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Comment by adastra | Hacker News Reader

If only someone had predicted this exact possibility 3 years ago...

"[2] In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to."

-Paul Graham, What Happened to Yahoo http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Edit: giving this another 30 seconds thought, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a friend of Mayer's sent her PG's essay when she first agreed to take the job. If she hadn't realized it already, she almost certainly would have seen this strategy as the correct one (use Yahoo's war chest to get more A-players into the company through acquisitions), and she's been executing on it ever since.

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"Buying" "A-Players" is only part of the battle though, you also have to motivate them to do more than coast until the golden handcuffs are off. Hopefully Yahoo is already working towards some big things that these people being acquired are excited to be part of, otherwise this will just be a very costly temporary solution.

What surprised me the most from Paul Graham's Yahoo article was he was "sitting in my cubicle". I don't see how you could make someone a millionaire, and then put them in a cubicle, and expect them to stick around.

As someone who has been in this situation more than once, a cubicle versus a desk versus an office is not the issue - the issue is, can you motivate people with work they are passionate about and an incentive/compensation plan they feel is fair. Once you have those pieces in place, the work environment usually doesn't matter as much (and to the extent it does, the newly motivated employees will take steps to fix it on their own).

I'm desperately trying to think of a way that will make this not sound like I'm hating on you, but there are other smart people in this world. While I respect PG immeasurably I really do hope HN hasn't gotten to a point where we can think enough to put into words that the CEO of one of the biggest web corporations has essentially based their new strategic plan off of the back of one of PG's essays!

I mean come on, MM has plenty of her own credentials, she was in at the ground floor of one of the greatest businesses of our generation (arguably) learning from her experiences and the people around her for over 10 years at what must have been one of the greatest rides.

But you know what, you might well be entirely correct, it just took me by surprise that the top comment wasn't about how great this new strategy of Yahoo's is (which I immediately thought) and how they're possibly starting to step into a new spotlight... but was instead about how the blueprint for this multi-billion dollar corporations new master plan was one of PG's essays.

I mean, don't get me wrong... I think the cult of PG would be a great one, we could get futuristic robes and .../sarcasm

Like I say, no hate intended. This is the top comment, someone had to say it

True!

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