Upvoted since I think this discussion might be interesting.
I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
And what's unhealthy about tone policing? I'll leave aside the way you've negatively framed my attempt to steer the conversation in a more positive direction, and just say that I don't see what the purpose of publicly bashing a well-compensated CEO who didn't have much success is.
Who is this unhealthy for? For her? For us? For future boards of directors who may be trying to attract a CEO to turn their company around?
> I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
To me it's because she wasn't taking a risk, she was getting paid massive amounts regardless of what she did. Why celebrate someone who enriched herself as the company imploded and had to lay off thousands of people? There are so many other people worth accolades.
Are you so confident in knowing what her objectives were that you can make that statement? For all we know the board wanted to maximize value on the way down.
>I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
It's simply the issue of gratuitous executive pay. If her pay hadn't been >>100x what a typical SV worker makes I think she'd get significantly less flak. The idea of someone being granted enough money so their great-grandchildren never have to work a day when that person did a poor job after only 4 years on the job just makes people sick. Don't forget some bad stuff happened on Mayer's watch; like 1B user accounts being compromised.
> I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
The payment and bashing might be slightly related, but I tend to think it's a minor factor. People focus on financials so much because that's what the western culture is built upon. The American Dream, if you will. However bashing, complimenting, or mentioning someone at all comes with fame. I'm fairly certain people would talk a lot about Marissa Mayer regardless of whether she got paid anything. The ratio of criticism-to-compliments tends to go hand-in-hand with the person's perceived success-to-failure ratio. Marissa Mayer wasn't that successful, and thus she'll mostly get criticism.
> The ratio of criticism-to-compliments tends to go hand-in-hand with the person's perceived success-to-failure ratio.
Intuitively this seems accurate. Wondering if you know of actual research regarding this though?
To add to that, I think people have a hard time assessing relative success. Imagine being dropped in as the captain of the Titanic after it's hit the iceberg. If you manage to delay the sinking for an extra hour, which allows more people to escape, you are successful even if most people do drown. You're successful relative to some expected value. But drive-by armchair analysts will just see that the ship sunk and a bunch of people died and blame you.
Obviously this situation is much more complicated, since opinions will differ about whether Yahoo was in fact inevitably sinking, or whether a different captain could have helped it survive.
I think the comment you're responding to is suggesting that though giving someone (Mayer) the benefit of the doubt might be humane, it may not be, strictly speaking, rationally appropriate.
I believe the financial compensation angle is that because she was particularly well compensated, she is perceived to not have much skin in the game. As an aside, I don't think this is especially productive because it is incredibly rare to find someone running a company who isn't deeply emotionally invested in that enterprise, but the perception remains.
Obviously, though the crowd wants to excoriate Mayer I think if folks have a problem with her compensation they should look to the board.
> I'm wondering why people focus on financial compensation so much? Why does how much someone was paid justify more or less bashing, as the case might be?
Because it reveals the tenuous relationship between executive pay and company results, and people prefer to take it out on the obvious cases rather than accept that there's little evidence they correlate very well.
If I take the time to put criticism of the contract in one mental bucket and criticism of the person and/or her performance in another, I get the impression that the preemptive tone policing loses much of its cause. I'd rather have those two buckets nicely separated than shushed together.
Indeed. I recently found out Michael O'Church was banned from HN because he called her the c word because of the anti-worker policies she implemented at Yahoo. (somewhat indirectly, and I'm hesitant to use it myself for fear of being banned).
I didn't downvote you but I think you see the issue with your statement yourself. HN does not censor words.
While name calling is completely childish it is most certainly tolerated by other users on HN (Do a search for "is a [insert derogatory word]" site:news.ycombinator.com. Steve Jobs is called an asshole in every HN thread.
For sure ochurch stepped on toes here but one thing he was passionate about is improving the profession of software development and in general the tech industry and he saw MMs actions really harming the profession and the industry. I obviously think HN is worse off without his commentary.
I'd want to be well compensated for taking on a job where I was fairly certain I was doomed to fail because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors.
Wouldn't it be unethical to take on a job you were certain you'd fail at? (If you disclosed that, and they hired you anyway, then there's no ethical problem.)
"Fairly certain", though. If her odds of saving Yahoo were twice as good as an alternative CEO, that was a possibility worth a small fortune. And presumably, they knew the odds were low after sacking the last few CEOs. I'm hoping that she didn't even have to say it - a competent board could approach the whole thing with "we're in deep water, we think you're less doomed than most people would be".
That may well have been the case, but if those odds are 1% and 2% I wouldn't want my compensation to depend on me saving the probably-doomed company.
It's perfectly ethical if you've had a frank discussion with your employer about your odds of success. If you sold them the idea that you could save it, but privately were certain you could not, that is plainly and simply unethical.
What level of compensation would it take to make such a statement OK? I'm sure plenty of execs turned it down because of the risk of failure and the inevitable microscope and personal attacks associated with being the CEO of one of the most recognizable but failing companies in the world.
(reasonable) tone policing helps prevent a bunch of armchair quarterbacks with modestly successful programming backgrounds from assuming they have any idea what happens at the executive level of a company like Yahoo.
Side note, but are there any good resources for learning how these things work in reality at the executive level? I haven't found much good reading that isn't a bunch of fluff. Any good educational resources on how these situations are run, how the politics work, how to navigate them, etc. Would be really helpful.
