Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo To Fire Another 15% As Mayer Attempts To Hang On (theguardian.com)
New submitter xxxJonBoyxxx writes: Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has announced plans to cut the company's workforce by 15% and close five foreign offices by the end of 2016 after announcing a $4.4bn loss. Yahoo shares have fallen 33% over the past year, including a 17% drop in the last three months. Its shares fell again in after-hours trading after Mayer announced her plan. Yahoo expects its workforce to be down to 9,000 and have fewer than 1,000 contractors by end of 2016. About a third of Yahoo's workforce has left either voluntarily or involuntarily over the last year. And the cuts may just be starting: one activist investor (SpringOwl) says the total number of employees should be closer to 3,000 for a company with its revenue.
... she'd fire herself.
She is not responsible for her actions. So she holds the laid off people responsible by laying them off.
Layoffs are always done by bad management who won't take responsibility for their actions.
But Twitter has 3600? Yahoo does a fuck lot more... I don't understand how these companies are valued.
It is hard to believe that Yahoo used to be one of the top search engines with a nice bright future. Now it has a bit less that 10% of Google's revenue, and it keeps dropping. I don't think this is a case of economies of scale... Google isn't the only online advertiser making money. But Yahoo somehow continues to lose money in this ever growing market.
Bottom line: Management at Yahoo sucks. The company should be sold in a fire sale as it has little prospects for turning things around.
The problem with a volunteering leaving of a company is a really bad thing, almost worse than layoffs. While it makes it easier for the managers to sleep at night knowing that they don't have to let a person go, which for most humans really hate doing.
But for the company the people who are smart enough to see the writing on the wall, know to jump ship early knowing that they can get a good or better job elsewhere. The ones who stick around are often the ones who lack the experience to see the warning signs, or just don't have the skills to get another job, and gamble on not being the one who gets canned. Thus populating the company with less experience or less than ideal employees. This creates a downward spiral of less quality and causing real layoffs (as we see here) which makes allowing for growth much harder.
But when you see voluntary leaving it is a bad sign.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why would anyone think there's a constant proper relationship between revenue and the number of employees across all businesses? I mean, let's just skip right over that employees are paid different amounts, businesses take different amount of human effort to create the wealth, the market will support different prices for different services, and the business will have a different amounts necessary to pay their vendors and capital requirements.
Suppose I have a farm business. One year I decide to spin-off the part of the company that picks the tomatoes. The previous company suddenly has much more revenue per employee. Should it go out and hire more people? The tomato picking company has little revenue per employee. Should the tomato picking company fire a bunch of people. Of course not.
-Dave
She'll get all the credit she deserves for the failure. Maybe she could run for office after she's done sandbagging Yahoo.
From what I can see, it's not so much that Mayer has made a bunch of bad decisions, but rather that she hasn't made any decisions at all. Well before she took over, everyone knew that Yahoo was in trouble and that their status quo wasn't tenable. So she was fully expected to come in and make sweeping and disruptive changes, hopefully thereby saving the company.
But what has she even attempted to change? From the outside at least, Yahoo as it exists in 2016 still seems fundamentally identical to Yahoo as it was in 2012, or for that matter, in 2006. The only plan I even heard about was that idea to split off the company into two pieces, let the unprofitable half (i.e. Yahoo) die off, and focus on the profitable half (i.e. partial ownership of Alibaba). And that's not really even a plan, that's just surrender.
Do something, at least. This wait-and-see stuff is no good. I'm pretty sure you won't like seeing what you waited for.
And the competent replacement will need to start off by firing thousands of workers. What competent person is going to want the job?
Are the people who produced the horrid piece of trash they now call a web site part of the 15% being sent packing? What used to be a fairly easy way of getting stories in an easy-to-use format is now a jumbled mess of shitty colors and blocky outlines.
I, and many others I have heard, have stopped going to their site as a direct result of the change. If Mayer, or the morons in charge of web design, were hoping to get more eyeballs to their site, they have failed miserably.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I mean seriously haven't all of us been here at one point in time or another. I know about 6 years back I was working for a company that decided that everyone would get pay cuts, first 3.5 percent. Then an additional 10 percent two weeks before Christmas. They as far as the leadership teams went, they had to give up paid vacation time. Then the layoffs came. But why is it that the upper management didn't lose anything? It was just the little guys, the people that actually did the work and made money for the company gets screwed. It was shortly after that, that most of the talented people left. Shortly there after the company lost their contract with their main source. They company that pulled the contract cited you no longer have a skilled labor force to provide adequate support for our products. If the company would of restructured it upper management (which it did after it lost the contract) instead of just hitting the employees where it hurt. They might of been able to salvage their operation and kept the contract and it's employees.
Mayer made one big change: doing away with telecommuting.
Yahoo is just now finally getting to the point they wanted to be in the late 90s. Things like their email mostly works now. It will always be my junk mail honeypot, but it does work.
But everything they are trying to fix and improve, someone else beat them to it years ago. They are trying to pry into a market they failed in.
All Mayer will be able to do at this point is try to wind everything down, fold up the chairs, and shut the lights off. The people with any brains have moved on to greener pastures and there is no way they are coming back, so trying to innovate a new business model is not going to happen.
Yahoo is dead, dead, dead. Pack the golden parachutes and jump!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
with 50% of the staff fired now, they have removed the bottom 50% of performers. So those remaining must be deleriously happy to be working with such elite peers. their productivity must be skyrocketing now that all the deadwood and even mediocre but dilligent workers are gone.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Layoffs should always be a last resort in positions that require technical talent. This goes double if your staff are more experienced and able to see the writing on the wall. I've chosen companies carefully over the years and have had long tenures at places I've worked. But, when a talented person who can get a job somewhere else sees the layoff balloons going up, the immediate thought is whether or not they'll be next. This causes everyone good to head for the exits, and you're left with the low-talent people who are just hanging on hoping they don't get it in the next round. This has happened to me twice, and I've carefully considered my options both times, opting to leave before things got worse.
This is partially driven by the (irrational) preference to hire only employed people. I know a lot of talented people who've just been blindsided by a sudden layoff, capricious firing or even the business going bankrupt. The road back for these people is very hard and they often have to take lower-salary work or work for companies with less-than-ideal working conditions.
[Goes to check Yahoo's site] WTF do those ten thousand people do all day?
If you were to tell me that website had a staff of twenty, I would say "Those are pretty hard workers, and the PHBs are obviously not interfering too much," and I would admire Yahoo as a company.
A hundred? I'd say, "looks like a luxurious job. I bet there are a lot of coffee breaks."
A thousand? I'm just stunned that they'd find something for a thousand people to do, even part-time.
Ten thousand? You're pulling my leg.
It had been more than ten thousand?!? I can't wait to read about the secret rocket ship they have been building for their manned Mars mission.
technical talent get replaced by H1B's. There needs to be an “cool off” period for companies that have laid off an American worker before they can access the H-1B system.
and if this is like any other layoff I have seen then management probably had 24 hours or less to decide who to let go and who to keep. Without adequate time to do any real analysis then the brown-nosers, game players and golf buddies get to stay. The ratio of dead wood to productive employee then swings even further to the dead wood side.
Then the good employees that did manage to make the cut see the writing on the wall and start sending out resumes. The exodus continues.
By any measure, Mayer has done an absolutely terrible job during her tenure. Granted, she inherited some challenges but she knew this going in. If you are working for Yahoo my advice would be to get out as soon as you can. This ship is sinking fast.
Yahoo lost its way a long time ago. I see more spam ads and malware from folks using Yahoo (and CNET for that matter) than from downloading torrents.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Doesn't it burn your ass to know that if she were to get fired, she'd walk away with tens of millions of dollars?
Why would it? To the class of workers Marissa Mayer belongs to, tens of millions of dollars is not a huge sum. Her net worth was about $300 million in 2012 when she took the the Yahoo job. Tens of millions of dollars to her is more like a tens of thousands of dollars to me, which would be a very reasonable severance package to someone in my position.
Just like you probably make far more money than people working in third world slums, Marissa Mayers makes far more money than you. Comparing the salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Well I will happily take one year of her salary and stocks and whatever, sign to fire 6000 workers to bring it down to 3000, and then retire myself as incompetent.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Eliminate all the employees...problem solved, and think of the money they'd save!
Seriously, I've never seen a company circle the drain as long as Yahoo has, it's like they have some magic drain-circling power than no amount of swirling or flushing can overcome.
I swear, ten years from now we'll still be reading stories like this...."Yahoo Set To Fire Its Last 20 Employees, Mayer Predicts Huge Cost Savings".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If yahoo goes down I will have to re-register for many forums and websites that send out gobs of terrible spam.... Where will I send all the spam! Does Slashdot have an email service? Are you thinking of offering one?
Then there will be a /. thread complaining about why you should have been fired.
She is making much more than she is worth. If that doesn't fit the idea of success in America I don't know what does.
She is not responsible for her actions. So she holds the laid off people responsible by laying them off.
Keeping her current job is probably not Marissa Mayer's primary motivation. She was worth $300 million before she started working at Yahoo. She could have retired, started her own company, became a full time VC, etc, but she chose to become a CEO of a huge Internet company. It is very likely this means she wants a career running large companies. So Mayer's primary motivation is probably doing a good enough job to be given other similar or even better opportunities in the future.
The more things stay the same at Yahoo, the less likely she will make a successful career as a big-shot CEO. That is how she is taking responsibility for her actions. Comparing firing Marissa Mayer with firing rank and file workers is useless. The impact of being fired on her life compared to the impact on her workers' lives are not comparable. Even if there were no golden parachutes. She was already in a position where financial penalties are not very significant before she started working at Yahoo.
Layoffs are always done by bad management who won't take responsibility for their actions.
While that is often true, it is not always true. For growth companies layoffs are often a sign of management admitting they are no longer growth companies. The layoffs can signal they realize becoming a stable profitable company is more realistic than becoming 10x larger in a few years. That IMHO is taking responsibility for their actions
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Bullshit hypothesizing nonsense. What if blah and blah, then competent person won't blah!
Mayers is crap, she's wasted a bucket load of money on her friends companies. She's made no positive changes at all, now she's reduced to sacking to cut costs as a consequence of her bad leadership,
You are simply trying to defend her with bullshit arguments that pretend she did the right things and somehow its all out of her control. But she's not competent, she made the bad choices, she shredded the company and she has to go, no fluffer like you can save her when the numbers speak volumes to shareholders!
Doesn't it burn your ass to know that if she were to get fired, she'd walk away with tens of millions of dollars?
Why would it? To the class of workers Marissa Mayer belongs to, tens of millions of dollars is not a huge sum. Her net worth was about $300 million in 2012 when she took the the Yahoo job. Tens of millions of dollars to her is more like a tens of thousands of dollars to me, which would be a very reasonable severance package to someone in my position.
Just like you probably make far more money than people working in third world slums, Marissa Mayers makes far more money than you. Comparing the salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful.
I totally agree with what you're saying. Here's where it breaks down. Mayer has a bunch of money due solely to incredibly good luck and timing. Nothing more. It has nothing to do with her abilities (obviously), education, or any of that. She was in the right place at the right time.
So she's in a "class" that's occupied by people who made a bunch of money at business, and powerball winners. Although she made her money in business technically the reality is that she's on the "powerball winner" side of the aisle, if you catch my drift. So it's not terribly surprising that when you put her into a position like this she falters.
Of course, she is in an impossible position, anyway, but the company should have pulled a real entrepreneur in if they wanted to have a radical turnaround.
Do you have ESP?
Comparing the salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful.
Your argument is very worrying not only because it is tautological but because we can never stop ever increasing income inequality if people 'accept it'. The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is about 350. In 1965 it was 20. The committee that decides executive compensation is stacked so that people serve on each others compensation committees guaranteeing extravagant salaries. They also prevent a more meritocratic search going out to the general population. It also is one of the reasons why average pay has fallen or stagnated for most people in the US - money spent on executives means less cash for the workers.
And you might also want to think about pay in terms of productivity. Since 1973 it has gone up by about 100% in the US. And yet wages for many people have fallen in real terms. Median household income should be double what it is and perhaps more given that the number of working adults per household has increased as women have gone to work full time.
In terms of finding 'good people'. I have personally met outstanding people who not only are smart and well educated but have excellent communications and people skills. They made good money - mid six figures. I am certain they could have done a better job than Marissa Mayer running Yahoo and they would have agreed to do it for a mere $1 million. Yet they are never seriously considered because of the tight knit and self referential world of executives.
What's so sad is that this is a bum deal for shareholders - even if you are capitalist and don't have any compassion on people getting poorer you should at least be bothered by the fact that awful CEOs like Marissa Mayer and Steve Ballmer get to destroy value at a company and get paid 8 figures to do so. Imagine that instead of hiring Steve Ballmer, Microsoft would have merely hired an average MIT PhD engineering graduate in their 30s or 40s with some business and management experience. Think about how much better off Microsoft would have been in 2013 when Ballmer did finally leave.
"salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful."
So someone is in a different class of society just because of their paycheque? Presumable when (not if) she's fired she'll be back down the class ladder when her salary is zero?
Management taking responsibility for their actions means THEY take the brunt of the results of the actions, not the laid off employees.
Since the management have no skin in the game, they're not responsible.
How do you propose to make C-level management take the brunt of the negative results of their failed policies? If the management is fired along with the employees, they are not taking the brunt of the negative results because they already had a significant net worth before taking these positions. If they required these managers to invest significant amounts of their own money in the company before taking the job, they wouldn't take the job in the first place because it would always be a horrible investment from a diversification standpoint.
You have to face facts that once you make a certain amount of money, you will never be "punished" in the same way as regular people unless your actions are criminal (and often not even then). There is no way for them to ever put as much "skin in the game" as rank and file employees ever again.
Employees are assets, not only expenses. Get rid of assets in a company, the company's value drops.
Employees are assets, but companies only rent those assets. They don't own them (that has been illegal since 1863 in the US). Once the return on investment of renting those assets becomes negative it is a very good decision to fire them. The company's value will drop even more if the company continues to pay for the use of assets when there is no plan to effectively use them in the future.
When the storm hits, the good Captain says "all hands on deck" - NOT "let's throw the sailors overboard."
They already did all hands on deck back in 2012. It didn't work. Now they will all drown, including upper management, although your analogy falls apart there because in this case "drowning" means different things for different workers. Some easily find new jobs, and some never recover. It depends on their individual value to society.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful."
So someone is in a different class of society just because of their paycheque? Presumable when (not if) she's fired she'll be back down the class ladder when her salary is zero?
Her income will most likely never be zero again. Her net worth is high enough she can count on at least a $5-$10 million yearly income for the rest of her life. Her current salary is not the primary reason she is in the wealthy class. It is her net worth.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I totally agree with what you're saying. Here's where it breaks down. Mayer has a bunch of money due solely to incredibly good luck and timing. Nothing more. It has nothing to do with her abilities (obviously), education, or any of that. She was in the right place at the right time.
So she's in a "class" that's occupied by people who made a bunch of money at business, and powerball winners. Although she made her money in business technically the reality is that she's on the "powerball winner" side of the aisle, if you catch my drift. So it's not terribly surprising that when you put her into a position like this she falters.
I also agree with you that Marissa Mayer was not up for this task. I thought it was a bad decision in 2012 and I still think that now. But I do think it is unfair to lump her in with "powerball winners", even if just metaphorically. She was certainly lucky to have the opportunity to be rewarded for her skills with hundreds of millions of dollars. But it was her accomplishments that earned her the job with Google, and it was her accomplishments that allowed her to succeed at Google. Not all of the 18 employees hired before Marissa or the 20 or so employees hired after her had the same level of success. A large portion of the credit for that success does go to Marissa.
That said, if she re-lived her life 100 times with slight modifications she is probably only a Senior VP at some company in most of those lives. But that could be said for the vast majority if not all of the world's self-made wealthy elite. There is always a hefty amount of both luck and ability involved in making hundreds of millions of dollars. If you treated every successful businessperson who had a lucky career as a "powerball winner", they would probably all earn that distinction.
Of course, she is in an impossible position, anyway, but the company should have pulled a real entrepreneur in if they wanted to have a radical turnaround.
Most "real entrepreneurs" were just as lucky as Marissa Mayer when achieving their success. That includes Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Yahoo could have certainly chosen other startup founders / early employees, but something about Mrs. Mayer made them think she was the right person for the job. That may have been a bad decision, or someone else may have failed even harder. It really is impossible to know for sure.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
There are millions of people who, for whatever reason, are happy to use Yahoo services and there is no reason why the company can not keep them running well and earning salary for employees. The problem is logically impossible expectation of infinite growth placed on public companies. Sooner or later this drives every successful company into collapse after losing their pyramid scheme and investors flock to the latest overhyped startup to try to recoup their losses with more gambling.
And you might also want to think about pay in terms of productivity. Since 1973 it has gone up by about 100% in the US. And yet wages for many people have fallen in real terms. Median household income should be double what it is and perhaps more given that the number of working adults per household has increased as women have gone to work full time.
That depends on why productivity has risen in the past 40 years. In the mid 1900's I would attribute most of that to educating the middle class. From 1900 to 1960 the number of college graduates rose from about 7% to 25%, over a 200% increase. From 1960-Today it has only risen to about 30%: a 20% increase. In the mid 1900's the workers were seeing increased wages along with their increased productivity because it was their increased skills that made them more productive.
For the past 40 years, however, I believe most of the increased productivity has come from increased investment in equipment, such as computers and robotics. Therefore now the benefits of increased productivity is going to those who invested in that equipment, not the people who use them. That is only a theory but I think it reflects the economic reality very well.
In terms of finding 'good people'. I have personally met outstanding people who not only are smart and well educated but have excellent communications and people skills. They made good money - mid six figures. I am certain they could have done a better job than Marissa Mayer running Yahoo and they would have agreed to do it for a mere $1 million. Yet they are never seriously considered because of the tight knit and self referential world of executives.
One of those people may have done a better job than Marissa Mayer, although of course it is only with hindsight that we believe Marissa did a poor job. The important thing to remember is there isn't much of a difference between a CEO making $1 million per year or $23 million. You are comparing 0.02% of Yahoo's yearly revenue with 0.5%. If for whatever reason I thought a VP at a $200 billion company could improve my company's revenue by 2% more than one of your middle management $150k salary friends, I would gladly pay that extra $20 million per year.
I believe you are correct that a vast number of skilled people are passed over for executives positions because they are never considered. But just like I want a plumber or my house who has worked on a residential home instead of just commercial buildings, a company board wants someone from senior management in a successful multi-billion dollar company to run their multi-billion dollar company. They don't want to take a chance the best SMB printer sales manager in Ohio. I can't really blame them, because when I hire people for personal or professional reasons I also want someone who's current career trajectory shows they are a good fit for the job.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
And the competent replacement will need to start off by firing thousands of workers. What competent person is going to want the job?
Any number of sociopathic executives. The golden parachute will be provided in advance of course.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Mind you, this is the company that owns Tumblr. Logic has no place in their world.
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
If you ruined the company you would be fired and get nothing. When she ruins the company she gets her severance package and another nice C level job destroying something else.
The difference is, at her level incompetence is not only free of negative consequences, it's actively rewarded. Why can't I be rewarded for being shit at my job?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Doesn't it burn your ass to know that if she were to get fired, she'd walk away with tens of millions of dollars?
Try one hundred million dollars.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Your hypothetical sounds plausible in the generic, but Mayer came to Yahoo from Google.
QED: nobody is interested in preventing Mayer from using her knowledge of the Internet search and email businesses elsewhere in industry
"We're not not doing layoffs" remixes indeed. I'm sure the Department of Labor will completely agree with her new "not layoff" jargon.
And the string of acquisitions by Mayer, handing out hundreds of millions to buy companies of questionable value from her friends, former Googlers, brings home the self-referential self-dealing of big business execs.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
If you ruined the company you would be fired and get nothing. When she ruins the company she gets her severance package and another nice C level job destroying something else.
The difference is, at her level incompetence is not only free of negative consequences, it's actively rewarded. Why can't I be rewarded for being shit at my job?
Negotiate a contract with your next company to pay you $X dollars if you are fired. You will need to convince them your future earnings would be negatively impacted if you fail, and the risk of failure is too high to take a risk on their job offer otherwise. I doubt you are in a position to negotiate such a contract, but then again there are people in this country who can't negotiate a $9 hourly wage.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
And the competent replacement will need to start off by firing thousands of workers. What competent person is going to want the job?
More people than you realize, on the theory that it's not in clear skies and smooth sailing you need a good captain. Some CEOs more or less specialize in this, join a rotten company and find the parts worth keeping, do the harsh cuts then move on to the next rescue/salvage project. If they can get a reputation for turning things around it could pay off very well. They're not going to win any popularity contests but usually they're just the ones announcing the layoffs. It's much worse for the middle managers that have to lay off the individuals. It's the CEOs that took a successful company and put it in a nosedive that I'm surprised finds new work.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But fear not good citizens, Mayer will probably get a severance package equal to the salaries of the people she fired.
I mean, there has to be justice for the woman, right?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
.... on the Democrat side. The GOP still has >10 candidates, while on the Dem side, you have a Socialist vs someone who's under the FBI microscope. Toss Meyer in - she could be their answer to Carly
Fire all the executives and save a whole lot more money plus cutting dead weight that does nothing at all for the company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I would argue that if her net worth is actually $300 million then she doesn't really need *any* severance, especially for doing a bad job and/or bad company performance during (or because of) her tenure. These golden parachutes executives get are more about ego than anything else. They already make something like 500% more than their employees make. At most, they should get the same kind of severance other people in their company would get.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Actually she got to her position because she was the girlfriend of one of Googles founders (Page). You can go look it up.
The Neo Con shuffle 1. Use quid-pro quo with connections to get into the board or at least an executive gig at a tech company. 2. Outsource as much as possible to (incompetent) head shops. 3. Layoff everybody you can. 4. Reap the rewards!, pay yourself and other executives/board members huge bonuses! 5. As the company begins to sink see step 1.
You raise a good point, but how can she become a VP candidate for the next election unless she exits Yahoo now?
back in 2013 and was able to see this from the inside. Everyone would spend most of their time playing Diplomacy and just like the board game, it was impossible to win without stabbing someone in the back. Even if you survive one round, to survive the next you'd need to betray someone new. I have no idea why anyone would think "Survivor" would be a good work atmosphere -- but that's probably why I don't have a multi-million dollar salary.
I was happy being a contractor because (a) free food was good (b) I had no job security -- but neither did they and (c) pleasing my manager by doing good work was easy enough.
The other problem, was of course, most of their products are completely worthless. As one investor put it, Y! has three businesses worth keeping: mail (most popular provider in the world), Finance (most popular free stocks site), and Sports (again, most popular free site -- more users than ESPN). All three teams could easily fit inside a single building with some room to spare for day-to-day operational stuff (server maintenance and the like).
So cutting divisions like Games (bingo...seriously?) totally makes sense.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Of course, whenever she loses her job (voluntarily or involuntarily), I'm sure there's a golden parachute that will deploy and she'll be set for life either way.
Even with Yahoo's stock tanking, Marissa Mayer doesn't need a golden parachute to be set for life.
If they required these managers to invest significant amounts of their own money in the company before taking the job, they wouldn't take the job in the first place because it would always be a horrible investment from a diversification standpoint.
The simple and easy solution to this is to completely eliminate the shielding that exists between investors' personal assets and the concrete results of corporate policies.
If an investor is personally responsible for everything his money helped cause, then extreme diversification becomes a severe liability. Did you invest in an investment fund that purchased shares in your name from a company that was found to subcontract to a company involved in child slavery? Now you are guilty of personally trading in child slavery, will all the legal and criminal implications involved in it, including the legal obligation to fully compensate your victims, no workarounds allowed, not even insurance shielding. Don't want risk ending bankrupt and in jail because you put your money where it shouldn't be? Don't invest in anything you don't know perfectly well, be always on top of things, and never allow it to lead to anything even remotely socially negative.
That alone would do wonders in making the entire world of big business turn from the greedy rapaciousness we came to expect of it into one in which every rich person takes extreme care about where they put their money, as putting their money anywhere, including in a bank account, now has consequences that go far beyond merely losing that amount.
Investment funds would still exist, but they'd be very different. Instead of just huge analytical schemes trying to find where's the highest ROI and switching what they according this one single parameter, they'd have troops of managers directly combing very finely every legal and moral aspect of whatever they were looking into putting their clients' money so as to be absolutely sure not only their clients, but they themselves, would not end up poor and in jail.
Do you know that old saying according which freedom requires responsibility? Modern capitalism has set things in such a way that the rich have tons of freedom and very little actual responsibility. Fixing that doesn't require toppling capitalism. Rebalancing things so that responsibility grows proportionally with freedom would to the trick.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
There are plenty of professional axe-men in the industry that would happily take the job for far less of a golden parachute that Mayer received, knowing full well they are only going to be there temporarily anyway.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Crazy like a fox! Page figured out what a screw-up she was, and recommended her highly to Yahoo so she could run somebody else's company into the ground instead of his own! (This is purely speculation on my part, of course.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Yahoo has been doomed ever since rejecting a MS offer of 44.6 Billion dollars. They were on the slide long before that, mostly because Google is so successful.
http://financesonline.com/top-...
Ironically, even in the attached URL Yahoo is broken!
Something I've never figured out: CEO's primary job is increasing share value. So why aren't they all just paid minimum wage, plus a bonus proportional to how much they increase shareholder value buy? Stock goes down, they eat beans and wieners for dinner. Are all CEO too greedy to accept such a deal? Seems to me, if you had faith in your ability, you'd take the gamble.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
That requires convincing?
No problem! Let me propose a slate of my best friends to be the board members who vote on the contract. Do you agree? Yes/Abstain (I voted Yes)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
she's on the "powerball winner" side of the aisle, if you catch my drift.
More like "powerbush", if you catch my drift.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The simple and easy solution to this is to completely eliminate the shielding that exists between investors' personal assets and the concrete results of corporate policies.
This is the exact type of simplistic and unreasonable logic that allows people to believe these are easily solvable problems if only the world wasn't corrupt.
No matter how good controls would be, there would be no way to stop some middle manager from trying to cut a corner and fudge an earnings report. Are you going to put thousands or even millions of people in jail because some manager committed fraud trying to hit his quarterly numbers? All he has to do is profit over $500 from the fraud for it to be a felony, and now all investors of that company just committed a felony because one guy committed one illegal act. It is simply silly.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
>have a shitty reference
Depending on where you are from, they may only be allowed to confirm the dates you were employed. Anything negative said could open them up to a lawsuit.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Taking stupid risks, and that's what this was, with other people's lives and livelihoods needs to be punished and not rewarded.
Everyone harmed by Yahoo's actions is immeasurably more responsible for their lives and livelihoods than Marissa Mayer or anyone on Yahoo's board of directors. Shareholders have not been harmed since the stock price has risen 88% since Marissa Mayer took over (it increased over 200% before dropping in late 2014). Any existing employees have had plenty of time to leave and all new employees knew what they were getting themselves into. Yahoo has been very open about its intent to take huge risks and try to turn itself into a growth company again. Owning Yahoo stock or working for them should have been considered a high risk investment for some time.
No one has been taken advantage of here.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Imagine that instead of hiring Steve Ballmer, Microsoft would have merely hired an average MIT PhD engineering graduate in their 30s or 40s with some business and management experience.
That's exactly what Microsoft did. Ballmer was assistant product manager at Proctor & Gamble before Microsoft and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, but I guess that's not as good as MIT. Also, that whole part about being with the company since 1980 when they were virtually an unknown to being such a massive force that they underwent an investigation for monopolistic practices, we should just overlook that part as well. Most people also seem to forget that he was the Microsoft CEO since way back in 2000......some products released during his tenure were real stinkers, but these "better products" that you wish for, some of them actually occurred during his tenure (think Windows XP, Windows 7, SQL Server 2000, Exchange, Windows 2000).
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I mostly agree with what you said, but I think your argument would have been far more convincing had it been written in a more polite manner, as the discussion has been so far. I don't think you will get a reply after taking such an aggressive tone to state your opinion.
If you actually agreed with what the AC said, you wouldn't be trying to detract from his arguments by making idiotic claims about his alleged "tone".
"Tone" is nothing more than you projecting your own hypersensitivity; it has exactly nothing to do with the fact that the AC is spot-on.
And I suppose since you find the GP "aggressive", you'll find me "abusive". So be it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's not that Yahoo has negative valuation. It's that everybody knows the Chinese stocks are in a bubble (_Average_ PE Ratio on the Shanghai exchange is in the 70 neighborhood).
And you can't liquidate your holdings. China says 'No selling and no talking.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well, are you more inclined to listen to someone who starts out by calling you names? "You must be a moron to believe this", or in this case, "so much stupid in this statement"? I think these types of attacks detract from his main argument, so he's only doing to himself what you accuse me right now of doing. I think personally that the way the AC stated his opinion simply deserves no reply, which is what he is going to get. Not that I think he cares, but nonetheless such pointless abuse is a distraction from the subject at hand, and people will focus on that, whether you think it is idiotic or not.
Sepaku!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Apply the argument to any non-executive in the same company. Oh, I hear the roars of protest already! "We can't compare non-executive salaries to executive salaries, the percentage of revenues isn't the same!" However in any other context, the "percentage of revenues" argument isn't used. At all. Ever. So why is it relevant when discussing executive salaries? Answer: It isn't relevant. Next question!
Good job shooting down the straw man argument you proposed. Why would calculating the ROI of an employee be restricted to only executives? An employer should be considering the ROI when hiring any employee, from a fast food cashier to a CEO. I am only a senior level software developer / technical architect, but my pay is still closely tied to the ROI I can provide compared to my employer's other options. During initial salary negotiations my current employer tried reducing my requested salary by mentioning they had another candidate who was asking for $30k less. I was being hired to improve their CRM system, and my primary argument was their salespersons' opportunity close rate would be significantly impacted by whoever they hire. $30k was a negligible amount, so they should make their decision on who they feel will do a better job. Considering my very significant merit raise and bonus after my first year, they likely felt they made the right choice.
No, what is relevant is the issue of Value Added. Is the executive Value Add, worth the sums we pay them? And I say it isn't. No one has ever made a cogent argument, based upon inarguable facts, that paying the CEO $1 million versus $23 million, results in better performance. Let alone 23x better performance.
First off, you don't have to provide 23x better performance to be worth 23x as much. You just need to be add more value than you are paid. Those are wildly different targets.
Second, I will agree that I have never seen a good study showing if highly paid CEOs do better or worse than lower paid CEOs. There are some studies that only track company performance and compare it to CEO pay, but that ignores the possibility that companies in crisis would pay CEOs even more to correct their problems or join a company where their job is to manage losses instead of creating gains.
One more thing. When we as shareholders continue to pay millions of dollars in compensation to executives, and the company performance is flat to negative, what kind of messages are we sending there?
Shareholders are sending the message that they cannot do any better themselves, or they would put their money somewhere else.
Put it into pure, hard-nosed economic terms. Imagine someone offered to sell you office paper for $1000/ream, and told you that you had to do it to remain "competitive", and that you needed the "right kind of paper" because you "just don't get the same quality of document" unless all your correspondence was printed on "hand-crafted, 100% organic, all cotton, artisanal blend from disadvantaged youth in Bolivia". What would any sane person say in response to that? They'd say it might be a nice notion but seriously, bugger off. It isn't affordable, it isn't practical, and the economic value added just isn't there.
If you think the quality of paper a company uses is as significant to a company's success as the quality of their workers, there isn't much point to discussing this with you. I'm assuming that is not what you meant to say, but it is all your analogy is implying. Although just to be clear, I agree that paper is not important enough to a company's success to ever be worth 100x the price of standard paper. I simply disagree that this is analogous to the value more qualified employees can bring to a company.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It is simply silly.
No, it isn't. Suppose you yourself were living in the scenario I described above and, yes, if an individual below you commits fraud you are responsible too. How would you act? How would you setup your company so as to avoid being sent to prison by effect of middle managers' greed?
I'm sure the simple fact I asked question has caused you to begin thinking on possible risk mitigation solutions, hasn't it?
Now think an entire world of entrepreneurs thinking over that exact same question. Don't you think they'd have developed and kept improving best practices? Practices that are so ingrained in such a world's entrepreneurial culture they are taught in universities, absorbed in trainee years, and all but became second nature to anyone who deals with any significant amount of money?
Yes, it's workable. It might be unimaginable if you only spent one minute thinking about it. For a culture that spent (or were beginning to spend) tens of thousands of man-years thinking about it however, not so much. There, it's just how things are.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Mayer has a bunch of money due solely to incredibly good luck and timing. Nothing more. It has nothing to do with her abilities (obviously), education, or any of that. She was in the right place at the right time.
This applies to most really rich people, and certainly to anyone born with well off parents who could give them a good start in life.
The idea that anyone can pull themselves from poverty to billionaire by sheer talent and hard work is just a fairy tale designed, like religion before it, to stop people realising the truth of the system they are in.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
And the string of acquisitions by Mayer, handing out hundreds of millions to buy companies of questionable value from her friends, former Googlers, brings home the self-referential self-dealing of big business execs.
I find it hard to believe that she was simply given the company cheque book and told to buy anything she fancied with no reference to anyone else at all.
And if she wasn't, it's stupid to blame her alone for making questionable purchases. Surely companies the size of Yahoo have investment committees, audit committees, due diligence committees, and so on?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm sure the simple fact I asked question has caused you to begin thinking on possible risk mitigation solutions, hasn't it?
No, it hasn't. Because risk mitigation solutions can only limit risk or create backup plans, not eliminate risk. And when it comes to the possibility of going to prison, that is one risk I want as low as possible. There is no way I would ever invest in any company if I risked jail time for the behavior of all employees at that company. And I would never start a company where I would have to hire employees if I knew any one of them could potentially send me to jail if they broke the law.
Even if mitigation strategies could eliminate all risk, your proposal would mean all startups would need to have their first employees be a watchdog group to set up controls so every future employee could never commit a crime. Startups would immediately be nearly impossible to create, and certainly impossible to bootstrap. Small businesses would stop being formed all over the country. Starting a business is already incredibly high risk, and you are adding risks that are almost immeasurably more severe.
All this would do is make any country which enacts these policies noncompetitive to all other nations. The number of extra employees it would take to turn our companies into a police state capable of ensuring no person was ever even capable of breaking a law in their professional dealings would grind our economy to a halt. An elimination of 95% of our GDP would not be an exaggeration. It is a laughable scenario.
Immediately disregarding suggestions like this is not a sign of intellectual laziness. It is a waste of time on the level of comparing the pros and cons of playing Russian roulette to decide what to have for dinner tonight.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
No, it hasn't.
Yes, it has, because when you wrote "your proposal would mean all startups would need to have their first employees be a watchdog group to set up controls so every future employee could never commit a crime" that's exactly what you did. Proceed in this manner and in a matter of hours you'll have a full set of workable proposals. :-)
By the way:
I would ever invest in any company / I would never start a company
That's fine. You'd be an employee or, better yet, a small scale entrepreneur. A world of small scale entrepreneurs is a good outcome for me. And, to be sure, it's part of an already developed economic system: Distributism.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Correction. Two weeks sense I last checked.
The Shanghai composite is now down to an average PE of just over 50.
Its now only about 400% overvalued.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
But I do think it is unfair to lump her in with "powerball winners", even if just metaphorically.
A better analogy might be a Powerball winner who subsequently burns down the Lottery agency.
I'm surprised they haven't fired Marissa Mayer! A lot of longtime Yahoo customers left Yahoo after they changed their email interface getting rid of a lot of features customers enjoyed with their email application. The new application was also buggy and some people reported losing emails stored on their account. After one designer said that sometimes people need to be kicked in the groin to appreciate good software design, email customers realized Yahoo won't return to Yahoo's classic email or give them the option to stick with what works and left in droves. The interface of Yahoo news started to be disliked by customers because of it's endless scrollbar and people started only receiving fluf news stories supposedly based on their interests. Eventually customers left Yahoo news in droves which is probably why they were losing revenue from advertisements on Yahoo news. I was a longtime Yahoo user that started using Yahoo in the mid-1990s, after they changed their email interface I was one of the droves of customers who left especially when you couldn't even trust that any email someone sends to you or you send to them will get delivered. Half the time I would be scrolling through my emails and would get some numerical error number and get logged out. I have reason to believe there was a bug in their software that allowed hackers to steal passwords since I had my account broken into despite having a very difficult to guess password that would not easily be discovered by brute force attacks. It was a pain to get my account back since Yahoo had gotten rid of customer support and I couldn't find help. I finally gave up on yahoo a couple of years ago. You can read many customer complaint sites such as pissedcustomer.com where people are still indicating how they could not get into their email one day and had troubles getting help from yahoo. Some have said that numbers that use to work are now disconnected and if they are able to get through to Yahoo after waiting two or three hours, they get some rude person who has no idea how to help them with a thick accent that they cannot understand. I think Marissa Mayer got in over her head and wasn't willing to admit it and kept blaming others when things didn't go as planned as a lot of senior Yahoo officials have also left Yahoo along with employees who voluntarily left or were fired to save money. I've heard employee morale has been at an all time low at Yahoo ever since Marissa took over. I don't know if anyone else could have turned yahoo around but it was obvious after 2 years that Marissa was in over her head but she is still with Yahoo to this day.