35 ms·

Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

251 points by Harj 7y ago

Harj 7y ago
Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision: "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there."
- telesilla 7y ago
  Yes, I agree - it was nice to hear her iterate that. I have learnt the exact same thing in my two decades as an adult: it doesn't matter really in the end what decision you make, it's how you make it work (and you do have to work at it).
- minderasure 7y ago
  It's funny, this is the nugget of wisdom that stood out to me as well. I waste so much time in my daily life trying to make the "perfect" decision, when choosing something good and moving on would be a much better use of my time.
  - matwood 7y ago
    A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. - George S. Patton I think about this quote a lot. It's so easy to get trapped in analysis paralysis which is really just procrastinating a decision. Like most things, there is a balance. Notice he says 'good' plan, not any plan.
    - afarrell 7y ago
      The trick is training yourself to separate out the shit plans from the good plans. Otherwise, you’re violently crossing the Isonzo river for the 9th time and violently dying. So, don’t be McClellan, but don’t be Cadorna either.
  - twic 7y ago
    But that's an entirely analytical way of thinking about it! You're looking at the decision process and asking if the marginal return on investing another unit of time in it, in terms of the improvement of the goodness of the selected outcome, is greater than the return on using that unit of time in some other way. The very term "overthinking" implies that there's a right amount of thinking for any decision, so your real problem is working out how much thinking to do.
  - sjg007 7y ago
    Go for the girl or the boy.. as made famous in good will hunting
- seem_2211 7y ago
  Agreed. I think for most people here the risk is the indecision rather than the wrong decision. For a lot of people there's a deathly fear of ending up under a bridge, and while that's undoubtably true for many people unfortunately, I'd wager most people here have a lot more runway than they'd think even.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- njepa 7y ago
  Seem like one of those in group type biases. Where the more similar something is the more we obsesses over the differences. Presumably because we can relate to a lot more of the information. Somewhat ironically being irrational can actually be a good way to make unknown, but largely equal, decisions. Because at least you picked something with conviction, rather than having analyzed the situation incorrectly. Of course for a lot of us good choices aren't the problem so much as the downside. I remember someone made a calculator online for how many time one would most likely see their parents before they died.
- jkaptur 7y ago
  Sheryl Sandberg described a similarly thorough weighing of her decision to join Google. Mayer: "I had a long analytical evening with a friend of mine where we looked at all the job offers I had received. We created a giant matrix with one row per job offer and one column per value. We compared everything from the basics like cash and stock to where I'd be living, happiness factor, and trajectory factor—all of these different elements. And so we went to work analyzing this problem." Sandberg: "After a while I had a few offers and I had to make a decision, so what did I do? I am MBA trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and my criteria in the rows, and compared the companies and the missions and the roles." It's a fun bit of trivia that Sandberg put the criteria in the rows, which enables sorting the criteria - a nice way to see the upsides and downsides of each choice.
  - 4thaccount 7y ago
    I don't think this is a rare thing to do. I've done it and so have co-workers. A simple pro/con chart is really all you need.
    - batty_alex 7y ago
      Sorry to weigh in this way, but yes it's a rare thing to do. Most people don't have multiple offers sitting on the table. It's a privilege. It's rare, that's all.
      - 4thaccount 7y ago
        I'm referring to comparing your existing job to a new one. Everyone does this and it can't be rare. You have to look at quality of work, work life balance, the area, commute time, cost of living, salary, 401k match, benefits, chance of advancement, company culture, job safety, bonus amount, job security...etc. For a lot of people the choice is a no-brainer, but there are comparable and even worse jobs out there. I apologise for the seemingly privledged attitude, but I'm assuming most on HN are Software Developers, Engineers, Mathematicians, and Scientists which generally have options and change jobs on occasion. Every single person who changed has done a pro/con comparison. Even if it was a no-brainier, the comparison would've taken place subconsciously.
- duxup 7y ago
  As someone who feels they're from the outside looking in (left college to work, still ended up in the technology but without a traditional college education) one of the most frustrating things is watch folks who I perceive as traditionally trained CS and similar folks ... is their desire to go hyper analytical ... and then REALLY commit to the result as the best choice above all others because of whatever analysis they made. Now granted there are time to hunker down and commit but sometimes all that data doesn't really tell you anything and you're still facing an unknown no matter how much work you do, and it might be worth thinking about it after taking a few steps down that road / experience. It's not uncommon to come across a variable(s) that plays a far stronger role than any other, only AFTER you tried doing something. For hyper analytical folks the data on hand is the hammer for every nail it seems sometimes.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    I wonder if they recognize that luck plays a significant role. Right place, right time sometimes matters more than anything you can predict or control.
  - Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
    Life is simply a game with non-perfect knowledge. It's not chess or go, it's more like Dota or poker.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Even without unknowns people elevating rationality to something that would in consequence just be horrible for everyone. Shouldn't be too hard to see if you follow through with the consideration. Hard data also suggest how often the allegedly rational result suddenly became wrong. The rational conclusion here should be to decrease hubris then, shouldn't it? Nope... And this is already a stereotype for softies...
- lkrubner 7y ago
  Too much focus on utility functions, not enough focus on novelty functions, even though it's been proven that utility functions decline in usefulness as a search space expands. Given an infinite search space, a utility function can only find local optima, there is no global optima. In such situations, a novelty function that finds a path from one happy local optima to another happy local optima is a better bet than using a utility function. The above paragraph is rational, and yet people who consider themselves hyper rational often ignore the truth of this. And the irony is that some of them do this for an emotional reason: they want the security that comes from believing that there is an absolute right answer. They are irrationally rational.
  - hitekker 7y ago
    What an interesting perspective with a great paradoxical conclusion. Well done.
  - tlb 7y ago
    How would you prove that? Here's a simple counterexample to what I understand your theorem to say: consider an infinite search space: 𝕽∞ and a utility function: 1-|x|. There's a single global optimum at (0, ...), and the gradient of the utility function would find it quickly.
    - pcmaffey 7y ago
      You missed the point that there is no global optimum. The GP’s novelty function is optimized for novelty, that’s all.
    - antt 7y ago
      Counter example: R^1 with a random function. There is no algorithm that can find a global maximum other than checking every point in R^1, of which there is an uncountable number.
      - salty_biscuits 7y ago
        Not all cost surfaces are equally likely to occur in real problems... Also depends on the constraints, linear assignment (i.e. one job to one worker with a big matrix of cost for job to worker and you minimize the sum) has a polynomial complexity solution.
- erobbins 7y ago
  > "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there." This absolutely drives me crazy in design/engineering decisions. Very commonly there are a lot of good solutions and one great one, and the good ones are good enough. Yet all the brilliant intellectuals want to find the VERY BEST METHOD EVER instead of just getting stuff done.
  - bookofjoe 7y ago
    Do an anesthesiology residency. I love how, when residents with engineering backgrounds as undergrads run up against the immutable fact of 5 minutes of hypoxia = brain death, they quickly abandon their old way of thinking in which finding the optimal solution is paramount in favor of whatever works, however kludgy.
  - pm90 7y ago
    > Yet all the brilliant intellectuals want to find the VERY BEST METHOD EVER instead of just getting stuff done. For many mathematical, CS problems, it _does_ help to think very hard to find the very best solution to the problem, sometimes irrationally hard. I do agree that we operate in a real world, and the facts of running a business mean that you can't be spending all your time trying to figure out the best. However, it was only by thinking very, very deeply about these problems have many of the technological improvements been possible. MapReduce, AI, ML, Cloud Computing... all started as ideas in companies where people dedicate quite a bit of thought into how to solve some basic problems. I'll be honest: I am glad that I can reap the fruits of the labor of all these smart people, that they have enabled me to change the way computing is done, to make it easier for anyone to get started and to generate value very quickly, using the building blocks which they created after thinking about and working about this for so long.
  - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
    This used to drive me nuts too. Now I just look at it as an opportunity to outmaneuver folks who are too wedded to making their solution ‘perfect.’ (Whatever that means.)
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  This reminds me of Jacob Falkovich's approach to picking a girlfriend: https://putanumonit.com/2017/03/12/goddess-spreadsheet/ https://putanumonit.com/2017/03/12/goddess-spreadsheet/
  - dgacmu 7y ago
    I'm going to reveal myself as entirely too geeky here, but my primary complaint about this approach is that it relies on a linear scale for evaluating utility, when much research suggests that utility curves are frequently logarithmic. (Example: Going from earning $20k to $100k per year is a huge difference with substantial implications for financial security, but $1m to $1.08m has a substantially lower impact.) One could argue this article looks at a restricted range where the log behaves more lineary, but if we're going to apply mathematical modeling to our life choices, ... :-)
- madrox 7y ago
  I've said something similar when mentoring engineering managers about how to let go of certain decision making. 90% of the decisions a team makes will have very little impact on the success of the project, but the other 10% do. You only learn from experience which decisions are the 90% and which decisions are the 10%. It's how leaders need to operate to survive if they want to avoid micromanaging, honestly.
jarym 7y ago
I respect Marissa Mayer a lot and enjoyed reading the article but that HEAVILY photoshopped photo felt weird and distracting. Why did someone go to the trouble of doing that in such an unnatural way?
tardo99 7y ago
The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.
- thenaturalist 7y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree, and I think it comes down to "signalling by association". For sure she is a workaholic and that gets you far, but to me it seems like she is filling the gap of providing confirmation to insecure overachievers after she - being one herself - made mistakes and reflected on them. Mistakes that could have been avoided had you taken out the ego in the first place. In contrast to my hypothesis: If you like her, feel free to share your thoughts or prove me wrong. What is special about her?
  - compiler-guy 7y ago
    Marissa is one of the smartest people I have ever been around. Most of my knowledge comes from running in neighboring circles at Stanford. The (then) girl just had an amazing ability to remember things, get things, and analyze them. She also has outstanding social intelligence, and a bit of a reality distortion field. Of course she chose the rocketship in 1999 while the rest of us fumbled around in the dot com bust. She always had the knack of picking the right place to be at the right time, and the talent (or ability to bs) that she could get noticed when she needed to. The yahoo thing was the worst misstep I've seen her take, but she got paid $200 million to take the risk, and I'm working for peanuts. So who is the smart one? Edited to add: There is exactly zero chance she remembers me. But everyone I hung around remembers her. She has a very strange ability to be remembered.
    - tardo99 7y ago
      I've known Marissa since Stanford too, and you're wrong. I'm not sure if you're lying or what, but you're wrong. Edit: Before you pile on, I'm rich too. Not as rich as her but rich enough not to take issue with her for that reason. The reason people remember Marissa is she was pretty. End of story.
node-bayarea 7y ago
She ruined Yahoo! Made stupid acquisitions like Tumblr and shit.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  Tumblr wasn't a bad acquisition. I would also challenge that she ruined Yahoo. Yahoo was already on a downward trajectory with an existential identity crisis. At worst, she couldn't change the direction.
  - hnzix 7y ago
    I wonder what Yahoo would look like now if Jerry had accepted the Microsoft acquisition. Yahoo was already in troubled waters at the time, in hindsight it looks like a missed opportunity.
    - cududa 7y ago
      Probably completely non-existent and shut down. Both Ballmer and Gates have commented that it would’ve been a monumental mistake
      - hangonhn 7y ago
        But that's part of doing business. The shareholders and employees (many of whom are also shareholders) might be in a lot better shape had the deal gone through. I'm skeptical that those people are better off with the Verizon deal.
    - duxup 7y ago
      Microsoft got some search tech out of them later.... that's all that would be left I imagine.
  - treis 7y ago
    >Tumblr wasn't a bad acquisition. I would like to see your justification for this. Because Yahoo paid 1.1 billion dollars for it and they wrote down pretty much all of the value within a few years. It looks especially bad when compared with Facebook buying Instagram around the same time for about the same price.
rajeshp1986 7y ago
"I realized that, while I had a very deep understanding of artificial intelligence, I did not yet have some of the basics down. I knew how a database worked. I knew how an operating system worked. I knew how a compiler worked. But I hadn't taken classes on those topics, so I went back for my master's and took the rest of the AI offerings as well as a lot of programming basics. That way, I could actually go and market myself as a software engineer and say, “I've written a compiler. I've written an operating system. I've written a database. I know how they work" I am confused. Is she talking about foundation CS courses like OS & database systems OR AI courses?
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  She's talking about foundation CS courses. She talk 7 (!) AI courses in Undergrad but apparently missed out on core CS courses. In Masters she got to cover those off. I think her majoring in Symbolic Systems not CS meant she missed out on compilers, DBs, etc..
  - k__ 7y ago
    Because she didn't study CS. A university here has a cognitive science degree. Many people doing it and then a masters in CS to get at least a bit more practical with all the AI stuff they learned.
  - hnuser355 7y ago
    I did a CS undergrad and skipped compilers, O.S., DBs, and many others cause I just took as many crosslisted math/CS electives as possible (at least a theorems or math heavy course like automata if I couldn’t do better), then the minimum CS requirements to graduate
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  You quoted her saying both, no? "I went back for my master's and took the rest of the AI offerings as well as a lot of programming basics."
- digitaltrees 7y ago
  The rest of the sentence says “...and a lot of the basics”, so she did both, took all 13 AI classes and CS classes on databases and compilers etc. Hope that helps.
subjectHarold 7y ago
Question: Did having an engineering background help you as CEO? Answer: ...I think I was a good engineer. I was an even better product manager ...lol. At least she appears to have stopped claiming credit for the Alibaba stake.
NelsonMinar 7y ago
I was also at Google when the AOL deal was signed and remember the decision and outcome quite differently. It was definitely a high risk deal, deliberately so, but in no way was it only "the best-case scenario had us breaking even". Nor was it the case that "all of our models were wrong". The product manager in charge of ads at the time had a clear understanding of exactly how the deal could be hugely profitable for Google because of the value of extra advertisers attracted to the Google platform thanks to the added AOL inventory. It was by no means a sure thing, but it was a likely outcome. Fortunately the decision makers believed him, they took the risk, and it paid off enormously.
- kayhi 7y ago
  What does that type of deal look like? AOL had ad inventory and Google had to get enough eye balls?
  - toast0 7y ago
    Inventory is slots to put ads. AOL had the eyeballs, Google had the platform to turn eyeballs into money, better than AOL was doing by itself. Google provided a guaranteed rate (cpm? cpc?) so that AOL would have confidence it wasn't bait and switch. See also the Yahoo/Bing deal which didn't work out as well. Microsoft didn't end up actually hitting the targets, and convinced Yahoo to take less; and Yahoo also didn't reduce employee count anywhere near plan on searchy/advertising stuff, so they missed targets on revenue and cost and user experience.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      "guaranteed rate (cpm? cpc?)" It was guaranteed revenue IIUC, something like "If you do not make at least $150M from this deal, Google will pay you the difference." That makes the deal a no-brainer for AOL, but puts Google on the hook for any shortfall, which could have potentially ended up bankrupting the company.
      - toast0 7y ago
Causality1 7y ago
Considering how Mayer absolutely cratered Yahoo I'd take her advice with a grain of salt. Quarterly operating profit dropped by more than 50% during her tenure and she was the driving force behind the acquisition of dozens of worthless companies leading to the write-off of billions of dollars in goodwill value.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  "When management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett.
  - sfblah 7y ago
    Yahoo is in a business that has fantastic economics. Try again.
    - kerbalspacepro 7y ago
      Why do you say this?
dustindiamond 7y ago
She seems like a lucky Elizabeth Holmes type.
- devoply 7y ago
  Yeah pretty much, I don't see much going on with many of these high status women (and men) other than their network. Especially when their actual performance doesn't speak volumes.
  - akozak 7y ago
    Damn, check your biases.
    - devoply 7y ago
      I feel the same way about many CEOs.
      - akozak 7y ago
        Cool but you chose to say "high status women" instead of "CEOs".
  - antt 7y ago
    To be fair I don't see much going on with all the high status men either. I'm reminded of the chimps who outperformed the stock markets: https://www.ft.com/content/abd15744-9793-11e2-b7ef-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/abd15744-9793-11e2-b7ef-00144feab... of course replacing the cocaine bill with grapes dramatically lowers your running costs.
    - devoply 7y ago
      agreed.
  - blueline 7y ago
    terrible and baseless generalization
Proven 7y ago
Who cares what Meyer thinks - it's likely wrong anyway. She! ruined! Yahoo!!
omot 7y ago
I'm always irked by hns attitude towards women leaders. There so many comments trying to discredit her or trying to shame her for self promotion. In general, there's always a sexist undertone, and I feel like the anonymity of hn brings the sexism of the tech community to the surface. In regards to Marissa, I personally believe that the Glass Cliff is real. It's inspiring that she was integral in creating one of the most valuable company in the valley. Likewise, I find it impressive that she was able to climb the political ladder of a generally sexist industry.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  I don't think I've ever seen anything but glowing praise for Lisa Su on hacker news. Then again, HN seems to discuss her less than Marissa Mayer. Why is that? She's far more successful. When I think great women leaders in tech, she's the first I think of. Anti-hardware bias maybe? Or maybe it's a valley bias. After all, she came out of MIT rather than Stanford and lives in Austin rather than San Francisco. I don't know, what do you think?
  - Udik 7y ago
    Maybe she's just more private, or less attractive and fashionable? However, when I read comments about her on HN they were enthusiastic.
- ckastner 7y ago
  > I'm always irked by hns attitude towards women leaders. There so many comments trying to discredit her or trying to shame her for self promotion. HN demonstrably shows the same attitude towards male leaders as well. Elon Musk is the poster child of this. This has nothing to do with the gender of the leader, but rather an aversion to self-promotion, hyping, or any other exaggeration of the self or one's accomplishments.
  - shaki-dora 7y ago
    Nobody has ever accused Musk of outsourcing his dry cleaning when discussion his workload.
ArcMex 7y ago
"Our final question: Why isn't everyone happy all the time? I don't know. Overall, I'm a pretty happy person, and one of my theories in life is that people fundamentally want to be happy. So, if you ever find a moment when you aren't happy, you should just wait. Something is likely to change in the scenario. Someone else will change what they're doing, or you'll get motivated to change what you're doing, so the situation will change overall for the better." Sort of in a slump and I don't have anything smart to say but this made me feel a little better. I feel like I have far more ability than my company utilizes but I cannot quit because I need this job. I don't have the balls to start a company because I don't have a great idea. I just write code. So I will wait. Something will give eventually.
- frankdenbow 7y ago
  I would say being patient is what she is talking about here, but are there other jobs that would be more fulfilling for you? Happy to chat and help. It gets better!
- strikelaserclaw 7y ago
  You will wait forever dude. Don't take advice from someone who won the lottery. Try taking action if you can and put yourself in areas (or companies) where the chance to encounter good ideas and possibly build upon them yourself is greater. It is incrediblely different to work with motivated people who love what they do vs folks who just clock in and clock out.
cirkut 7y ago
M.M. One of the worst CEO. Just lucky to be on right side of the fence
hwj 7y ago
I liked this phrase: > And one of the reasons I was a good product manager was because I had been an engineer.
musicale 7y ago
I'm more interested in an explanation of what went wrong when she was running Yahoo!.
guatepeor1 7y ago
If Mayer was never hired by Google, Google would have been just as big. It's a shame how rich these executive starlets like Sanderberg, Mayer etc become: their roles are completely dispensable, but their wealth suggests that they weren't.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  This is fairly subjective, since we do not know what would have happened without them. It’s easy to speculate, but if you find a way to accurately benchmark C-level performance, there is a whole lot of investors that want to talk with you.
- shaki-dora 7y ago
  Funny how you meantime exactly two CXOs. And that those „useless“ two happen to be women, while something like less than 20% of tech leadership is.
  - guatepeor1 7y ago
    This is not a good forum for your gender battles.
thecleaner 7y ago
Was it really necessary to put in the phrase - "..bought with my babysitting money" ? Does she mean her job as a babysitter or is it just an adjective ? How much did babysitting pay that you could afford a computer with that stuff ?
alexeiz 7y ago
Did Marissa Mayer have any accomplishments at either Google or Yahoo? It looks like she just /was/ there, but she didn't make any significant decisions which can be undoubtedly attributed to her.

251 points by Harj 7y ago

Harj 7y ago

Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision: "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there."

telesilla 7y ago
Yes, I agree - it was nice to hear her iterate that. I have learnt the exact same thing in my two decades as an adult: it doesn't matter really in the end what decision you make, it's how you make it work (and you do have to work at it).
minderasure 7y ago
It's funny, this is the nugget of wisdom that stood out to me as well. I waste so much time in my daily life trying to make the "perfect" decision, when choosing something good and moving on would be a much better use of my time.
- matwood 7y ago
  A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. - George S. Patton I think about this quote a lot. It's so easy to get trapped in analysis paralysis which is really just procrastinating a decision. Like most things, there is a balance. Notice he says 'good' plan, not any plan.
  - afarrell 7y ago
    The trick is training yourself to separate out the shit plans from the good plans. Otherwise, you’re violently crossing the Isonzo river for the 9th time and violently dying. So, don’t be McClellan, but don’t be Cadorna either.
- twic 7y ago
  But that's an entirely analytical way of thinking about it! You're looking at the decision process and asking if the marginal return on investing another unit of time in it, in terms of the improvement of the goodness of the selected outcome, is greater than the return on using that unit of time in some other way. The very term "overthinking" implies that there's a right amount of thinking for any decision, so your real problem is working out how much thinking to do.
- sjg007 7y ago
  Go for the girl or the boy.. as made famous in good will hunting
seem_2211 7y ago
Agreed. I think for most people here the risk is the indecision rather than the wrong decision. For a lot of people there's a deathly fear of ending up under a bridge, and while that's undoubtably true for many people unfortunately, I'd wager most people here have a lot more runway than they'd think even.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
njepa 7y ago
Seem like one of those in group type biases. Where the more similar something is the more we obsesses over the differences. Presumably because we can relate to a lot more of the information. Somewhat ironically being irrational can actually be a good way to make unknown, but largely equal, decisions. Because at least you picked something with conviction, rather than having analyzed the situation incorrectly. Of course for a lot of us good choices aren't the problem so much as the downside. I remember someone made a calculator online for how many time one would most likely see their parents before they died.
jkaptur 7y ago
Sheryl Sandberg described a similarly thorough weighing of her decision to join Google. Mayer: "I had a long analytical evening with a friend of mine where we looked at all the job offers I had received. We created a giant matrix with one row per job offer and one column per value. We compared everything from the basics like cash and stock to where I'd be living, happiness factor, and trajectory factor—all of these different elements. And so we went to work analyzing this problem." Sandberg: "After a while I had a few offers and I had to make a decision, so what did I do? I am MBA trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and my criteria in the rows, and compared the companies and the missions and the roles." It's a fun bit of trivia that Sandberg put the criteria in the rows, which enables sorting the criteria - a nice way to see the upsides and downsides of each choice.
- 4thaccount 7y ago
  I don't think this is a rare thing to do. I've done it and so have co-workers. A simple pro/con chart is really all you need.
  - batty_alex 7y ago
    Sorry to weigh in this way, but yes it's a rare thing to do. Most people don't have multiple offers sitting on the table. It's a privilege. It's rare, that's all.
    - 4thaccount 7y ago
      I'm referring to comparing your existing job to a new one. Everyone does this and it can't be rare. You have to look at quality of work, work life balance, the area, commute time, cost of living, salary, 401k match, benefits, chance of advancement, company culture, job safety, bonus amount, job security...etc. For a lot of people the choice is a no-brainer, but there are comparable and even worse jobs out there. I apologise for the seemingly privledged attitude, but I'm assuming most on HN are Software Developers, Engineers, Mathematicians, and Scientists which generally have options and change jobs on occasion. Every single person who changed has done a pro/con comparison. Even if it was a no-brainier, the comparison would've taken place subconsciously.
duxup 7y ago
As someone who feels they're from the outside looking in (left college to work, still ended up in the technology but without a traditional college education) one of the most frustrating things is watch folks who I perceive as traditionally trained CS and similar folks ... is their desire to go hyper analytical ... and then REALLY commit to the result as the best choice above all others because of whatever analysis they made. Now granted there are time to hunker down and commit but sometimes all that data doesn't really tell you anything and you're still facing an unknown no matter how much work you do, and it might be worth thinking about it after taking a few steps down that road / experience. It's not uncommon to come across a variable(s) that plays a far stronger role than any other, only AFTER you tried doing something. For hyper analytical folks the data on hand is the hammer for every nail it seems sometimes.
- tyingq 7y ago
  I wonder if they recognize that luck plays a significant role. Right place, right time sometimes matters more than anything you can predict or control.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  Life is simply a game with non-perfect knowledge. It's not chess or go, it's more like Dota or poker.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Even without unknowns people elevating rationality to something that would in consequence just be horrible for everyone. Shouldn't be too hard to see if you follow through with the consideration. Hard data also suggest how often the allegedly rational result suddenly became wrong. The rational conclusion here should be to decrease hubris then, shouldn't it? Nope... And this is already a stereotype for softies...
lkrubner 7y ago
Too much focus on utility functions, not enough focus on novelty functions, even though it's been proven that utility functions decline in usefulness as a search space expands. Given an infinite search space, a utility function can only find local optima, there is no global optima. In such situations, a novelty function that finds a path from one happy local optima to another happy local optima is a better bet than using a utility function. The above paragraph is rational, and yet people who consider themselves hyper rational often ignore the truth of this. And the irony is that some of them do this for an emotional reason: they want the security that comes from believing that there is an absolute right answer. They are irrationally rational.
- hitekker 7y ago
  What an interesting perspective with a great paradoxical conclusion. Well done.
- tlb 7y ago
  How would you prove that? Here's a simple counterexample to what I understand your theorem to say: consider an infinite search space: 𝕽∞ and a utility function: 1-|x|. There's a single global optimum at (0, ...), and the gradient of the utility function would find it quickly.
  - pcmaffey 7y ago
    You missed the point that there is no global optimum. The GP’s novelty function is optimized for novelty, that’s all.
  - antt 7y ago
    Counter example: R^1 with a random function. There is no algorithm that can find a global maximum other than checking every point in R^1, of which there is an uncountable number.
    - salty_biscuits 7y ago
      Not all cost surfaces are equally likely to occur in real problems... Also depends on the constraints, linear assignment (i.e. one job to one worker with a big matrix of cost for job to worker and you minimize the sum) has a polynomial complexity solution.
erobbins 7y ago
> "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up with. They look at things as if there’s a right answer and a wrong answer when, the truth is, there’s often just good choices, and maybe a great choice in there." This absolutely drives me crazy in design/engineering decisions. Very commonly there are a lot of good solutions and one great one, and the good ones are good enough. Yet all the brilliant intellectuals want to find the VERY BEST METHOD EVER instead of just getting stuff done.
- bookofjoe 7y ago
  Do an anesthesiology residency. I love how, when residents with engineering backgrounds as undergrads run up against the immutable fact of 5 minutes of hypoxia = brain death, they quickly abandon their old way of thinking in which finding the optimal solution is paramount in favor of whatever works, however kludgy.
- pm90 7y ago
  > Yet all the brilliant intellectuals want to find the VERY BEST METHOD EVER instead of just getting stuff done. For many mathematical, CS problems, it _does_ help to think very hard to find the very best solution to the problem, sometimes irrationally hard. I do agree that we operate in a real world, and the facts of running a business mean that you can't be spending all your time trying to figure out the best. However, it was only by thinking very, very deeply about these problems have many of the technological improvements been possible. MapReduce, AI, ML, Cloud Computing... all started as ideas in companies where people dedicate quite a bit of thought into how to solve some basic problems. I'll be honest: I am glad that I can reap the fruits of the labor of all these smart people, that they have enabled me to change the way computing is done, to make it easier for anyone to get started and to generate value very quickly, using the building blocks which they created after thinking about and working about this for so long.
- aaronbrethorst 7y ago
  This used to drive me nuts too. Now I just look at it as an opportunity to outmaneuver folks who are too wedded to making their solution ‘perfect.’ (Whatever that means.)
brianpgordon 7y ago
This reminds me of Jacob Falkovich's approach to picking a girlfriend: https://putanumonit.com/2017/03/12/goddess-spreadsheet/ https://putanumonit.com/2017/03/12/goddess-spreadsheet/
- dgacmu 7y ago
  I'm going to reveal myself as entirely too geeky here, but my primary complaint about this approach is that it relies on a linear scale for evaluating utility, when much research suggests that utility curves are frequently logarithmic. (Example: Going from earning $20k to $100k per year is a huge difference with substantial implications for financial security, but $1m to $1.08m has a substantially lower impact.) One could argue this article looks at a restricted range where the log behaves more lineary, but if we're going to apply mathematical modeling to our life choices, ... :-)
madrox 7y ago
I've said something similar when mentoring engineering managers about how to let go of certain decision making. 90% of the decisions a team makes will have very little impact on the success of the project, but the other 10% do. You only learn from experience which decisions are the 90% and which decisions are the 10%. It's how leaders need to operate to survive if they want to avoid micromanaging, honestly.

jarym 7y ago

I respect Marissa Mayer a lot and enjoyed reading the article but that HEAVILY photoshopped photo felt weird and distracting. Why did someone go to the trouble of doing that in such an unnatural way?

tardo99 7y ago

The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.

thenaturalist 7y ago
Wholeheartedly agree, and I think it comes down to "signalling by association". For sure she is a workaholic and that gets you far, but to me it seems like she is filling the gap of providing confirmation to insecure overachievers after she - being one herself - made mistakes and reflected on them. Mistakes that could have been avoided had you taken out the ego in the first place. In contrast to my hypothesis: If you like her, feel free to share your thoughts or prove me wrong. What is special about her?
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  Marissa is one of the smartest people I have ever been around. Most of my knowledge comes from running in neighboring circles at Stanford. The (then) girl just had an amazing ability to remember things, get things, and analyze them. She also has outstanding social intelligence, and a bit of a reality distortion field. Of course she chose the rocketship in 1999 while the rest of us fumbled around in the dot com bust. She always had the knack of picking the right place to be at the right time, and the talent (or ability to bs) that she could get noticed when she needed to. The yahoo thing was the worst misstep I've seen her take, but she got paid $200 million to take the risk, and I'm working for peanuts. So who is the smart one? Edited to add: There is exactly zero chance she remembers me. But everyone I hung around remembers her. She has a very strange ability to be remembered.
  - tardo99 7y ago
    I've known Marissa since Stanford too, and you're wrong. I'm not sure if you're lying or what, but you're wrong. Edit: Before you pile on, I'm rich too. Not as rich as her but rich enough not to take issue with her for that reason. The reason people remember Marissa is she was pretty. End of story.

node-bayarea 7y ago

She ruined Yahoo! Made stupid acquisitions like Tumblr and shit.

macspoofing 7y ago
Tumblr wasn't a bad acquisition. I would also challenge that she ruined Yahoo. Yahoo was already on a downward trajectory with an existential identity crisis. At worst, she couldn't change the direction.
- hnzix 7y ago
  I wonder what Yahoo would look like now if Jerry had accepted the Microsoft acquisition. Yahoo was already in troubled waters at the time, in hindsight it looks like a missed opportunity.
  - cududa 7y ago
    Probably completely non-existent and shut down. Both Ballmer and Gates have commented that it would’ve been a monumental mistake
    - hangonhn 7y ago
      But that's part of doing business. The shareholders and employees (many of whom are also shareholders) might be in a lot better shape had the deal gone through. I'm skeptical that those people are better off with the Verizon deal.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Microsoft got some search tech out of them later.... that's all that would be left I imagine.
- treis 7y ago
  >Tumblr wasn't a bad acquisition. I would like to see your justification for this. Because Yahoo paid 1.1 billion dollars for it and they wrote down pretty much all of the value within a few years. It looks especially bad when compared with Facebook buying Instagram around the same time for about the same price.

rajeshp1986 7y ago

"I realized that, while I had a very deep understanding of artificial intelligence, I did not yet have some of the basics down. I knew how a database worked. I knew how an operating system worked. I knew how a compiler worked. But I hadn't taken classes on those topics, so I went back for my master's and took the rest of the AI offerings as well as a lot of programming basics. That way, I could actually go and market myself as a software engineer and say, “I've written a compiler. I've written an operating system. I've written a database. I know how they work" I am confused. Is she talking about foundation CS courses like OS & database systems OR AI courses?

thundergolfer 7y ago
She's talking about foundation CS courses. She talk 7 (!) AI courses in Undergrad but apparently missed out on core CS courses. In Masters she got to cover those off. I think her majoring in Symbolic Systems not CS meant she missed out on compilers, DBs, etc..
- k__ 7y ago
  Because she didn't study CS. A university here has a cognitive science degree. Many people doing it and then a masters in CS to get at least a bit more practical with all the AI stuff they learned.
- hnuser355 7y ago
  I did a CS undergrad and skipped compilers, O.S., DBs, and many others cause I just took as many crosslisted math/CS electives as possible (at least a theorems or math heavy course like automata if I couldn’t do better), then the minimum CS requirements to graduate
jrochkind1 7y ago
You quoted her saying both, no? "I went back for my master's and took the rest of the AI offerings as well as a lot of programming basics."
digitaltrees 7y ago
The rest of the sentence says “...and a lot of the basics”, so she did both, took all 13 AI classes and CS classes on databases and compilers etc. Hope that helps.

subjectHarold 7y ago

Question: Did having an engineering background help you as CEO? Answer: ...I think I was a good engineer. I was an even better product manager ...lol. At least she appears to have stopped claiming credit for the Alibaba stake.

NelsonMinar 7y ago

I was also at Google when the AOL deal was signed and remember the decision and outcome quite differently. It was definitely a high risk deal, deliberately so, but in no way was it only "the best-case scenario had us breaking even". Nor was it the case that "all of our models were wrong". The product manager in charge of ads at the time had a clear understanding of exactly how the deal could be hugely profitable for Google because of the value of extra advertisers attracted to the Google platform thanks to the added AOL inventory. It was by no means a sure thing, but it was a likely outcome. Fortunately the decision makers believed him, they took the risk, and it paid off enormously.

kayhi 7y ago
What does that type of deal look like? AOL had ad inventory and Google had to get enough eye balls?
- toast0 7y ago
  Inventory is slots to put ads. AOL had the eyeballs, Google had the platform to turn eyeballs into money, better than AOL was doing by itself. Google provided a guaranteed rate (cpm? cpc?) so that AOL would have confidence it wasn't bait and switch. See also the Yahoo/Bing deal which didn't work out as well. Microsoft didn't end up actually hitting the targets, and convinced Yahoo to take less; and Yahoo also didn't reduce employee count anywhere near plan on searchy/advertising stuff, so they missed targets on revenue and cost and user experience.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    "guaranteed rate (cpm? cpc?)" It was guaranteed revenue IIUC, something like "If you do not make at least $150M from this deal, Google will pay you the difference." That makes the deal a no-brainer for AOL, but puts Google on the hook for any shortfall, which could have potentially ended up bankrupting the company.
    - toast0 7y ago

Causality1 7y ago

Considering how Mayer absolutely cratered Yahoo I'd take her advice with a grain of salt. Quarterly operating profit dropped by more than 50% during her tenure and she was the driving force behind the acquisition of dozens of worthless companies leading to the write-off of billions of dollars in goodwill value.

nostrademons 7y ago
"When management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett.
- sfblah 7y ago
  Yahoo is in a business that has fantastic economics. Try again.
  - kerbalspacepro 7y ago
    Why do you say this?

dustindiamond 7y ago

She seems like a lucky Elizabeth Holmes type.

devoply 7y ago
Yeah pretty much, I don't see much going on with many of these high status women (and men) other than their network. Especially when their actual performance doesn't speak volumes.
- akozak 7y ago
  Damn, check your biases.
  - devoply 7y ago
    I feel the same way about many CEOs.
    - akozak 7y ago
      Cool but you chose to say "high status women" instead of "CEOs".
- antt 7y ago
  To be fair I don't see much going on with all the high status men either. I'm reminded of the chimps who outperformed the stock markets: https://www.ft.com/content/abd15744-9793-11e2-b7ef-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/abd15744-9793-11e2-b7ef-00144feab... of course replacing the cocaine bill with grapes dramatically lowers your running costs.
  - devoply 7y ago
    agreed.
- blueline 7y ago
  terrible and baseless generalization

Proven 7y ago

Who cares what Meyer thinks - it's likely wrong anyway. She! ruined! Yahoo!!

omot 7y ago

I'm always irked by hns attitude towards women leaders. There so many comments trying to discredit her or trying to shame her for self promotion. In general, there's always a sexist undertone, and I feel like the anonymity of hn brings the sexism of the tech community to the surface. In regards to Marissa, I personally believe that the Glass Cliff is real. It's inspiring that she was integral in creating one of the most valuable company in the valley. Likewise, I find it impressive that she was able to climb the political ladder of a generally sexist industry.

darkpuma 7y ago
I don't think I've ever seen anything but glowing praise for Lisa Su on hacker news. Then again, HN seems to discuss her less than Marissa Mayer. Why is that? She's far more successful. When I think great women leaders in tech, she's the first I think of. Anti-hardware bias maybe? Or maybe it's a valley bias. After all, she came out of MIT rather than Stanford and lives in Austin rather than San Francisco. I don't know, what do you think?
- Udik 7y ago
  Maybe she's just more private, or less attractive and fashionable? However, when I read comments about her on HN they were enthusiastic.
ckastner 7y ago
> I'm always irked by hns attitude towards women leaders. There so many comments trying to discredit her or trying to shame her for self promotion. HN demonstrably shows the same attitude towards male leaders as well. Elon Musk is the poster child of this. This has nothing to do with the gender of the leader, but rather an aversion to self-promotion, hyping, or any other exaggeration of the self or one's accomplishments.
- shaki-dora 7y ago
  Nobody has ever accused Musk of outsourcing his dry cleaning when discussion his workload.

ArcMex 7y ago

"Our final question: Why isn't everyone happy all the time? I don't know. Overall, I'm a pretty happy person, and one of my theories in life is that people fundamentally want to be happy. So, if you ever find a moment when you aren't happy, you should just wait. Something is likely to change in the scenario. Someone else will change what they're doing, or you'll get motivated to change what you're doing, so the situation will change overall for the better." Sort of in a slump and I don't have anything smart to say but this made me feel a little better. I feel like I have far more ability than my company utilizes but I cannot quit because I need this job. I don't have the balls to start a company because I don't have a great idea. I just write code. So I will wait. Something will give eventually.

frankdenbow 7y ago
I would say being patient is what she is talking about here, but are there other jobs that would be more fulfilling for you? Happy to chat and help. It gets better!
strikelaserclaw 7y ago
You will wait forever dude. Don't take advice from someone who won the lottery. Try taking action if you can and put yourself in areas (or companies) where the chance to encounter good ideas and possibly build upon them yourself is greater. It is incrediblely different to work with motivated people who love what they do vs folks who just clock in and clock out.

cirkut 7y ago

M.M. One of the worst CEO. Just lucky to be on right side of the fence

hwj 7y ago

I liked this phrase: > And one of the reasons I was a good product manager was because I had been an engineer.

musicale 7y ago

I'm more interested in an explanation of what went wrong when she was running Yahoo!.

guatepeor1 7y ago

If Mayer was never hired by Google, Google would have been just as big. It's a shame how rich these executive starlets like Sanderberg, Mayer etc become: their roles are completely dispensable, but their wealth suggests that they weren't.

stingraycharles 7y ago
This is fairly subjective, since we do not know what would have happened without them. It’s easy to speculate, but if you find a way to accurately benchmark C-level performance, there is a whole lot of investors that want to talk with you.
shaki-dora 7y ago
Funny how you meantime exactly two CXOs. And that those „useless“ two happen to be women, while something like less than 20% of tech leadership is.
- guatepeor1 7y ago
  This is not a good forum for your gender battles.

thecleaner 7y ago

Was it really necessary to put in the phrase - "..bought with my babysitting money" ? Does she mean her job as a babysitter or is it just an adjective ? How much did babysitting pay that you could afford a computer with that stuff ?

alexeiz 7y ago

Did Marissa Mayer have any accomplishments at either Google or Yahoo? It looks like she just /was/ there, but she didn't make any significant decisions which can be undoubtedly attributed to her.