7 ms·

> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years Why? That is $50mil/year which is an insane amount of

by ebbv 10y ago

> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years Why? That is $50mil/year which is an insane amount of money for any one person to receive. Yes you can point to tons of examples of people earning even more, but that's still way more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes per year to fail. It's a total cop-out to say that "Well Yahoo was already failing when she came in and nobody could turn it around!" She was hired to turn it around. She did fail at the job she was hired to do. It doesn't matter if it was impossible, she took it on and she's getting tons of money despite failing. For me her compensation is one thing but the truly objectionable part is the $50mil golden parachute. And it's not just her, tons of execs that fail at their jobs get these golden parachutes and it's awful. She's just the latest high profile example. If I take a developer position at a company with terrible project/team management, terrible culture, nasty legacy codebase, etc. and I do a bad job I'm still going to get fired. I'm not going to get a massive golden parachute. I might get two weeks severance. I'm not going to get a full year's severance. Combine that cushy parachute with salary that is so out of sync with what the average person makes and yeah, people are going to go "What the fuck?" It shouldn't surprise you.

superuser2 10y ago
>She's just the latest high profile example. She's attracted an order of magnitude more vitriol than any of the other "tons of execs." It's her that HN chooses to complain about. It matters which instances you choose to be vocal about. And it's extremely suspicious, to say the least, that an industry which insists it has no sexism problem because men are just better at it, spends a great deal of time and energy attacking a woman who presides over a collapse but glosses over or barely acknowledges the men who have done the same.
- ebbv 10y ago
  I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misogyny on the internet recently with the MRA b.s. but personally my objections to her pay are the same as every other executive. I can't speak to anyone else's motivations.
  - Nadya 10y ago
    >I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misogyny on the internet recently with the MRA b.s. I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misandry on the internet recently with the feminist b.s. but personally I have no objections to her pay in particular, I feel CEO''s in general are completely overpaid. She took a sinking ship and tried to right it and failed - I don't really think anyone could have realistically turned around Yahoo anyway.
- pharrington 10y ago
  Very few people on this forum spend alot of time looking into the leadership of the myriad of ineptly run companies. Mayer is deliberately high profile, and the company she runs is a household name. Criticism of her is the low hanging fruit; its precisely because most of us can't be assed to get interested in inept CEOs that the ones we do criticize are already the most (in)famous.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  That's a slippery slope right there. I don't care about Yahoo or celebrity CEO culture at all. But I also feel like people should be able to express their opinions on a CEO and not be worried that doing so constitutes being labeled a sexist if the CEO happens to be a woman. There have been many males CEOs that have been derided as well - Bezos, Jobs et al so lets keep this in perspective. Star CEOs with their insanely outsized pay packages and their carefully cultivated public images make them targets for derision, not their sex.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    I think this issue the other poster is referring to is whether we should act to decrease sexism (their argument) or ignore sexism (your argument). There's no right answer, but the other commenter has a point that if sexism is what causes Mayer to appear more often in stories about underperforming CEOs with exit packages (sexism), and we comment negatively on all stories of the like (neutral), then we become complicit in generating a sexist culture. Essentially because sexists chose the only things we saw to comment on in the first place.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  Yeah, everyone here criticizes her because she's a woman. We only root for men. Get over yourself. MM was hyped beyond reason when she was hired, made a ton of money and ended up being an apparently mediocre CEO. And yet, people are still producing articles about the "great" work she did at Yahoo. That's why she is criticized.
sokoloff 10y ago
Executives have [employment] options. If you believe you need a talented executive to have a chance at turning around your company and your company is in dire straits, you may very well have to offer a golden parachute package to have any hope of engaging the services of the talented exec you seek, particularly when that's the norm at that level. Failing to offer such terms amounts to forfeiting any chance to hire the talent you think you need. Offering such terms is totally rational under that set of (reasonable, I think) assumptions.
- ebbv 10y ago
  Yeah, yeah this same excuse is always used to justify insane executive pays but it's baloney. It's a self perpetuating cycle, "Oh WE Have to pay more because companies X, Y and Z are offering $N million!" Executive pay has skyrocketed in relation to worker pay over the last 30 years and it's not for any good reason like executives are so much more important or talented. It's because the executive pay is decided by boards that are full of friends of the executives, people who are executives at the same or other companies, and want everyone involved to hook them up when their pay is being decided. The only way it's going to get fixed is regulation, and I hope it comes sooner rather than later. The greed displayed by boards and high level executives is revolting.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    Market supply and demand is another big part of it. And you are responsible for the fate of mega $$$ corps. If you can create something more efficient you would outcompete those companies.
    - ebbv 10y ago
      I get that a lot of people think that's how the real world market works, but it isn't. Look how long it took Yahoo! to die. It hasn't been relevant for over a decade but it has coasted by on pure momentum, and even as its dying it throws 1% of its purchase price to the CEO as a parting gift. Entrenched corporations have a lot of momentum and a lot of power. Taking them on is nearly impossible. Tesla has only been able to do what it has done so far because Elon Musk was already a billionaire and willing to risk his entire fortune on it. The Model 3 is obviously in high demand but even so the future of Tesla is far from assured (they have an enormous ramping up of production to do. I have hope they can do it but it's far from guaranteed.) Verizon and Google made attempts at competing in the telco industry and have basically both failed miserably. Comcast, Charter and TWC continue to dominate the entire country and instead of competing with each other grant each other regional monopolies and try to merge. The game is rigged and it's not in the favor of the average person.
1024core 10y ago
> She did fail at the job she was hired to do. But did she? The market had valued Yahoo's core assets at -7B (that is, negative 7 Billion), if you added all of Yahoo's assets and compared it to the market price. But she sold those same assets for +5B. That's a decent turnaround, isn't it?
- dbenhur 10y ago
  This right here. Saving Yahoo was impossible. If I had been an investor I would be quite satisfied paying the CEO $200M to secure $12B increase in valuation.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by ebbv 10y ago

superuser2 10y ago

>She's just the latest high profile example. She's attracted an order of magnitude more vitriol than any of the other "tons of execs." It's her that HN chooses to complain about. It matters which instances you choose to be vocal about. And it's extremely suspicious, to say the least, that an industry which insists it has no sexism problem because men are just better at it, spends a great deal of time and energy attacking a woman who presides over a collapse but glosses over or barely acknowledges the men who have done the same.

ebbv 10y ago
I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misogyny on the internet recently with the MRA b.s. but personally my objections to her pay are the same as every other executive. I can't speak to anyone else's motivations.
- Nadya 10y ago
  >I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misogyny on the internet recently with the MRA b.s. I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misandry on the internet recently with the feminist b.s. but personally I have no objections to her pay in particular, I feel CEO''s in general are completely overpaid. She took a sinking ship and tried to right it and failed - I don't really think anyone could have realistically turned around Yahoo anyway.
pharrington 10y ago
Very few people on this forum spend alot of time looking into the leadership of the myriad of ineptly run companies. Mayer is deliberately high profile, and the company she runs is a household name. Criticism of her is the low hanging fruit; its precisely because most of us can't be assed to get interested in inept CEOs that the ones we do criticize are already the most (in)famous.
bogomipz 10y ago
That's a slippery slope right there. I don't care about Yahoo or celebrity CEO culture at all. But I also feel like people should be able to express their opinions on a CEO and not be worried that doing so constitutes being labeled a sexist if the CEO happens to be a woman. There have been many males CEOs that have been derided as well - Bezos, Jobs et al so lets keep this in perspective. Star CEOs with their insanely outsized pay packages and their carefully cultivated public images make them targets for derision, not their sex.
- ethbro 10y ago
  I think this issue the other poster is referring to is whether we should act to decrease sexism (their argument) or ignore sexism (your argument). There's no right answer, but the other commenter has a point that if sexism is what causes Mayer to appear more often in stories about underperforming CEOs with exit packages (sexism), and we comment negatively on all stories of the like (neutral), then we become complicit in generating a sexist culture. Essentially because sexists chose the only things we saw to comment on in the first place.
forgetsusername 10y ago
Yeah, everyone here criticizes her because she's a woman. We only root for men. Get over yourself. MM was hyped beyond reason when she was hired, made a ton of money and ended up being an apparently mediocre CEO. And yet, people are still producing articles about the "great" work she did at Yahoo. That's why she is criticized.

sokoloff 10y ago

Executives have [employment] options. If you believe you need a talented executive to have a chance at turning around your company and your company is in dire straits, you may very well have to offer a golden parachute package to have any hope of engaging the services of the talented exec you seek, particularly when that's the norm at that level. Failing to offer such terms amounts to forfeiting any chance to hire the talent you think you need. Offering such terms is totally rational under that set of (reasonable, I think) assumptions.

ebbv 10y ago
Yeah, yeah this same excuse is always used to justify insane executive pays but it's baloney. It's a self perpetuating cycle, "Oh WE Have to pay more because companies X, Y and Z are offering $N million!" Executive pay has skyrocketed in relation to worker pay over the last 30 years and it's not for any good reason like executives are so much more important or talented. It's because the executive pay is decided by boards that are full of friends of the executives, people who are executives at the same or other companies, and want everyone involved to hook them up when their pay is being decided. The only way it's going to get fixed is regulation, and I hope it comes sooner rather than later. The greed displayed by boards and high level executives is revolting.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  Market supply and demand is another big part of it. And you are responsible for the fate of mega $$$ corps. If you can create something more efficient you would outcompete those companies.
  - ebbv 10y ago
    I get that a lot of people think that's how the real world market works, but it isn't. Look how long it took Yahoo! to die. It hasn't been relevant for over a decade but it has coasted by on pure momentum, and even as its dying it throws 1% of its purchase price to the CEO as a parting gift. Entrenched corporations have a lot of momentum and a lot of power. Taking them on is nearly impossible. Tesla has only been able to do what it has done so far because Elon Musk was already a billionaire and willing to risk his entire fortune on it. The Model 3 is obviously in high demand but even so the future of Tesla is far from assured (they have an enormous ramping up of production to do. I have hope they can do it but it's far from guaranteed.) Verizon and Google made attempts at competing in the telco industry and have basically both failed miserably. Comcast, Charter and TWC continue to dominate the entire country and instead of competing with each other grant each other regional monopolies and try to merge. The game is rigged and it's not in the favor of the average person.

1024core 10y ago

> She did fail at the job she was hired to do. But did she? The market had valued Yahoo's core assets at -7B (that is, negative 7 Billion), if you added all of Yahoo's assets and compared it to the market price. But she sold those same assets for +5B. That's a decent turnaround, isn't it?

dbenhur 10y ago
This right here. Saving Yahoo was impossible. If I had been an investor I would be quite satisfied paying the CEO $200M to secure $12B increase in valuation.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]