9 ms·

Her mega-salary, like that of other comparable executives, is decided by other mega-rich people. It's no hardship for them to hand her (one of their own) enoug

Her mega-salary, like that of other comparable executives, is decided by other mega-rich people. It's no hardship for them to hand her (one of their own) enough cash to buy a small town. Let's ponder that $260M compared to every time an outgoing job offer was dialed down from $145K to $135K. Or when the yearly bonus for a rank and file is a healthy $25K (1/1000th her accumulated comp). Sour grapes? Yes, and why not? We're all giving our lives to these same companies.

valuearb 9y ago
She was given $30M in restricted stock to get her to walk away from being owed that much at Google. Then they gave her some incentives in stock options (valued at $22M if yahoo stock increased by something like 8% a year for a decade), because otherwise why would she take the job? Instead Yahoo stock tripled and that created her $260M. Now she may not have had a lot to do with the stock increase, but she certainly didn't screw it up. Her compensation was mostly incentive based, which is what you want for a CEO. CEOs aren't going to be paid like an engineer. They probably are overpaid. But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't.
- verytrivial 9y ago
  > But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't. This is how most organised religions work.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. A $2500 bonus ($250 million divided by 10k employees) is also a small amount to pay.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - porpoisemonkey 9y ago
    $250,000,000 divided by 10,000 people is $25,000 per person, not $2,500 per person.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      Right you are! Point is that I've been reluctant to take certain kinds of jobs because the company seems unserious in different ways (building a good product, providing career opportunities, etc.). Paying more, in bonuses or salary, alleviates these concerns for me. There's a lot of talk about recruiting good CEOs through better pay. At least in some organizations, the ability to recruit engineering talent (or at least engineering leadership) is just as paramount.
- wand3r 9y ago
  > she may not have had to do with it Yahoo was; iirc a negative asset on the balance sheet and Japan and Alibaba were only drivers of actual value. Given how much Yahoo had to pay to entice her, in hindsight paying $1.00 for a carrot at stop and shop to be CEO of Yahoo would've had the same result until they went into sales negotiations
  - 1024core 9y ago
    The thing is: she actually did help create some of that value. Before she got there, Carol Bartz was the chief. She had royally FUCKED UP the relationship with Alibaba. As a result, BABA refused to go public until it got back the shares from Yahoo; and, in fact, Jack Ma took Alipay out of the consortium in a fit of anger, without even consulting Bartz. In short: the relationship was in dire straits. Mayer comes in, smoothes things over, strokes Ma's ego and next thing you know, Yahoo gets to keep most of the shares, BABA goes public and Yahoo's value skyrockets. Mayer had absolutely everything to do with this. Edit: for more reading: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/12/bartz-in-a-china-shop-has-yahoos-ceo-wrecked-the-valley%E2%80%99s-most-valuable-chinese-relationship/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/12/bartz-in-a-china-shop-has-...
    - gmarx 9y ago
      You don't know that a carrot couldn't have accomplished the same thing
      - rthomas6 9y ago
        Yes I do, because carrots can't talk.
  - gmarx 9y ago
    That would have been a bold choice. I remember the guy who played Trapper John on MASH was talking on one of those stock pick shows back in the tech bubble days. He was mocking the idea that the CEO of GM should expect compensation to put him on par with the CEO of a company like Oracle or Microsoft. His point lacked the carrot but he essentially said anyone could be CEO of GM. The company runs itself.
usmeteora 9y ago
It seems alot of the critcism is focused on Marissa Meyer but I'm more interested in understanding how Yahoo got to such a bad state where they had to ask Marissa Meyer to come rescue the company, why it was in such dissarray when she got there and what led to her inability to save the company, from a logistical and business standpoint as opposed to just the constant banter about her being a horrible person and her salary being more than everyone elses (I never heard this criticism about the previous Yahoo CEO who let the company fall to pieces before she got there despite having similiar income) Also, on a separate note, I've noticed multiple multibillion dollar companies who fall into disarray, have CEOs sit quietly in the background, hire a woman to come in and try to save it when to me the finances, business portfolio but most importantly jaded work culture and workforce of thousands of people seems hard to face, and then I see these women get relentless criticism, one particularly being related to their salary, which is comparable to the men previous to them in their position as well as men all over the world who earn a disgusting amount more than they should for their contributions as leaders of their organizations, but I only ever see woman CEOs in the spotlight for making too much money. Is there a slight bias here or is it just me? Edit: I'd also like to add that I'm not rephrasing your comments as Marissa Meyer hate, just the thousands of non stop comments and general immediate focus on her income and failures as opposed to the failures of yahoo as a company that led to there being a new CEO (male or female) in the first place and what was faced during that time. From what I know, Marissa Meyer worked many late nights for months going through every line item cost trying to understand what noone was hired under a man to summarize in the line item costs while she was pregnant, but the only news headlines I saw was how unfair it was to her employees that she was going to have a nursery in her office while asking her employees to not work remotely, when I'm pretty sure that decision was made purely based on her line item evaluation and the evaluation that the culture was lacking the accountability other software companies who had remote workers adhered to. Nonetheless, everything she does or attempts to do seems to be immediately commented/overshadowed by how much money she makes or how its unfair she can afford childcare when noone else can. This is really quite bizarre to me being a woman because I never see overwhelming responses about a man making too much money or their negligence to employees about their ability to take care of their children (or criticism for having or not having nurserys in their offices because obviously why would I man need that when there is a presumed woman at home taking care of them?). Is there a relevance to this and why does it seem to overshadow and be constantly associated with everything she does despite not being the case for every other CEO who has been at the helm of a failed company?
codingdave 9y ago
> We're all giving our lives to these same companies. No. We are not. Many of us work for ourselves. Or at the very least, choose who we work for very carefully. If you are not satisfied with your position in life, by all means, act on that. Don't give your life to a company you do not believe in.
- jazzyk 9y ago
  True, but it is very hard to work for yourself these days. There is a reason why small business creation is at an all -time low [1][2]. Big corps (and their lackeys in Congress) would like us to "give our lives to some companies", not our business. Here is how they do it: - make it hard for companies to hire consultants/contractors on a corp/corp basis - you need to go through a third-party corp sucking away 30% of the billing rate - increase regulatory burden keeping startups from going IPO and letting bigger corps just swallow some of the promising ones, thus growing even bigger - bail out the selected "too big to fail" corps - raise healthcare premiums - affecting self-employed rising 15% a year for the many years now. [1]http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/shrinking-support-for-small-businesses-1467151550 https://www.wsj.com/articles/shrinking-support-for-small-bus...
  - jliptzin 9y ago
    I would add that people who fooled themselves into taking expensive college loans for an overpriced degree they probably didn't need is trapping them financially and preventing them from having any ability to start a business.
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    - make it hard for companies to hire consultants/contractors on a corp/corp basis - you need to go through a third-party corp sucking away 30% of the billing rate Can you explain the mechanism by which they do this?
- smrtinsert 9y ago
  I believe in Google, not dumb enough to work there ;) I'd be a doctor if I felt like throwing away my time.
rhino369 9y ago
260M is ridiculous. But other employees shouldn't be bothered. Her money doesn't come from some pool of employee money. It's straight from the bottom line of the shareholders.

valuearb 9y ago

She was given $30M in restricted stock to get her to walk away from being owed that much at Google. Then they gave her some incentives in stock options (valued at $22M if yahoo stock increased by something like 8% a year for a decade), because otherwise why would she take the job? Instead Yahoo stock tripled and that created her $260M. Now she may not have had a lot to do with the stock increase, but she certainly didn't screw it up. Her compensation was mostly incentive based, which is what you want for a CEO. CEOs aren't going to be paid like an engineer. They probably are overpaid. But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't.

verytrivial 9y ago
> But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't. This is how most organised religions work.
humanrebar 9y ago
> offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. A $2500 bonus ($250 million divided by 10k employees) is also a small amount to pay.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- porpoisemonkey 9y ago
  $250,000,000 divided by 10,000 people is $25,000 per person, not $2,500 per person.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Right you are! Point is that I've been reluctant to take certain kinds of jobs because the company seems unserious in different ways (building a good product, providing career opportunities, etc.). Paying more, in bonuses or salary, alleviates these concerns for me. There's a lot of talk about recruiting good CEOs through better pay. At least in some organizations, the ability to recruit engineering talent (or at least engineering leadership) is just as paramount.
wand3r 9y ago
> she may not have had to do with it Yahoo was; iirc a negative asset on the balance sheet and Japan and Alibaba were only drivers of actual value. Given how much Yahoo had to pay to entice her, in hindsight paying $1.00 for a carrot at stop and shop to be CEO of Yahoo would've had the same result until they went into sales negotiations
- 1024core 9y ago
  The thing is: she actually did help create some of that value. Before she got there, Carol Bartz was the chief. She had royally FUCKED UP the relationship with Alibaba. As a result, BABA refused to go public until it got back the shares from Yahoo; and, in fact, Jack Ma took Alipay out of the consortium in a fit of anger, without even consulting Bartz. In short: the relationship was in dire straits. Mayer comes in, smoothes things over, strokes Ma's ego and next thing you know, Yahoo gets to keep most of the shares, BABA goes public and Yahoo's value skyrockets. Mayer had absolutely everything to do with this. Edit: for more reading: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/12/bartz-in-a-china-shop-has-yahoos-ceo-wrecked-the-valley%E2%80%99s-most-valuable-chinese-relationship/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/12/bartz-in-a-china-shop-has-...
  - gmarx 9y ago
    You don't know that a carrot couldn't have accomplished the same thing
    - rthomas6 9y ago
      Yes I do, because carrots can't talk.
- gmarx 9y ago
  That would have been a bold choice. I remember the guy who played Trapper John on MASH was talking on one of those stock pick shows back in the tech bubble days. He was mocking the idea that the CEO of GM should expect compensation to put him on par with the CEO of a company like Oracle or Microsoft. His point lacked the carrot but he essentially said anyone could be CEO of GM. The company runs itself.

usmeteora 9y ago

It seems alot of the critcism is focused on Marissa Meyer but I'm more interested in understanding how Yahoo got to such a bad state where they had to ask Marissa Meyer to come rescue the company, why it was in such dissarray when she got there and what led to her inability to save the company, from a logistical and business standpoint as opposed to just the constant banter about her being a horrible person and her salary being more than everyone elses (I never heard this criticism about the previous Yahoo CEO who let the company fall to pieces before she got there despite having similiar income) Also, on a separate note, I've noticed multiple multibillion dollar companies who fall into disarray, have CEOs sit quietly in the background, hire a woman to come in and try to save it when to me the finances, business portfolio but most importantly jaded work culture and workforce of thousands of people seems hard to face, and then I see these women get relentless criticism, one particularly being related to their salary, which is comparable to the men previous to them in their position as well as men all over the world who earn a disgusting amount more than they should for their contributions as leaders of their organizations, but I only ever see woman CEOs in the spotlight for making too much money. Is there a slight bias here or is it just me? Edit: I'd also like to add that I'm not rephrasing your comments as Marissa Meyer hate, just the thousands of non stop comments and general immediate focus on her income and failures as opposed to the failures of yahoo as a company that led to there being a new CEO (male or female) in the first place and what was faced during that time. From what I know, Marissa Meyer worked many late nights for months going through every line item cost trying to understand what noone was hired under a man to summarize in the line item costs while she was pregnant, but the only news headlines I saw was how unfair it was to her employees that she was going to have a nursery in her office while asking her employees to not work remotely, when I'm pretty sure that decision was made purely based on her line item evaluation and the evaluation that the culture was lacking the accountability other software companies who had remote workers adhered to. Nonetheless, everything she does or attempts to do seems to be immediately commented/overshadowed by how much money she makes or how its unfair she can afford childcare when noone else can. This is really quite bizarre to me being a woman because I never see overwhelming responses about a man making too much money or their negligence to employees about their ability to take care of their children (or criticism for having or not having nurserys in their offices because obviously why would I man need that when there is a presumed woman at home taking care of them?). Is there a relevance to this and why does it seem to overshadow and be constantly associated with everything she does despite not being the case for every other CEO who has been at the helm of a failed company?

codingdave 9y ago

> We're all giving our lives to these same companies. No. We are not. Many of us work for ourselves. Or at the very least, choose who we work for very carefully. If you are not satisfied with your position in life, by all means, act on that. Don't give your life to a company you do not believe in.

jazzyk 9y ago
True, but it is very hard to work for yourself these days. There is a reason why small business creation is at an all -time low [1][2]. Big corps (and their lackeys in Congress) would like us to "give our lives to some companies", not our business. Here is how they do it: - make it hard for companies to hire consultants/contractors on a corp/corp basis - you need to go through a third-party corp sucking away 30% of the billing rate - increase regulatory burden keeping startups from going IPO and letting bigger corps just swallow some of the promising ones, thus growing even bigger - bail out the selected "too big to fail" corps - raise healthcare premiums - affecting self-employed rising 15% a year for the many years now. [1]http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/shrinking-support-for-small-businesses-1467151550 https://www.wsj.com/articles/shrinking-support-for-small-bus...
- jliptzin 9y ago
  I would add that people who fooled themselves into taking expensive college loans for an overpriced degree they probably didn't need is trapping them financially and preventing them from having any ability to start a business.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  - make it hard for companies to hire consultants/contractors on a corp/corp basis - you need to go through a third-party corp sucking away 30% of the billing rate Can you explain the mechanism by which they do this?
smrtinsert 9y ago
I believe in Google, not dumb enough to work there ;) I'd be a doctor if I felt like throwing away my time.

rhino369 9y ago

260M is ridiculous. But other employees shouldn't be bothered. Her money doesn't come from some pool of employee money. It's straight from the bottom line of the shareholders.