5 ms·

Hilarious how god awful these CEOs are while still apparently being worth $23MM in severance.

by distortionfield 3y ago

sickofparadox 3y ago
Fail objectively, get a huge payout, move on to the next company, crash the company, repeat. Being a CEO must be nice.
- tombert 3y ago
  And despite the fact that the CEOs are all able to have like five different side hustles, they still get to drone on endlessly about how hard they work, and do not see the hypocrisy with making all the employees sign overly broad "non-competes".
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Well, sure! We're untrustworthy plebes who would certainly drain company resources to support our "side hustles". The people who become CEOs are virtuous hyperperforming knights who always do everything right. /s
    - tombert 3y ago
      Probably the most trouble I got into when I was at Apple was when I emailed a VP directly asking if I could maybe contribute some code (in my own time, on my own hardware, at home) to an open source project. The VP didn't just say "no", but also ratted me out to like the six managers between me and him, and each manager thought it was a good use of company time to schedule half-hour meetings explaining to me that I needed to go through the proper bureaucratic channels because the VP's time is "extremely valuable". Honestly kind of poisoned the entire job for me.
      - erulabs 3y ago
        Haha, what's funny there is the idea that if they paid the VP less maybe it would be worth this time to engage with his employees.
      - subw00f 3y ago
        Why would you ask that? It’s literally your time and resources.
        tombert 3y ago
        Apple made it pretty clear that they viewed pretty much any code that I wrote while I was employed by them, by default, belonged to them. If I contributed to an open source repo without legal's explicit approval, it was grounds for termination. It was ridiculous.
        JohnFen 3y ago
        I've encountered this sort of clause in about 2/3 of the employment contracts I've been presented with. Every time, I object to it and request that it be removed and replaced with wording to the effect of "I won't use company time, resources, or information in side projects". Every time I've done this, they've agreed to the change. If they don't, then I don't take the job.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Sounds like that happened a long time ago, my condolences. Non-competes don't mean shit and 99% of them in CA are illegal these days unless you are extremely high up (having 6 managers between you and a VP doesn't seem to satisfy that). Hope you did it anyway. No one should be able to tell you what you can do in your spare time.
        tombert 3y ago
        This was early 2020; is that a long time ago? Time has no meaning after COVID. I mean, I wasn't worried about them suing me for contributing to open source (it would be pretty hard to prove any real damages), but I think being fired would have been on the table.
      - lotsoweiners 3y ago
        I also heard you’d been having problems with your TPS reports. Didn’t you get the memo?
        tombert 3y ago
        My wife basically made the Office Space joke when it happened, how I had like six half-hour meetings in one day to explain how I screwed up on some arbitrary rule.
        westmeal 3y ago
        Six. Six managers Bob.
  - dpkirchner 3y ago
    And then a lot of CEOs with their side hustles claim that remote work is "morally wrong" or whatever.
- NickC25 3y ago
  Yeah, seriously. If you were in early with a hot company and that company hits hyperscale, people for some reason assume you're competent running a much larger legacy organization. I see very little parallels or overlap, but perhaps I'm blind. Mayer was an engineer, and for some reason people thought she'd be a great CEO. Surprise, she wasn't. Wasn't she really disliked within Yahoo!?
- lawn 3y ago
  But "its so difficult to find competent people", "it's just that hard", "you don't get it", and my favorite: "you think you could do a better job?". At least I could crash the company without costing the company hundreds of millions.
andy_ppp 3y ago
We were told at Yahoo! that it was pointless to compete with Google and Microsoft at search because Yahoo! were not willing to put in the money to have their own search engine. At the time they were still the most popular webpage on the Internet. What really irritated me about this was the idea you could just look at a spreadsheet and decide if you'll be successful at search or anything else for that matter, startups constantly prove that resources don't automatically equal success... it sort of summed up the jail Yahoo! and Carol Bartz created and the thought process involved in that company's demise. MBAs have a lot to answer for IMO.
- itronitron 3y ago
  How do people deal with such poor leadership? One of the founders of Lucene worked at Yahoo for a time so Yahoo certainly could have done something distinctive in the search space.
  - Joeri 3y ago
    They don’t. They leave. When enough of them leave a negative spiral sets in, until most of whose left are people who have nowhere else to go. You would think that kills a company, but a big company can survive decades in that mode, just slowly riding the elevator all the way down.
    - doubled112 3y ago
      The Dead Sea effect?
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    You give feedback, they ignore it, and you leave. Most engineers don't want to spend their times fighting politics instead of doing their job. And if leadership doesn't have confidence in your job, why should you not seek a place that does? Not like there's really much employee retention factors these days.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    Doug worked at Apple on v-twin [0]. He has a long history of building search related products. By the way, after co-founding Jakarta, I was the one who brought him and Lucene into the ASF and the rest is history. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting

Hilarious how god awful these CEOs are while still apparently being worth $23MM in severance.

sickofparadox 3y ago

Fail objectively, get a huge payout, move on to the next company, crash the company, repeat. Being a CEO must be nice.

tombert 3y ago
And despite the fact that the CEOs are all able to have like five different side hustles, they still get to drone on endlessly about how hard they work, and do not see the hypocrisy with making all the employees sign overly broad "non-competes".
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Well, sure! We're untrustworthy plebes who would certainly drain company resources to support our "side hustles". The people who become CEOs are virtuous hyperperforming knights who always do everything right. /s
  - tombert 3y ago
    Probably the most trouble I got into when I was at Apple was when I emailed a VP directly asking if I could maybe contribute some code (in my own time, on my own hardware, at home) to an open source project. The VP didn't just say "no", but also ratted me out to like the six managers between me and him, and each manager thought it was a good use of company time to schedule half-hour meetings explaining to me that I needed to go through the proper bureaucratic channels because the VP's time is "extremely valuable". Honestly kind of poisoned the entire job for me.
    - erulabs 3y ago
      Haha, what's funny there is the idea that if they paid the VP less maybe it would be worth this time to engage with his employees.
    - subw00f 3y ago
      Why would you ask that? It’s literally your time and resources.
      - tombert 3y ago
        Apple made it pretty clear that they viewed pretty much any code that I wrote while I was employed by them, by default, belonged to them. If I contributed to an open source repo without legal's explicit approval, it was grounds for termination. It was ridiculous.
        JohnFen 3y ago
        I've encountered this sort of clause in about 2/3 of the employment contracts I've been presented with. Every time, I object to it and request that it be removed and replaced with wording to the effect of "I won't use company time, resources, or information in side projects". Every time I've done this, they've agreed to the change. If they don't, then I don't take the job.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Sounds like that happened a long time ago, my condolences. Non-competes don't mean shit and 99% of them in CA are illegal these days unless you are extremely high up (having 6 managers between you and a VP doesn't seem to satisfy that). Hope you did it anyway. No one should be able to tell you what you can do in your spare time.
      - tombert 3y ago
        This was early 2020; is that a long time ago? Time has no meaning after COVID. I mean, I wasn't worried about them suing me for contributing to open source (it would be pretty hard to prove any real damages), but I think being fired would have been on the table.
    - lotsoweiners 3y ago
      I also heard you’d been having problems with your TPS reports. Didn’t you get the memo?
      - tombert 3y ago
        My wife basically made the Office Space joke when it happened, how I had like six half-hour meetings in one day to explain how I screwed up on some arbitrary rule.
        westmeal 3y ago
        Six. Six managers Bob.
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  And then a lot of CEOs with their side hustles claim that remote work is "morally wrong" or whatever.
NickC25 3y ago
Yeah, seriously. If you were in early with a hot company and that company hits hyperscale, people for some reason assume you're competent running a much larger legacy organization. I see very little parallels or overlap, but perhaps I'm blind. Mayer was an engineer, and for some reason people thought she'd be a great CEO. Surprise, she wasn't. Wasn't she really disliked within Yahoo!?
lawn 3y ago
But "its so difficult to find competent people", "it's just that hard", "you don't get it", and my favorite: "you think you could do a better job?". At least I could crash the company without costing the company hundreds of millions.

andy_ppp 3y ago

We were told at Yahoo! that it was pointless to compete with Google and Microsoft at search because Yahoo! were not willing to put in the money to have their own search engine. At the time they were still the most popular webpage on the Internet. What really irritated me about this was the idea you could just look at a spreadsheet and decide if you'll be successful at search or anything else for that matter, startups constantly prove that resources don't automatically equal success... it sort of summed up the jail Yahoo! and Carol Bartz created and the thought process involved in that company's demise. MBAs have a lot to answer for IMO.

itronitron 3y ago
How do people deal with such poor leadership? One of the founders of Lucene worked at Yahoo for a time so Yahoo certainly could have done something distinctive in the search space.
- Joeri 3y ago
  They don’t. They leave. When enough of them leave a negative spiral sets in, until most of whose left are people who have nowhere else to go. You would think that kills a company, but a big company can survive decades in that mode, just slowly riding the elevator all the way down.
  - doubled112 3y ago
    The Dead Sea effect?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  You give feedback, they ignore it, and you leave. Most engineers don't want to spend their times fighting politics instead of doing their job. And if leadership doesn't have confidence in your job, why should you not seek a place that does? Not like there's really much employee retention factors these days.
- latchkey 3y ago
  Doug worked at Apple on v-twin [0]. He has a long history of building search related products. By the way, after co-founding Jakarta, I was the one who brought him and Lucene into the ASF and the rest is history. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Cutting