5 ms·

Marissa Mayer's Email Promising To Make Yahoo 'The Absolute Best Place To Work'

45 points by jacquesgt 14y ago

taskstrike 14y ago
Some things they mention should be done at every tech company: 1. Give employees free lunch 2. Give every employee an iphone 3. Github for code review
- greenyoda 14y ago
  Actually, I wouldn't be terribly happy if my company gave me a daily free lunch. It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive. (I work in a big city, where diverse types of food are a short walk away. If you work in an office park in Silicon Valley, I can see why a free lunch might be more appealing.) Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them, which I don't want to encourage. Since I'm a developer of software that doesn't get deployed to the web in real time, it isn't likely that an issue can't wait until the next work day. For dire emergencies, they have my home number.
  - eta_carinae 14y ago
    > It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive. If stepping away from your coworkers makes you happy and productive, your company has bigger problems than charging for meals.
    - greenyoda 14y ago
      I actually like my co-workers very much, but being an introverted type (as I suspect many developers are), I need a break from people once in a while. Even being with my best friends for ten hours straight would be a bit tiring for me.
    - kitsune_ 14y ago
      He didn't say that it makes him "happy and productive", he said it makes him "happier and more productive". You do realize that there is a difference here, right? I assume that you are an intelligent being that knows basic English grammar and hence you must have simply misread that comment.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I really like the "we'll provide free food onsite, and if you go out to lunch with anyone, we'll pay for that too (but keep it reasonable)" -- encouraging employees go to out to lunch together, or to have lunch with people from other companies, or potential customers, or hires, or whatever, seems worth the cost of lunch. You may or may not be able to deduct the cost of the meals (depending on who they're with), and only at 50%, but who cares.
    - justincormack 14y ago
      What a hassle. Just pay more.
      - rdl 14y ago
        Basically all good engineers I've talked to at places with free food onsite value it at at least cost, and often at >>1x cost. Encouraging people to go be social at lunch itself (and not to eat at their desks, at least not every day) is a win for retention. Check the zillion times this has come up on HN. Not offering free food will hurt in recruiting a lot more than the cost, even if you moved $1 in food costs directly into salary. I mean, if even Yahoo! eventually figures it out, it is probably true.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Google gave out cell phones as a gift to promote interest in their mobile business. Then they gave out cell phones for traditional work related purposes as well.
  - lsc 14y ago
    >Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them. Heh. well, I've been on call forever. Nearly everyone I know that works at google is also on-call. (they seem to have a hierarchy, where the more valuable folks don't get called very often.) So yeah, company cell phone? yeah, sure, that is expected. I think the thing is that most people think of an iphone as nicer than your average cellphone. From that perspective, e.g. we are going to call you anyhow, they might as well give you a nice cellphone to carry around. (that said, a cellphone without a keyboard is of limited utility. I need to be able to type and see the screen at the same time. SSH on iphone doesn't cut it.)
  - guelo 14y ago
    Not only that, when IT departments start thinking about company owned phones they start thinking about securing important data so they start locking things down and it would be bad if some sexual harrasment was being done with company property so they need some monitoring and filtering and on and on and down the rabbit hole it goes.
- geoka9 14y ago
  You mean a smartphone, right? Why does it have to be an iphone? And why even that? A laptop I could understand, but phone?
  - sneak 14y ago
    The argument could be made that a smartphone-as-tool-for-company-business should be as appliance-like as possible. Years ago, that would have meant BlackBerries all around. Today, it means iOS.
- illicium 14y ago
  I wouldn't say GitHub is the best system for code review. Pull requests work OK for open source and outside contributors, but I'd rather use Gerrit instead.
- EnderMB 14y ago
  The best thing about a free lunch isn't necessarily that you'll be eating nice food (hopefully) and saving a bit of money. It's that it forces you to ditch your machine or your ritual and to spend some non-work time with your work colleagues. As a regular desk-eater (like many I assume) you definitely miss that aspect in favour of getting a bit more work done.
wyclif 14y ago
This is adorably cute, but Yahoo! won't be a great place to work until they begin creating great products again.
- jmspring 14y ago
  "Cute" it may be, but if new leadership inspires enough people to step up, want to do something great, and their path for bringing those ideas to fruition are cleared, then Yahoo can succeed. That said, the biggest gripe I've read about Yahoo is the insane amount of middle management. If anyone (regardless of position -- an intern, an engineer, an architect) has an idea, I would hope there is a path for that idea to be evaluated and, if show potential, is allowed to come to fruition.
- quesera 14y ago
  I think it works both ways -- neither will Yahoo create great products until they become a great place to work, again. This is why I think Mayer was a great choice. If you're at Yahoo and disillusioned, or considering an offer and on the fence...you have to latch on to something representing change. Marissa wasn't the only possible choice, but she was at least as good as any other imaginable choices. Now I'm making her sound like Obama. I'm much more comfortable with that conflation than the Steve Jobs one though. Oh, and sorry about the motherhood pun. I didn't even notice it til the reread.
- kordless 14y ago
  Hadoop?
apaitch 14y ago
I know almost nothing about her, but Marissa Mayer doesn't come off as a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk-like "visionary" who will drive Yahoo to unexplored and unexpected market openings. Her approach seems to be to make Yahoo a great place to work, attract and empower talent, and let said talent churn out great products. Some would say that she should focus on changing the market direction of the company, and that's certainly one of her responsibilities. At the same time, I think what she's doing is admirable and valuable. It's certainly putting Yahoo on the map in the communities that matter. Let's hope Yahoo can ride this momentum and make something of it!
- hobonumber1 14y ago
  What makes you say that she's not a visionary?
  - apaitch 14y ago
    As I said, I barely know her/of her so my opinion is based on superficial things like reputation. The main point I was trying to make is not that she's not a "visionary" but that the things she's doing to help Yahoo are admirable and worthy of praise >.>
- greenyoda 14y ago
  Not every CEO has to be a visionary. If the CEO can hire good people who have good ideas and get out of their way, she doesn't have to provide all the ideas herself. But she'd need to create an environment where good ideas can be born and come to fruition. Giving people free food won't do this. You'd need to set up a culture in which good ideas actually get rewarded and people aren't afraid to fail.
  - yuhong 14y ago
    I hope modern MBA courses teaches things like this.
    - hcal 14y ago
EdwardTattsyrup 14y ago
I've worked at a few companies where a fresh CEO asked the rank and file for a list of problems, suggestions, ideas, etc. But I've never seen it make much of a difference. I fear Marissa Meyer is already toast -- just like Yahoo.
- weka 14y ago
  She joined the sinking ship. She just there to soften the landing.
  - drgath 14y ago
    > to soften the landing. I've always said that was Carol's job at Yahoo. If she didn't make tough choices to cut costs and trim products, Y! may very well have face-planted, hard. She did very little to create growth, but she did a good job to realign & reorg the company to a position where someone like Marissa can come in and create growth.
stevenj 14y ago
Someone once told me: "Never tell anybody that you're good. If you're good, they'll tell you."
- skrebbel 14y ago
  "So, son, why do you think you're fit for this job?" "No idea sir, you tell me."
bishnu 14y ago
So far all of Marissa Meyer's moves (at least the one's getting publicity) have made Yahoo! a bit more Google-like. While that's probably for the best, I will be real interested to see when/where she breaks with Google culture for the first time.
- sneak 14y ago
  Interesting, sure, but most of that stuff worked amazingly well for Google back when their engineer headcount was at what Y!'s is today.
  - greenyoda 14y ago
    Correlation is not causation. We don't really know what combination of the many factors in Google's culture made them so successful. For all we know, it may have been due entirely to the people they hired, and the same team might have produced great results with or without all the perks that Google is famous for.
    - lsc 14y ago
      sure. but it seems to me that this woman was hired with a mandate to 'make the place more google-like' - I'm with you; my belief is that 95% of leadership is picking the right people, but, then, I'm a bad leader. It seems like it's worth a shot. I mean, Yahoo has tried and failed many other strategies.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  You can't create culture with edicts, culture is an emergent property of the community that either is supported or fought by the power structure at hand. A corporation is like an ecosystem, you can create the conditions that will allow a healthier culture to flourish but it will likely take a huge amount of time for that culture to take hold, assuming that there aren't other roadblocks still in the way such as entrenched middle management with different ideas about the place they want to work.
wamatt 14y ago
The perks are certainly nice and likely a good move all things considered, but at some point she is going to have to inspire and innovate. A "Google-like office", without a seriously great product, will probably be tough sell, longterm.
- joshAg 14y ago
  Based on the things that came out of google labs, I think it's more than possible that a seriously great product can be a byproduct of a google-type office and not just a prerequisite for said office environment.
  - wamatt 14y ago
    It's possible I guess, but in the case of Google Labs, perhaps the more significant factor is the raw amount of talent/ability, per square foot. :p
    - zem 14y ago
      i've known several ex-yahoo people. they all agree that yahoo has no shortage of raw engineering talent in the trenches; it's just that they aren't given the environment they need to get things done. hopefully mayer will change that.
shin_lao 14y ago
You can't remove jams by adding a new process to report problems... If you want to remove jams, just make sure decisions are taken as low as possible in the hierarchy.
- drgath 14y ago
  Being able to report problems is the first step to figuring out what is actually wrong.
jyap 14y ago
Yahoo! is in crisis mode and I think Marissa is making the right moves. If what she says inspires current employees and keeps talent then it is all worth while. Now the pessimist could see Yahoo! as a dying company/stock. Apple was in the same position before Steve Jobs came back. Yahoo! could possible die a slow death or this could mark the start of a recovery. Marissa understands it begins with products and to have great products, engineers need to be happy and inspired. Perhaps Yahoo! could be seen as a down stock and is poised for growth? What if Yahoo! triples in value over the next 3 years? The best time to buy into a stock is when it is down. I will add that what Marissa is doing is also making Yahoo! more attractive to prospective employees. If a prospective employee has the hypothetical choice between working at Facebook and working at Yahoo! and hears about the changes that Marissa has made then they may be inclined to work at Yahoo! Perhaps they have heard about the poor stock performance since Facebook's IPO. If that prospective talent chooses to work at Yahoo! instead of Facebook then it is a win.
- quesera 14y ago
  This is clearly the Hail Mary for Yahoo. I give the board a ton of credit for having the gumption, though I realize they tried every other permutation of crisis reaction first. And they couldn't have chosen anyone more appropriate for the strategy than Marissa Mayer. I have no use for Yahoo in my life, but I'm really rooting for her and them, and I hope they change my mind. You raise an interesting point about stock. It defies all logic to believe that Marissa could achieve what Steve Jobs did. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth a small bet.

45 points by jacquesgt 14y ago

Some things they mention should be done at every tech company: 1. Give employees free lunch 2. Give every employee an iphone 3. Github for code review

greenyoda 14y ago
Actually, I wouldn't be terribly happy if my company gave me a daily free lunch. It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive. (I work in a big city, where diverse types of food are a short walk away. If you work in an office park in Silicon Valley, I can see why a free lunch might be more appealing.) Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them, which I don't want to encourage. Since I'm a developer of software that doesn't get deployed to the web in real time, it isn't likely that an issue can't wait until the next work day. For dire emergencies, they have my home number.
- eta_carinae 14y ago
  > It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive. If stepping away from your coworkers makes you happy and productive, your company has bigger problems than charging for meals.
  - greenyoda 14y ago
    I actually like my co-workers very much, but being an introverted type (as I suspect many developers are), I need a break from people once in a while. Even being with my best friends for ten hours straight would be a bit tiring for me.
  - kitsune_ 14y ago
    He didn't say that it makes him "happy and productive", he said it makes him "happier and more productive". You do realize that there is a difference here, right? I assume that you are an intelligent being that knows basic English grammar and hence you must have simply misread that comment.
- rdl 14y ago
  I really like the "we'll provide free food onsite, and if you go out to lunch with anyone, we'll pay for that too (but keep it reasonable)" -- encouraging employees go to out to lunch together, or to have lunch with people from other companies, or potential customers, or hires, or whatever, seems worth the cost of lunch. You may or may not be able to deduct the cost of the meals (depending on who they're with), and only at 50%, but who cares.
  - justincormack 14y ago
    What a hassle. Just pay more.
    - rdl 14y ago
      Basically all good engineers I've talked to at places with free food onsite value it at at least cost, and often at >>1x cost. Encouraging people to go be social at lunch itself (and not to eat at their desks, at least not every day) is a win for retention. Check the zillion times this has come up on HN. Not offering free food will hurt in recruiting a lot more than the cost, even if you moved $1 in food costs directly into salary. I mean, if even Yahoo! eventually figures it out, it is probably true.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Google gave out cell phones as a gift to promote interest in their mobile business. Then they gave out cell phones for traditional work related purposes as well.
- lsc 14y ago
  >Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them. Heh. well, I've been on call forever. Nearly everyone I know that works at google is also on-call. (they seem to have a hierarchy, where the more valuable folks don't get called very often.) So yeah, company cell phone? yeah, sure, that is expected. I think the thing is that most people think of an iphone as nicer than your average cellphone. From that perspective, e.g. we are going to call you anyhow, they might as well give you a nice cellphone to carry around. (that said, a cellphone without a keyboard is of limited utility. I need to be able to type and see the screen at the same time. SSH on iphone doesn't cut it.)
- guelo 14y ago
  Not only that, when IT departments start thinking about company owned phones they start thinking about securing important data so they start locking things down and it would be bad if some sexual harrasment was being done with company property so they need some monitoring and filtering and on and on and down the rabbit hole it goes.
geoka9 14y ago
You mean a smartphone, right? Why does it have to be an iphone? And why even that? A laptop I could understand, but phone?
- sneak 14y ago
  The argument could be made that a smartphone-as-tool-for-company-business should be as appliance-like as possible. Years ago, that would have meant BlackBerries all around. Today, it means iOS.
illicium 14y ago
I wouldn't say GitHub is the best system for code review. Pull requests work OK for open source and outside contributors, but I'd rather use Gerrit instead.
EnderMB 14y ago
The best thing about a free lunch isn't necessarily that you'll be eating nice food (hopefully) and saving a bit of money. It's that it forces you to ditch your machine or your ritual and to spend some non-work time with your work colleagues. As a regular desk-eater (like many I assume) you definitely miss that aspect in favour of getting a bit more work done.

wyclif 14y ago

This is adorably cute, but Yahoo! won't be a great place to work until they begin creating great products again.

jmspring 14y ago
"Cute" it may be, but if new leadership inspires enough people to step up, want to do something great, and their path for bringing those ideas to fruition are cleared, then Yahoo can succeed. That said, the biggest gripe I've read about Yahoo is the insane amount of middle management. If anyone (regardless of position -- an intern, an engineer, an architect) has an idea, I would hope there is a path for that idea to be evaluated and, if show potential, is allowed to come to fruition.
quesera 14y ago
I think it works both ways -- neither will Yahoo create great products until they become a great place to work, again. This is why I think Mayer was a great choice. If you're at Yahoo and disillusioned, or considering an offer and on the fence...you have to latch on to something representing change. Marissa wasn't the only possible choice, but she was at least as good as any other imaginable choices. Now I'm making her sound like Obama. I'm much more comfortable with that conflation than the Steve Jobs one though. Oh, and sorry about the motherhood pun. I didn't even notice it til the reread.
kordless 14y ago
Hadoop?

apaitch 14y ago

I know almost nothing about her, but Marissa Mayer doesn't come off as a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk-like "visionary" who will drive Yahoo to unexplored and unexpected market openings. Her approach seems to be to make Yahoo a great place to work, attract and empower talent, and let said talent churn out great products. Some would say that she should focus on changing the market direction of the company, and that's certainly one of her responsibilities. At the same time, I think what she's doing is admirable and valuable. It's certainly putting Yahoo on the map in the communities that matter. Let's hope Yahoo can ride this momentum and make something of it!

hobonumber1 14y ago
What makes you say that she's not a visionary?
- apaitch 14y ago
  As I said, I barely know her/of her so my opinion is based on superficial things like reputation. The main point I was trying to make is not that she's not a "visionary" but that the things she's doing to help Yahoo are admirable and worthy of praise >.>
greenyoda 14y ago
Not every CEO has to be a visionary. If the CEO can hire good people who have good ideas and get out of their way, she doesn't have to provide all the ideas herself. But she'd need to create an environment where good ideas can be born and come to fruition. Giving people free food won't do this. You'd need to set up a culture in which good ideas actually get rewarded and people aren't afraid to fail.
- yuhong 14y ago
  I hope modern MBA courses teaches things like this.
  - hcal 14y ago

EdwardTattsyrup 14y ago

I've worked at a few companies where a fresh CEO asked the rank and file for a list of problems, suggestions, ideas, etc. But I've never seen it make much of a difference. I fear Marissa Meyer is already toast -- just like Yahoo.

weka 14y ago
She joined the sinking ship. She just there to soften the landing.
- drgath 14y ago
  > to soften the landing. I've always said that was Carol's job at Yahoo. If she didn't make tough choices to cut costs and trim products, Y! may very well have face-planted, hard. She did very little to create growth, but she did a good job to realign & reorg the company to a position where someone like Marissa can come in and create growth.

stevenj 14y ago

Someone once told me: "Never tell anybody that you're good. If you're good, they'll tell you."

skrebbel 14y ago
"So, son, why do you think you're fit for this job?" "No idea sir, you tell me."

bishnu 14y ago

So far all of Marissa Meyer's moves (at least the one's getting publicity) have made Yahoo! a bit more Google-like. While that's probably for the best, I will be real interested to see when/where she breaks with Google culture for the first time.

sneak 14y ago
Interesting, sure, but most of that stuff worked amazingly well for Google back when their engineer headcount was at what Y!'s is today.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  Correlation is not causation. We don't really know what combination of the many factors in Google's culture made them so successful. For all we know, it may have been due entirely to the people they hired, and the same team might have produced great results with or without all the perks that Google is famous for.
  - lsc 14y ago
    sure. but it seems to me that this woman was hired with a mandate to 'make the place more google-like' - I'm with you; my belief is that 95% of leadership is picking the right people, but, then, I'm a bad leader. It seems like it's worth a shot. I mean, Yahoo has tried and failed many other strategies.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
You can't create culture with edicts, culture is an emergent property of the community that either is supported or fought by the power structure at hand. A corporation is like an ecosystem, you can create the conditions that will allow a healthier culture to flourish but it will likely take a huge amount of time for that culture to take hold, assuming that there aren't other roadblocks still in the way such as entrenched middle management with different ideas about the place they want to work.

wamatt 14y ago

The perks are certainly nice and likely a good move all things considered, but at some point she is going to have to inspire and innovate. A "Google-like office", without a seriously great product, will probably be tough sell, longterm.

joshAg 14y ago
Based on the things that came out of google labs, I think it's more than possible that a seriously great product can be a byproduct of a google-type office and not just a prerequisite for said office environment.
- wamatt 14y ago
  It's possible I guess, but in the case of Google Labs, perhaps the more significant factor is the raw amount of talent/ability, per square foot. :p
  - zem 14y ago
    i've known several ex-yahoo people. they all agree that yahoo has no shortage of raw engineering talent in the trenches; it's just that they aren't given the environment they need to get things done. hopefully mayer will change that.

shin_lao 14y ago

You can't remove jams by adding a new process to report problems... If you want to remove jams, just make sure decisions are taken as low as possible in the hierarchy.

drgath 14y ago
Being able to report problems is the first step to figuring out what is actually wrong.

jyap 14y ago

Yahoo! is in crisis mode and I think Marissa is making the right moves. If what she says inspires current employees and keeps talent then it is all worth while. Now the pessimist could see Yahoo! as a dying company/stock. Apple was in the same position before Steve Jobs came back. Yahoo! could possible die a slow death or this could mark the start of a recovery. Marissa understands it begins with products and to have great products, engineers need to be happy and inspired. Perhaps Yahoo! could be seen as a down stock and is poised for growth? What if Yahoo! triples in value over the next 3 years? The best time to buy into a stock is when it is down. I will add that what Marissa is doing is also making Yahoo! more attractive to prospective employees. If a prospective employee has the hypothetical choice between working at Facebook and working at Yahoo! and hears about the changes that Marissa has made then they may be inclined to work at Yahoo! Perhaps they have heard about the poor stock performance since Facebook's IPO. If that prospective talent chooses to work at Yahoo! instead of Facebook then it is a win.

quesera 14y ago
This is clearly the Hail Mary for Yahoo. I give the board a ton of credit for having the gumption, though I realize they tried every other permutation of crisis reaction first. And they couldn't have chosen anyone more appropriate for the strategy than Marissa Mayer. I have no use for Yahoo in my life, but I'm really rooting for her and them, and I hope they change my mind. You raise an interesting point about stock. It defies all logic to believe that Marissa could achieve what Steve Jobs did. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth a small bet.