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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

I think I'm going to be sick. Compensation for executives should be directly tied to company performance. You want to be at the top, then you should take the risk.

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Her compensation was directly tied to company performance. 96% of her compensation was in ownership share in the company. That ownership share is worth $117M because the stock went from $15 to $39 per share while she was the CEO. If the company had tanked instead, her compensation would be less. Considering the outlook for Yahoo!'s core business was so bleak at the time she was hired, who's to say this wasn't one of the better outcomes for the board that hired her? Yahoo! returning to its glory days as a tech giant was pretty unlikely.

The stock prices are directly related to the awesome performance of Alibaba, and lesser Yahoo Japan, both of which they own stakes. Both which were investments prior to Mayer starting. Reading the article, without those two calculated in, the company is actually down $2.4 billion.

Paying her salary for two years AFTER she leaves, including her health insurance, AND office space for her to find a new job. Is completely ludicrous.

Why is it ludicrous? Would someone have managed to better preserve the value of those investments than her? Would someone capable of doing that have been willing to take on the job for lesser compensation?

Yes, the company is down $2.4 billion because the core Yahoo! business was spending $400MM/quarter more than it was taking in -- on the backs of those investments. After 4 years of trying to turn that around, they sold off that money pit for $5B cash, which is more than that $2.4 billion the company is down. Sounds like a pretty good outcome for YHOO's board and owners.

Dealing with that board and owners, attempting to maximize the shareholder return on those investments you mentioned, was as large a part of her job as trying to maximize the return from the bleeding tech business. She spent much of late 2014 and early 2015 trying to spin off the investments into a separate company to minimize tax liability, ensuring Yahoo!'s shareholders get as much value as possible if Yahoo! eventually sells some of those shares for cash. You can't write off her stewardship of the value of the BABA and YJP holdings, and their contribution to YHOO, just because they were initially purchased before she took the job.

This case shows how simplistic it is to measure an executive's success by stock price alone.

Instead of competitiveness and productivity seeking, we get pump and dump:

- pump the stock price up (workforce reductions, stock buybacks, mergers and acquisitions)

- cash out

- let the company crash and burn.

Rinse and repeat.

It's like the business equivalent of forest fires. How dead wood/companies and sick companies/trees get cleared off to make room for new younger ones.

Company performance has improved since she got there, check out the stock.

If you read the complete article, it is explained why that is the case and why Meyer presumably is not the one who should get the credit.

Yes, but the comment he was replying to said it should be _directly_ tied to company performance. Normally that means stock price, which the compensation was tied to.

why are you littering every comment with the same comment response. Also, the stock has nothing to do with Mayer's performance.

Right, because of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. The company is down 2.4 billion without those two.

And the day is dark but for the sun. What a useless thing to say!

The point here, is that her compensation should be based on changes she made in her tenure. Not what two other companies are doing, where she happened to be conveniently in the CEO role at the time they did.

Mayer had absolutely nothing to do with Alibaba or Yahoo Japan though. What she is directly in control of has been hemorrhaging money.

If an executive has a solid plan for long-term benefit that will require three or four excruciatingly bad years to achieve, should the executive be compensated poorly in the lean years for sticking with the company to achieve the long-term goal? Because you're talking about a recipe for optimizing short-term gains at the expense of the company's prospects, and I doubt the work force of most companies would be very happy to have their futures handled that way.

What exactly are you considering being compensated "poorly". ONLY a million instead of tens of millions? If an exec is confident enough to think they can turn a business around in four years, then they shouldn't get the massive payouts until they do so. She hasn't done so. Why do execs still get huge bonus/stock allocations for an under performing company?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/highest-pai...

Would you take a job at a company in trouble and not want some compensation for the risk?

I was asked to look at a role at Hibu (ex Yell) in the Uk and I told the recruiter id want a serious premium and some very good share options to even consider it.

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