Marissa Mayer On Turning Around Yahoo

An anonymous reader writes For the 20th anniversary of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer discusses how she's trying to reinvent the company. In a wide-ranging interview, Mayer shares her vision for fixing the company's past mistakes, including a major investment in mobile and a new ad platform. Yet she's been dogged by critics who see her as an imperious micromanager, who criticize her $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, and who fault her for moving too slowly. The company's executives explain that the business could only return to health after she first halted Yahoo's brain drain and went big on mobile. As one Yahoo employee summarized Mayer's thinking: "First people, then apps."

Comments

Brain drain

[afidel]

How did cutting telecommuting across the board and thus forcing many talented engineers to go elsewhere stop the brain drain?

Re:Brain drain

[rrohbeck]

I'm sure it saved a lot on salaries and packages.

Re:Brain drain

[bhcompy]

Brain drain wasn't about engineers, it was about culture. They want the Silicon Valley culture of being in-office tied-to-desk slaves. They got it.

Re:Brain drain

[LifesABeach]

Beats me, I always considered H1B brains to be like tampons; maybe she came up short day and while digging in the champagne bucket, she got her next Epiphany?

Re:Brain drain

[hey!]

Well... maybe there's some kind of model in which you would actually look forward to seeing your colleagues in person.

Personally, I've done in both ways. When my partner and I sold our business to a company that was on the other side of the country, I no longer had a two hour a day commute, which was awesome. I also didn't have a team I saw in person every day, which I very quickly grew to miss. And I'm not the most sociable person in the world. I'm more than glad to spend a few days or even weeks working by myself. But as weeks stretched into months, with only emails, teleconferencing, and the occasional cross-country flight, I grew to hate telecommuting. It's great to be able to do it even a couple of days a week, but if I had the choice of woking in bathrobe in the spare bedroom ALL the time or spending two hours in the car EVERY day, I'd go with the commute.

If I were starting another company, I think one of my priorities would be to make being there fun, stimulating, and personally rewarding. I'd make it possible to telecommute, but if people began to see it as their primary mode of working I'd consider that a red flag.

Re:Brain drain

[Trepidity]

When was that part of SV culture? Even if you go back to the old-school SV firms, they were pretty negative on telecommuting, and ran regular offices. What era and kind of company do you have in mind? If you go back to the '60s-'90s even, Silicon Valley companies like Intel, Sun, Apple, SGI, Oracle, etc. required regular office time. You could certainly shift your schedule at many of them (e.g. come in at 10am, not 8am, as long as you stay late too), but you couldn't work from home, or get away with less than 40+ hours in the office (often 50+).

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

yes, silicon valley culture USED to be about the employees. I worked at SGI and I remember them allowing dogs into the offices, so that single folks who don't have anyone to watch over their pups can avoid having to kennel them during the day. we had hardwall offices, with doors (!) while managers had 'cubes'. it was the opposite of how most of the rest of the valley was, and it helped make sgi one of the best places to work at.

I also worked at sun. also had a hardwall office.

I was at fore systems (west coast) and many of us had offices with walls and doors.

now, the bad news. the last 10 or so years, I've seen a move to 'open offices' and so, you don't even get a cube anymore! ;( really really bad move, HR morans.

every place that had an open office, sucked. everyone felt that way but HR, who would never admit they made a mistake (like politicians, never admit you were wrong, sigh).

if someone gets sick, YOU get sick, too. isn't THAT nice??

plus, the new trend is to not hire f/t but only hire contractors. guess what: contractors don't get sick time off, so they HAVE to report in and make everyone else sick.

I have never been at yahoo, but it sounds like I would hate it there if I went.

as for their products, their email is the worst/slowest and loads the most CRAP when you give it permission. its also the most unfriendly html/js code to filter on (on purpose, no doubt). adblock has a harder time with yahoo content since they intentionally make every fucking variable name unique! ;( really unfriendly, which I'm sure they could care less about. obscurring the 'content' that gets downloaded via yahoo pages is part of what makes yahoo, well, 'a yahoo'.

taking away telecommuting - all the while, SHE has a private room next to her office for her little ones - that would be the most insulting thing to me if I was working there.

the sooner yahoo fails, the better. the whole internet would be better off without them, at this point.

Re:Brain drain

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't I spout unsourced "facts" and get 5 karma?

Re:Brain drain

[OrangeTide]

Out of all the SV companies I've worked at, the main thing they have in common is they want to do things differently than everyone else. It seems like some wanted cubes only, others want engineers in offices and managers in cubes. Some companies bend over backwards for employees, and other companies bluntly tell employees that if they aren't already happy they should leave.

(if someone insists on my citing sources, I might be willing to do that privately, but not publicly)

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

I'm not seeing much choice, anymore. the last few years of interviews (off and on) have shown me that the bay area is swallowing the 'open office' idea, hook line and sinker.

my last gig was at cisco and they are converting (slowly but surely) to an all OO environment. and again, no one I talked to, there, was a tiny bit happy about it. they all talked about working from home (cisco still allows that) or just plain leaving.

make no mistake, companies do this to save money, save space and they don't care at all about your happiness! they at least acted like they did, years ago, but they don't even try that anymore. they know we all know what their plan is.

being a tech worker is really starting to suck. its becoming like factory work, many decades ago. churn and burn.

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

I worked at both sun and sgi (that you mentioned in your list) and neither one required us to be at our desks. I was telecommuting about 99% of the time (even though my office was about 10mi from where I live, all my co-workers were 'remote' and all our meetings were on the phone, so there was no real reason to 'be' there). I stayed there 5 years and had a great time, did good work and enjoyed being at sun. well, up until oracle bought them and all hell broke loose...

at sgi, same kind of deal; I was allowed to work from home as-needed and sgi was a 'very online' company back in the 90's. before it was trendy, in fact.

so, not sure which bay area you worked at, but I've been here over 25 years and I know what the silicon valley culture is all about. and it used to be pretty open and flexible. it was the 'california way' (I moved from boston, so I knew the east coast 'uptight' way as well as the more relaxed calif way.)

Re:Brain drain

[TheGratefulNet]

so, what level of manager are you?

first line, middle mgmt or maybe c-level?

you are clearly not a working stiff like most of us, here...

Re:Brain drain

[stephanruby]

so, what level of manager are you?
first line, middle mgmt or maybe c-level?
you are clearly not a working stiff like most of us, here...

That is correct. He's probably speaking from personal experience.

Managers are usually the least productive telecommuters I know.

Re:Brain drain

[Paradise Pete]

and for about 20% it declines to ZERO.

To be fair, about 20% of an in-office staff also tends to be completely unproductive.

Re:Brain drain

[Xest]

"Telecommuting was a nice experiment, but it doesn't work for people whose work is not easily quantified."

And who are those people? I've always quantified my home working staff's work based on results. Have they got done what I've expected them to do in the time I expect them to be able to do it? It's not really rocket science.

"In theory, it may be possible to identify the people that are more productive, but that takes a lot of management effort"

Yes, it's so effortful to determine who is and isn't pulling their weight. Honestly, please don't become a manager. Ever. If you can't even begin to understand how you might gauge which of your staff are effective and not calling such understanding merely "theory" then you're really not cut out for such a role. If you've any experience managing people then it's fairly easy to see who does and doesn't get done what they need to do. Dealing with the problem is often the hard part, because you can often be hamstrung by company or national policies on the issue depending on who you work for and where you live.

"since, obviously, the people that do NO work at home are the people that like telecommuting the most."

Yes obviously. Thank you for the wealth of proof you provided for your assertion.

"Although it wasn't popular, Marissa was right to end the practice at Yahoo."

Yes, if by right you mean she found it easier to lose talent than actually do a job of managing any real or perceived problem. The problem is there are as equally unproductive amounts of people as your pulled out of thin air numbers in the office too. Unproductive people are unproductive, it doesn't matter where you make them turn up for work. It doesn't fix the root problem- they're unproductive because they're not motivated, and they're not motivated for any number of reasons- unhappy with compensation package, being managed by a hopeless manager that demotivates people, being repeatedly given the most boring work, being forced to do things not in their contract that they don't want to do, not being given a fair shot at career progression or training and so on and so forth. If you don't fix the root issues your people will still be entirely demotivated and unproductive. Some of these things are your fault as a leader and you can fix, others you can do little about- someone has to do the boring work and the best you can do is help them move on.

Meyer's actual claimed reason for getting rid of it was because she wanted people in the office bouncing ideas off of people to try and spur on innovation. I agree with this to a degree, I think during product conception phase this is absolutely right, but the problem is this whole bouncing ideas off each other open plan office mindset falls apart when it's time to stop coming up with ideas and start implementing them. Once those ideas have formed a product, and you've got down on paper what your bounds for this product are, and you need to start planning and building it, people need a few days a week to actually get on and do that in the environment they're most comfortable in where they're not going to be repeatedly distracted. For some people this is the office, some this is the local cafe, some it's in the park, and for others it's at home.

And that's why Meyer's blanket ban was bad. There's no question she'll have lost some talent doing it as she did. But when you claim your goal is to stem the flow of talent out of the company, then such blanket actions are doomed to fail. It's short sighted lazy management that makes great headlines, whilst shedding you real actual talent, and doing nothing to stem any apparent company wide problem of poor motivation. Even if she has got more people into the office coming up with more ideas, she's not enabling an environment that ever lets all her people put those ideas into practice- the only ones that will be productive are those who can be productive in an office environment, which isn't even close to the whole of the human race, maybe like you I'll make up a percentage, I'l

Re:Brain drain

[tehcyder]

The problem is there are as equally unproductive amounts of people as your pulled out of thin air numbers in the office too.

Some of the lazy bastards even take time to read and post on internet forums while they're supposed to be working in the office. Un-fucking-believable...

serious question

[ganjadude]

what value is there in yahoo??? I havent used anything by them (not including companies they bought out) in I cant tell you how long. I dont know anyone who uses their email (do they still have email? / chat apps???) their search???? I honestly dont even know what they do anymore (well, other than they have a female CEO, all the tech blogs love to talk about that fact)

Re:serious question

[Trepidity]

From a monetary, stock-price perspective, at the moment the main value in Yahoo is that they own a significant stake in Alibaba, a huge Chinese conglomerate. Their stake in Alibaba at current prices is worth about $34 billion, and Yahoo's current market cap is ~$40 billion. Even assuming a discount on their Alibaba stake due to some overhead that would be involved in unwinding it, it still represents more than half of Yahoo's stock value.

Re:serious question

[Leuf]

I still use yahoo email as my I don't care what happens to it address. Spam filter works well so I haven't seen a need to change.

Once she took over they redid the my yahoo homepage and broke literally everything about it. The sports feed has mostly become functional again but the weather... my god the weather... completely and utterly useless. The widget on the homepage can't keep track of where I am or even what day of the week it is. Everything else is more likely to give you a gateway timeout or other error than actual information.

Re:serious question

[bhcompy]

Number one sports website, number one fantasy sports website, well regarded finance site, Flickr and Tumblr are still going strong, Yahoo Mail is still near the top in active userbase, smart investments in foreign social/search companies, etc. They do pretty well for themselves, which is why they're still around

Re:serious question

[ganjadude]

thanks for that information. but other than the mail, none of that is anything they did. they bought out other companies. I mean thats great for them, flickr is a good platform, im sure tumblr as well. but buying a company and innovating are 2 different things.

I thought they were down low on the post on life support, I cant think of anyone who I know who goes out of their way to use any of yahoos products. ill have to check out the fantasy sports they are using.

Re:serious question

[phantomfive]

I thought they were down low on the post on life support, I cant think of anyone who I know who goes out of their way to use any of yahoos products.

A clear example of selection bias: people who surround you are like you.

Re:serious question

[bhcompy]

The only companies left standing after 20 years are those that use acquisitions to make up for the fact that successful innovation involves a lot of luck. Google, Microsoft, and Apple all use strategic acquisitions to enhance themselves. Do you think Google created Android, YouTube, and Google Maps/Earth? Do you think Microsoft created MS-DOS, Powerpoint, and Skype? Do you think Apple created iOS, OSX, and Final Cut Pro? All of those are final products that evolved from acquisitions. They are not home grown, yet they define massive parts of their corporate identities.

New mobile mail

[samwichse]

If the new mobile mail app is part of their big push, then they're in trouble.

That thing is DOG slow on a Nexus 5 (a quad core phone with 2gb RAM). I can't even imagine how crap it is on anything older. Every time they push it back on me, I have to go to settings->classic mail experience.

Not to mention the fact I have to use the browser version instead of their app due to mysterious random "oops your battery is dead" moments and the ridiculous number of permissions their app wants.

And can we talk about reliability? 50-50 whether the desktop site loads videos correctly, they seem to have 4 different commenting systems with the same backend (one of which never shows comments), and constant "oops, server error" issues. This last block I'm separating because the crapitude predates her, but Yahoo can't seem to code its way out of a wet paper bag.

Re:New mobile mail

[rogoshen1]

So what you're saying is.. the Dice crew and the Yahooligans get together, drink Balmer tier amounts of booze, then stay up all night playing laser tag -- and in the pale light of a hungover morning; push changes to production without testing?

To her credit...

[Irate Engineer]

She was handed the wheel 10 years after the ship hit the iceberg, and they are still marginally afloat. Anybody who thinks that Yahoo should be kicking Apple to the curb right now is high.

Oh God the Lens Flare, the Blur

[Kunedog]

TFA was directed by J.J. Abrams.

130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[Torp]

"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." Ref: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ar...
I don't think Yahoo is a place I'd like to work at. And come to think of it, she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google, which says something about working at Google too?

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who claims to work 130 hour weeks is quite simply a liar. There's no way that person is producing anything resembling 'work' for more than 18 hours per day, 7 days a week. She may have been in the office for that long, but she sure as hell wasn't working. What is it with this fetishism about long work weeks? What's next, claims about a 170 hour week?

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[eulernet]

she was promoted pretty high in the food chain at Google

She was dating Larry Page.
http://gawker.com/214051/utter...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

She is very ambitious, thus she constantly self-promotes herself.
Claiming to work 130 hours a week is part of this self-promotion.

Re:130 hour weeks and "people first"?

[stephanruby]

"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." Ref: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ar...

With access to free showers, free laundry service, and free extra yummy food outside of regular working hours. I could also see myself never leaving my workplace and sleeping 130 hours a week.

Google supports Yahoo!

[mi]

If Google weren't afraid of "monopoly" accusations — and the resulting regulatory scrutiny — and started treating Yahoo! as a real competitor, Ms. Mayer's company would've gone the way of Radio Shack and Woolworth years ago.

I suppose, it is good for the rest of us while it lasts, but the moment Yahoo! actually does start performing (if that ever happens), Google may decide to take the gloves of...

Telecommuting sort of sucks

[mveloso]

I work in an office where you can work at home. It's much, much better to work in the office. There's a lot of cross-talk, which makes our product(s) better.

That said, WFH is good when you need to get stuff done that's task-specific.

As a blanket policy WFH can work, but if everyone works from home then you have strong online collaboration tools. For a place the size of Yahoo WFH across the board is a "I don't feel like working" policy.

Yahoo was stagnating for years, so it's unclear what these people who were WFH were actually doing. If they were kicking out killer shit than the policy would be justifiable - but they weren't.

Re:Telecommuting sort of sucks

[Rinikusu]

My office has telecommute days where coming in is optional and more often than not, I make the trek through LA traffic to work in the office. Not as many distractions and, because many of our devs work from home, the office is nice and quiet.

Re:Criticism

[OrangeTide]

Both are dinosaurs of a previous age.

Apple must be three or four ages old. They ended up outlasting Sun, Palm, Nokia and soon HP. They might even outlast Microsoft.

Re:Brain drain-Meyer will win, no matter what

[ebusinessmedia1]

At some point, Yahoo will be parted out, sold, or rolled up. Any one of these options will lead to a nice payday for Meyer and Yahoo's biggest investors. That's what this is all about. The same thing happened at hp, and is happening now, at IBM. This is an old story in Silicon Valley - company comes out of the chute like gangbusters; low barriers to entry eventually lead to competition; the company falters; someone is brought in to "save" the company (and paid a LOT of money); the company is parted out or limps along for 10+ years while a succession of "in-people" make a pile of $$$ in options, perks, etc. etc.

Hm

[Greyfox]

Is there something hugely profitable that I've missed about running a company into the ground? It seems to be all the rage lately, been seeing it at HP, at IBM, at Sun, couple smaller companies I've worked at in the past. Some jackhole will come in, talk a big game, cut tiny little perks that used to be given to employees to the bone, spend a couple billion dollars on some idiotic shit like another company or a shiny new headquarters that's later discovered to be riddled with asbestos and sitting on top of a colony of leprosy-ridden armadillos and then jettisons with a $50 million golden parachute while the company burns. This has happened far too many times recently to be coincidence!

A good way to tell if your company has been thus afflicted is to look at the quality of the coffee now compared to the quality a couple years ago. At one such company that I worked at a few years ago, I one day remarked to my test minion that the coffee at the company was so good that you hardly even minded the urine. After the VC's took over and replaced it with, I want to say, "Peet's Coffee", the coffee there was so bad that the urine was an improvement!

Re:Hm

[gstoddart]

No, the answer seems to be that CEOs are incompetent, talk corporations into giving them huge pay packets (which is done with the help of other CEOs), and generally don't have a clue of what they should be doing.

The compensation of a CEO is not tied to performance, so they can be as idiotic as possible, ruin the company, and still have their huge payout.

Basically, CEOs have hoodwinked the world into believing they're extra special people with valuable skillsets, even when they don't.

Essentially being a CEO is a great scam, funded by the shareholders and the employees. Being a CEO has to be the easiest fucking job in the world .. because no matter the shit job you do you still make a huge sum of money, and people subsequently are willing to hire you in other companies on the assumption that, having been incompetent to be a CEO already, you're qualified for the job.

In my experience and observation, your average CEO is either a failed business person, or an engineer who got lucky in another company and now has an MBA ... they're just chimps who get paid vast sums of money if they win or lose.

And, of course, since the people who hire and fire CEOs are just as incompetent, and in on the scam, they will never decide to tie compensation to any meaningful level of results.

Cynically, I believe this is just a massive scam being perpetuated to make a bunch of assholes even richer, while not giving a crap what happens to the company or the stock price.

Me, I'd be an incompetent CEO for half the price ... and I'd probably do no better or worse, and then I'd get my severance package and retire.

A fucking drunk chimp could do as good of a job as most corporate CEOs. This is just another example.

Re:Hm

[TheGratefulNet]

A fucking drunk chimp could do as good of a job as most corporate CEOs.

agreed.

we had one as a president of the US for 2 terms. and half the country still thought 'things were fine'.

the value of leadership is HIGHLY over-rated. the workers are still the ones who do the real work, in ANY corporation.

Re:Brain drain-Meyer will win, no matter what

[50000BTU_barbecue]

"SIlicon Valley"? Pretty sure you just described the vast majority of human history.

"Empire of the Rising Scum"

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

From a 1990 essay comes the insight
"The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating- organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them-- apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, 'The scum rises to the top.' "

http://bobshea.net/empire_of_t...

It is as insightful in its own way as "The Mythical Man-Month".

Several stories say Marissa Mayer was demoted.

[Futurepower(R)]

"... they hired someone who they thought would bring a lot of Google inside information to them, ..."

Marissa Meyer was demoted, according to an L.A. Times story that has now been deleted, but is available at another site.

Quote: "But when Page took over as CEO in April 2011, he did not make a spot for her on his senior leadership team. Instead, she took over the company's location and local products, fueling speculation she would leave Google."

Do you think someone can be CEO and take care of a baby at the same time?

Back in 2006, before she joined Yahoo, there were questions about how much she thinking she could do, considering her work habits: How I work.

Quote: "I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight. I almost always have the radio or my TV on."

Another, earlier quote: "I use Gmail for my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast."