I wouldn't have much time to feed the fish in my backyard. I just find the glorifying of answering emails at 1am on a a Sunday a little crazy, that's all.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  It's the glorification by the people making 8 figures that gets the people making 5-6 figures to do it too. The profits flow to the top.
- pavlov 10y ago
  It's the kind of thing that a CEO in a startup will often do because he/she cares and has an overwhelming personal involvement in the company. (I once was in that position for a tiny company of a handful of people, and I would write emails at 1:00 on Saturday night.) It's rare to see that carried over into a tech giant. I imagine Larry Ellison does something rather different at that point of his weekend than responding to individual worker bees' concerns.
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    I think you underestimate how hard a guy like Larry Ellison works.
- Mendenhall 10y ago
  I could completely understand that feeling. Right now im nowhere near her scale but I answer emails at 1 am on a sunday. For me now it is just how I am wired, I want to do it. I also see a difference between being a ceo/owner and "working". I can make decissions all day and answer questions, to me it doesnt feel like work. Now to sit down and design\illustrate for 15 hours straight every day forget it, I burn out. Its like no one who does hard physical labor for 10-12hours a day answers emails at 1 am on sunday lol. For me there is a difference in the "work" being done.

exelius 10y ago

There's a certain workaholic personality that excels at executive-level positions. I'm convinced they simply have better genetics than the rest of us -- after 10 or so hours of work, my memory is garbage and I wouldn't feel confident dealing with anything important but some people are totally fine. Plus, you couldn't work that hard for any amount of money unless you loved the work. I'm not sure I want to be a CEO for that reason -- I treasure the ability to turn off 'work mode' for a little while every day.

GuiA 10y ago
I work with high level executives at a well known company regularly. Most of them are normal people. Hard working, smarter than the average? Sure. Answering emails at 1am on a Sunday with a newborn? Certainly not. In fact, my director just took a month off when his second child was born, and is taking another month off soon. There is no "better genetics" or "sleeping 4 hours a night". That's just the media and tech echo chamber doing its thing.
- exelius 10y ago
  I work with major company C-suite guys on a regular basis, and while not everyone is the "4 hours a night" type, they're definitely overrepresented. Keep in mind I don't see this as a positive thing -- I think it's unhealthy and sets a bad example for your employees. But there are some people who just have more stamina, and that's something I've had to accept. I have less stamina, so I need to be more effective with the time that I do have and delegate work to others.
- twblalock 10y ago
  There are reasons to believe that there are people who have a genetic characteristic that enables them to get by on that little sleep. This is a link to the study referenced in the parent post's BBC article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2884988/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2884988/ Furthermore, human genetic variation being what it is, there is no reason to dismiss "better genetics" in general. There are many genetic differences that make people better or worse than others at performing certain tasks. Some are obvious, some less so. But its certainly plausible that they exist, and dismissing them as part of an "echo chamber" is unjustified.

deleted 10y ago

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AnimalMuppet 10y ago

Of course, with a new baby in the house, it's possible she was going to be up at 1 AM anyway...

dexterdog 10y ago
Do you really think she had to get up with the baby? I'm sure even her help had help.

ufmace 10y ago

That's what stuck out to me the most. I'd rather work for a CEO/manager that communicates through actions that it's perfectly fine to go home at 6 and ignore work until you come in the next morning.

telesilla 10y ago
The right kind of CEO does that by not requiring that you copy her behaviour. It is her prerogative to work all through the night - I had a co-founder who was similar, but I work best in the mornings. It did take us a while to come to a mutual agreement on who was working "more" but once we did it was smooth sailing. We never, ever asked staff to work outside of hours unless in emergencies or with paid overtime and mutual agreement. And in fact, they pressured us back to take time off, and worked with us to make sure our own work was covered (where possible). It was a great environment I am fostering further: hard work comes in small, rewarding bursts, the rest of the time is to support others doing that hard work or having some mental downtime with less challenging work.

jazzyk 10y ago

>I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning Perhaps she should have gotten a good night sleep and be refreshed to come up with a viable strategy for the company, rather than worry about emails at 1am?