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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

Why'd she do it then? Got paid a lot, that's for damn sure. $219M over 4 years.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/25/technology/marissa-mayer-pay...

Everyone loves a good turnaround story versus slow-death story. As Google's 20th employee she was already approaching the tres commas league.

Remember when she was confirmed as a hire, the feeling around the Valley was less of "wow, a new CEO" and more of "how did someone like Yahoo get someone like Marissa". The previous CEOs include alumni from PayPal and AutoDesk, so getting someone as successful was a win for Yahoo at the time.

> more of "how did someone like Yahoo get someone like Marissa".

Not me. My comment at the time was "Fiorina 2.0", a mediocre mid level got lucky.

I think your factual comment would not be popular then. I thought along the line that clever Google got rid of her without sacking or asked to go.

> The previous CEOs include alumni from PayPal and AutoDesk

I don't know whether that sentence is supposed to imply innovation (PayPal) or stagnation (AutoDesk).

For sure. For perspective, that's around 2000X more than an average tech salary in Silicon Valley. I'd be thrilled to [Not Turn Around Yahoo] for that much money. Hell, I could have done it for a fraction of the cost!

Did you add an extra 0? The average programmer salary is around $27,000 per year in Silicon Valley?

I suspect they simply didn't divide by four as you have...

If that's really the case then Silicon Valley salaries have gone through the floor recently. That would be considered an insulting salary for a developer in London, in GBP.

If you search for web designer jobs in the UK on Indeed, most jobs are in the £25k to £30k range, with a slightly smaller selection between £30k and £35k.

London may be in a class of its own, but elsewhere in the UK £35k is considered decent money.

https://www.indeed.co.uk/jobs?q=Web+Design&l=

Development isn't design.

(Good) developer jobs tend not to make it job sites like Indeed. I'd expect a developer job somewhere other than a small agency to be starting at ~£30k anywhere in the country, and £35k in London. In London a half-decent developer can make ~£50k easily, and much more than that if they're good, or willing to do contract work.

Don't disagree about £35k being decent in the UK - easy to take for granted how well paid the tech industry is.

That said, a "Web designer" role and a "Developer" role are two completely different things. £35k is about right for a decent web designer salary; but for a developer, that's more of junior to mid-level role, even outside of London.

Compare http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?q=developer&l=&id=... and http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?q=web+designer&l=&...

You're right. Divide by four, so 500X instead of 2000X. Much more reasonable.

Would you have refused such pay if you were in her position?

Of course not, but then when I failed which would have been pre-ordained and actually entirely foreseeable, bashing me here would NOT be really, really pointless and sad. However, if you are respecting her for picking up a paycheck, that is your right.

I'm not "respecting" her; I'm just pointing out that the high pay is not as black and white as it was made out to be.

eh?

I think it's pointless and sad to bash her because, once again, I don't think it can reasonably be said that somebody else had the expertise to save Yahoo. We'll never know, of course.

Also, being the CEO of an "old and out of touch" company with services that only grannies use nowadays leaves you open to lots of undeserved bashing. So bashing her is easy. But she should be bashed if she was a bad CEO (which she wasn't, I think) or if somebody else would've done better than her (a person that most probably doesn't exist). So there's that.

(Yes, most of my comment was facetious. Don't take it literally)

Take a look at what Meyers did at Yahoo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo!#Marissa_Maye...

Basically, Yahoo has had exactly two successes: its investment in Google signed in 2001 when Yahoo used Google's search results and Jerry Yang's heroic investment in Alibaba. Everything Meyers did was simply spending that money.

It's easy to spend money, especially when you have a lot and you are getting paid bank.

This "bashing" seems to be an attempt to deflect any and all criticism of her countless mistakes at Yahoo! - not least of which was that they helped leak vast swathes of personal data due to their CEO's reckless indifference to security.

>Also, being the CEO of an "old and out of touch" company with services that only grannies use nowadays

Yahoo owns both Flickr and Tumblr which are both popular with younger crowd.

>Also, being the CEO of an "old and out of touch" company with services that only grannies use nowadays leaves you open to lots of undeserved bashing.

So are CEOs responsible for the company or not?

Because HackerNews seems to want bank executives to go to prison for actions taken by the company and its employees. However, we don't want to even hold a tech CEO accountable for the financial results of the company because the culture is "stodgy"? One of the CEO's jobs is to change the culture.

The point is that where there is a great paycheck there is great responsibility, to paraphrase Churchill.

Only if there's a performance clause in the contract.

Where can I sign up for a job making 7 figures with no "performance clause?" Even better, she probably had something like a "no downside performance clause," but would still receive lavish bonuses for any upside.

Whatever. Yahoo was already going down, and she just looted it for an order of magnitude more than "f-you money" on its way down, without much steepening its decline. Things end as they always would have, and Mayer retires to the island she just bought.

Well I work for a company where C level execs have 100m+ contracts and they are behaving in exceptionally bad ways. Also Dir/Sr Dir level may have around 1m+ contracts and they seem quite indifferent to project health. At this point I guess they think reward is enough for indifference or non-performance.

I don't think that's enough to bash someone. She gave it a good shot, I don't think anyone could've done better.

This is not a convincing argument. The odds are certainly against Yahoo, and the promise of MM was it will turn Yahoo into a Engineering powerhouse, which never happened. On top of that the Yahoo hack handling was not leadership.

She tried, well but her Participation Trophy was worth $300 million including Golden Parachute. That is a grave sign!

You're looking at this backwards.

Yahoo was dying. They were dying no matter who was at the head. And whoever was holding the reins when Yahoo went down would get to be known as the person who killed Yahoo with the appropriate reputation hit. They might never work again, almost certainly never be the CEO of any significant company.

Meanwhile the board needs a big name at the helm. Someone to goose the stock price at the end, someone to guide the company on a smooth glide back down. Someone to take the blame. If the board doesn't get someone big and credible, they lose money, they take the blame.

Marissa Mayer didn't get paid $300 million despite presiding over a sinking ship. She got $300 million to preside over a sinking ship. That was the price of her reputation as a CEO.

> Yahoo was dying.

Yahoo was dying when I was there in 2005-6 - the internal political structure, in-fighting, and general disdain from the US for anything not made there was terrifying.

But with billions of dollars propping it up, it takes a long time for a corpse to actually fall over.

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