9 ms·

The real reason Marissa Mayer left Google: She had to

100 points by vtry 14y ago

monkeyfacebag 14y ago
"she is known for pulling 130-hour work weeks and trading sleep for a few more hours in front of a laptop" Is this even humanly possible? What does that leave, 5 hours a day for sleeping, even on weekends?
- GuiA 14y ago
  This has been discussed far and wide on HN. The basic consensus is that she mentioned this once to a journalist, and her 130 hour workweek was likely a once in a lifetime kind of thing. But journalists like to spin things up and the media is often just a game of telephone; and boom, you end up reading in articles all over that Marissa Mayer pulls 130 hours work week every week. One thing that I've learned living in Silicon Valley and meeting "famous" people regularly is that they're almost never as smart, brilliant, hard-working, etc. as the press makes them up to be. Sure, there are a lot of hard-working talented people here, but the image that the worldwide press builds of them is just plain exaggerated (and I guess it's their job to do so).
- gwern 14y ago
  ((7 * 24) - 130) / 7 = 5.43, actually. I suppose it's possible, although if I were to seriously contemplate such a thing, I'd want a supply of modafinil or amphetamines laid in...
  - ricardonunez 14y ago
    It is possible. I did it in college for a week. Couple of days is easy, but after six days you feel that is messing with your system. Like another comment mentioned it was a once in a lifetime kind of thing. I don't recommend it to anybody.
  - felipemnoa 14y ago
    Now assuming that she commutes, takes showers, eats, bathroom breaks, then that means that she was sleeping even less than that.
    - gaius 14y ago
      Only Americans believe that 130 hours in the office constitutes a 130 hour working week. Which is why the French work 35 hours a week, yet Airbus is as productive as Boeing.
      - shin_lao 14y ago
        French don't work 35 hours a week, we work much more than that. Only basic employees do that. I probably have around a 50 hours work week.
        tonfa 14y ago
        But then you have extra vacation days...
      - vl 14y ago
        You mean as outsourced as Boeing?
- JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  I slept under my desk and showered at the office gym once for two weeks and pulled about if not more than that. Not sustainable, but not unnatural either - I don't drink coffee and think I had a Red Bull once or twice.
- msellout 14y ago
  Yes, I have done this. A few times. I think for not more than one week at a time.
- Uchikoma 14y ago
  I did this for one month for my master exams - I had to catch up on a lot of things due to working in a startup ;-) I was a wreck in the end.
simonsarris 14y ago
aside: I like that "OP/ED" is presented very boldly at the start of the article. I wish other news sites were as clear. > The one thing she lacked is the sole reason she’s now at Yahoo: Power. That damn well better be the reason. There really can't be any other reason at least as far as my feeble mind can fetch. If you're worth $300 million and you don't plan to take, say, a year or two off to play and connect with your soon-to-be-firstborn child? Not to sound mean but what could possibly motivate you to do otherwise, than lust for power? $300 million and you could be everything to your child but you insist on attempting to overwork? Jesus that just feels stark to me. ~~~ Wait a minute, didn't Yahoo pass on promoting Susan Decker because they demanded that they find someone who had been a CEO before? I guess they dropped that requirement. For the record, Decker resigned when Yahoo announced that Bartz was to be the new CEO. Not that Mayer is necessarily a bad pick, I'm not wise enough to say, I just find the whole Yahoo CEO parade these past four years to be a very odd affair.
- theorique 14y ago
  $300 million and you could be everything to your child but you insist on attempting to overwork? Jesus that just feels stark to me. Chacun a son gout. Mayer was famous for her over-the-top 100 hour weeks at Google - it's unlikely that would change with a change of scenery.
- harshreality 14y ago
  Do top executives come back from taking a year or two off? If she wants to be a top executive in 10 years, or wants to have had the experience of being a CEO so she can go do something else interesting, can she afford to take two years off now? The ones I can think of worked through their children's early years. Parents with time consuming stressful jobs usually make it work. Every parent has regrets, but there's a difference between having regrets and bungling raising a child. Which brings to mind [1]. I don't think Mayer will bungle it. [1] “If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- simplexion 14y ago
  If I was worth $300 million, I would not be working and I would be spending annoying (to my daughter) amounts of time with my daughter. Fuck work! You only get 1 life.
fmitchell0 14y ago
and if she turns Yahoo's better assets (news, Flickr, dev tools) into the face of the company while inventing something ridiculously awesome (maybe a dead simple, language agnostic calendar/scheduling api...lol), she'll be hailed as a genius. if you're an entrepreneur and you've already made it, taking the biggest risk seems like the obvious choice (elon musk, anyone?) good for her.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
I don't quite understand why we're celebrating articles that gossip about her career and life. This article felt like the nerdy version of a tabloid piece that also took some cheap shots at entrepreneurialism. I can't properly articulate why this article (and others like it) irk me, but they do.
- smashing 14y ago
  Tech culture is pop culture.
- 6ren 14y ago
  It's industry news and gossip. It doesn't gratify one's intellectual curiosity.
spaghetti 14y ago
What did she contribute to Google exactly? Articles like this hand-wave through actual contributions with "influencing the minimalist and user-friendly interfaces of Google web search and Gmail" which is extremely vague and could easily amount to nothing.
- msellout 14y ago
  Executives allocate budget. That's what she did. She chose what things to pay for. This is pretty much all any executive does at any company with any scale.
  - frisco 14y ago
    > This is pretty much all any executive does at any company with any scale. Totally false. They do allocate budget, but they also recruit, retain, and motivate the best staff members they can find. They proactively keep an eye on potential opportunities, order research when necessary and follow up on it. They keep track of how their business unit is operating (not just "are we working on the right problems?" in terms of allocation; also: are there morale problems? are there critical risks that need to be reduced? how will our market evolve around us as we operate? and more) and care for and feed it. Don't underestimate how hard it is to keep a heterogeneous group of big egos all moving in the same direction, together. It's not at all just reading proposals in a vacuum and deciding what to fund. A company is a human organization, and the main job of an executive is to align that group of people towards a common goal.
rglullis 14y ago
Am I the only one who is seriously considering about applying to Yahoo, now? You have a company that is profitable and is known for developing good technology, but that never had an "engineer mindset" at the top. PG himself tells how their biggest problem is that Yahoo's top management doesn't think about "products", but rather about "properties". Now - after God-knows-how-many "media" CEOs - you have this insanely capable engineer at the top, whose sole focus is on using the brain power at the company for creating products, instead of pushing ads or competing in "social" anything. If she manages to change the culture at Yahoo, I think they will have a strong comeback - and I'd love to be a part of it. Actually, I'd love to have Paul Buchheit to chime in. He is the one that probably got closest to her, and might be able to provide some insight as to how much of an impact she can have on Yahoo.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Mayer got engineering training, but became a place product manager almost immediately. More Jobs than Gates, but without the artistic side. Still better than most Yahoo CEOs.
- joshAg 14y ago
  I've been thinking the same thing. I'm just worried that the culture might be too entrenched for her to change it.
- spaghetti 14y ago
  Please elaborate on the "insanely capable engineer" part. I've read conflicting views, opinions and assessments of her qualifications. So I'm curious what exactly makes her an "insanely capable engineer".
dlitwak 14y ago
Good point about the fact that she had gone as high as she could go at Google, but the disparaging of startup CEOs: "Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it." I don't get her logic, the entire valley is built on people who did exactly that at one point. And now shes trying to convince us that well, obviously, she'd want to go take over a failed company instead of possibly trying to start her own, who'd wanna do that, that's just ridiculous? A gazillion execs at companies like Facebook (Asana, Quora, I think), Paypal (SpaceX, Tesla, etc.) went and started their own company and have plenty of power. Not to mention the obvious point that maybe "power" shouldn't be the only thing someone aspires to . . .
code51 14y ago
> She could have run off and been a startup founder and “CEO,” but what kind of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it. Portraying visionary people believing in what they do are "beggars" is stupid way of explaining things.
gearoidoc 14y ago
Terribly misleading title.
adventureful 14y ago
This is an extraordinarily dumb paragraph: "She could have run off and been a startup founder and "CEO," but what kind of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it." Why would she have to beg for VC? She has $300 million. That's just working like a dog? The author just described that Mayer already does that. It's a gamble at best? We're talking about Yahoo here. Mayer would NEVER have to beg for VC under any circumstances first of all. And second, you can easily swap out dealing with VC's for some things that can be worse: dealing with analysts 24/7, activist investors, board members, shareholders in general, public company regulations, and on and on.
cerebrum 14y ago
The elephant in the room: why exactly didn't she get a promotion to Googles top tier? Considering that she was one of the first 20 employees there has to be some reason for that. I have the impression that there is some piece missing here.

100 points by vtry 14y ago

"she is known for pulling 130-hour work weeks and trading sleep for a few more hours in front of a laptop" Is this even humanly possible? What does that leave, 5 hours a day for sleeping, even on weekends?

GuiA 14y ago
This has been discussed far and wide on HN. The basic consensus is that she mentioned this once to a journalist, and her 130 hour workweek was likely a once in a lifetime kind of thing. But journalists like to spin things up and the media is often just a game of telephone; and boom, you end up reading in articles all over that Marissa Mayer pulls 130 hours work week every week. One thing that I've learned living in Silicon Valley and meeting "famous" people regularly is that they're almost never as smart, brilliant, hard-working, etc. as the press makes them up to be. Sure, there are a lot of hard-working talented people here, but the image that the worldwide press builds of them is just plain exaggerated (and I guess it's their job to do so).
gwern 14y ago
((7 * 24) - 130) / 7 = 5.43, actually. I suppose it's possible, although if I were to seriously contemplate such a thing, I'd want a supply of modafinil or amphetamines laid in...
- ricardonunez 14y ago
  It is possible. I did it in college for a week. Couple of days is easy, but after six days you feel that is messing with your system. Like another comment mentioned it was a once in a lifetime kind of thing. I don't recommend it to anybody.
- felipemnoa 14y ago
  Now assuming that she commutes, takes showers, eats, bathroom breaks, then that means that she was sleeping even less than that.
  - gaius 14y ago
    Only Americans believe that 130 hours in the office constitutes a 130 hour working week. Which is why the French work 35 hours a week, yet Airbus is as productive as Boeing.
    - shin_lao 14y ago
      French don't work 35 hours a week, we work much more than that. Only basic employees do that. I probably have around a 50 hours work week.
      - tonfa 14y ago
        But then you have extra vacation days...
    - vl 14y ago
      You mean as outsourced as Boeing?
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
I slept under my desk and showered at the office gym once for two weeks and pulled about if not more than that. Not sustainable, but not unnatural either - I don't drink coffee and think I had a Red Bull once or twice.
msellout 14y ago
Yes, I have done this. A few times. I think for not more than one week at a time.
Uchikoma 14y ago
I did this for one month for my master exams - I had to catch up on a lot of things due to working in a startup ;-) I was a wreck in the end.

simonsarris 14y ago

aside: I like that "OP/ED" is presented very boldly at the start of the article. I wish other news sites were as clear. > The one thing she lacked is the sole reason she’s now at Yahoo: Power. That damn well better be the reason. There really can't be any other reason at least as far as my feeble mind can fetch. If you're worth $300 million and you don't plan to take, say, a year or two off to play and connect with your soon-to-be-firstborn child? Not to sound mean but what could possibly motivate you to do otherwise, than lust for power? $300 million and you could be everything to your child but you insist on attempting to overwork? Jesus that just feels stark to me. ~~~ Wait a minute, didn't Yahoo pass on promoting Susan Decker because they demanded that they find someone who had been a CEO before? I guess they dropped that requirement. For the record, Decker resigned when Yahoo announced that Bartz was to be the new CEO. Not that Mayer is necessarily a bad pick, I'm not wise enough to say, I just find the whole Yahoo CEO parade these past four years to be a very odd affair.

theorique 14y ago
$300 million and you could be everything to your child but you insist on attempting to overwork? Jesus that just feels stark to me. Chacun a son gout. Mayer was famous for her over-the-top 100 hour weeks at Google - it's unlikely that would change with a change of scenery.
harshreality 14y ago
Do top executives come back from taking a year or two off? If she wants to be a top executive in 10 years, or wants to have had the experience of being a CEO so she can go do something else interesting, can she afford to take two years off now? The ones I can think of worked through their children's early years. Parents with time consuming stressful jobs usually make it work. Every parent has regrets, but there's a difference between having regrets and bungling raising a child. Which brings to mind [1]. I don't think Mayer will bungle it. [1] “If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
simplexion 14y ago
If I was worth $300 million, I would not be working and I would be spending annoying (to my daughter) amounts of time with my daughter. Fuck work! You only get 1 life.

fmitchell0 14y ago

and if she turns Yahoo's better assets (news, Flickr, dev tools) into the face of the company while inventing something ridiculously awesome (maybe a dead simple, language agnostic calendar/scheduling api...lol), she'll be hailed as a genius. if you're an entrepreneur and you've already made it, taking the biggest risk seems like the obvious choice (elon musk, anyone?) good for her.

kintamanimatt 14y ago

I don't quite understand why we're celebrating articles that gossip about her career and life. This article felt like the nerdy version of a tabloid piece that also took some cheap shots at entrepreneurialism. I can't properly articulate why this article (and others like it) irk me, but they do.

smashing 14y ago
Tech culture is pop culture.
6ren 14y ago
It's industry news and gossip. It doesn't gratify one's intellectual curiosity.

spaghetti 14y ago

What did she contribute to Google exactly? Articles like this hand-wave through actual contributions with "influencing the minimalist and user-friendly interfaces of Google web search and Gmail" which is extremely vague and could easily amount to nothing.

msellout 14y ago
Executives allocate budget. That's what she did. She chose what things to pay for. This is pretty much all any executive does at any company with any scale.
- frisco 14y ago
  > This is pretty much all any executive does at any company with any scale. Totally false. They do allocate budget, but they also recruit, retain, and motivate the best staff members they can find. They proactively keep an eye on potential opportunities, order research when necessary and follow up on it. They keep track of how their business unit is operating (not just "are we working on the right problems?" in terms of allocation; also: are there morale problems? are there critical risks that need to be reduced? how will our market evolve around us as we operate? and more) and care for and feed it. Don't underestimate how hard it is to keep a heterogeneous group of big egos all moving in the same direction, together. It's not at all just reading proposals in a vacuum and deciding what to fund. A company is a human organization, and the main job of an executive is to align that group of people towards a common goal.

rglullis 14y ago

Am I the only one who is seriously considering about applying to Yahoo, now? You have a company that is profitable and is known for developing good technology, but that never had an "engineer mindset" at the top. PG himself tells how their biggest problem is that Yahoo's top management doesn't think about "products", but rather about "properties". Now - after God-knows-how-many "media" CEOs - you have this insanely capable engineer at the top, whose sole focus is on using the brain power at the company for creating products, instead of pushing ads or competing in "social" anything. If she manages to change the culture at Yahoo, I think they will have a strong comeback - and I'd love to be a part of it. Actually, I'd love to have Paul Buchheit to chime in. He is the one that probably got closest to her, and might be able to provide some insight as to how much of an impact she can have on Yahoo.

Evbn 14y ago
Mayer got engineering training, but became a place product manager almost immediately. More Jobs than Gates, but without the artistic side. Still better than most Yahoo CEOs.
joshAg 14y ago
I've been thinking the same thing. I'm just worried that the culture might be too entrenched for her to change it.
spaghetti 14y ago
Please elaborate on the "insanely capable engineer" part. I've read conflicting views, opinions and assessments of her qualifications. So I'm curious what exactly makes her an "insanely capable engineer".

dlitwak 14y ago

Good point about the fact that she had gone as high as she could go at Google, but the disparaging of startup CEOs: "Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it." I don't get her logic, the entire valley is built on people who did exactly that at one point. And now shes trying to convince us that well, obviously, she'd want to go take over a failed company instead of possibly trying to start her own, who'd wanna do that, that's just ridiculous? A gazillion execs at companies like Facebook (Asana, Quora, I think), Paypal (SpaceX, Tesla, etc.) went and started their own company and have plenty of power. Not to mention the obvious point that maybe "power" shouldn't be the only thing someone aspires to . . .

code51 14y ago

> She could have run off and been a startup founder and “CEO,” but what kind of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it. Portraying visionary people believing in what they do are "beggars" is stupid way of explaining things.

gearoidoc 14y ago

Terribly misleading title.

adventureful 14y ago

This is an extraordinarily dumb paragraph: "She could have run off and been a startup founder and "CEO," but what kind of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it." Why would she have to beg for VC? She has $300 million. That's just working like a dog? The author just described that Mayer already does that. It's a gamble at best? We're talking about Yahoo here. Mayer would NEVER have to beg for VC under any circumstances first of all. And second, you can easily swap out dealing with VC's for some things that can be worse: dealing with analysts 24/7, activist investors, board members, shareholders in general, public company regulations, and on and on.

cerebrum 14y ago

The elephant in the room: why exactly didn't she get a promotion to Googles top tier? Considering that she was one of the first 20 employees there has to be some reason for that. I have the impression that there is some piece missing here.