> Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do.
Through these actions and posts, she looks like someone I wouldn't want to work with, or for.
I avoid people who claim "I am not X, but I know enough to be dangerous" like the plague they are. I've had my share of "I am not an engineer, but I know enough to be dangerous"; they're the people who think you used two decoupling caps in parallel because you couldn't find one with the right value, or who are always there to help you with an obvious and useless tip when you're debugging a program -- and then you spend five minutes explaining them why they're not even close to the problem (partly because they used some words that mean something different than what they thought they mean). And take another fifteen to gather back your focus, as a bonus.
Second, if I had some work to do, the last thing I'd want is the CEO in my room. Yahoo looks like a big company, don't they have some CEO-ing to do? When you decide you want to make a career out of pushing papers and borderline lying to investors, stick to it.
Third, having the CEO bug you and working weekends is a really low, indecent form of manipulation. Someone who's designs stuff for Yahoo is probably experienced enough to have gone past the "I have to work weekends to impress my boss and jumpstart my career" phase. The dudes probably had families to spend time with (or bars to hit and get drunk over the grudge of their loneliness, whatever). Let them go home, you can brag to the press about what a workaholic culture your company has without actually keeping your employees at work over the weekend.
Sure, if the atmosphere is fun enough, it may seem like you're having fun and playing, but this doesn't avoid the burnout, it just makes its settling less painful.
> finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page.
This is clearly destined to appeal to the ambitious, 21-year hipster who wants to be a corporate drone but with style, you know, like he's not a corporate drone. Job-desperate, loan-starved young graduates who want to subscribe to the 70 hours a week -- but oh so fun -- culture.
I don't think they are to be condemned (we were all pretty stupid when we were 21), but someone who perpetuates this culture isn't to be admired and certainly not made an example of, not among tech professionals anyway. Among Wall Street investors? Sure, who the hell wouldn't admire someone who can make people work over weekends and proud of it.
Also -- at the risk of doing a sexist no-no -- I can't help but wonder how someone like, say, Steve Ballmer, which I guess no one around here wants to do, would have been treated if he were the one treating his employees like this -- micromanaging exactly the people you shouldn't micromanage (i.e. the creative team), over a weekend, then bragging about how hip it is.
Breathing life into a company is a difficult task, and Marissa Mayer seems to be trying to do exactly that. Initial success is obviously to be applauded, but don't be overly enthusiastic. The smith's fire will eat through the coals and make the iron unworkable if you overwork the bellows.
> Yahoo looks like a big company, don't they have some CEO-ing to do? When you decide you want to make a career out of pushing papers and borderline lying to investors, stick to it.
Do you purposely have you head in the sand or haven't you heard of all the policy changes and various acquisitions?
Besides, branding is "CEO" type work.
> Initial success is obviously to be applauded, but don't be overly enthusiastic.
Hmm, let's see. In the past year, Yahoo!'s stock price is up 91.6%. That's pretty good "initial success".
Remember what happened before that? From 2007 onwards, Yahoo went through 5 CEO's.
Branding is CEO type work. Logo design isn't. Encouraging people to put all their resources into their work is awesome. "Jumping into the trenches" (oh, over the weekend!) isn't what the CEO of a multi-billion company does, it's what an arrogant, career-oriented boss who can't delegate does to compensate for his apparent lack of sufficient involvement.
Leading an agenda of technological innovation is also "CEO" type work, but would you like to do pair programming with the CEO (who hasn't worked on anything longer than a thousand lines in half a decade) on a Sunday evening?
> Hmm, let's see. In the past year, Yahoo!'s stock price is up 91.6%. That's pretty good "initial success".
That's one year. It's something well worth the "initial" mention. That's less than a fifth of the time Carly Fiorina spent at HP, and she also did a lot of important strategic moves.
"Jumping into the trenches" (oh, over the weekend!) isn't what the CEO of a multi-billion company does, it's what an arrogant, career-oriented boss who can't delegate does to compensate for his apparent lack of sufficient involvement.
That's absolutely ridiculous. Plenty of CEOs carve out a little time to jump into the trenches and work on things they really care about, or work on fun things to relax and get away from the big stuff for a little bit. Nothing about that says "arrogant, career-oriented boss who can't delegate and requires compensating for lack of involvement." May be Marissa Mayer thinks the logo is important enough to warrant her attention. Or may be she just wanted to work on something fun to get a break from the boardroom for a day or two. Or may be it's both.
Jumping to conclusions about someone you don't know based on a breezy blog post about a logo project seems far more arrogant to me than her taking a few days to work closely on this project.
> That's absolutely ridiculous. Plenty of CEOs carve out a little time to jump into the trenches and work on things they really care about, or work on fun things to relax and get away from the big stuff for a little bit.
Come on, read through the lines :-).
My post isn't to be read in terms of "Marissa Mayer is an arrogant, career-oriented boss"; it's my own experience there, and should be read in terms of "I've seen people do what she did, and they were arrogant, career-oriented bosses". Correlation doesn't imply causation; for all we know, it could be that she's a talented graphic designer with exceptional leadership skills, but I have my doubts on it.
That being said, Yahoo's logo change was a big move. It's the visual spearhead of their rebranding. That's hardly a fun thing you do to relax and get away from the big stuff, so that leaves important.
Leaving management principles aside, the polite thing to do when something is really important is generally to leave it to people who are good at it and not put unneeded pressure on them. The whole stream of action reeked of manipulation -- which, as it always happens, may not have been intentional, but that doesn't make it stink any less.
I am not being intentionally thick or judgmental based on nothing but a blog post. I am relating it to my previous experience, and definitely hope I am wrong (for the sake of Yahoo's employees, if anything).
> Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do.
Through these actions and posts, she looks like someone I wouldn't want to work with, or for.
I avoid people who claim "I am not X, but I know enough to be dangerous" like the plague they are. I've had my share of "I am not an engineer, but I know enough to be dangerous"; they're the people who think you used two decoupling caps in parallel because you couldn't find one with the right value, or who are always there to help you with an obvious and useless tip when you're debugging a program -- and then you spend five minutes explaining them why they're not even close to the problem (partly because they used some words that mean something different than what they thought they mean). And take another fifteen to gather back your focus, as a bonus.
Second, if I had some work to do, the last thing I'd want is the CEO in my room. Yahoo looks like a big company, don't they have some CEO-ing to do? When you decide you want to make a career out of pushing papers and borderline lying to investors, stick to it.
Third, having the CEO bug you and working weekends is a really low, indecent form of manipulation. Someone who's designs stuff for Yahoo is probably experienced enough to have gone past the "I have to work weekends to impress my boss and jumpstart my career" phase. The dudes probably had families to spend time with (or bars to hit and get drunk over the grudge of their loneliness, whatever). Let them go home, you can brag to the press about what a workaholic culture your company has without actually keeping your employees at work over the weekend.
Sure, if the atmosphere is fun enough, it may seem like you're having fun and playing, but this doesn't avoid the burnout, it just makes its settling less painful.
> finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page.
This is clearly destined to appeal to the ambitious, 21-year hipster who wants to be a corporate drone but with style, you know, like he's not a corporate drone. Job-desperate, loan-starved young graduates who want to subscribe to the 70 hours a week -- but oh so fun -- culture.
I don't think they are to be condemned (we were all pretty stupid when we were 21), but someone who perpetuates this culture isn't to be admired and certainly not made an example of, not among tech professionals anyway. Among Wall Street investors? Sure, who the hell wouldn't admire someone who can make people work over weekends and proud of it.
Also -- at the risk of doing a sexist no-no -- I can't help but wonder how someone like, say, Steve Ballmer, which I guess no one around here wants to do, would have been treated if he were the one treating his employees like this -- micromanaging exactly the people you shouldn't micromanage (i.e. the creative team), over a weekend, then bragging about how hip it is.
Breathing life into a company is a difficult task, and Marissa Mayer seems to be trying to do exactly that. Initial success is obviously to be applauded, but don't be overly enthusiastic. The smith's fire will eat through the coals and make the iron unworkable if you overwork the bellows.