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Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

I'm extra-suspicious of this lawsuit because of the opportunistic timing. He was fired in January 2015, more than 1.5 years ago. And yet the lawsuit is only filed now during Verizon's process of closing its acquisition of Yahoo. Whether or not he has a case, his motives now have an antagonistic taint because he no doubt timed this to maximize the PR damage and his chances of getting a quick settlement.

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It takes a long time to put together a lawsuit like this for many reasons. What you're seeing now is the result of a lot of work.

If he was truly wronged, then why WOULDN'T he time his lawsuit so that it is most advantageous? If he is in the right, of course he wants to maximize his changes of getting a settlement.

If the article is a good preview of the case, it does seem to be bullshit... The mechanism by which this discrimination supposedly happen was the stack ranking feedback system.

Now I believe stack ranking is stupid and somewhat cruel. But I don't see how it allows more discrimination than other grading systems. The lawsuit also doesn't claim intent and it'd be quite a stretch to assign liability to the CEO for hard-to-prove unintentional side effect.

Now, once the lawsuit is filed, he gets to do discovery. And if some exec at Yahoo has ever said something over email to the effect of aggressively promoting women, and, given the current set of beliefs in the Valley, it is hard to believe nothing would turn up, the guy might have struck gold here.

Because performance reviews are highly subjective to begin with, you can easily hide discrimination behind the guise of stack ranking. It's easy to prove liability, she is CEO she has all this performance data at her fingertips.

If the lawsuit is to be believed, it's a stack ranking system with some unusual twists - most notably, the part where higher ranking managers can arbitrarily change ranking scores of anyone under them, bypassing their direct managers. He gives a specific example where scores of several people were decreased from above with no explanation, and seemingly no clear basis other than gender.

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