7 ms·

People who are criticizing Mayer's deal are failing to realize that Mayer had better options than taking over as head of yahoo. She was a bright star who could

People who are criticizing Mayer's deal are failing to realize that Mayer had better options than taking over as head of yahoo. She was a bright star who could have gone to any number of companies. Nobody in the tech community would have categorized Yahoo as "ready for a turn around". Companies that large that have been mismanaged for so long are filled with middle managers that are better at internal politics than driving initiatives. The odds of yahoo turning around were extremely low. They had to put a deal together to entice someone who had a good reputation from a leading tech company to put their name on the line to go try and sort out a giant mess. If your gripe is the difference between her salary and the lowest paid then I understand. That doesn't mean you bash Mayer for playing by the rules that society has set up. Good for her for getting paid. That makes you no different than the middle manager who isn't helping their team push forward but instead is sitting in meetings taking pot shots at everyone else. Support a law that says the top executive can't make x times the total comp of the lowest paid. Of course every law like that will create incentives to structure companies to maximize payments to execs. those conversations would add more to our discussion than just throwing rocks.

iaw 10y ago
> People who are criticizing Mayer's deal are failing to realize that Mayer had better options than taking over as head of yahoo. Could you provide sources for this? What opportunities were available to Mayer better than being an executive of a multi-billion dollar giant like Yahoo? Edit: I'm seeing a lot of speculative replies but none that demonstrate an 8 to 9 figure payday from 5 years of sitting in place. Does anyone have an example of an alternative that would've yielded her this much wealth?
- kornish 10y ago
  Well, for one, being an executive at a multi-billion dollar giant which was growing or doing well. edit: by "executive", I was including the whole C-suite – should have clarified.
  - pmlnr 10y ago
    But those tend to hire/promote CEOs who can actually push things forward.
    - kornish 10y ago
      Not all executives are chief executives. Meyer surely could have gotten another VP or SVP job at a non-Google company with momentum. To require compensation for risk/opportunity cost in foregoing those opportunities seems very reasonable.
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    What company fitting that description could Mayer have gone to?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    But which multi-billion dollar giant would go for an in-experienced CEO? Running a department of a large company is not the same as being CEO of even a much smaller one. I figure the only reason she was given a shot was that the Yahoo! board hoped the Google magic had somehow rubbed off on Mayer and that that alone would make the difference. Other than that I don't see what would have gotten her a CEO spot, especially not in a growing company at the multi-billion $ level. Yahoo! did not have that much to lose at that point in time.
    - wwalser 10y ago
      The person above you didn't say CEO. They said exec. If she had stayed at Google and had some equity comp she would have netted more money. Absolutely.
- leatherdaddy 10y ago
  here's your source: eat shit
- viggity 10y ago
  One option would be to continue to work as an executive at Google, where she was already working. I would have to imagine that Vice President of Search Products at GOOGLE would be able to find a cushy gig just about anywhere in tech.
- mikeyouse 10y ago
  I imagine any unicorn in existence would have jumped at the opportunity to have her come in as COO or CEO if it wasn't Founder-led.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    COO yes, CEO no. She simply did not have the relevant experience. Ironically, now she does but now any such companies would likely not hire her.
    - cat199 10y ago
      but she has enough money to buy several and build her own empire, if she is so inclined.. so there's that..
- grandalf 10y ago
  > Could you provide sources for this? Do you think that Yahoo's board decided to grant Mayer the golden parachute out of kindness, or out of sympathy to a fellow member of the nobility? Mayer and Yahoo's board negotiated the terms of her contract. The parachute is meant to lure an executive who would normally not want to risk taking the helm of such a high risk company.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    I, for one, would have been perfectly able and happy to have done the job of "fail to turn around Yahoo" for a mere 1/100'th of what she got. For some reason, the board chose not to call me for that interview. Could have saved those shareholders some big money!
  - acjohnson55 10y ago
    Such a risk! With respect to the complexity of running a multi-billion, it still seems a little absurd to phrase out that way. To me, real personal risk is losing your house or dying.
    - grandalf 10y ago
      Well, Mayer faced tremendous reputation risk if she failed. Now that she has failed, she is not held in remotely the same high regard that she was prior to taking the helm of Yahoo. She's also been implicated in some of Yahoo's more embarrassing missteps during her tenure. So it's important to weight the parachute against her annual salary in a "safe" job for 3-5 years. It may still seem overvalued (or undervalued) but the price was reached through negotiation.
      - cobalt 10y ago
        so? If I fuck up, I burn my reputation as well (It may be easier to hide, but it still stands) and I don't get a giant payout
        grandalf 10y ago
- compiler-guy 10y ago
  It's not just the opportunities that were on the table at the time, but also declining all future opportunities if this venture failed. You get one shot at a job like this. The company making the offer had to make it worth her while to A. Leave Google, and while she wasn't the top dog at Google any more, she was still extremely well respected, and incredibly well compensated, and--perhaps most importantly--very, very safe. What would it take for you to leave a job like that? B. Spend her one shot at the ultra-big time at a company near death, where it was likely that she couldn't save it, regardless of what she did. Yahoo had to offer her the big bucks for to take a risk like that, and one part of reducing the risk to her is to give her a golden parachute, where regardless of whether the venture succeeds or fails, she is still better off than at her old position. And you have to make all the numbers risk-adjusted. All of this negotiated _before_ you know if she is going to succeed or fail. Yahoo wanted her that badly and spent what it took to get her.
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    > she was still extremely well respected, and incredibly well compensated, and--perhaps most importantly--very, very safe. Re: well respected and very safe, not really. Worked during that time in Maps. Cracks were starting to show. She wasn't that well respected in engineering circles. Maybe in product management she was, I don't have much visibility into that. Also, her safety was in question. She already got shunted to a position with less authority and a further degree of separation from Larry Page. She wouldn't have gotten fired, but a slow stripping of responsibilities and transfer into a ceremonial role probably wouldn't have been out of the question.
    - compiler-guy 10y ago
      There is no doubt she had lost in her last round of executive intrigue at Google, but still, she was employee number 20. Even shunted aside, she was making millions of dollars. There was certainly a group of engineers who didn't respect her, but there was also a very large contingent who did. On the product level, many credit her work on the look and feel of early Google products with a broad portion of Google's early success. (And indeed, one reason she was shunted aside because Google had decided to abandon her vision of Google's look and feel.) Your last paragraph is pretty much pure speculation. It's pretty clear she was unhappy at Google, but what would have happened if she hadn't taken the Yahoo job? She could have bided her time until a better situation came along. Google wasn't going to fire her.
ue_ 10y ago
>Support a law that says the top executive can't make x times the total comp of the lowest paid. Or support a law that means that you get paid for as much as you work. That makes more sense, no?
- yellow_postit 10y ago
  How do you propose to measure this?
  - ue_ 10y ago
    Although there are various ways (which I'm not personally familiar with), hours of SNLT may be a starting point for more complex calculations. It doesn't apply for management positions (or really positions which don't produce a non-reproducible good), though I'd be interested to see where the research in that's going. I'm not sure why my comment was downvoted, especially without explanation. I thought it's quite reasonable for a person to be paid as much as he or she works.
- FLUX-YOU 10y ago
  If we did, I'm pretty sure Torvalds would get all the money anyway
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
phaus 10y ago
How was this even a good deal for her? Didn't the fraud she hired and was immediately forced to fire get $60 million as a severance package? I know I'd like $23 million for getting fire, but I'm just a regular person. I thought she would get significantly more.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  She lost some of her expected bonuses due to the repeated security breaches that compromised user accounts. http://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14783686/yahoos-lawyer-ousted-hacking-marissa-mayer-pay-docked http://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14783686/yahoos-lawyer-ousted...
product50 10y ago
You are wrong. Before joining Yahoo, Marissa was demoted from her position and no longer was in Larry's inner circle. She pretty much had her hand forced to quit Google given the influence she had once no longer remained. Wrt joining other tech companies, it is debatable whether she could get a CEO role of $30B+ tech company given she never had such an accreditation before. Wrt your excuses on why she failed, those are exactly that - excuses. If it is such a common knowledge that middle managers are political centers, why didn't she do anything about it? There wasn't a single round of layoffs at Yahoo in her first 2.5 yrs when everyone was asking why Yahoo needs 12k+ employees to support $4B in annual revenues. She failed to figure out what was wrong with Yahoo and take adequate steps to fix it. In essence she completely failed in her duties as ceos. I think a lot of frustration here is not that CEOs earn that much. I, for one, am totally fine if Satya Nadella earns $100M+ for all the great work and transformation he has done over at Microsoft. So I don't agree with your proposal on fixing the salaries of CEOs based on a multiple. I think what is frustrating here is that here is a CEO who clearly failed across the board and did nothing noteworthy (and made huge costly mistakes such as hiring Henrique de Castro which cost Yahoo $100M) but still was seemingly unaffected in securing the CEO role and being paid handsome salary/bonuses.
- wwalser 10y ago
  Any ah… evidence for that first claim (or any of them really…)? It seems obvious that she would have netted more money if she had just stayed anywhere near the top tier of Google. Yahoo was a capsized ship before Marissa came aboard. The fact that she got it into harbor at all is impressive enough for me. I always assumed there was a near-zero chance that she would save it from complete collapse. Making bets that don't pay off is par for the course for a CEO (Bezos & Satya are both great at this), some just have the luxury of huge profit centers to point at when investors come knocking. Marissa made her bets — some worked, others didn't. She managed to get an asset that, for a time, was negatively valued in the market[1] sold for parts. How she is compensated for the feat is, I assume, based on her employer's evaluation of that result. 1. http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos-core-business-negatively-valued-baba-yhoo-goog-amzn-fb.aspx http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
st3v3r 10y ago
"That doesn't mean you bash Mayer for playing by the rules that society has set up." So "don't hate the player, hate the game"? I've never agreed with that idea. The "players" are adults who are perfectly capable of taking responsibility for their own actions.

iaw 10y ago

> People who are criticizing Mayer's deal are failing to realize that Mayer had better options than taking over as head of yahoo. Could you provide sources for this? What opportunities were available to Mayer better than being an executive of a multi-billion dollar giant like Yahoo? Edit: I'm seeing a lot of speculative replies but none that demonstrate an 8 to 9 figure payday from 5 years of sitting in place. Does anyone have an example of an alternative that would've yielded her this much wealth?

kornish 10y ago
Well, for one, being an executive at a multi-billion dollar giant which was growing or doing well. edit: by "executive", I was including the whole C-suite – should have clarified.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  But those tend to hire/promote CEOs who can actually push things forward.
  - kornish 10y ago
    Not all executives are chief executives. Meyer surely could have gotten another VP or SVP job at a non-Google company with momentum. To require compensation for risk/opportunity cost in foregoing those opportunities seems very reasonable.
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  What company fitting that description could Mayer have gone to?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  But which multi-billion dollar giant would go for an in-experienced CEO? Running a department of a large company is not the same as being CEO of even a much smaller one. I figure the only reason she was given a shot was that the Yahoo! board hoped the Google magic had somehow rubbed off on Mayer and that that alone would make the difference. Other than that I don't see what would have gotten her a CEO spot, especially not in a growing company at the multi-billion $ level. Yahoo! did not have that much to lose at that point in time.
  - wwalser 10y ago
    The person above you didn't say CEO. They said exec. If she had stayed at Google and had some equity comp she would have netted more money. Absolutely.
leatherdaddy 10y ago
here's your source: eat shit
viggity 10y ago
One option would be to continue to work as an executive at Google, where she was already working. I would have to imagine that Vice President of Search Products at GOOGLE would be able to find a cushy gig just about anywhere in tech.
mikeyouse 10y ago
I imagine any unicorn in existence would have jumped at the opportunity to have her come in as COO or CEO if it wasn't Founder-led.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  COO yes, CEO no. She simply did not have the relevant experience. Ironically, now she does but now any such companies would likely not hire her.
  - cat199 10y ago
    but she has enough money to buy several and build her own empire, if she is so inclined.. so there's that..
grandalf 10y ago
> Could you provide sources for this? Do you think that Yahoo's board decided to grant Mayer the golden parachute out of kindness, or out of sympathy to a fellow member of the nobility? Mayer and Yahoo's board negotiated the terms of her contract. The parachute is meant to lure an executive who would normally not want to risk taking the helm of such a high risk company.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  I, for one, would have been perfectly able and happy to have done the job of "fail to turn around Yahoo" for a mere 1/100'th of what she got. For some reason, the board chose not to call me for that interview. Could have saved those shareholders some big money!
- acjohnson55 10y ago
  Such a risk! With respect to the complexity of running a multi-billion, it still seems a little absurd to phrase out that way. To me, real personal risk is losing your house or dying.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    Well, Mayer faced tremendous reputation risk if she failed. Now that she has failed, she is not held in remotely the same high regard that she was prior to taking the helm of Yahoo. She's also been implicated in some of Yahoo's more embarrassing missteps during her tenure. So it's important to weight the parachute against her annual salary in a "safe" job for 3-5 years. It may still seem overvalued (or undervalued) but the price was reached through negotiation.
    - cobalt 10y ago
      so? If I fuck up, I burn my reputation as well (It may be easier to hide, but it still stands) and I don't get a giant payout
      - grandalf 10y ago
compiler-guy 10y ago
It's not just the opportunities that were on the table at the time, but also declining all future opportunities if this venture failed. You get one shot at a job like this. The company making the offer had to make it worth her while to A. Leave Google, and while she wasn't the top dog at Google any more, she was still extremely well respected, and incredibly well compensated, and--perhaps most importantly--very, very safe. What would it take for you to leave a job like that? B. Spend her one shot at the ultra-big time at a company near death, where it was likely that she couldn't save it, regardless of what she did. Yahoo had to offer her the big bucks for to take a risk like that, and one part of reducing the risk to her is to give her a golden parachute, where regardless of whether the venture succeeds or fails, she is still better off than at her old position. And you have to make all the numbers risk-adjusted. All of this negotiated _before_ you know if she is going to succeed or fail. Yahoo wanted her that badly and spent what it took to get her.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > she was still extremely well respected, and incredibly well compensated, and--perhaps most importantly--very, very safe. Re: well respected and very safe, not really. Worked during that time in Maps. Cracks were starting to show. She wasn't that well respected in engineering circles. Maybe in product management she was, I don't have much visibility into that. Also, her safety was in question. She already got shunted to a position with less authority and a further degree of separation from Larry Page. She wouldn't have gotten fired, but a slow stripping of responsibilities and transfer into a ceremonial role probably wouldn't have been out of the question.
  - compiler-guy 10y ago
    There is no doubt she had lost in her last round of executive intrigue at Google, but still, she was employee number 20. Even shunted aside, she was making millions of dollars. There was certainly a group of engineers who didn't respect her, but there was also a very large contingent who did. On the product level, many credit her work on the look and feel of early Google products with a broad portion of Google's early success. (And indeed, one reason she was shunted aside because Google had decided to abandon her vision of Google's look and feel.) Your last paragraph is pretty much pure speculation. It's pretty clear she was unhappy at Google, but what would have happened if she hadn't taken the Yahoo job? She could have bided her time until a better situation came along. Google wasn't going to fire her.

ue_ 10y ago

>Support a law that says the top executive can't make x times the total comp of the lowest paid. Or support a law that means that you get paid for as much as you work. That makes more sense, no?

yellow_postit 10y ago
How do you propose to measure this?
- ue_ 10y ago
  Although there are various ways (which I'm not personally familiar with), hours of SNLT may be a starting point for more complex calculations. It doesn't apply for management positions (or really positions which don't produce a non-reproducible good), though I'd be interested to see where the research in that's going. I'm not sure why my comment was downvoted, especially without explanation. I thought it's quite reasonable for a person to be paid as much as he or she works.
FLUX-YOU 10y ago
If we did, I'm pretty sure Torvalds would get all the money anyway

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

phaus 10y ago

How was this even a good deal for her? Didn't the fraud she hired and was immediately forced to fire get $60 million as a severance package? I know I'd like $23 million for getting fire, but I'm just a regular person. I thought she would get significantly more.

xiaoma 10y ago
She lost some of her expected bonuses due to the repeated security breaches that compromised user accounts. http://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14783686/yahoos-lawyer-ousted-hacking-marissa-mayer-pay-docked http://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14783686/yahoos-lawyer-ousted...

product50 10y ago

You are wrong. Before joining Yahoo, Marissa was demoted from her position and no longer was in Larry's inner circle. She pretty much had her hand forced to quit Google given the influence she had once no longer remained. Wrt joining other tech companies, it is debatable whether she could get a CEO role of $30B+ tech company given she never had such an accreditation before. Wrt your excuses on why she failed, those are exactly that - excuses. If it is such a common knowledge that middle managers are political centers, why didn't she do anything about it? There wasn't a single round of layoffs at Yahoo in her first 2.5 yrs when everyone was asking why Yahoo needs 12k+ employees to support $4B in annual revenues. She failed to figure out what was wrong with Yahoo and take adequate steps to fix it. In essence she completely failed in her duties as ceos. I think a lot of frustration here is not that CEOs earn that much. I, for one, am totally fine if Satya Nadella earns $100M+ for all the great work and transformation he has done over at Microsoft. So I don't agree with your proposal on fixing the salaries of CEOs based on a multiple. I think what is frustrating here is that here is a CEO who clearly failed across the board and did nothing noteworthy (and made huge costly mistakes such as hiring Henrique de Castro which cost Yahoo $100M) but still was seemingly unaffected in securing the CEO role and being paid handsome salary/bonuses.

wwalser 10y ago
Any ah… evidence for that first claim (or any of them really…)? It seems obvious that she would have netted more money if she had just stayed anywhere near the top tier of Google. Yahoo was a capsized ship before Marissa came aboard. The fact that she got it into harbor at all is impressive enough for me. I always assumed there was a near-zero chance that she would save it from complete collapse. Making bets that don't pay off is par for the course for a CEO (Bezos & Satya are both great at this), some just have the luxury of huge profit centers to point at when investors come knocking. Marissa made her bets — some worked, others didn't. She managed to get an asset that, for a time, was negatively valued in the market[1] sold for parts. How she is compensated for the feat is, I assume, based on her employer's evaluation of that result. 1. http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos-core-business-negatively-valued-baba-yhoo-goog-amzn-fb.aspx http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

st3v3r 10y ago

"That doesn't mean you bash Mayer for playing by the rules that society has set up." So "don't hate the player, hate the game"? I've never agreed with that idea. The "players" are adults who are perfectly capable of taking responsibility for their own actions.