You’re fired, we’re doing great thanks to cutting your cost, but stay strong in your job search during this recession like those who have been persecuted for the color of their skin!
The quote in question had nothing to do with that. It was a generic statement about leadership:
"‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,’”
Maybe you should check the context because it was absolutely about civil rights.
As a general rule, people shouldn’t use quotes when they don’t understand the context. It’s distasteful at best to use a quote like that for something so routine and trivial.
HN needs to stop repeating this nonsense to one another. We are not in a recession. The latest GDP figures came out yesterday, and growth beat expectations by 12%. Service industries are hiring. The tech sector can no longer make billions by using AI to draw cat faces on selfie pics, but that has little bearing on the rest of the economy.
People on this site have willfully changed the definition of recession to "layoffs are happening in my industry". That's not what it means, at all.
Of course we aren't in a recession. It's why the business class has been losing their goddamned minds. They keep attempting to force us into one so that they can slow down the economy and get a Republican in the White House again, but companies are having so much fun gobbling up record profits via record markups that interest rates aren't mattering as much as they should. We have an entire new generation of C-suite executives who have no clue how to play along. When else in recent television history has a well-functioning economy been met with consternation by the hosts and guests?
Unless you think inflation doesn't matter, the economy has only been well-functioning for the last couple months, and was in big trouble for the previous year and a half.
Inflation is the tool that the Fed was attempting to use to slow down the economy. Q1 and Q2 only look bad because they kept raising rates nonstop. Hell, Q4 of 2021 saw 7% growth.
What exactly do you think raising interest rates contribute to? Yes, prices are going higher, but they're trying to use the tools available to force hiring to slow down because it's impacting the market with increased wages.
> What exactly do you think raising interest rates contribute to?
Not inflation... the whole point of this is to make inflation go down.
If raising interest rates would cause inflation, why did they start after inflation spiked? Why did inflation go back down after they raised rates? Why are they saying everything they're saying?
If inflation slows down the economy, and they want to slow the economy and openly admit that, why are they claiming to fight inflation?
Am I completely misunderstanding your argument? I'm so confused.
They are using interest rates to slow down hiring and increasing wages because of increasing prices. They are essentially trying to make borrowing as hard as possible to increase unemployment. Not everyone is going to quit borrowing. Especially companies who are currently experiencing hypergrowth. But in any event, increasing interest rates are going to increase prices.
In other words, their mechanism for regulating inflation is broken and it's just causing more price increases to occur. Wages have been so stagnant for so long and employees are so incredibly tired of wealth hoarding by the upper class that people are refusing to take jobs for comparative wages that they would have flocked to in 2008.
And I'm all for it. Because prices have outstripped wages for a very long time and we're supposed to just sit here and figure out how to borrow ourselves to death.
What a completely weird conspiracy theory. Are you saying big tech execs are republicans? This is literally just blue maga qanon rhetoric. They said the exact same about "the elite" sabotaging trump back in 2020 by tanking the economy since it was doing too well for him to lose.
The GP is correct. Executives have been warning about a so-called recession since spring 2022, and it's naive to think they're doing it to keep the public informed--that's not really their thing.
They've been trying to induce a slowdown because the unemployment rate is too low, and they don't want to raise salaries. Unionization is gaining traction across the country, and executives need to exert their bargaining power however they can. This has nothing to do with conspiracy, it's a part of the day-to-day business.
Look at the actual data. The economy is doing fine.
I'm not saying the economy isn't correct. I actually agree that it's doing just fine, regardless of all the doomerposting about it that has been so popular lately. I'm just saying that the "exec conspiring to elect the GOP" part is completely insane imo.
I have no words to express how much I hate US culture around on call duty. When I was on call in Europe, in 2 different countries, it was either:
* you're on call but you get paid extra hours for each hour on call. This was enforced by law. You're asking an employee to put in more than the legal 40-ish hours? You pay. Let me tell you that companies only used that when they really cared about being up 24/7.
* your work hours were aligned with on call duty. So yeah, for a week every other month or so you were working 8pm-4am or something like that. Probably awful when you have a family but at least you're not 24h on the clock.
US companies are so freaking entitled when it comes to demanding on call support from their employees.
I work for a European company and on-call is mandatory (part of your employment contract, and no additional compensation). However, the culture around it is completely different. You're expected to take the next day off if you get paged in the middle of the night (unless it's like a 5 min false alarm), you get to expense all meals while on-call, and your manager freely gives time off in lieu if you have a bad shift.
When I was working on-call in a previous role my team was split between Poland and Australia (where I’m based) - we used to have to take 80%~ of the on-call roster because Polish labour laws don’t allow more than 13 hours of work a day and a minimum of 35 hours of continuous rest a week.
> Nonetheless, it all starts to go downhill when she decides to use the same email where she announces layoffs to celebrate recent employee promotions, reveal good financial results for the fourth quarter of last year, and state that the company expects to end the year strong.
The MLK quote:
> ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,’
In this round of layoffs, leadership is bragging about standing in their moment of comfort and convenience, but putting challenge and tribulation to their flock regardless. I'm not sure anyone else has been quite so up-front about that juxtaposition. Bravo, Ms Tejada, for saying the quiet part loud.
The beautiful irony of quoting MLK while commending their great leadership is that it shows her complete obliviousness to many of things MLK advocated for, particularly in his later speeches.
Exactly. He spoke about the problems with capitalism and advocated for socialism as a way to achieve equality. This very important aspect of his politics is always conveniently forgotten, and especially when coming from CEOs and other beneficiaries of capital.
The original MLK quote doesn’t actually seem, to me at least, to be much about leadership at all. More about personal virtue or something. The brackets were used to totally change the meaning rather than clarify the context (which is what they are conventionally used for).
This is not really a quote at all, it is a new sentiment written in the general shape of something Dr. King wrote. This makes it seem even tackier, IMO. It is like trying to grab some emotional gravity through osmosis or proximity rather than reflecting on the meaning of the quote.
Thank you for pointing out the brackets. I thought that the HN commenter above added them. No, those 3 sets of brackets are in the original press release.
Reminds me of the Teddy Roosevelt quote: "It is not the [words themselves that count]: [but the status] of the [person who said them]."
ChatGPT has become the place that people go when they don't want to write something and don't know what to write. It's not unlikely that Jennifer Tejada used ChatGPT.
Seems the article was written using ChatGPT too? From the site's comment section:
---------
Are you guys letting AI write your articles for you? Cause this one is like the third article I’ve seen in the last week or so, with this following number error.
“In a 1,1669-word email to employees…”
Different article authors too iirc. Unless, again, it’s a singular AI.
> ended her note with a reference a quote from King’s sermons published in The Measure of a Man in 1959. She used brackets to change the quote slightly to accommodate her message.
> “I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,’” Tejada said.
It’s sort of surprising this isn’t a product in various cloud providers; there are open source options of course (which cost engineering time), but this could also be as straightforward as a scheduler using existing IAM (user list) and messaging (voice, email, sms, webhooks) interfaces. You’d of course still be able to use this with non cloud infra based on telemetry or other signals to trigger the initial incident.
I’ll mention to our AWS and Azure TAMs.
(Thesis: it’s a supporting product not a whole company)
Scheduling is more complex than just an IAM list: there are escalation policies, the actual phase of the schedule, dealing with additions/removals, overrides, and not to mention the entirety of routing pages for which PD's solution isn't even powerful enough for our needs … because the problem is more complex than they bargained for! Not to mention the telephony & mobile integrations, which are still lackluster, the desire to be able to have some things not page on weekends, etc.
I sort of do acknowledge that, yeah, this does seem like a place where AWS could easily kill PD by just offering their own version and leveraging their weight as a cloud provider. But they haven't, so that doesn't really matter to the person you've replied to.
I was in a pagerduty rotation for ~3 years at a profitable SaaS software firm and am fluent with the product as a stakeholder in my current role (we are in the process of replacing it for cost savings reasons). I am aware that it isn’t as easy as writing comments, but lets not kids ourselves this is going to space. Software is work, but it isn’t magic. It’s not a weekend project, and I never said it was. It’s likely 20-30 people and 6-12 months to start (which is what a lot of teams at cloud providers looks like, I’m more familiar with AWS internals vs Azure) and likely a profitable endeavor. You don’t have to do everything PagerDuty does, just what the largest cohort of customer needs.
Open source for some, reasonable alternatives of a commodity product for others.
PagerDuty engineer here. PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. You are correct that there are free products that can schedule people and send them messages, and with some elegant baling wire and duct tape, anyone can put together something that looks like a notification service.
But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? It's not like they don't evaluate 2-3 products before choosing PD. They are choosing to pay more, so there's more to their decision than just "What's the cheapest way to notify people when we get a signal from monitoring that something's amiss."
PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. And wrapped around that are layers of what pg called "muck," functionality that accommodates the needs of enterprise-grade customers like permissions, integrations, teams, analytics, AIOps for filtering noise and resolving things that don't require human intervention and so on.
That's not special, it's how all "Enterprise" software works. At its core is something that people on HN will regularly boast they could code up in a weekend, a long weekend at most, and they're not wrong. But wrapped around that simple core are layers of functionality that accommodate how large companies manage the activity mediated by that core.
I don't want to spark a long debate about PD's value, I urge you to see this as a pattern that applies to a lot of software that is sold B2B: The value is in the stuff around what appears to be the primary value proposition.
If HN readers want to get into the Enterprise software business, embracing that pattern is mandatory: You will generate most of your economic value by taking an idea that at its core isn't that hard to duplicate, but wrapping it in accommodations for the baroque and sometimes-dystopian org structures you sell into.
We could easily have flying cars now but they're incredibly less efficient and roads work pretty well so where's the demand? Would you honestly buy one?
> PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents.
This is a good argument.
> But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD?
This is not a good argument. Businesses make tons of non-optimal purchases. Research is hard, and salespeople are convincing (and might be talking to a different group than the actual users).
We'll have to agree to disagree about non-optimal purchases. Lots of purchases are non-optimal, but how often do people climb onto their soapbox and say that everyone buying Apple hardware is making a "non-optimal" purchase?
At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal." A better characterization is that "optimal" often looks different for an enterprise than it does for an SMB than it does for a startup than it does for a consumer, and within each of these segments there are sub-segments with different definitions of "optimal."
I am not saying that buying PD or any other enterprise product is always optimal, but at the same time, I am saying that it cannot be dismissed as some kind of reality-distortion field that mesmerizes customers into overpaying.
---
But again, whether PD is overpriced or not is far less interesting on HN than understanding what goes into a successful "enterprise" SaaS product for those startups who are directly pursing enterprise customers or may need to pivot from another market to enterprise.
It's not just hiring convincing salespeople to sell the easily replicable obvious value proposition, it's actually all that stuff wrapped around it.
> At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal."
This post makes me want to check out your competitors. (Unfortunately, I know one of them, and I like y'all better than them.)
Yes … when the sales are wheeled and dealed there's enough Enterprise-grade bullshit shoveled about for me to start a fertilizer business. But that's not a.) what I care about as an engineer who has to use PagerDuty, and b.) time and again, I think we see upstart competitors whose products is actually better than the dominant player finally get enough mindshare among actual users that the tide turns against the incumbent and "everybody uses $X" stops working.
I don't have to "embrace the pattern" to understand how the game is played, and thus be able to successfully navigate the space. But boy oh boy would it be nice if that weren't necessary.
It would be a better advertisement for PagerDuty if you were concerned about improving the product. (Or, at least feigned such, which is what many businesses seem to do.)
And absolutely things are chosen by dart toss. PD has inertia: it's well known, and the product isn't terrible. And I don't know anything better yet — so I'd choose you again, but that "yet" is key to any future competitor. But people believe the marketing, and nobody does the research necessary prior to adoption: the research is, for these things, equal to the work of actually migrating onto the platform: it is only by migrating that you find out where you've made assumptions about how paging works that don't match PD's. Marketing pages are too shallow to discover such things.
I am not interested in defending or advertising the product or company. I am on Hacker News, a site for people interested in startups that serves as a something of a feeder for Ycombinator. My interest is in discussing the dynamics of making and selling enterprise software so that my fellow HNers and I gain more insight into what to build and how to sell it.
At the risk of an appeal to authority, I have been in the enterprise technology business since the late 1980s. I have held position in sales and marketing before my current career in engineering. In engineering I have had roles on both the IC ladder (I am currently a Principal Engineer) and the management ladder (topping out as a Director of Engineering).
I don't regard this as a game we play for the purpose of bamboozling stupid customers into overpaying for software. I think that's a remarkably poor perspective on how business works, very similar in my mind to calling all Apple users "fanbois." It's a way of dismissing a large and complex equation that encompasses complex organizations, individuals within those organizations, various tradeoffs and aggregations of value, and so on and so forth.
Reducing it to a simplistic take that it's all about marketing bullshit is low-effort and contributes nothing to anyone who wants to enter this space or survive if the economics of what they build indicates--as it did with companies like DropBox and 1Password--that they need to pivot to enterprise.
Everything you are saying that drips with contempt for enterprise SaaS business, is also expressing contempt for their customers. I do not hold our customers or those who buy from our competitors in contempt, I admire them all: They have built businesses that advance technology, grow our economies, and employ people (modulo the current climate for employment).
If you want to model the world as companies picking products with a dart toss, that's your business. But I'm not dignifying your position, I think it is absolutely not a foundation for success selling into these markets.
The guy said thar the service doesn't need to exist. I just don't get what that mean. I don't think "it is hard to config follow the sun model" is enough reason to claim that the service serves no purpose.
Their examples of follow the sun model seems pretty straight forward to me.
Huh.. not only the quote but also the promotion bit.
I'm shocked. Must be a case of her having read this tweet and subconsciously regurgitating it. Otherwise I'm scared for our eventual chatgpt overlords.
Both were on the 24th. The PagerDuty post doesn't have a visible time but it refers to a town hall later in the day that was a couple hours before that tweet happened.
Haven't we reached the stage of this where a CEO laying off people can just send a link to the past 4 CEOs apologies and explanations, and say "watch this video"?
Not much new info being conveyed at this point. I guess you have a need to see your own CEO do it for some kind of closure?
I'm really happy for her. Worst CEO has typically been a male dominated category. It's nice see some diversity in lacking empathy and having over inflated egos.
HP also had Léo Apotheker as CEO, so the competition is very tough at this company. A pet rock would have done a better job for cheaper than Apotheker.
Can confirm. I was at HP during Leo's tenure.
I remember we bought Palm in July, 2010, but because the Palm Tablet (TouchPad) didn't immediately eclipse the iPad in sales, the whole thing was cancelled.
How arrogant do you have to be to think you will overtake the iPad in sales over a single quarter.
The whole touchpad thing is really baffling, I remember they fire-saled them and having one. It wasn’t half bad and deserved much better commitment from the execs. What a waste of engineering effort
WebOS and the touchpad in particular were in many ways superior to android. However, HP didn't have the stomach for the fight. Heck, even MSFT didn't have the stomach for the fight At the end of the day, android was paid for by ads, so google could keep on pushing it in ways that everyone else couldn't, even without owning the hardware.
It seems to be the general trend - HP, Google being the poster companies for this - post-founder companies seem to lose their soul altogether, if they had one to start with.
I wonder if that is because the skills and values needed to climb the corporate ladder to Executive positions are fundamentally different from those of Founders that formed their ethos in the broader society, outside of the ladder-climbing environment.
This hypothesis has interesting implications for founders that wish their companies to be reflective of their ethos over time. Suddenly the Japanese practice of adopting successors to leadership instead of hereditary succession makes a lot more sense - valuing temperament over bloodline. It also completely bypasses the issues with internal promotions in a hierarchical structure.
Debian is interesting with their use of an alternate operating model and democratically elected leadership.
Given how long-lasting companies can become destructive to the societies that they operate in, it seems to be that Society has a vested interest in solving this problem of companies losing their soul. Maybe there are corporate structures that can be designed to minimize these issues? Anyone aware of research or proposals in this area?
The key quote I see in a lot of these stories is "change the culture" and it seems the decision to change the culture from what got you there to something else is done entirely without understanding what the current culture actually is.
> The key quote I see in a lot of these stories is "change the culture" and it seems the decision to change the culture from what got you there to something else is done entirely without understanding what the current culture actually is.
That's a great point. Might be splitting hairs a little bit here - but the question must be asked - if the ethos of the Successors are fundamentally different from those of the Founders, maybe the "change the culture" is deliberate, to align with the ethos of the Successors?
There's an additional factor at play here: age. The Founders of the two companies - HP and Google - were in their 20s at the time of founding. The Successors were likely much older (40s? 50s?) when they took over - it takes time to climb to the Executive positions. How much of an impact that simple number (Age at Founding/Succession) would have had on what culture would be fostered. It would be really interesting to see a macro study on cultures at companies 1-5 years from Founding/Succession, grouped by age decade (20s, 30s, 40s) at founding/succession. Dell and Apple could be case studies onto themselves because their founders left and then came back at a different age.
Marissa Mayer deserves a spot for stack-ranking Yahoo into the grave. An early pioneer of forcing remote workers into offices or exits. The Tumblr acquisition. "There will be no layoffs this week", then calling layoffs "remixes".
What other shape do you suggest for a vehicle meant to escape Earth's gravity and reach space?
I know it's not your main point, but every time I hear the "oh look at these nerdy space men playing with their phallic toys!" comment I get curious about the alternative.
That actually could be viable. First stage could fully envelop the second stage and eject it at the top of its arc before gliding back down for recovery and reuse.
A weird design, sure, but there have been weirder ones.
Yeah, though I'm pretty sure that this "design fiction" (1) has more of a cultural point than an aerodynamic one.
but IMHO "lets make it it look _another sex organ_" doesn't really either break out of the existing cultural framing, or design primarily around the extreme engineering needs, which have to come before the cultural ones.
The space shuttle was great, but it was retired for a reason.
Additionally, when taking off it did essentially look like a rocket. The shuttle is small compared to the tank/boosters combination. And these are the ones making sure it can take off.
Fine then, look at Artemis 1. It looks roughly like the Discovery rockets might have looked without the shuttle attached. You can stack your payload without making it overtly glans-shaped. We have the technology.
You know, cylindrical and with more thickness at the bottom / fins is basically part of the game. It's intrinsic.
But Blue Origin has an aspect ratio that really makes the comparison more obvious... and then the top looks like a glans. Making it that penis-like is not mandatory.
Mate, I'm gonna make fun of anyone who spends billions to launch a three-zillion-times-scale human genital model into space. Bezos happened to pick the penis.
In my book, the unsurpassed champion is Marissa Mayer. She was a product manager at early Google who dated Sergey and was promoted to VP. One of her accomplishments at Google was choosing the palette for the Google logo using a data-driven process. Based off of this success, she was made the CEO of Yahoo!, which she promptly proceeded to drive into the ground.
Any league table of contenders would be a social third rail. Kind of an anti-"hot or not"/original Facebook focused on business aspects, profile pictures banned. Super bad idea, don't do it.
Yes when she took the job the stock was at $15 and sold it for $40.
Granted much of the appreciation had nothing to do with Yahoo but I'm sure a worse executive would have messed up the Alibaba situation.
She took a dying company, tried a couple of home run ideas which flopped and then effectively returned what value was left to the shareholders. There is no reason to think that Yahoo would have performed any better under another CEO.
Imagine if another CEO took all the proceeds from the Alibaba stock and blew it trying to make a dying company relevant again. That would have been much, much worse.
Also the value of the company is the stock. She didn't tank it, it went up.
I think the metric you're using for success is different than what Yahoo's shareholders are using.
The CEO of a publicly traded company is responsible for carrying out the goals set by the board, which represent the whims of the owners of the company. Typically that means balancing many factors. If the owners of the company care about features and competing, they will set goals accordingly. If the owners feel like maximizing profit for an expedient exit, they will set goals aligned with that.
Tell me you're completely unfamiliar with all of the terrible CEOs Yahoo had before Mayer without telling me you're completely unfamiliar with all of the terrible Yahoo CEOS.
She inherited an absolutely untenable situation and yes, she failed, but given the atrocious track records of the previous five CEOs, she absolutely didn't do any worse and yes, she did at least get the company through the Alibaba IPO so that shareholders got that value.
Let's look at the tenure of her predecessors:
* Jerry Yang: Founder who told Microsoft to fuck off when they offered $45b for a company that was in no way worth that. At least Microsoft didn't get saddled with that shit. Yang also managed to flub the entire Web 2.0 boom despite Yahoo being primely suited for that (and buying early Web 2.0 darlings like Flickr). A year after Yang rebuffed the deal, Yahoo's stock was 60% lower than Microsoft's offer. Truly, this is one of the worst CEO moves in history. Oh, he also turned down a deal to sell the search business for $20b.
* Carol Bartz: Came from Autodesk and had no idea what a consumer web company was like, traded in Yahoo's search stuff (and search deals) for Microsoft's stack (the same Microsoft that had offered to buy Yahoo's search business for $20b just six months earlier) but for very little upfront money and for a deal that was at the high level, only valued at $500m in revenue a year over ten years (which if you do the math, is half of what Microsoft had offered for the search business six months earlier). Didn't understand consumer products at all and let Mail, Flickr and the other acquisitions languish.
* Tim Morse - CFO who served as interim CEO while they found the next replacement. He tried unsuccessfully to sell Yahoo's ad business to Google or Microsoft.
* Scott Thompson - This joker was the OG George Santos, who got caught lying about his education on his resume (which, bro, you're trying to be CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, don't do this) and was fired in one of the most humiliating ways that I can ever recall seeing. He lasted 5 months and didn't achieve anything but making an embarrassment of himself and laying off 15% of the staff. Oh, and he sued Facebook over that ridiculous patent thing.
* Ross Levinsohn - The interim CEO who REALLY wanted the job for keeps but was just keeping the seat warm while the board did the executive search. He didn't do anything wrong per se, but there was a reason he wasn't chosen as CEO. He was a media guy, not a tech guy, and wouldn't have known how to handle what was still ostensibly a tech company. He later went on to lead a bunch of very bad (from a business perspective) media companies, most notably tronc. He's now head of a company that buys once-proud media brands that it licenses out for every dollar it can, killing the legacy and value of those brands along the way.
That's who you were looking at before. Was Marissa successful? Absolutely not. Yahoo spent a lot of money and made a lot of big swings but ultimately came up short. But at least she tried. At least she tried to invest in things like email, search, and content, areas that had the previous five leaders (I guess four is more fair, Ross didn't have a chance to do anything) focused on, the company might not have been in that position.
She also managed to keep things afloat and working so that the Alibaba IPO and Yahoo's stake in that could come to fruition. Given the caliber of the people who led the company before that and the shareholder activism and lawsuits happening before and during her tenure, she did probably as good as anyone in that situation could do.
The bottom line is that Yahoo was not a company that could be saved and she took on an impossible mission, but at least she tried. Yahoo's death warrant was signed in 2008 when Jerry Yang told Steve Ballmer to go fuck himself because he didn't consider $45b a high enough valuation for Yahoo (even tho the pri...
Carol Bartz was the one who decided to divest search to Microsoft. Even preceding Carol, there was an attitude among the executives at Yahoo that search was not "strategic" and as a result they jumped from one shiny new object to the next, never realizing the treasure chest was underneath them the whole time.
I suggest this is sexism here - and I'm generally the last person to call that kind of thing out, usually assuming goodwill. Specifically for implying that someone traded sex for a promotion, unless you have some legit data there.
Marissa was a very early person at Google, and contributed to a lot of things [1]. Obviously a Wikipedia entry is going to be hagiographic, and some early players are going to be better than others, but there's no reason to believe she wasn't at least on the same playing field as many of the other early landing big names.
And she has nothing acutely toxic or myopic on her record. She was hired by the board of Yahoo to mostly do what she did.
FYI Kamala Harris had a romantic relationship with someone in power who appointed her to positions she was not remotely qualified for, that's an example wherein the unseemly facts are just a bit too real for polite conversation. But I suggest when one wants to throw such tawdry things around, one should not be making arbitrary claims.
The origin adds additional color here - hagiography is writing about the lives of saints. So the adjectival form just means that it's portraying someone as (perhaps excessively) saintly.
Hagiography is literally writing about the lives of saints: a sturdy addition to any writer's vocabulary. To avoid overuse there are also fine synonyms like panegyric (defined as "elaborate praise" in the OED) and encomium.
From wiki:
> She oversaw the layout of Google's well-known, unadorned search homepage.
There was literally nothing to oversee. Even in this unadorned search homepage, she was able to keep an unused button (I'm feeling lucky) for more than a decade.
I guarantee there was a lot of pressure to add crap to that page. "Just a couple of top news links!" "How about icons for people's most visited sites?" "Can we sneak in a 'promo' or two?"
Excellent point. While I believe that whatever was on the front page was Larry and Sergey's ultimate decision, there definitely was some work to convince them to keep it this way.
"Suggesting that someone traded sex for a position of power is sexist... now hold my beer while I do exactly that w.r.t. the sitting Vice President of the United States."
Your point would've been much stronger had you not used this as an opportunity for a political cheap shot; your last paragraph completely nullifies the three preceding it.
Kamala Harris used her relationship to obtain considerable power in a nakedly callous manner, it's a stark reality.
Aside from the more vulgar elements, it's immoral and wold be illegal in most circumstances; it's just straight corruption.
To wit, those participating in these actions are Lawmakers and those responsible for the Justice System aka District Attorney, further embroiling the hypocrisy in the situation.
It's understandable people will feel uncomfortable with that reality, because it resonates with a kind of slander that is used to belittle people (especially women), hence my calling out the individual OP for making arbitrary insinuations.
But it's irresponsible to ignore such actions because it doesn't fit either one's political orientation, or triggers one's sensitivities.
What Harris did was bad. Arbitrarily insinuating women are only successful because they 'slept around' is also bad. It's actually not very nuanced at all once you start to think about it.
> Kamala Harris used her relationship to obtain considerable power in a nakedly callous manner, it's a stark reality.
[citation needed]
> hence my calling out the individual OP for making arbitrary insinuations.
Calling out someone for making arbitrary insinuations while yourself making arbitrary insinuations is blatantly hypocritical and - as you put it - "nakedly callous". Your comments boil down to "if the allegations are against a woman on my team then they're false but if they're against a woman on the other team then they're true". Maybe that ain't your intention, but that's how it reads.
There was zero good-faith reason to bring up Kamala Harris apropos nothing - and in doing so (and in doubling down on doing so) you've obliterated your own argument.
Marissa had some short term wins (improving the talent pool, productivity, migrating the product, audience & revenue to mobile) that were a remarkable interruption to the long term decline.
She deserves mild to moderate praise for her brief tenure. Not stellar but also not useless.
> Brown's romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the early 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris's 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: "Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work".[57] Brown's relationship with Harris gained renewed attention in early 2019 after she had become a U.S. senator and ran for president.[58][59][60][61] Brown addressed the questions by publishing a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" He wrote that he may have "influenced" her career by appointing her to boards and supporting her run for District Attorney, but added that he had also influenced the careers of other politicians.
[1] State of California's guide on 'Conflict of Interest' which one will find that appointing one's partner/gf/bf/spouse to arbitrary positions would nominally be illegal. Note that this is the statement by the 'Office of Attorney General' of California, a position to which Ms. Harris was elevated after direct appointments by her then partner, Willie Brown, thereby making issues of 'conflict of interest' considerably more problematic.
Though I don't think we need to derail this conversation too much away from the fact that though these things do happen, belittling women (or men) arbitrarily for supposedly doing these kinds of things is not nice at all.
And that Ms. Tajeda is holding her own in indicating we can all be a bit insufferable ...
Is there a reasonable assumption Yahoo! was even salvageable by time Mayer took the reigns?
From the outside looking in, it appeared Yahoo! was a ghost ship, sailing under previously established momentum with no wind in the sails. Piecemealing Yahoo! out Gordon Gekko style might have been the only realistic future to save groups/units that could operate without the mothership, so to speak.
The spending/acquisition spree Mayer went on... I'm not certain what to make of that, however.
Gosh, early employees/founder dated, and that early employee somehow ended up highly ranked. The only possibility is sexing her way to the top. Every knows early employees never go far up the ranks.
By all accounts she did quite a bit more than just "choosing the colors" at google, but as we all know only guys can do real work.
And then she came into the hugely profitable, exponentially growing yahoo, and turned it into a failure. Yahoo! absolutely was not an already failing business that bought Meyer in solely because the were trying to find some external person who would try different things to turn it around.
Don't forget that she not only ruined Yahoo, but also companies that Yahoo acquired like Tumblr.
>On May 20, 2013, Mayer led Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr in a $1.1 billion acquisition.[53][54] In February 2016, Yahoo! acknowledged that the value of Tumblr had fallen by $230 million since it was acquire
She also covered up Yahoo hack, that was one of the biggest in history:
>U.S. Charges Russian FSB Officers and Their Criminal Conspirators for Hacking Yahoo and Millions of Email Accounts
Not easy to achieve that much on a single CEO position, without being forced out from a company
That's a very uncharitable take. By the time Mayer took over Yahoo, it was already a sinking ship and had been so for a few years. It would have taken extraordinary leadership (and a lot of luck) to turn it around. Turned out Mayer couldn't, but that doesn't necessarily make her a bad leader.
You say that like it's not the goal. Yes, women are more vocal about male dominated careers that they're actively trying to enter but you're missing the forest. For adult women the damage of "has never even thought about a career as a plumber because that's a boy job" has already been done. You could probably name 20 careers that are like this for both men and women off the top of your head. That doesn't mean it's not the goal to change that.
“Women” is 50% of the population, not some hive mind.
People who are pushing for better career paths for women are largely not pushing women (and others) towards careers in trades. I think that’s to the detriment of society in general.
Ah yes, you can't possibly talk about the experiences of women because we're 50% of the population but "people" who are 100% of the population, that group is homogeneous.
It can't be that I'm giving an explanation as to why you see women pushing for more representation in some fields but not others, it must be that I'm describing the personal lived experience of every single woman on the planet.
Also we absolutely are a hive mind, Beyonce is the current queen who took over after Madonna.
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but yeah, we should have diversity in all fields. And it’s slowly happening. My garbage person is female, as was the electrician that replaced my electrical panel.
The garbage collection is mostly automated using an arm from the truck, but she can still lift a full compost bin to dump in the truck that’s too heavy for me to lift.
Joking aside, people will not take social justice seriously until the failures, responsibilities and setbacks are equally shared as well. If the movement only addresses the benefits and none of the responsibilities, it will not be durable.
Hanlon's Razor and all that, but this reads as intentional to me.
She wanted attention; she got attention. Specifically, she wanted people to know about items that she believes will increase her company's valuation, and she found a way to get attention in that area (the giveaway is that she even boasted about some elements of the company's financials and reports in the very same letter).
She knew damn well that this shameless and odious approach was going to draw eyeballs.
That "all PR is good PR" kinda only applies to actors. Some random startup that does God knows what (probably not very much if their leadership is so shit) doesn't benefit from having a massive scandal come up every time you Google them. Most technical people don't use the same criteria to purchase SaaS software that they use to purchase tabloids
Sorry if I was unclear: I didn't mean to suggest that this is PR for PR's sake, because of a belief that all PR is good.
She probably correctly believes that a) layoffs will increase short-term valuation, and that her vile characterization of the layoffs will get more eyeballs on the part of the letter that begins, "We expect to finish the year strong".
It's an extremely simple money play.
She probably drafted an apology letter alongside this one, which she'll issue in a few days, by which time the goals of this letter will have been achieved.
If you're a line worker businesses, managers, and executives are not your friends. That might seem controversial to some, but to me it's just the pecking order. Executives usually take home large sums from these businesses for very little personal risk. Meanwhile, line workers are the ones that produce the product that earns them large sums in bonuses while sacrificing their time, energy, and often personal well-being. We move to new, expensive cities for these people. We work weekends for them. We work nights for them. As long as executives are perceived as different from employees in all the wrong ways beatings will continue and morale will not improve.
Then this message is probably not for you. In regards to my own experience at startups, I've never met a selfish founder (not to say they don't exist). I'm specifically talking about established companies. Something happens to an exec (typically) when they move from close proximity startup world to ruling a fiefdom.
Unclear to me how much of the negative perspective of this is because of her gender. Media has a bias against female leaders. The fact that they don't put the whole email in there is concerning as well.
E.g. Stripe had a similar tone in that they basically wanted to maintain their margins but didn't get anything close to this type of negative coverage. No MLK quotes though
I once worked for a well known healthcare consulting firm where right after layoffs the CEO said on a company wide call that the layoffs would help all the rest to reach their target bonuses.
I have reached the conclusion that most executives in the US reach their level because of factors outside expertise and capability and for the most part are clueless and tone deaf .
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] thread...huh, never mind.
You’re fired, we’re doing great thanks to cutting your cost, but stay strong in your job search during this recession like those who have been persecuted for the color of their skin!
"‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,’”
(It's exceedingly clear that MLK is talking about racial equality, and quoting him in an tone-deaf layoff email is execrable.)
As a general rule, people shouldn’t use quotes when they don’t understand the context. It’s distasteful at best to use a quote like that for something so routine and trivial.
HN needs to stop repeating this nonsense to one another. We are not in a recession. The latest GDP figures came out yesterday, and growth beat expectations by 12%. Service industries are hiring. The tech sector can no longer make billions by using AI to draw cat faces on selfie pics, but that has little bearing on the rest of the economy.
People on this site have willfully changed the definition of recession to "layoffs are happening in my industry". That's not what it means, at all.
“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job. It’s a depression when you lose your own.”
― Harry S. Truman
Not inflation... the whole point of this is to make inflation go down.
If raising interest rates would cause inflation, why did they start after inflation spiked? Why did inflation go back down after they raised rates? Why are they saying everything they're saying?
If inflation slows down the economy, and they want to slow the economy and openly admit that, why are they claiming to fight inflation?
Am I completely misunderstanding your argument? I'm so confused.
In other words, their mechanism for regulating inflation is broken and it's just causing more price increases to occur. Wages have been so stagnant for so long and employees are so incredibly tired of wealth hoarding by the upper class that people are refusing to take jobs for comparative wages that they would have flocked to in 2008.
And I'm all for it. Because prices have outstripped wages for a very long time and we're supposed to just sit here and figure out how to borrow ourselves to death.
They've been trying to induce a slowdown because the unemployment rate is too low, and they don't want to raise salaries. Unionization is gaining traction across the country, and executives need to exert their bargaining power however they can. This has nothing to do with conspiracy, it's a part of the day-to-day business.
Look at the actual data. The economy is doing fine.
* you're on call but you get paid extra hours for each hour on call. This was enforced by law. You're asking an employee to put in more than the legal 40-ish hours? You pay. Let me tell you that companies only used that when they really cared about being up 24/7.
* your work hours were aligned with on call duty. So yeah, for a week every other month or so you were working 8pm-4am or something like that. Probably awful when you have a family but at least you're not 24h on the clock.
US companies are so freaking entitled when it comes to demanding on call support from their employees.
Jealous
The MLK quote:
> ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,’
In this round of layoffs, leadership is bragging about standing in their moment of comfort and convenience, but putting challenge and tribulation to their flock regardless. I'm not sure anyone else has been quite so up-front about that juxtaposition. Bravo, Ms Tejada, for saying the quiet part loud.
This is not really a quote at all, it is a new sentiment written in the general shape of something Dr. King wrote. This makes it seem even tackier, IMO. It is like trying to grab some emotional gravity through osmosis or proximity rather than reflecting on the meaning of the quote.
Reminds me of the Teddy Roosevelt quote: "It is not the [words themselves that count]: [but the status] of the [person who said them]."
> Ask not [what a historical figure said] — ask what you [want them to have said].
*For those outside the US, February is Black History Month here.
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Are you guys letting AI write your articles for you? Cause this one is like the third article I’ve seen in the last week or so, with this following number error.
“In a 1,1669-word email to employees…”
Different article authors too iirc. Unless, again, it’s a singular AI.
------
ChatGPT writes about ChatGPT. We did it.
> ended her note with a reference a quote from King’s sermons published in The Measure of a Man in 1959. She used brackets to change the quote slightly to accommodate her message.
> “I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,’” Tejada said.
I’ll mention to our AWS and Azure TAMs.
(Thesis: it’s a supporting product not a whole company)
Scheduling is more complex than just an IAM list: there are escalation policies, the actual phase of the schedule, dealing with additions/removals, overrides, and not to mention the entirety of routing pages for which PD's solution isn't even powerful enough for our needs … because the problem is more complex than they bargained for! Not to mention the telephony & mobile integrations, which are still lackluster, the desire to be able to have some things not page on weekends, etc.
I sort of do acknowledge that, yeah, this does seem like a place where AWS could easily kill PD by just offering their own version and leveraging their weight as a cloud provider. But they haven't, so that doesn't really matter to the person you've replied to.
Open source for some, reasonable alternatives of a commodity product for others.
Putting strawmen in people's mouths doesn't make for a good argument.
That is HN's version of "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? It's not like they don't evaluate 2-3 products before choosing PD. They are choosing to pay more, so there's more to their decision than just "What's the cheapest way to notify people when we get a signal from monitoring that something's amiss."
PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. And wrapped around that are layers of what pg called "muck," functionality that accommodates the needs of enterprise-grade customers like permissions, integrations, teams, analytics, AIOps for filtering noise and resolving things that don't require human intervention and so on.
That's not special, it's how all "Enterprise" software works. At its core is something that people on HN will regularly boast they could code up in a weekend, a long weekend at most, and they're not wrong. But wrapped around that simple core are layers of functionality that accommodate how large companies manage the activity mediated by that core.
I don't want to spark a long debate about PD's value, I urge you to see this as a pattern that applies to a lot of software that is sold B2B: The value is in the stuff around what appears to be the primary value proposition.
If HN readers want to get into the Enterprise software business, embracing that pattern is mandatory: You will generate most of your economic value by taking an idea that at its core isn't that hard to duplicate, but wrapping it in accommodations for the baroque and sometimes-dystopian org structures you sell into.
> PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents.
This is a good argument.
> But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD?
This is not a good argument. Businesses make tons of non-optimal purchases. Research is hard, and salespeople are convincing (and might be talking to a different group than the actual users).
At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal." A better characterization is that "optimal" often looks different for an enterprise than it does for an SMB than it does for a startup than it does for a consumer, and within each of these segments there are sub-segments with different definitions of "optimal."
I am not saying that buying PD or any other enterprise product is always optimal, but at the same time, I am saying that it cannot be dismissed as some kind of reality-distortion field that mesmerizes customers into overpaying.
---
But again, whether PD is overpriced or not is far less interesting on HN than understanding what goes into a successful "enterprise" SaaS product for those startups who are directly pursing enterprise customers or may need to pivot from another market to enterprise.
It's not just hiring convincing salespeople to sell the easily replicable obvious value proposition, it's actually all that stuff wrapped around it.
Sure I can. Oracle is awful.
Yes … when the sales are wheeled and dealed there's enough Enterprise-grade bullshit shoveled about for me to start a fertilizer business. But that's not a.) what I care about as an engineer who has to use PagerDuty, and b.) time and again, I think we see upstart competitors whose products is actually better than the dominant player finally get enough mindshare among actual users that the tide turns against the incumbent and "everybody uses $X" stops working.
I don't have to "embrace the pattern" to understand how the game is played, and thus be able to successfully navigate the space. But boy oh boy would it be nice if that weren't necessary.
It would be a better advertisement for PagerDuty if you were concerned about improving the product. (Or, at least feigned such, which is what many businesses seem to do.)
And absolutely things are chosen by dart toss. PD has inertia: it's well known, and the product isn't terrible. And I don't know anything better yet — so I'd choose you again, but that "yet" is key to any future competitor. But people believe the marketing, and nobody does the research necessary prior to adoption: the research is, for these things, equal to the work of actually migrating onto the platform: it is only by migrating that you find out where you've made assumptions about how paging works that don't match PD's. Marketing pages are too shallow to discover such things.
At the risk of an appeal to authority, I have been in the enterprise technology business since the late 1980s. I have held position in sales and marketing before my current career in engineering. In engineering I have had roles on both the IC ladder (I am currently a Principal Engineer) and the management ladder (topping out as a Director of Engineering).
I don't regard this as a game we play for the purpose of bamboozling stupid customers into overpaying for software. I think that's a remarkably poor perspective on how business works, very similar in my mind to calling all Apple users "fanbois." It's a way of dismissing a large and complex equation that encompasses complex organizations, individuals within those organizations, various tradeoffs and aggregations of value, and so on and so forth.
Reducing it to a simplistic take that it's all about marketing bullshit is low-effort and contributes nothing to anyone who wants to enter this space or survive if the economics of what they build indicates--as it did with companies like DropBox and 1Password--that they need to pivot to enterprise.
Everything you are saying that drips with contempt for enterprise SaaS business, is also expressing contempt for their customers. I do not hold our customers or those who buy from our competitors in contempt, I admire them all: They have built businesses that advance technology, grow our economies, and employ people (modulo the current climate for employment).
If you want to model the world as companies picking products with a dart toss, that's your business. But I'm not dignifying your position, I think it is absolutely not a foundation for success selling into these markets.
Example: Go to the homepage and see how many clicks it takes to find out the simle question of "When am I on call next?"
Their examples of follow the sun model seems pretty straight forward to me.
https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/schedule-examples#:~:text....
Unfortunately for him, another email he sent out not five minutes before was proudly boasting about record profits.
You do get an instant wave of people not giving two shits about work, though.
When I saw the title here I thought maybe that tweet was satirizing her email, but, the tweet clearly predates it.
Amazing.
I'm shocked. Must be a case of her having read this tweet and subconsciously regurgitating it. Otherwise I'm scared for our eventual chatgpt overlords.
Here's the original source: https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/improving-pagerdutys-operatio...
Here's a Tweet quoting it at 11am PST: https://twitter.com/noahchestnut/status/1617960469565931523
And the tweet in the parent was ~4 hours later at 2:52pm PST: https://twitter.com/mattstratton/status/1618018859763798016
Both were on the 24th. The PagerDuty post doesn't have a visible time but it refers to a town hall later in the day that was a couple hours before that tweet happened.
Not much new info being conveyed at this point. I guess you have a need to see your own CEO do it for some kind of closure?
How arrogant do you have to be to think you will overtake the iPad in sales over a single quarter.
I wonder if that is because the skills and values needed to climb the corporate ladder to Executive positions are fundamentally different from those of Founders that formed their ethos in the broader society, outside of the ladder-climbing environment.
This hypothesis has interesting implications for founders that wish their companies to be reflective of their ethos over time. Suddenly the Japanese practice of adopting successors to leadership instead of hereditary succession makes a lot more sense - valuing temperament over bloodline. It also completely bypasses the issues with internal promotions in a hierarchical structure.
Debian is interesting with their use of an alternate operating model and democratically elected leadership.
Given how long-lasting companies can become destructive to the societies that they operate in, it seems to be that Society has a vested interest in solving this problem of companies losing their soul. Maybe there are corporate structures that can be designed to minimize these issues? Anyone aware of research or proposals in this area?
That's a great point. Might be splitting hairs a little bit here - but the question must be asked - if the ethos of the Successors are fundamentally different from those of the Founders, maybe the "change the culture" is deliberate, to align with the ethos of the Successors?
There's an additional factor at play here: age. The Founders of the two companies - HP and Google - were in their 20s at the time of founding. The Successors were likely much older (40s? 50s?) when they took over - it takes time to climb to the Executive positions. How much of an impact that simple number (Age at Founding/Succession) would have had on what culture would be fostered. It would be really interesting to see a macro study on cultures at companies 1-5 years from Founding/Succession, grouped by age decade (20s, 30s, 40s) at founding/succession. Dell and Apple could be case studies onto themselves because their founders left and then came back at a different age.
I'd be genuinely surprised if both sexes weren't equally represented in terms of sociopathy and narcissism if we ever got to an even 50/50 split.
She is the definite leader in the category of callous CEOs.
I know it's not your main point, but every time I hear the "oh look at these nerdy space men playing with their phallic toys!" comment I get curious about the alternative.
A vulva, of course.
https://whatisfeminism.today/spaceship/
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/vulva-shaped-spaceshi...
https://www.dezeen.com/2022/03/03/vulva-spaceship-design-aim...
A weird design, sure, but there have been weirder ones.
but IMHO "lets make it it look _another sex organ_" doesn't really either break out of the existing cultural framing, or design primarily around the extreme engineering needs, which have to come before the cultural ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_fiction
Perhaps it's less about the shape of the rockets, and more about the unnecessary (space) travel?
Additionally, when taking off it did essentially look like a rocket. The shuttle is small compared to the tank/boosters combination. And these are the ones making sure it can take off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_1
But Blue Origin has an aspect ratio that really makes the comparison more obvious... and then the top looks like a glans. Making it that penis-like is not mandatory.
Have you not watched 1950s sci-fi? Clearly a flying saucer would be optimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
Nevermind the service ceiling (actual).
Granted much of the appreciation had nothing to do with Yahoo but I'm sure a worse executive would have messed up the Alibaba situation.
She took a dying company, tried a couple of home run ideas which flopped and then effectively returned what value was left to the shareholders. There is no reason to think that Yahoo would have performed any better under another CEO.
She drove Yahoo into the ground with incredibly useless ideas like a new weather app that made them no money.
Basically everything she tried completely flopped and she tanked the value of the company.
What are you even talking about?
Also the value of the company is the stock. She didn't tank it, it went up.
The CEO of a publicly traded company is responsible for carrying out the goals set by the board, which represent the whims of the owners of the company. Typically that means balancing many factors. If the owners of the company care about features and competing, they will set goals accordingly. If the owners feel like maximizing profit for an expedient exit, they will set goals aligned with that.
She inherited an absolutely untenable situation and yes, she failed, but given the atrocious track records of the previous five CEOs, she absolutely didn't do any worse and yes, she did at least get the company through the Alibaba IPO so that shareholders got that value.
Let's look at the tenure of her predecessors: * Jerry Yang: Founder who told Microsoft to fuck off when they offered $45b for a company that was in no way worth that. At least Microsoft didn't get saddled with that shit. Yang also managed to flub the entire Web 2.0 boom despite Yahoo being primely suited for that (and buying early Web 2.0 darlings like Flickr). A year after Yang rebuffed the deal, Yahoo's stock was 60% lower than Microsoft's offer. Truly, this is one of the worst CEO moves in history. Oh, he also turned down a deal to sell the search business for $20b.
* Carol Bartz: Came from Autodesk and had no idea what a consumer web company was like, traded in Yahoo's search stuff (and search deals) for Microsoft's stack (the same Microsoft that had offered to buy Yahoo's search business for $20b just six months earlier) but for very little upfront money and for a deal that was at the high level, only valued at $500m in revenue a year over ten years (which if you do the math, is half of what Microsoft had offered for the search business six months earlier). Didn't understand consumer products at all and let Mail, Flickr and the other acquisitions languish.
* Tim Morse - CFO who served as interim CEO while they found the next replacement. He tried unsuccessfully to sell Yahoo's ad business to Google or Microsoft.
* Scott Thompson - This joker was the OG George Santos, who got caught lying about his education on his resume (which, bro, you're trying to be CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, don't do this) and was fired in one of the most humiliating ways that I can ever recall seeing. He lasted 5 months and didn't achieve anything but making an embarrassment of himself and laying off 15% of the staff. Oh, and he sued Facebook over that ridiculous patent thing.
* Ross Levinsohn - The interim CEO who REALLY wanted the job for keeps but was just keeping the seat warm while the board did the executive search. He didn't do anything wrong per se, but there was a reason he wasn't chosen as CEO. He was a media guy, not a tech guy, and wouldn't have known how to handle what was still ostensibly a tech company. He later went on to lead a bunch of very bad (from a business perspective) media companies, most notably tronc. He's now head of a company that buys once-proud media brands that it licenses out for every dollar it can, killing the legacy and value of those brands along the way.
That's who you were looking at before. Was Marissa successful? Absolutely not. Yahoo spent a lot of money and made a lot of big swings but ultimately came up short. But at least she tried. At least she tried to invest in things like email, search, and content, areas that had the previous five leaders (I guess four is more fair, Ross didn't have a chance to do anything) focused on, the company might not have been in that position.
She also managed to keep things afloat and working so that the Alibaba IPO and Yahoo's stake in that could come to fruition. Given the caliber of the people who led the company before that and the shareholder activism and lawsuits happening before and during her tenure, she did probably as good as anyone in that situation could do.
The bottom line is that Yahoo was not a company that could be saved and she took on an impossible mission, but at least she tried. Yahoo's death warrant was signed in 2008 when Jerry Yang told Steve Ballmer to go fuck himself because he didn't consider $45b a high enough valuation for Yahoo (even tho the pri...
She failed and milked the company for hundreds of millions. It's hilarious that you want to defend her
Marissa was a very early person at Google, and contributed to a lot of things [1]. Obviously a Wikipedia entry is going to be hagiographic, and some early players are going to be better than others, but there's no reason to believe she wasn't at least on the same playing field as many of the other early landing big names.
And she has nothing acutely toxic or myopic on her record. She was hired by the board of Yahoo to mostly do what she did.
FYI Kamala Harris had a romantic relationship with someone in power who appointed her to positions she was not remotely qualified for, that's an example wherein the unseemly facts are just a bit too real for polite conversation. But I suggest when one wants to throw such tawdry things around, one should not be making arbitrary claims.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer
Hagiographic
Definition: Excessively flattering
There was literally nothing to oversee. Even in this unadorned search homepage, she was able to keep an unused button (I'm feeling lucky) for more than a decade.
(I suspect keeping the Google homepage "unadorned" took a lot more effort than you'd imagine, too.)
Your point would've been much stronger had you not used this as an opportunity for a political cheap shot; your last paragraph completely nullifies the three preceding it.
Aside from the more vulgar elements, it's immoral and wold be illegal in most circumstances; it's just straight corruption.
To wit, those participating in these actions are Lawmakers and those responsible for the Justice System aka District Attorney, further embroiling the hypocrisy in the situation.
It's understandable people will feel uncomfortable with that reality, because it resonates with a kind of slander that is used to belittle people (especially women), hence my calling out the individual OP for making arbitrary insinuations.
But it's irresponsible to ignore such actions because it doesn't fit either one's political orientation, or triggers one's sensitivities.
What Harris did was bad. Arbitrarily insinuating women are only successful because they 'slept around' is also bad. It's actually not very nuanced at all once you start to think about it.
[citation needed]
> hence my calling out the individual OP for making arbitrary insinuations.
Calling out someone for making arbitrary insinuations while yourself making arbitrary insinuations is blatantly hypocritical and - as you put it - "nakedly callous". Your comments boil down to "if the allegations are against a woman on my team then they're false but if they're against a woman on the other team then they're true". Maybe that ain't your intention, but that's how it reads.
There was zero good-faith reason to bring up Kamala Harris apropos nothing - and in doing so (and in doubling down on doing so) you've obliterated your own argument.
She deserves mild to moderate praise for her brief tenure. Not stellar but also not useless.
For anyone curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Brown_(politician)#Favo...:
> Brown's romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the early 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris's 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: "Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work".[57] Brown's relationship with Harris gained renewed attention in early 2019 after she had become a U.S. senator and ran for president.[58][59][60][61] Brown addressed the questions by publishing a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" He wrote that he may have "influenced" her career by appointing her to boards and supporting her run for District Attorney, but added that he had also influenced the careers of other politicians.
Though I don't think we need to derail this conversation too much away from the fact that though these things do happen, belittling women (or men) arbitrarily for supposedly doing these kinds of things is not nice at all.
And that Ms. Tajeda is holding her own in indicating we can all be a bit insufferable ...
[1] https://oag.ca.gov/conflict-interest
From the outside looking in, it appeared Yahoo! was a ghost ship, sailing under previously established momentum with no wind in the sails. Piecemealing Yahoo! out Gordon Gekko style might have been the only realistic future to save groups/units that could operate without the mothership, so to speak.
The spending/acquisition spree Mayer went on... I'm not certain what to make of that, however.
This is a really disingenuous way of framing her work at Google.
By all accounts she did quite a bit more than just "choosing the colors" at google, but as we all know only guys can do real work.
And then she came into the hugely profitable, exponentially growing yahoo, and turned it into a failure. Yahoo! absolutely was not an already failing business that bought Meyer in solely because the were trying to find some external person who would try different things to turn it around.
JFC.
>On May 20, 2013, Mayer led Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr in a $1.1 billion acquisition.[53][54] In February 2016, Yahoo! acknowledged that the value of Tumblr had fallen by $230 million since it was acquire
She also covered up Yahoo hack, that was one of the biggest in history:
>U.S. Charges Russian FSB Officers and Their Criminal Conspirators for Hacking Yahoo and Millions of Email Accounts
Not easy to achieve that much on a single CEO position, without being forced out from a company
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
She wanted a color and a font changed.
I was actually grateful that was all she wanted, because it gave me more time to get the features done!
People who are pushing for better career paths for women are largely not pushing women (and others) towards careers in trades. I think that’s to the detriment of society in general.
It can't be that I'm giving an explanation as to why you see women pushing for more representation in some fields but not others, it must be that I'm describing the personal lived experience of every single woman on the planet.
Also we absolutely are a hive mind, Beyonce is the current queen who took over after Madonna.
The garbage collection is mostly automated using an arm from the truck, but she can still lift a full compost bin to dump in the truck that’s too heavy for me to lift.
Meant to be sarcastic, made my edit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEtw3XJoJrE
She wanted attention; she got attention. Specifically, she wanted people to know about items that she believes will increase her company's valuation, and she found a way to get attention in that area (the giveaway is that she even boasted about some elements of the company's financials and reports in the very same letter).
She knew damn well that this shameless and odious approach was going to draw eyeballs.
Look, we're all talking about it.
She probably correctly believes that a) layoffs will increase short-term valuation, and that her vile characterization of the layoffs will get more eyeballs on the part of the letter that begins, "We expect to finish the year strong".
It's an extremely simple money play.
She probably drafted an apology letter alongside this one, which she'll issue in a few days, by which time the goals of this letter will have been achieved.
The play seems relatively transparent to me.
You are an outlier- the exception, not the rule.
Ouch. I’m not sure if it’s worse to get laid off after that email or have to stay for that kind of leadership.
E.g. Stripe had a similar tone in that they basically wanted to maintain their margins but didn't get anything close to this type of negative coverage. No MLK quotes though
If any tech leader sent such a ridiculous msg during layoffs they would face the same scrutiny.
I guess that's even more scary than ill intended.
I say she did a great job.