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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Loses Bonus And Stock Award Over Security Breach
- Irishsteve 10y agoQuote from MM - "When I learned in September 2016 that a large number of our user database files had been stolen, I worked with the team to disclose the incident to users, regulators, and government agencies. "However, I am the CEO of the company and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant this year and have expressed my desire that my bonus be redistributed to our company's hardworking employees, who contributed so much to Yahoo's success in 2016." So does that mean no one pushed it up the chain
- arjie 10y agoShouldn't you always have a breach? That way you get some of MM's bonus.
- Buge 10y agoThe employees directly responsible probably won't have a bonus.
- amptorn 10y agoFrom this quote it seems like she didn't so much lose her bonus as voluntarily declined it.
- secfirstmd 10y agoThat's what I would say in her position also.
- philipov 10y agoYes, and all executives who resign after a scandle do so voluntarily. No one ever resigns because the people above them offered it as a mutually-beneficial alternative to getting fired. I'll totally accept her motivations at face value.
- soneca 10y agoI don't see it the way you do. I never heard of an executive being pushed to earn less money the way executives are pushed to resign. Usually is quite the opposite, companies pay resigning executives a wealth sum as it is in the best interest of the company that the burned executive leave as soon as possible and with no intentions to harm the company after leaving. The board usually couldnt care less about the money a leaving executive gets. An executive leaving money on the table (and distributing among other employees) is extremely rare and I think your cynism have no logical thinking support here.
- 36bydesignBL 10y agoThey don't pay them a wealthy sum when their actions lowered Verizon's buying price by billions. If you crunch the numbers, there is a 0% chance Marissa did this 100% voluntarily with no pressure on her.
- jsjohnst 10y ago> when their actions lowered Verizon's buying price by billions. You mean 0.35 billion?
- tyingq 10y agoIt is common enough that it has a name...claw back provision. It's risen in popularity since the subprime mortgage crisis. Used more often to claw back bonuses for fraud, but used for lackluster performance as well. Voluntarily forgoing your bonus versus an embarrassing board decision isn't that odd.
- bogomipz 10y ago>"No one ever resigns because the people above them offered it as a mutually-beneficial alternative to getting fired. " When C level executives are involved in a scandal, this is exactly what happens. The folks above them "ask" for their resignation. The subtext is that it is mandatory. Resigning keeps them from the disgrace of being fired and also often allows them to keep certain things like bonuses, pensions etc.
- iand 10y agoWhen you agree to forgo something, you do so because someone else asked you to do it. Otherwise you would say you offered to forgo and they accepted.
- novaleaf 10y agoexcellent parsing of words :)
- rashkov 10y agoThat is a pretty good demonstration of a fluency in business speak.
- devoply 10y agoBusiness speak in the upper echelons.
- 12312throwaway 10y agoAny resource recommendations for someone to learn business speak such as this?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kafkaesq 10y agoWhen she said "I have agreed to forgo" it means she was "asked" to forgo her bonus -- presumably on the threat of being fired, otherwise.
- laughfactory 10y agoAnyone note the "I expressed my DESIRE that it be distributed among hardworking employees?" To me that sounds pretty empty. How about actually making it happen, Ms. Meyer? It would be a lot more palatable if she said she's distributed her bonus among YAHOO employees, full stop.
- arachnids 10y agoThe CEOs salary and bonus is negotiated by the board. What happened here is the board decided to not pay her, and she asked them to distribute it to the employees instead. It's not her pay to do anything with anymore.
- throwaway5752 10y agoIn corporations, the CEO reports to the board of directors. She can't redistribute compensation that has been docked from her.
- omarforgotpwd 10y agoMarissa Mayer is still the CEO of Yahoo?
- gaius 10y agoThat is not as surprising as Yahoo even still existing!
- mgiannopoulos 10y agoThe deal with Verizon is still on hold http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/23/technology/yahoo-earnings-verizon-sale/ http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/23/technology/yahoo-earnings-ve...
- joaodlf 10y agoThe state Yahoo is in, I don't think anyone else in there expected less. Public information on these bonuses shocked me, to be frank. Ok, you took a hard job, but you also failed. A culture that rewards upper management - even on failures - is a recipe for failure, especially when you employ a large portion of talented and educated individuals who can very easily move somewhere else.
- whineBuster 10y agoYou may not share the sentiment, but some people try to succeed. It's called winning. These Yahoo's don't have a clue.
- sctb 10y agoPlease post civilly and substantively on Hacker News or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- arachnids 10y agoThey probably agreed on the bonus ahead of time. I doubt she would have taken the offer if it was conditional on Yahoo doing well.
- MegaButts 10y ago> I doubt she would have taken the offer if it was conditional on Yahoo doing well. But that's the point. What motivation does she have to do a good job and actually care about the well-being of the company if she gets extraordinary sums of money no matter what?
- arachnids 10y agoIf she had turned Yahoo around, she would be making much more in equity.
- git-pull 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13654513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13654513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13386349 I still don't have my flickr account. Here's the response from Yahoo Concierge: https://imgur.com/a/smjuL https://imgur.com/a/smjuL The employees at Yahoo have been kind and helpful to me. But the bureaucracy is a rotted waste who just doesn't care. What am I supposed to do? Why can't you just allow accepting verification documentation like FB and Blizzard does. The engineers are great. The managers are great. But the rotten core would screw over tens of thousands of people locked out of their account so as to not make one mistake with an identity theft. How can I be sure my account wasn't one of the ones hacked in one of their many security fiascos? I'm just exhausted.
- arjie 10y agoIf the information you can provide doesn't match, what would you prefer they do? (Going off the picture you shared here)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- git-pull 10y agoAccept the mountains of information I've provided them: - Picture of me with my driver's license (which has logins from the area) - Sworn oath under penalty of perjury - Proof photos in my public account are linked to me (I have pics of a laptop with an xmonad config open which is the same as my GH) https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2741/4437425032_a059639217_o_d.jpg https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2741/4437425032_a059639217_o_... == https://github.com/tony/xmonad-config/blob/master/xmonad https://github.com/tony/xmonad-config/blob/master/xmonad
- arjie 10y agoThe fact that you can present the Credit Cards that were used for billing and then the bank can prove provenance and all that is in your name would be pretty convincing to me. I'm surprised by their strict adherence to policy here.
- ourcat 10y ago/searches flickr for photos of undersized stringed instruments...
- kzrdude 10y agoIt wouldn't be a bonus if you were entitled to it no matter the circumstance.
- lojack 10y agoThat's true, but the circumstances to which she is entitled the bonus are probably well defined. The article made it sound as if she was still entitled to the bonus, but was asked to not accept it. In this case, being asked to do something is a pretty loose definition, there's usually fallout from refusing these kinds of things.
- rectang 10y agoSo when she ultimately escapes from the crumbling wreckage, she'll have marginally fewer millions. The incentives for CEOs at today's ridiculous pay grades are all towards short-termism. That's how we get into messes like this in the first place.
- chimeracoder 10y ago> The incentives for CEOs at today's ridiculous pay grades are all towards short-termism. That's how we get into messes like this in the first place. That's a pretty weak criticism of Marissa Mayer. First, she was hardly set up for success - a first-time CEO placed at the helm of a company that had been struggling for years to find its market, and whose two predecessors were both fired in very public scandals. I'm not sure if anyone could have turned Yahoo around in those circumstances. Furthermore, Mayer was not at all incentivized towards short term thinking. Yahoo's share price was largely driven by Alibaba from when she joined until the IPO, and it was literally one of the selling points used to recruit her: that she, unlike most CEOs of public companies, would be able to focus on executing a long-term vision without the pressures of worrying about the daily share price for the first couple of years (until the Alibaba IPO).
- bogomipz 10y ago>"That's a pretty weak criticism of Marissa Mayer." I don't believe the OP was criticizing her but rather the exclusive "CEO Club" where their compensation is 2200 times[1] what their average employees get paid, recieve bonuses in bad or unprofitable years, always get to resign and never fired, and if they do resign in a cloud of scandal they magically show up somewhere else and repeat the whole process anew. [1] http://fortune.com/2015/06/22/ceo-vs-worker-pay/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/22/ceo-vs-worker-pay/
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoYou tried to rebut short-termism with first couple of years.
- PoarNeemn 10y agoJust replace her, women are unfit to be CEO's
- tonetheman 10y agoInteresting. Not to stir the pot... but would they have forced her into this if she was a dude. I mean Verizon leaked last year http://www.crn.com/news/security/300080151/telecom-partners-say-cloud-security-is-top-of-mind-in-wake-of-verizon-breach.htm http://www.crn.com/news/security/300080151/telecom-partners-... I cannot say that I remember their CEO not getting a bonus for it.
- tyingq 10y agoThe Target CEO resigned 6 months after their breach, but he did walk away with $61M. http://fortune.com/2014/05/21/target-ceos-golden-parachute-61-million/ http://fortune.com/2014/05/21/target-ceos-golden-parachute-6...
- tonetheman 10y agoCEO for big companies is almost a no lose situation, no matter how bad you mess up... or what you do might be a better way to say that.
- n72 10y agoDon't know why you're being down voted. I immediately thought the same thing. I'm all for CEO's being held accountable for these types of things, but it doesn't seem to happen very often. So, asking whether gender plays a role is absolutely fair game. Could also be, of course, that she's embattled, so it's easy to do.
- tonetheman 10y agoI too wondered the down vote. I HOPE it had more to do with some inner dealings of getting a purchase agreement. Rather than gender.
- michaelmrose 10y agoWas verizon sold for hundreds of millions less because of the leak? Did the ceo of Verizon hop aboard the titanic after the first iceberg and run it into another one? I think it vastly more likely that the impact of the leak and the general performance of the company was meaningfully different than supposing gender had anything to do with it. I think before we play the gender card it would be reasonable for the party posing the question ought to discover and consider before posing it if the idea is absurd on its face or worthy of further discussion.
- lloydde 10y agoWhat I imagine happened based on hints of what Ms Mayer wrote is that the breach affected all employees bonuses for 2016. Ms Mayer would have been under pressure to forego her bonus and put it into the general employee pool and even then bonuses are likely much lower than previous years.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mrspeaker 10y agoIs it a cultural thing (american?) that everyone here is calling her "Marissa Mayer" or "MM" or "Ms Mayer"? No one would say "Mr Mayer", or "Dave Mayer" or "DM" in a hacker news comment, they just say "Mayer". Is that a traditional thing, or is it specific to Mayer?
- thiht 10y agoI guess something in the name makes it feel more natural to use the full name. In the case of Bill Gates for example, I rarely see anyone using "Gates", the full name "Bill Gates" is used.
- zulln 10y agoDoes not explain Ms Mayer though.
- purple-again 10y agoLook up my post history, I referred to Warren Buffet as Mr. Buffet. It's a sign of respect for someone you are discussing but have no personal connection to. Nothing sinister going on here.
- TallGuyShort 10y agoI've never heard the title Ms used in America much at all, especially not compared to use I've heard in several Commonwealth countries. It sticks out at me as being unusual in this thread. But then, even within the US you have big linguistic variations. In Silicon Valley you'll almost never hear anyone addressed as "Ma'am" or "Sir" as that seems too formal, but in the South many people use such titles even in more casual settings with anyone who is their superior or a relative stranger. Most people I know (which is mainly people from Western states) would refer to her as Marissa Mayer, and the same with any other well-known executive (e.g. Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) How would you expect her to be named in conversation based on where you're from?
- 10y ago
- CaptSpify 10y agoI hope this is the start of something better. There's been a distinct lack of punishment for allowing and even hiding breaches across the industry that I've seen.
- drudru11 10y agoWasn't the guy responsible during this time frame the guy who now heads Facebook security?