16 ms·

I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer's "overpa

I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer's "overpay" as CEO and outrage over her "golden parachute," while HN (a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40 comments and I've only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several comments praising her job in the role. Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section. Why is this? Is this because she's from Google? Because she's a former engineer? Because she's a female CEO? Is she just a politically polarizing topic ala Elon Musk? Genuinely curious. Anyone have any ideas?

krisdol 9y ago
Because she's a female CEO and any news-provider's comment sections are absolute cesspools.
- nobleach 9y ago
  I'm not so sure it completely boils down to her gender. I mean, I'm sure that's an issue for some folks... but I can't say that explains 100% of the vitriol. She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. That was a douche move. Any CEO that plays the "us and them" policy with their workers vs execs rubs me the wrong way. I'm not at all bothered that she got 23 million as a "thank you". She had an extremely hard job. The pressures she dealt with are nothing I could understand. So by all means, reward her for it! But I'm still kinda chapped about the work from home thing.
  - 1024core 9y ago
    > She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Google does not have a WFH policy. She killed the policy because internal audit showed that many people were just not working when they claimed to be; VPN and sign-in logs turned up many slackers. There were some who were allowed to WFH. So it wasn't a blanket "no one's allowed to WFH", but more a "justify your need to WFH and show that you're doing a good job". > Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. She did not take much of a maternity leave at all. She came back within 2 weeks of giving birth via a cesaerean(sp). She just converted a cube nearby to where she kept her kid.
    - exelius 9y ago
      Both fair points. Also remember that by the time she killed the WFH policy, Yahoo had been circling the drain for a long time. When your best folks can easily find new/better jobs, they do; and you're left with a company full of people who are having a hard time finding anything else. It's one thing to kill a successful WFH policy at a thriving company; it's another entirely to do it with a company that is having problems.
    - nobleach 9y ago
      >Google does not have a WFH policy. Google is also among the companies I wouldn't want to work for. It's just a deal breaker for me. Having a policy and then rescinding it would be another deal breaker. I get that there were slackers, but when it comes to developers, were team leads really not seeing this? They had to have an audit? How does this type of slacking even work? "Oh, I'm working on this thing that should have taken a few hours for the third day in a row". My point was that I don't think she afforded the "bring your infant to work" policy for developers. One main reason I might choose to work from home, is that I would be able to look after an infant while my significant other ran errands. All kudos to heading right back to work especially after that tough of a procedure. (although I'd argue SHE should have worked from home at that point)...
- ng12 9y ago
  Or it's the opposite and HN desperately wants female CEOs to succeed.
- shakestheclown 9y ago
  How many other female CEOs can you name? And how many of those are portrayed negatively even infrequently or regularly bashed in comments? Mary Barra made $22.6 million, more than all the male auto CEOs. I haven't really ever seen much bashing of her personally. Elizabeth Holmes was a media love story until it all came crashing down, although she was a founder/CEO. Agree about the cesspools though.
  - BlackjackCF 9y ago
    Lisa Su of AMD is another female CEO I can think of. I don't think I've seen anyone bash her. I mean she is extraordinarily competent and has 3 degrees in EE to boot.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - compiler-guy 9y ago
    Ginny Rometty takes heat pretty regularly, but is basically successful.
  - jansho 9y ago
    Jessica Alba to add another. It's so easy to not be taken seriously but her Honest company is now valued at $1 billion.
    - rasz 9y ago
      the "has agreed to pay out $1.55 million in a class action lawsuit settlement for lying to customers about a chemical they claimed was absent from their products" Honest company?
  - bluedino 9y ago
    >> How many other female CEOs can you name? And how many of those are portrayed negatively even infrequently or regularly bashed in comments? Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO
  - 9y ago
- briandear 9y ago
  Because she’s A female CEO? Any evidence? Lockheed, Duke Energy, IBM – all female CEOs and they don’t get near the scrutiny of Mayer – probably because they are competent and don’t engage in bombastic grandstanding. Mayer was a bad CEO – take Alibaba out of the equation and Yahoo became materially worse off expressly because of the decisions she made. Look at the ridiculous acquisitions, look at the brain drain. What the hell is Yahoo’s product? Email? They can’t even keep that secure – compromising a BILLION accounts. They were warned about MD5 in 2008. Yahoo’s Security team was treated like second class citizens – requests being denied because of cost too much or they were considered a low priority. Who set those priorities? Mayer. A a billion accounts got compromised as a result. There is a direct cause-effect. Complaining about her salary is completely valid – not because it was “high” but because she got such an incomprehensible salary for running the company into the ground. Nobody complains about Tim Cook’s salary because nobody cares – Apple is extremely profitable, which is the entire point of a CEO. Tim Cook is a liberal gay man – so if the idea that people are harder on Mayer is because of her sex – imagine how hard they should ostensibly be on Cook. Yet Cook is actually doing a good job. Nobody cares what someone has between their legs if the share price is good. Mayer is criticized because she was horrible, ineffective and engaged in substance-poor grandstanding and she got paid enormously for essentially crashing the ship into an iceberg before Verizon came along like the Carpathia. Sure, Yahoo was the Titanic before Mayer arrived, but she knew that and yet still went full-ahead sailing Yahoo into the ice field or irrelevancy.
  - naturalgradient 9y ago
    What I am really looking forward to is to hear how Marissa Mayer will frame her time at Yahoo in hindsight. Will she show humility for failing at turning the company around? Will she claim success for a coincidental share price increase she had nothing to do with? Will she claim nobody could have done better? This will allow for a better judgment of character.
  - rewrew 9y ago
    Thank you for laying it out so well. I am a female executive and I am so sick of everyone saying that she's only getting criticized because she's female. So what, we can't get criticized if we do a horrible job? If we treat our employees unfairly? If we don't do what's best for our companies? She was a bad CEO and she deserved to be fired long ago.
cmiles74 9y ago
Personally, I assumed that all CEO's are massively overpaid and that they all negotiate substantial "golden parachutes". I think I'm a bit numb to the dollar amounts as they all seem inconceivably large to me. It all strikes me as buisiness-as-usual.
- nazka 9y ago
  I don't know. I think for instance that Steve Jobs was really underpaid. His work (even surrounded by smart minds) and his leadership with his vision were a real launch pad for Apple. I can see a few CEOs like that who seem to be overpaid but I think are underpaid compared to their value they bring for their company. Look at Satya Nadella. His new vision for Microsoft and all the key decisions he made are really what you see in its stocks. From +12 years of nothing to twice its valuation.
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    In the case of Apple the CEO is the public face of a fantastic team Steve built. I assume Microsoft is similar, Satya just knows how to get out of the way better than Ballmer did.
    - metaphorm 9y ago
      I think Satya comes from a dramatically different cultural and professional background than Ballmer and has a correspondingly different set of priorities and ideas. The difference is like night and day. Ballmer was all about monopolization, vendor lock-in, ruling the developer community with an iron fist, and funneling all business into the proven profit centers. Nadella understands the value of interoperability, evangelizing your own tech while trying to advance community efforts, embracing open source, and developing new lines of business independent of legacy products.
      - Longhanks 9y ago
        Also, Satya doesn't act like a clown in public (Developers, developers) or drops unqualified statements about products from the competition (Ballmer about the iPhone). He behaves like a proper CEO.
wellboy 9y ago
Because she made big PR how she will make yahoo new again and then did super tiny things thay changed the logo, made random acquisitions and removed remote workers, which will absolutely change a failing company. I was expecting a new revolutionary product, a complete refocus of the company, such as Apple. She sure must have had this in her plan or she probably actually didn't. Sounds to me like someone didn't know what they were doing instead of someone who really has a plan.
- iraphael 9y ago
  I think she approached it as trying to do what Ruth Porat is doing at Google. But maybe Yahoo needed more than putting finances in order.
gus8 9y ago
She is planning to run for President. Probably why.
arcticfox 9y ago
IMO it's because she was intentionally not a generic CEO. The high profile approach to publicity was part of her plan, and brand, to turn around Yahoo. It just failed.
- compiler-guy 9y ago
  And not just a part of her plan, part of the Yahoo Board's plan. They wanted someone with a big name that would make Yahoo exciting again. They got that. The news of her hiring spiked the share price, and the media announced that Yahoo was suddenly relevant again. Then the time came to actually save a business that was in dire straights. Not sure anyone could have done that.
rb808 9y ago
I agree about the polarizing part. I think she is paid pretty similar to most CEOs, but she seems to get much more hate because she stands out. This page does have more complementary comments than normal, I think startup world likes a clean exit, but maybe its just people have given up moaning about her and are over it.
libertymcateer 9y ago
WSJ has a more economically sophisticated audience and this place is full of crypto-libertarians.
Shivetya 9y ago
most open forums like that one are regularly spammed by social justice warriors and the like. the business readers aren't going to waste their time posting to a message forum such as that. one example of similar that went downhill after acquisition by a national paper is The Volokh Conspiracy whose comment section became downright toxic after the exposure to a more public forum occurred
- willvarfar 9y ago
  Tangent: pleas me can we stop with "social justice warrior" nonsense? Us Europeans are getting mighty tired of the polarisation of American domestic politics leaking out online ;)
  - hyperdunc 9y ago
    Europe is more divided that you seem to realize. Ire toward dogmatic progressivism isn't consigned to US domestic politics - it pervades the West. Just look at the UK, Hungary and Australia right now.
  - vocatus_gate 9y ago
    Oh trust me, we Americans are getting tired of it too.
oculusthrift 9y ago
maybe it's because over her watch a legendary company died? and at the same time she got paid a lot. not that it's completely her fault. i think reactions would be the same regardless of gender. if anything, people are more scared to question her for fear of being labeled sexist
ebbv 9y ago
> Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section. That may be true, but it doesn't make the comments about her being overpaid any less valid; or analysis of what happened with Yahoo any less interesting. I think the special outrage over Mayer has an element of misogyny (how can it not?), but I honestly think it's mostly fueled by the fact that most of her public decisions (ending remote work, etc.) seem like changing uniforms on the staff of the Titanic as it sinks. When someone does a terrible job I don't think they should get paid more money than most people will ever see in their lifetime. I think a lot of people feel that way. Mayer is not unique in this, there's plenty of terrible executives who are wealthy, she was just a really visible one.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  I don't know. If you replace Marissa Mayer with a generic CEO, and Yahoo did just as badly under that CEO, there might be just as much anger and/or contempt. See Steve Ballmer for an example - and Microsoft didn't do badly under him, just less great than it did under Bill Gates. (Yes, I know that lots of the vitriol aimed at Ballmer was for various weird public antics. But he was also regarded as a dud of a CEO, and roundly criticized for not actually knowing how to run Microsoft.)
  - 1024core 9y ago
    > If you replace Marissa Mayer with a generic CEO, and Yahoo did just as badly under that CEO, there might be just as much anger and/or contempt. But Yahoo was doing a much worse job before she got there! How many articles have you seen on HN about Scott Thompson? About Carol Bartz? About Terry Semel?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
amrrs 9y ago
Because when she was brought in to lead Yahoo, it gave a huge hope the same way people hoped when Jack came back to Twitter. But there's also a conspiracy theory I like that she was primarily brought in to be made the scapegoat and being criticised while Jack still being admired as a visionary (While I'd argue DC is a better one to do lead Twitter, but he faced the same fate as MM)
scandox 9y ago
Maybe because HN readers are slightly more tuned to the relationship between numbers (in terms of magnitude)? In other words they feel instinctively her pay is a numerical irrelevance given the context?
InclinedPlane 9y ago
She's a woman. Incompetence in other CEOs is generally ignored and tolerated.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  I don't think that's necessary fair; she has far more celebrity attached to her name than just about anyone else who could have taken the spot.
dragonwriter 9y ago
CEOs are often also capitalists, and often specifically major capital holders in the firms of which they are CEO, but, as CEOs, they are elite, highly-compensated employees. HN may be less pro-capitalist than the WSJ (though it's still pretty pro-capitalist, overall), but if anything it's more pro-elite-employee than the WSJ.
jacquesm 9y ago
We've had entire threads here discussing MM's overpay. Consider the subject exhausted.
wayn3 9y ago
its because she's pretty. nothing gets a lesser man more jelly than a pretty woman that is powerful. does not compute. has nothing to do with the money.
grandalf 9y ago
In the days when Mayer was at Google, Silicon Valley was one of the few places in America with a relatively meritocratic labor market and its firms (including Google at the time) had risen to prominence by upsetting incumbent industries and not through corporate welfare and cronyism. A lot has changed. Schmidt weaponized Google's offering and helped sell to DC, turning Google into the Halliburton of information. I think the typical notion of capitalism is too broad (and encompasses the gamut of disruptive businesses, traditional "crony" capitalism, rent-seeking, and borderline fraud). The WSJ caters mainly to establishment ("crony" and rent-seeking) capitalist readers. HN includes more classically liberal views. Also, I think few people realize that Mayer's comp package was an exercise in leverage and risk reduction for both parties. Taking the helm of a project that has failed under a handful of seasoned practitioners is certainly not something most people would feel comfortable doing in their own line of work.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer's "overpay" as CEO and outrage over her "golden parachute," while HN (a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40 comments and I've only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several comments praising her job in the role." A CEO's compensation is used to retain and motivate that talent to create value for the company. If investors feel dissatisfied with how much they paid for the level of value creation they received on a particular asset that is very much a capitalist sentiment. There is nothing even remotely anti-capitalist about that. Those hundreds of millions of dollars in CEO pay have to come from somewhere and that somewhere is increasingly company stock. Company stock is an asset that belongs to the company and that company is owned by shareholders. Money spent on "rock star CEOs" is money that could have otherwise been used to deliver more value to shareholders, an example would be returning money to shareholders in the form of dividends.
- derefr 9y ago
  > Company stock is an asset that belongs to the company and that company is owned by shareholders. I think this is the key to the confusion: seeing the shareholders as the true "owners" (and therefore controllers) of a corporation is, more and more, associated with socialist undertones: people recognize in phrases like "the shareholders are more important than the CEO" the sentiments of people who call for labor unions and co-ops, which want to assert not only employee shareholdership, but also shareholder primacy. The current form of "capitalism" that exists in most Western countries, has a corporate structure that's a bit like the Bureaucracy of ancient China: we have self-perpetuating Boards of Directors that—while being nominated by the voting shareholders—also control the opinions of the same shareholders. Where the ideal corporation would be a "representative democracy of the shareholders", the current structure is more akin to a "plutocracy of the directors." This is the hidden war that is being fought using the proxy of "CEO pay": Board-of-Directors-plutocracy corporate-model-ists like cronyist CEOs that are in their own pocket, doing things that serve the board in particular at the expense of the shareholders generally. They're willing to pay high premiums for this—and, also, when the CEO "comes from" their stock, to throw money at them "just because" (hoping they'll get their own turn to be thrown money at later on.) Meanwhile, the representative-democracy corporate-model-ists resent CEOs that have any sort of elevated position; they see a CEO as a necessary evil—a general and strategist to serve with skilled experience their civilian representative who does not have those skills. To them, the CEO isn't a buddy, but rather a risk to be managed—a sort of genie, who the board (as the trusted elect) must do its best to keep in its bottle, even as they demand wishes from them. Each side of this confrontation calls the other "anti-capitalist." But, as I hope should be obvious, neither of these sides really represents "capitalism" per se. Instead, one values the sort of concentration of wealth and power that anarchocapitalism enables; while the other side values the power of the corporate charter in an almost patriotic way.
mnarayan01 9y ago
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a CEO get extensively criticized on HN for their pay. I feel like this needs at least a single anecdotal comparison from both the WSJ and HN for the question to get any sort of real answers.
nihonde 9y ago
I think any CEO that takes $1M/week out of a failing company and claims credit for a predecessors' good bets is going to get some negative attention. Add a little dash of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do workplace policy making, some obviously stupid acquisitions, throwing huge parties where you're the guest of honor, hiring retirement-age network news anchors to spruce up a new media play, and you're infamous.
linkmotif 9y ago
Can't offer any proof but going to say it's because she's a woman.
NTDF9 9y ago
Take 50 million out of that and find really skilled engineers and product guys and maybe the company could turn around?
- coredog64 9y ago
  How many "rockstars" would that cover in SV?
  - NTDF9 9y ago
    Enough to build a Dropbox inside Yahoo.
exelius 9y ago
IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absolutely ludicrous to most Americans. She's an easy target for people who want to claim that she only got the job for being an attractive female. I think HN readers remember a bit more about the state that Yahoo was in when she took over (hint: not good.) I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo. I think she succeeded on that front: the market was probably undervaluing Yahoo's other assets, and she was able to sell those to Verizon for a fair price after divesting the Alibaba stake. tl;dr: Yahoo was long dead before she arrived. WSJ readers forget that. HN readers don't. Plus she's an attractive woman, which will always paint a target on your back as an executive.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Qub3d 9y ago
  I am of the opinion that Ms. Mayer was hired partly as a way for Yahoo's investors to hedge their bets [1]. Its a bit of a dark view on silicon valley culture, perhaps, but I think a valid one. Anyways, I agree with your point that Yahoo had already suffered most of its damage. In many ways, its latest CEO did the best that could be expected of anyone in that position. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
- jonknee 9y ago
  > I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo. If that was the case she never would have been given the job. That's something any old bean counter could do and they wouldn't require hundreds of millions of dollars for the babysitting job. She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?). Some examples: * Tumblr - $1.1b with the majority of that later written off because they have only figured out how to keep losing money * Polyvore - $230m A fashion search engine run by people she used to mentor at Google * Summly - $30m to a teenager for a news app that was shut down and never heard of again
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I am not sure that a 'generic' CEO would have had a different result. Broadly there are commentators who seem nostalgic for the 'old' Yahoo (and by that I mean the turn of the century Yahoo) and they often express angst in 'over paying' the CEO more along the lines of "we could have used that money to may Yahoo! great again" rather than pay it to some CEO. Then there are people who have some idea of the level of change Yahoo! has gone through and the number of founding assumptions that didn't work later in its life. Those people understand what Mayer was up against at least. And there are a number of entrepreneurial folks who made lifestyle businesses out of one or more of the many Yahoo! APIs that powered a lot of web sites over the years. My point is that the opinion of the commentator will often have more to do with their relationship to Yahoo! and less to do with how well or poorly Marissa did her job.
wodenokoto 9y ago
Yesterday there was a post about Marissa resigning, and it was nothing but "I can't believe she has been payed this much for sinking Yahoo". My pet theory is that the first comment or so sets the mood, and the opposing camp can't be bothered to participate where their opinion will be met with critique.
bjourne 9y ago
Wasn't here tenure at Yahoo almost a mirror image of Stephen Elop's at Nokia? He was put in place to save their mobile division but couldn't turn the company around and it was eventually bought by Microsoft. It seem self-evident that failing companies are hard for CEO:s to save. And if any CEO should be burned at a stake, shouldn't it be that guy that refused to sell Yahoo for 47 billion to Microsoft?
- metaphorm 9y ago
  > And if any CEO should be burned at a stake, shouldn't it be that guy that refused to sell Yahoo for 47 billion to Microsoft? That was Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo. And yes, he was "burned at the stake". He was fired from the CEO job within months of tanking that deal.
  - needlessly 9y ago
    Jerry also bought the Alibaba shares in 2001 which is the reason why Yahoo is even alive. After he left, Yahoo made the mistake of selling half of the Alibaba which are worth $36 Billion.
- pessimizer 9y ago
  Elop trashed a company that dominated the world featurephone market, but was clearly going to start falling behind as smartphones took over. Elop accidentally announced that they were going to abandon the featurephone market, killing the business. He then scrapped their well-regarded smartphone experiment, and announced that they were going to switch to the marginal smartphone platform of a company with a history of failing at smartphones. Mayer joined a horribly failing company with no core purpose for existing, experimented wildly in an attempt to shake things up and turn it around, then after failing, unwound the thing and sold it for far more than it was worth.
abritinthebay 9y ago
> a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet Since when? It's a pro-capitalism, free-market, libertarian, Ayn Rand, love-fest in here most days. Talking against those points is a great way to be voted down unless you happen to be commenting in a thread that has attracted the smaller left-wing side of HN.
marcoperaza 9y ago
I'm a capitalist and think that some CEOs are overpaid and that golden parachutes for failed CEOs are obscene. That doesn't mean that I want the government to do something about it. Shareholders are getting ripped off and that's their problem ultimately. Caveat emptor.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Definitely. When the government steps in, it's always the boards and executives who hire the lobbyists who write the laws and regulations. They don't do so with common stock investors' interests in mind. The system will not solve the problems with the system.
- Bakary 9y ago
  Negative externalities can reach beyond the CEO-shareholder relationship. Determining what these would be is of course a difficult task.
macspoofing 9y ago
>Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section. Uhh.. What are you talking about? Everyone complains about the pay scale of CEOs. Especially CEOs of failing or under performing companies. That's been a thing for years. She's a failed CEO. She was brought in to turn Yahoo around and didn't.
metaphorm 9y ago
I can't claim to have any insight into group psychology here so I'll only speak for myself. I'm much more interested in the aspect of the story that has Marisa Mayer failing to save a sinking ship than I am interested in the ludicrous golden parachute. There is something interesting to discuss about the former but nothing interesting to discuss about the latter.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Yes for sure. I'm much more interested in the former as well. I have read and commented on a number of Yahoo and Mayer comments but yeah seems like I'm always only interested in the failing ship part
zekevermillion 9y ago
The WSJ has gone way downhill after the Newscorp acquisition. The WSJ is now a tabloid. The misinformed comments on the Yahoo deal are just a symptom of readers who are not really involved in finance or public company governance, and do not understand what MM was hired to do. She served the shareholders very well. Yes it is extremely disappointing to see all the delightful little tech properties that are now part of the Evil Empire. But, they already sold out, and furthermore, that has nothing to do with MM's performance. Seems like most people here agree she did a great job or at least did not screw up a good deal for Yahoo's shareholders. It may look easy but I suspect there were very difficult corporate politics to navigate. Maybe someone will write a nice book about this deal in a couple years and we can get the juicy gossip then.
anth1988 9y ago
> Is this because she's from Google? Because she's a former engineer? Because she's a female CEO? I'd say all of those contributed to a lot of expectations, which she didn't really live up to in the view of many people.
avenoir 9y ago
I think you're comparing general population with technical population at HN, many of which are in leadership roles and would naturally be more sympathetic because they understand the struggles of growing a company. People who don't get it simply don't understand the situation and wonder why Yahoo isn't dead already or why they have insane payouts for a CEO which essentially finished the downward spiral.
polskibus 9y ago
How is HN less capitalist-friendly? Articles about high valuations, venture capitalists, raising rounds, praising mega corporations like amzn, fb, Google, etc. often get to the top without many criticizing remarks. Many HNrs benefit greatly from capitalism and its mechanisms like raising capital or stock market while working for very large corporations.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  >How is HN less capitalist-friendly? It isn't a business focused newspaper owned by News Corp, most anticapitalists aren't going to go anywhere near their comments section.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
subterfudge44 9y ago
HN probably won't question her overpay for two reasons 1. Fear of being labelled as sexist. 2. It makes no sense. She is not really overpaid. Firstly, Mayer's career is over. After her spectacular failure as a leader I think she can say goodbye to her career and spend rest of her time vacationing in Bahamas. Of course she is a smart woman and she had factored in this risk and is part of the reason she gets a golden parachute. Ask yourself this : Will you end your career today if someone gives you 10x of you current salary today ? Then ask if 10x is an overpay.
zghst 9y ago
The external diagnosis of a situation must always be minted in racism, misogyny or struggle. You are not allowed to criticize without starting there
mrspeaker 9y ago
One other thing I noticed is that every time there is a post about her here, everyone calls her Marissa, or Marissa Mayer, or Ms. Mayer (seriously!)... never Mayer. I might be "attributing to malice" but dudes never get called "first name", only "last name". It might just be the way it is in the US, but I can't help read it as a way to depower someone. I dunno if "depower" is the right term, but it feels something like that. Again, that might just be a cultural thing that I'm not aware of.
- baitbiter 9y ago
  Nonsense....Several men are called by first names. You must be a feminist
- kyrre 9y ago
  this is demonstrably false just by looking at the comments submitted prior to your own. why did you even write this?
  - alistairSH 9y ago
    At this time, there are 28 instances of Marissa, 1 instance of Marissa Meyer, and 3 instances of Meyer.
    - smackmybishop 9y ago
      How many if you spell it right?
    - skinnymuch 9y ago
      Someone could say you have sexist intentions for misspelling her last name. And that would be silly.
- sethrin 9y ago
  I think it's something we inherited from the Brits. I don't believe it would be 'proper' to call a woman by her (unadorned) family name. But generally yes, it's a way to disempower women built into our language.
Cacti 9y ago
I don't know what gave you the impression that HN isn't capitalist-friendly. We have long had a whole lotta kool-aid going around here about markets, entrepreneurs, etc. In many ways startup culture is the embodiment of capitalism.
Touche 9y ago
I just don't get it personally, I would think HN being about startups would be more capitalist. I mean, she did her job, she didn't to my knowledge do anything unethical. She negotiated her salary based on her credentials and the board gave her that salary. My capitalist opinion is, fucking good for you, I hope to be in that position some day.
- Bakary 9y ago
  It's the result of cognitive dissonance. Many closeted capitalists don't want to admit, even to themselves, that the pursuit of money far outstrips other incentives and especially the vague Gavin Belson-esque promises to "make the world a better place". Seeing someone actually make a fortune will thus evoke strong and conflicting feelings almost immediately.
dghughes 9y ago
Most stories or comments I see on the web are about Mayer's "male purge" but also her salary/severance after gutting Yahoo.
jlarocco 9y ago
I don't know if being a female CEO has much to do with it. She was making a lot of money because she was supposed to turn things around and save the company. Instead Yahoo made a ton of huge blunders, sold off Alibaba and then finally sold the company to Verizon for a fraction of what it used to be worth.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Some stake in Alibaba was required to be sold off during be IPO. The person she hired to be the liaison with Alibaba was able to keep over 100 million extra shares. And the deal to sell a huge stake was before she came on board. So that's not her fault at all.
tanilama 9y ago
She is a rising star before joining Yahoo, and she basically turns Yahoo from a 20B company into a 5B one, and rewarded with a huge chunk of money for leaving the company. And among all those astounding achievements, you only think people are judging her because she is a female, you must being living in a bubble.
- vocatus_gate 9y ago
  It's because for some reason these days people have this bizarre obsession to shoehorn gender into everything, regardless the relevance.
- xordon 9y ago
  All the talk prior to MM taking over Yahoo was that it was worth less than its stake in Alibaba. ie. Yahoo had a negative value. I think it is probably more correct that she grew the value of Yahoo significantly, ~0 -> 4.5B Accusing anyone who disagree's with you as being a sexist/anti-sexist or whatever isn't helpful.
  - tanilama 9y ago
    I disagree that her criticism is gender motivated. I doubt that Yahoo worth negative value with all the engineers they hire and assets they control, without Alibaba's stock. From another perspective, she doesn't really bring Yahoo back on track, that market thinks it is worthless without Alibaba's stock. As a CEO and a high profile one, that is a definitely a failure.
    - pessimizer 9y ago
      > I doubt that Yahoo worth negative value with all the engineers they hire and assets they control, without Alibaba's stock. That's not a matter of opinion. The worth of the company and the worth of the Alibaba stock it held were common knowledge, and subtracting one from the other resulted in a negative number.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
baitbiter 9y ago
She did bad as CEO. Every one who dies that badly will be criticized. Female CEO wont get exception.
FerrisBowler 9y ago
Typical muckraking... I have ideas about muckraking. Give it a rest?
syrrim 9y ago
The CEO's salary, even if absurdly high, will generally pale in comparison to the revenue of the company. So long as salaries and other expenses aren't absurdly high across the board, a high CEO salary will only have a marginal effect on the company as a whole. Since her compensation only really affects her, those saying it should be lower aren't concerned for yahoo, but rather jealous of her. They think they could have done what she's done, and don't know why she's getting paid so well for it while they aren't. Capitalism (at it extreme) takes as an assumption that things are distributed fairly, and that merit is what achieves a reward. Deviations from this are therefore a source of ire to capitalists.
ma2rten 9y ago
I remember in previous posts Marissa Mayer's salary was already discussed to death. I think this discussion just focuses on the new information in this post.

krisdol 9y ago

Because she's a female CEO and any news-provider's comment sections are absolute cesspools.

nobleach 9y ago
I'm not so sure it completely boils down to her gender. I mean, I'm sure that's an issue for some folks... but I can't say that explains 100% of the vitriol. She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. That was a douche move. Any CEO that plays the "us and them" policy with their workers vs execs rubs me the wrong way. I'm not at all bothered that she got 23 million as a "thank you". She had an extremely hard job. The pressures she dealt with are nothing I could understand. So by all means, reward her for it! But I'm still kinda chapped about the work from home thing.
- 1024core 9y ago
  > She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Google does not have a WFH policy. She killed the policy because internal audit showed that many people were just not working when they claimed to be; VPN and sign-in logs turned up many slackers. There were some who were allowed to WFH. So it wasn't a blanket "no one's allowed to WFH", but more a "justify your need to WFH and show that you're doing a good job". > Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. She did not take much of a maternity leave at all. She came back within 2 weeks of giving birth via a cesaerean(sp). She just converted a cube nearby to where she kept her kid.
  - exelius 9y ago
    Both fair points. Also remember that by the time she killed the WFH policy, Yahoo had been circling the drain for a long time. When your best folks can easily find new/better jobs, they do; and you're left with a company full of people who are having a hard time finding anything else. It's one thing to kill a successful WFH policy at a thriving company; it's another entirely to do it with a company that is having problems.
  - nobleach 9y ago
    >Google does not have a WFH policy. Google is also among the companies I wouldn't want to work for. It's just a deal breaker for me. Having a policy and then rescinding it would be another deal breaker. I get that there were slackers, but when it comes to developers, were team leads really not seeing this? They had to have an audit? How does this type of slacking even work? "Oh, I'm working on this thing that should have taken a few hours for the third day in a row". My point was that I don't think she afforded the "bring your infant to work" policy for developers. One main reason I might choose to work from home, is that I would be able to look after an infant while my significant other ran errands. All kudos to heading right back to work especially after that tough of a procedure. (although I'd argue SHE should have worked from home at that point)...
ng12 9y ago
Or it's the opposite and HN desperately wants female CEOs to succeed.
shakestheclown 9y ago
How many other female CEOs can you name? And how many of those are portrayed negatively even infrequently or regularly bashed in comments? Mary Barra made $22.6 million, more than all the male auto CEOs. I haven't really ever seen much bashing of her personally. Elizabeth Holmes was a media love story until it all came crashing down, although she was a founder/CEO. Agree about the cesspools though.
- BlackjackCF 9y ago
  Lisa Su of AMD is another female CEO I can think of. I don't think I've seen anyone bash her. I mean she is extraordinarily competent and has 3 degrees in EE to boot.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- compiler-guy 9y ago
  Ginny Rometty takes heat pretty regularly, but is basically successful.
- jansho 9y ago
  Jessica Alba to add another. It's so easy to not be taken seriously but her Honest company is now valued at $1 billion.
  - rasz 9y ago
    the "has agreed to pay out $1.55 million in a class action lawsuit settlement for lying to customers about a chemical they claimed was absent from their products" Honest company?
- bluedino 9y ago
  >> How many other female CEOs can you name? And how many of those are portrayed negatively even infrequently or regularly bashed in comments? Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO
- 9y ago
briandear 9y ago
Because she’s A female CEO? Any evidence? Lockheed, Duke Energy, IBM – all female CEOs and they don’t get near the scrutiny of Mayer – probably because they are competent and don’t engage in bombastic grandstanding. Mayer was a bad CEO – take Alibaba out of the equation and Yahoo became materially worse off expressly because of the decisions she made. Look at the ridiculous acquisitions, look at the brain drain. What the hell is Yahoo’s product? Email? They can’t even keep that secure – compromising a BILLION accounts. They were warned about MD5 in 2008. Yahoo’s Security team was treated like second class citizens – requests being denied because of cost too much or they were considered a low priority. Who set those priorities? Mayer. A a billion accounts got compromised as a result. There is a direct cause-effect. Complaining about her salary is completely valid – not because it was “high” but because she got such an incomprehensible salary for running the company into the ground. Nobody complains about Tim Cook’s salary because nobody cares – Apple is extremely profitable, which is the entire point of a CEO. Tim Cook is a liberal gay man – so if the idea that people are harder on Mayer is because of her sex – imagine how hard they should ostensibly be on Cook. Yet Cook is actually doing a good job. Nobody cares what someone has between their legs if the share price is good. Mayer is criticized because she was horrible, ineffective and engaged in substance-poor grandstanding and she got paid enormously for essentially crashing the ship into an iceberg before Verizon came along like the Carpathia. Sure, Yahoo was the Titanic before Mayer arrived, but she knew that and yet still went full-ahead sailing Yahoo into the ice field or irrelevancy.
- naturalgradient 9y ago
  What I am really looking forward to is to hear how Marissa Mayer will frame her time at Yahoo in hindsight. Will she show humility for failing at turning the company around? Will she claim success for a coincidental share price increase she had nothing to do with? Will she claim nobody could have done better? This will allow for a better judgment of character.
- rewrew 9y ago
  Thank you for laying it out so well. I am a female executive and I am so sick of everyone saying that she's only getting criticized because she's female. So what, we can't get criticized if we do a horrible job? If we treat our employees unfairly? If we don't do what's best for our companies? She was a bad CEO and she deserved to be fired long ago.

cmiles74 9y ago

Personally, I assumed that all CEO's are massively overpaid and that they all negotiate substantial "golden parachutes". I think I'm a bit numb to the dollar amounts as they all seem inconceivably large to me. It all strikes me as buisiness-as-usual.

nazka 9y ago
I don't know. I think for instance that Steve Jobs was really underpaid. His work (even surrounded by smart minds) and his leadership with his vision were a real launch pad for Apple. I can see a few CEOs like that who seem to be overpaid but I think are underpaid compared to their value they bring for their company. Look at Satya Nadella. His new vision for Microsoft and all the key decisions he made are really what you see in its stocks. From +12 years of nothing to twice its valuation.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  In the case of Apple the CEO is the public face of a fantastic team Steve built. I assume Microsoft is similar, Satya just knows how to get out of the way better than Ballmer did.
  - metaphorm 9y ago
    I think Satya comes from a dramatically different cultural and professional background than Ballmer and has a correspondingly different set of priorities and ideas. The difference is like night and day. Ballmer was all about monopolization, vendor lock-in, ruling the developer community with an iron fist, and funneling all business into the proven profit centers. Nadella understands the value of interoperability, evangelizing your own tech while trying to advance community efforts, embracing open source, and developing new lines of business independent of legacy products.
    - Longhanks 9y ago
      Also, Satya doesn't act like a clown in public (Developers, developers) or drops unqualified statements about products from the competition (Ballmer about the iPhone). He behaves like a proper CEO.

wellboy 9y ago

Because she made big PR how she will make yahoo new again and then did super tiny things thay changed the logo, made random acquisitions and removed remote workers, which will absolutely change a failing company. I was expecting a new revolutionary product, a complete refocus of the company, such as Apple. She sure must have had this in her plan or she probably actually didn't. Sounds to me like someone didn't know what they were doing instead of someone who really has a plan.

iraphael 9y ago
I think she approached it as trying to do what Ruth Porat is doing at Google. But maybe Yahoo needed more than putting finances in order.

gus8 9y ago

She is planning to run for President. Probably why.

arcticfox 9y ago

IMO it's because she was intentionally not a generic CEO. The high profile approach to publicity was part of her plan, and brand, to turn around Yahoo. It just failed.

compiler-guy 9y ago
And not just a part of her plan, part of the Yahoo Board's plan. They wanted someone with a big name that would make Yahoo exciting again. They got that. The news of her hiring spiked the share price, and the media announced that Yahoo was suddenly relevant again. Then the time came to actually save a business that was in dire straights. Not sure anyone could have done that.

rb808 9y ago

I agree about the polarizing part. I think she is paid pretty similar to most CEOs, but she seems to get much more hate because she stands out. This page does have more complementary comments than normal, I think startup world likes a clean exit, but maybe its just people have given up moaning about her and are over it.

libertymcateer 9y ago

WSJ has a more economically sophisticated audience and this place is full of crypto-libertarians.

Shivetya 9y ago

most open forums like that one are regularly spammed by social justice warriors and the like. the business readers aren't going to waste their time posting to a message forum such as that. one example of similar that went downhill after acquisition by a national paper is The Volokh Conspiracy whose comment section became downright toxic after the exposure to a more public forum occurred

willvarfar 9y ago
Tangent: pleas me can we stop with "social justice warrior" nonsense? Us Europeans are getting mighty tired of the polarisation of American domestic politics leaking out online ;)
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  Europe is more divided that you seem to realize. Ire toward dogmatic progressivism isn't consigned to US domestic politics - it pervades the West. Just look at the UK, Hungary and Australia right now.
- vocatus_gate 9y ago
  Oh trust me, we Americans are getting tired of it too.

oculusthrift 9y ago

maybe it's because over her watch a legendary company died? and at the same time she got paid a lot. not that it's completely her fault. i think reactions would be the same regardless of gender. if anything, people are more scared to question her for fear of being labeled sexist

ebbv 9y ago

> Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section. That may be true, but it doesn't make the comments about her being overpaid any less valid; or analysis of what happened with Yahoo any less interesting. I think the special outrage over Mayer has an element of misogyny (how can it not?), but I honestly think it's mostly fueled by the fact that most of her public decisions (ending remote work, etc.) seem like changing uniforms on the staff of the Titanic as it sinks. When someone does a terrible job I don't think they should get paid more money than most people will ever see in their lifetime. I think a lot of people feel that way. Mayer is not unique in this, there's plenty of terrible executives who are wealthy, she was just a really visible one.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
I don't know. If you replace Marissa Mayer with a generic CEO, and Yahoo did just as badly under that CEO, there might be just as much anger and/or contempt. See Steve Ballmer for an example - and Microsoft didn't do badly under him, just less great than it did under Bill Gates. (Yes, I know that lots of the vitriol aimed at Ballmer was for various weird public antics. But he was also regarded as a dud of a CEO, and roundly criticized for not actually knowing how to run Microsoft.)
- 1024core 9y ago
  > If you replace Marissa Mayer with a generic CEO, and Yahoo did just as badly under that CEO, there might be just as much anger and/or contempt. But Yahoo was doing a much worse job before she got there! How many articles have you seen on HN about Scott Thompson? About Carol Bartz? About Terry Semel?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

amrrs 9y ago

Because when she was brought in to lead Yahoo, it gave a huge hope the same way people hoped when Jack came back to Twitter. But there's also a conspiracy theory I like that she was primarily brought in to be made the scapegoat and being criticised while Jack still being admired as a visionary (While I'd argue DC is a better one to do lead Twitter, but he faced the same fate as MM)

scandox 9y ago

Maybe because HN readers are slightly more tuned to the relationship between numbers (in terms of magnitude)? In other words they feel instinctively her pay is a numerical irrelevance given the context?

InclinedPlane 9y ago

She's a woman. Incompetence in other CEOs is generally ignored and tolerated.

BinaryIdiot 9y ago
I don't think that's necessary fair; she has far more celebrity attached to her name than just about anyone else who could have taken the spot.

dragonwriter 9y ago

CEOs are often also capitalists, and often specifically major capital holders in the firms of which they are CEO, but, as CEOs, they are elite, highly-compensated employees. HN may be less pro-capitalist than the WSJ (though it's still pretty pro-capitalist, overall), but if anything it's more pro-elite-employee than the WSJ.

jacquesm 9y ago

We've had entire threads here discussing MM's overpay. Consider the subject exhausted.

wayn3 9y ago

its because she's pretty. nothing gets a lesser man more jelly than a pretty woman that is powerful. does not compute. has nothing to do with the money.

grandalf 9y ago

In the days when Mayer was at Google, Silicon Valley was one of the few places in America with a relatively meritocratic labor market and its firms (including Google at the time) had risen to prominence by upsetting incumbent industries and not through corporate welfare and cronyism. A lot has changed. Schmidt weaponized Google's offering and helped sell to DC, turning Google into the Halliburton of information. I think the typical notion of capitalism is too broad (and encompasses the gamut of disruptive businesses, traditional "crony" capitalism, rent-seeking, and borderline fraud). The WSJ caters mainly to establishment ("crony" and rent-seeking) capitalist readers. HN includes more classically liberal views. Also, I think few people realize that Mayer's comp package was an exercise in leverage and risk reduction for both parties. Taking the helm of a project that has failed under a handful of seasoned practitioners is certainly not something most people would feel comfortable doing in their own line of work.

bogomipz 9y ago

>"I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer's "overpay" as CEO and outrage over her "golden parachute," while HN (a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40 comments and I've only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several comments praising her job in the role." A CEO's compensation is used to retain and motivate that talent to create value for the company. If investors feel dissatisfied with how much they paid for the level of value creation they received on a particular asset that is very much a capitalist sentiment. There is nothing even remotely anti-capitalist about that. Those hundreds of millions of dollars in CEO pay have to come from somewhere and that somewhere is increasingly company stock. Company stock is an asset that belongs to the company and that company is owned by shareholders. Money spent on "rock star CEOs" is money that could have otherwise been used to deliver more value to shareholders, an example would be returning money to shareholders in the form of dividends.

derefr 9y ago
> Company stock is an asset that belongs to the company and that company is owned by shareholders. I think this is the key to the confusion: seeing the shareholders as the true "owners" (and therefore controllers) of a corporation is, more and more, associated with socialist undertones: people recognize in phrases like "the shareholders are more important than the CEO" the sentiments of people who call for labor unions and co-ops, which want to assert not only employee shareholdership, but also shareholder primacy. The current form of "capitalism" that exists in most Western countries, has a corporate structure that's a bit like the Bureaucracy of ancient China: we have self-perpetuating Boards of Directors that—while being nominated by the voting shareholders—also control the opinions of the same shareholders. Where the ideal corporation would be a "representative democracy of the shareholders", the current structure is more akin to a "plutocracy of the directors." This is the hidden war that is being fought using the proxy of "CEO pay": Board-of-Directors-plutocracy corporate-model-ists like cronyist CEOs that are in their own pocket, doing things that serve the board in particular at the expense of the shareholders generally. They're willing to pay high premiums for this—and, also, when the CEO "comes from" their stock, to throw money at them "just because" (hoping they'll get their own turn to be thrown money at later on.) Meanwhile, the representative-democracy corporate-model-ists resent CEOs that have any sort of elevated position; they see a CEO as a necessary evil—a general and strategist to serve with skilled experience their civilian representative who does not have those skills. To them, the CEO isn't a buddy, but rather a risk to be managed—a sort of genie, who the board (as the trusted elect) must do its best to keep in its bottle, even as they demand wishes from them. Each side of this confrontation calls the other "anti-capitalist." But, as I hope should be obvious, neither of these sides really represents "capitalism" per se. Instead, one values the sort of concentration of wealth and power that anarchocapitalism enables; while the other side values the power of the corporate charter in an almost patriotic way.

mnarayan01 9y ago

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a CEO get extensively criticized on HN for their pay. I feel like this needs at least a single anecdotal comparison from both the WSJ and HN for the question to get any sort of real answers.

nihonde 9y ago

I think any CEO that takes $1M/week out of a failing company and claims credit for a predecessors' good bets is going to get some negative attention. Add a little dash of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do workplace policy making, some obviously stupid acquisitions, throwing huge parties where you're the guest of honor, hiring retirement-age network news anchors to spruce up a new media play, and you're infamous.

linkmotif 9y ago

Can't offer any proof but going to say it's because she's a woman.

NTDF9 9y ago

Take 50 million out of that and find really skilled engineers and product guys and maybe the company could turn around?

coredog64 9y ago
How many "rockstars" would that cover in SV?
- NTDF9 9y ago
  Enough to build a Dropbox inside Yahoo.

exelius 9y ago

IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absolutely ludicrous to most Americans. She's an easy target for people who want to claim that she only got the job for being an attractive female. I think HN readers remember a bit more about the state that Yahoo was in when she took over (hint: not good.) I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo. I think she succeeded on that front: the market was probably undervaluing Yahoo's other assets, and she was able to sell those to Verizon for a fair price after divesting the Alibaba stake. tl;dr: Yahoo was long dead before she arrived. WSJ readers forget that. HN readers don't. Plus she's an attractive woman, which will always paint a target on your back as an executive.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Qub3d 9y ago
I am of the opinion that Ms. Mayer was hired partly as a way for Yahoo's investors to hedge their bets [1]. Its a bit of a dark view on silicon valley culture, perhaps, but I think a valid one. Anyways, I agree with your point that Yahoo had already suffered most of its damage. In many ways, its latest CEO did the best that could be expected of anyone in that position. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
jonknee 9y ago
> I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo. If that was the case she never would have been given the job. That's something any old bean counter could do and they wouldn't require hundreds of millions of dollars for the babysitting job. She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?). Some examples: * Tumblr - $1.1b with the majority of that later written off because they have only figured out how to keep losing money * Polyvore - $230m A fashion search engine run by people she used to mentor at Google * Summly - $30m to a teenager for a news app that was shut down and never heard of again

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I am not sure that a 'generic' CEO would have had a different result. Broadly there are commentators who seem nostalgic for the 'old' Yahoo (and by that I mean the turn of the century Yahoo) and they often express angst in 'over paying' the CEO more along the lines of "we could have used that money to may Yahoo! great again" rather than pay it to some CEO. Then there are people who have some idea of the level of change Yahoo! has gone through and the number of founding assumptions that didn't work later in its life. Those people understand what Mayer was up against at least. And there are a number of entrepreneurial folks who made lifestyle businesses out of one or more of the many Yahoo! APIs that powered a lot of web sites over the years. My point is that the opinion of the commentator will often have more to do with their relationship to Yahoo! and less to do with how well or poorly Marissa did her job.

wodenokoto 9y ago

Yesterday there was a post about Marissa resigning, and it was nothing but "I can't believe she has been payed this much for sinking Yahoo". My pet theory is that the first comment or so sets the mood, and the opposing camp can't be bothered to participate where their opinion will be met with critique.

bjourne 9y ago

Wasn't here tenure at Yahoo almost a mirror image of Stephen Elop's at Nokia? He was put in place to save their mobile division but couldn't turn the company around and it was eventually bought by Microsoft. It seem self-evident that failing companies are hard for CEO:s to save. And if any CEO should be burned at a stake, shouldn't it be that guy that refused to sell Yahoo for 47 billion to Microsoft?

metaphorm 9y ago
> And if any CEO should be burned at a stake, shouldn't it be that guy that refused to sell Yahoo for 47 billion to Microsoft? That was Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo. And yes, he was "burned at the stake". He was fired from the CEO job within months of tanking that deal.
- needlessly 9y ago
  Jerry also bought the Alibaba shares in 2001 which is the reason why Yahoo is even alive. After he left, Yahoo made the mistake of selling half of the Alibaba which are worth $36 Billion.
pessimizer 9y ago
Elop trashed a company that dominated the world featurephone market, but was clearly going to start falling behind as smartphones took over. Elop accidentally announced that they were going to abandon the featurephone market, killing the business. He then scrapped their well-regarded smartphone experiment, and announced that they were going to switch to the marginal smartphone platform of a company with a history of failing at smartphones. Mayer joined a horribly failing company with no core purpose for existing, experimented wildly in an attempt to shake things up and turn it around, then after failing, unwound the thing and sold it for far more than it was worth.

abritinthebay 9y ago

> a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet Since when? It's a pro-capitalism, free-market, libertarian, Ayn Rand, love-fest in here most days. Talking against those points is a great way to be voted down unless you happen to be commenting in a thread that has attracted the smaller left-wing side of HN.

marcoperaza 9y ago

I'm a capitalist and think that some CEOs are overpaid and that golden parachutes for failed CEOs are obscene. That doesn't mean that I want the government to do something about it. Shareholders are getting ripped off and that's their problem ultimately. Caveat emptor.

jessaustin 9y ago
Definitely. When the government steps in, it's always the boards and executives who hire the lobbyists who write the laws and regulations. They don't do so with common stock investors' interests in mind. The system will not solve the problems with the system.
Bakary 9y ago
Negative externalities can reach beyond the CEO-shareholder relationship. Determining what these would be is of course a difficult task.

macspoofing 9y ago

>Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section. Uhh.. What are you talking about? Everyone complains about the pay scale of CEOs. Especially CEOs of failing or under performing companies. That's been a thing for years. She's a failed CEO. She was brought in to turn Yahoo around and didn't.

metaphorm 9y ago

I can't claim to have any insight into group psychology here so I'll only speak for myself. I'm much more interested in the aspect of the story that has Marisa Mayer failing to save a sinking ship than I am interested in the ludicrous golden parachute. There is something interesting to discuss about the former but nothing interesting to discuss about the latter.

skinnymuch 9y ago
Yes for sure. I'm much more interested in the former as well. I have read and commented on a number of Yahoo and Mayer comments but yeah seems like I'm always only interested in the failing ship part

zekevermillion 9y ago

The WSJ has gone way downhill after the Newscorp acquisition. The WSJ is now a tabloid. The misinformed comments on the Yahoo deal are just a symptom of readers who are not really involved in finance or public company governance, and do not understand what MM was hired to do. She served the shareholders very well. Yes it is extremely disappointing to see all the delightful little tech properties that are now part of the Evil Empire. But, they already sold out, and furthermore, that has nothing to do with MM's performance. Seems like most people here agree she did a great job or at least did not screw up a good deal for Yahoo's shareholders. It may look easy but I suspect there were very difficult corporate politics to navigate. Maybe someone will write a nice book about this deal in a couple years and we can get the juicy gossip then.

anth1988 9y ago

> Is this because she's from Google? Because she's a former engineer? Because she's a female CEO? I'd say all of those contributed to a lot of expectations, which she didn't really live up to in the view of many people.

avenoir 9y ago

I think you're comparing general population with technical population at HN, many of which are in leadership roles and would naturally be more sympathetic because they understand the struggles of growing a company. People who don't get it simply don't understand the situation and wonder why Yahoo isn't dead already or why they have insane payouts for a CEO which essentially finished the downward spiral.

polskibus 9y ago

How is HN less capitalist-friendly? Articles about high valuations, venture capitalists, raising rounds, praising mega corporations like amzn, fb, Google, etc. often get to the top without many criticizing remarks. Many HNrs benefit greatly from capitalism and its mechanisms like raising capital or stock market while working for very large corporations.

boomboomsubban 9y ago
>How is HN less capitalist-friendly? It isn't a business focused newspaper owned by News Corp, most anticapitalists aren't going to go anywhere near their comments section.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

subterfudge44 9y ago

HN probably won't question her overpay for two reasons 1. Fear of being labelled as sexist. 2. It makes no sense. She is not really overpaid. Firstly, Mayer's career is over. After her spectacular failure as a leader I think she can say goodbye to her career and spend rest of her time vacationing in Bahamas. Of course she is a smart woman and she had factored in this risk and is part of the reason she gets a golden parachute. Ask yourself this : Will you end your career today if someone gives you 10x of you current salary today ? Then ask if 10x is an overpay.

zghst 9y ago

The external diagnosis of a situation must always be minted in racism, misogyny or struggle. You are not allowed to criticize without starting there

mrspeaker 9y ago

One other thing I noticed is that every time there is a post about her here, everyone calls her Marissa, or Marissa Mayer, or Ms. Mayer (seriously!)... never Mayer. I might be "attributing to malice" but dudes never get called "first name", only "last name". It might just be the way it is in the US, but I can't help read it as a way to depower someone. I dunno if "depower" is the right term, but it feels something like that. Again, that might just be a cultural thing that I'm not aware of.

baitbiter 9y ago
Nonsense....Several men are called by first names. You must be a feminist
kyrre 9y ago
this is demonstrably false just by looking at the comments submitted prior to your own. why did you even write this?
- alistairSH 9y ago
  At this time, there are 28 instances of Marissa, 1 instance of Marissa Meyer, and 3 instances of Meyer.
  - smackmybishop 9y ago
    How many if you spell it right?
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Someone could say you have sexist intentions for misspelling her last name. And that would be silly.
sethrin 9y ago
I think it's something we inherited from the Brits. I don't believe it would be 'proper' to call a woman by her (unadorned) family name. But generally yes, it's a way to disempower women built into our language.

Cacti 9y ago

I don't know what gave you the impression that HN isn't capitalist-friendly. We have long had a whole lotta kool-aid going around here about markets, entrepreneurs, etc. In many ways startup culture is the embodiment of capitalism.

Touche 9y ago

I just don't get it personally, I would think HN being about startups would be more capitalist. I mean, she did her job, she didn't to my knowledge do anything unethical. She negotiated her salary based on her credentials and the board gave her that salary. My capitalist opinion is, fucking good for you, I hope to be in that position some day.

Bakary 9y ago
It's the result of cognitive dissonance. Many closeted capitalists don't want to admit, even to themselves, that the pursuit of money far outstrips other incentives and especially the vague Gavin Belson-esque promises to "make the world a better place". Seeing someone actually make a fortune will thus evoke strong and conflicting feelings almost immediately.

dghughes 9y ago

Most stories or comments I see on the web are about Mayer's "male purge" but also her salary/severance after gutting Yahoo.

jlarocco 9y ago

I don't know if being a female CEO has much to do with it. She was making a lot of money because she was supposed to turn things around and save the company. Instead Yahoo made a ton of huge blunders, sold off Alibaba and then finally sold the company to Verizon for a fraction of what it used to be worth.

skinnymuch 9y ago
Some stake in Alibaba was required to be sold off during be IPO. The person she hired to be the liaison with Alibaba was able to keep over 100 million extra shares. And the deal to sell a huge stake was before she came on board. So that's not her fault at all.

tanilama 9y ago

She is a rising star before joining Yahoo, and she basically turns Yahoo from a 20B company into a 5B one, and rewarded with a huge chunk of money for leaving the company. And among all those astounding achievements, you only think people are judging her because she is a female, you must being living in a bubble.

vocatus_gate 9y ago
It's because for some reason these days people have this bizarre obsession to shoehorn gender into everything, regardless the relevance.
xordon 9y ago
All the talk prior to MM taking over Yahoo was that it was worth less than its stake in Alibaba. ie. Yahoo had a negative value. I think it is probably more correct that she grew the value of Yahoo significantly, ~0 -> 4.5B Accusing anyone who disagree's with you as being a sexist/anti-sexist or whatever isn't helpful.
- tanilama 9y ago
  I disagree that her criticism is gender motivated. I doubt that Yahoo worth negative value with all the engineers they hire and assets they control, without Alibaba's stock. From another perspective, she doesn't really bring Yahoo back on track, that market thinks it is worthless without Alibaba's stock. As a CEO and a high profile one, that is a definitely a failure.
  - pessimizer 9y ago
    > I doubt that Yahoo worth negative value with all the engineers they hire and assets they control, without Alibaba's stock. That's not a matter of opinion. The worth of the company and the worth of the Alibaba stock it held were common knowledge, and subtracting one from the other resulted in a negative number.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

baitbiter 9y ago

She did bad as CEO. Every one who dies that badly will be criticized. Female CEO wont get exception.

FerrisBowler 9y ago

Typical muckraking... I have ideas about muckraking. Give it a rest?

syrrim 9y ago

The CEO's salary, even if absurdly high, will generally pale in comparison to the revenue of the company. So long as salaries and other expenses aren't absurdly high across the board, a high CEO salary will only have a marginal effect on the company as a whole. Since her compensation only really affects her, those saying it should be lower aren't concerned for yahoo, but rather jealous of her. They think they could have done what she's done, and don't know why she's getting paid so well for it while they aren't. Capitalism (at it extreme) takes as an assumption that things are distributed fairly, and that merit is what achieves a reward. Deviations from this are therefore a source of ire to capitalists.

ma2rten 9y ago

I remember in previous posts Marissa Mayer's salary was already discussed to death. I think this discussion just focuses on the new information in this post.