3 ms·
This is why a lot of otherwise bright people dedicate their lives to (getting an MBA and) climbing the corporate ladder at a large company. After a while you g
by plinkplonk 16y ago
This is why a lot of otherwise bright people dedicate their lives to (getting an MBA and) climbing the corporate ladder at a large company. After a while you get huge payouts irrespective of any actual contribution. A few years at a Vice President role (leave alone CEO) can give you huge amounts of money.
Interestingly enough Terry Semel got a nice Golden Parachute too iirc after doing nothing much at Yahoo. One VP I know was asked to "teach Semel how the Internet worked" after Semel joined as CEO.
Yahoo also had 300 (!!) Vice Presidents at a point of time. Imagine the outflow of money to maintain that crowd. From Yahoo's latest marketing campaign
"There’s nothing to look at but a box and a button,” says the voice-over in the Yahoo (YHOO) marketing video–about an unnamed, but obvious, Web site. “When you look at this homepage nothing looks back at you. You come to this place so you can leave.” [1]
Somewhere in Yahoo there is whole bunch of marketing VPs and managers raking in millions of dollars for this!!
Yahoo's successive CEOs seem to take out a good chunk of its profits without adding much to the bottom line. Fwiw Sun was that way too.
[1] Source: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100505/yahoo-tries-to-recover-from-its-you-ad-disaster-by-attacking-googles-one-box-this-is-going-to-end-in-tears/ http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100505/yahoo-tries-to-recover-f...
- ivenkys 16y ago"getting an MBA and climbing the corporate ladder" - one would have thought in Tech companies Engineers would count for more than MBA's, but clearly that's not the case with Yahoo.
- borism 16y agoexcept Yahoo is not tech but media company
- joubert 16y agoI don't disagree, but they have some smart and fun hackers at yahoo.
- smwhreyebelong 16y agoThey used to. Yahoo! used to be a great company for an engineer to work for. Given what they have been doing lately, it seems the focus has changed from being a tech company to a media company. In fact, it all probably changed when Terry was brought in to run the company and he wanted to focus on digital media. There's a lot of small intangible things that go in to making a huge successful company. The core employees "wanting" to work at the company (as compared to just collecting a paycheck) is one of the most imporant ones.
- josefresco 16y agoAn engineer is the last person I'd want running a company like Yahoo! (and for many reasons). Hired-gun CEO's are expensive and don't always work, but the odds of success must be greater then hoping your brilliant founder/engineer works out as an executive. I would argue it's easier to educate an old CEO on tech than it is to teach an engineer how to be a successful exec.
- derwiki 16y agoSee Slide, Yelp, Facebook...
- ivenkys 16y ago"Engineers would count for more than MBA's" - i never said that an Engineer/Founder should be the CEO. However, in a Tech company the contribution and therefore compensation of an Engineer would be expected to be higher than that of an MBA.
- smwhreyebelong 16y agoIt depends. Ben horowitz wrote a blog post recently on why they prefer founding CEOs : http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/ http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/
- abstractbill 16y agoIt's not just Yahoo. Companies that think of engineers as anything but replaceable "resources" are very much an exception to the norm.
- ivenkys 16y ago@plinkplonk : i seem to have replied to your comment while you were in the process of updating it or did you edit it later.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- shruthidipali 16y agoI don't think Carol Bratz has a degree in MBA! atleast, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Bartz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Bartz
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]