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Arsenic Lupin posted:If I recall correctly, she didn't get options, she got actual stock. Even with the stock falling, that's still millions, and the golden parachute is in money, not stock. "They" referred to Yahoo, not her comp package. I thought Yahoo was already worth worth more as scrap when she was hired.
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Feb 26, 2016 19:17
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FilthyImp posted:Obviously you underestimate the value of a sock-puppet mascot. But even if you're 8, I think you can recognize "poo poo this 9-11 thing is bad and scary" and place it as a turning point of some kind. Even if it's just "All this news is taking Gundam off the TV!" like it was with Gulf War 1. I distinctly remember being in the "Campus Club" room for kids whose busy parents drop them off before school starts, when I was 9 years old. The supervisor wheeled a TV in front of us showing the news, and I saw the coolest loving explosions ever!!! It was an awesome day.
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Feb 26, 2016 19:18
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pangstrom posted:It was a consistent August treat for the last ~10 years to go to the Yahoo page to find fantasy football again and dear god the visual chaos. If a company decided to not buy Yahoo for $1 out of a superstitious fear that a design contagion could spread into their company I wouldn't blame them. redscare posted:Yahoo's history is a comedy of unforced errors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo! Munkeymon posted:I thought they were already worth more on paper than in stock when she was brought on, no? Granted, her buying a bunch of garbage for too much money just made that worse, but still, she just failed to stop the inevitable rather than taking an OK company and loving it over.
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Feb 26, 2016 19:18
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Munkeymon posted:E: also lol that people don't remember that there were MS smartphones for about a decade before there was a usable iPhone worth buying. There were MS smartphones for about a decade before there was a usable MS smartphone. I left the last two words of the quote out for a reason.
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Feb 26, 2016 19:37
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Wheany posted:There were MS smartphones for about a decade before there was a usable MS smartphone. Fair point but I wasn't referring to your post?
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Feb 26, 2016 19:55
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MS biggest problem in mobile space is either where either generations ahead of technology (the tablets they where making in the late 90's), a generation behind or so weird no one wants to use it. Of course they also own so many patients that they make a huge amount of money from every Android phone sold and more then likely will get a massive winfall whenever they settle with Apple.
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Feb 26, 2016 21:02
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Don't people like her love being ceo? So parachuting off into the sunset with her gold wouldn't be her thing. And ending yahoo on a bad note would hurt her chances at being ceo of another big company no?
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Feb 26, 2016 21:11
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Holyshoot posted:Don't people like her love being ceo? So parachuting off into the sunset with her gold wouldn't be her thing. And ending yahoo on a bad note would hurt her chances at being ceo of another big company no? I think people like that mostly just like having comical amounts of money and being guaranteed to get more. That's the problem with stuff like golden parachutes; doesn't matter what happens in the end she still gets paid.
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Feb 26, 2016 21:20
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I just want to understand why CEOs are held to such low standards of accountability. They are quite literally less materially responsible for their actions than a call center rep, in many large orgs. Why would you accept this as a board member?
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Feb 26, 2016 21:20
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Radbot posted:I just want to understand why CEOs are held to such low standards of accountability. They are quite literally less materially responsible for their actions than a call center rep, in many large orgs. Why would you accept this as a board member? Probably because the board has similarly low levels of accountability and are looking to get payouts for it. I'm going to guess that she's good at cutting costs and increasing dividends or something like that. This is not a class that is playing by the same rules as the rest of us; short term gains are all that matters and it's totally fine to burn a company down and pillage it if you're getting hundreds of millions of dollars out of it.
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Feb 26, 2016 21:24
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Radbot posted:I just want to understand why CEOs are held to such low standards of accountability. They are quite literally less materially responsible for their actions than a call center rep, in many large orgs. Why would you accept this as a board member? Because then you're held to a similar standard and everybody gets to raid the piggy bank. that and also most board directors historically wildly overpay to get their person as ceo despite studies showing little to no difference versus the average.
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Feb 26, 2016 21:30
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Radbot posted:I just want to understand why CEOs are held to such low standards of accountability. They are quite literally less materially responsible for their actions than a call center rep, in many large orgs. Why would you accept this as a board member? It's not uncommon for a company in trouble to be systematically looted by the people running it. One of the most egregious examples I've read about is what happened to Colt, the famous and venerable firearms company, starting in the early 2000s. quote:Over the next several years, Colt Defense went through the private equity leverage wringer. Sciens Capital and its affiliates loaded the company with debt while taking out cash in the form of “distributions” and “advisory fees.” The 2005 SEC filing shows payouts totaling $40 million over the two prior years—a significant amount for a company in such fragile financial health. In 2006, another SEC filing shows, the company redeemed “members’ equity” worth $41 million. In 2007, Colt Defense agreed to borrow $150 million in a “leveraged recapitalization” that featured distributions to “members” of $131 million. In 2009 it borrowed an additional $250 million, while multimillion-dollar payouts continued. For 2010, Colt Defense had sales of $176 million—more than double what they were in 2004—but registered an $11 million loss. The article that I pulled that quote from is worth a read because it shows in detail how the company got itself into the position of being the target of corporate looters. It's entirely possible that Yahoo is in a similar position, where its only real value is as a way to line the pockets of higher-ups before they jump ship.
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Feb 26, 2016 21:58
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:It's not uncommon for a company in trouble to be systematically looted by the people running it. One of the most egregious examples I've read about is what happened to Colt, the famous and venerable firearms company, starting in the early 2000s. In a leveraged buy out they usually keep management quiet by bribing them with salary increases. The talk of "go private" might be them shopping for a firm to do a bust out on Yahoo.
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Feb 26, 2016 23:32
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Is stack ranking and equivalent bellcurve-based employment metrics a means to this sort of raiding practice?
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Feb 27, 2016 00:24
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Discendo Vox posted:Is stack ranking and equivalent bellcurve-based employment metrics a means to this sort of raiding practice? Stack ranking is apparently more or less the same as grading a class on a curve. It's stupid because if you have 100 students and they're all understanding the material and doing A-level work they should all get A's. But a curve requires that you fail some of them whether or not they deserve it. It also puts them in competition with each other. One of the weird things about the tech sector is that libertarianism and "more competition is always good" are ideas that caught hold. Companies are deliberately pitting employees against each other by implementing these sorts of policies. The idea is that you encourage good work by rewarding your top performers which, really, is a fine idea but the way these companies are implementing it has led to situations where people deliberately sabotage each other rather than try to be the best. Amazon apparently has nasty, nasty culture that people tend to just run away from because of that kind of idea. It's absurd because if you had the best 100 programmers in the world on a project you would be required to fire a certain number of them in that kind of system but like...if you have the best 100 programmers in the world why the gently caress would you fire any of them? That's my understanding of it, anyway. In the case of corporate raiding it's a good way to reduce costs by eliminating people and telling everybody it's their own fault they got fired because, hey, if they wanted to not get fired they'd work harder to get ranked better, right? It's also a way to squeeze productivity out of people. Bob works 70 hours a week. You want to be the best performer? Well do more than Bob. Stay for 71. Oh by the way Sandy decided to stay 90 to get the top rank. Beat that, pleb. 
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Feb 27, 2016 00:37
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I'm familiar with what stack ranking is, I just wasn't sure if it was specifically a way to justify gutting a company while extracting value. It sounds like the answer is "hell yes".
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Feb 27, 2016 00:49
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Radbot posted:I just want to understand why CEOs are held to such low standards of accountability. They are quite literally less materially responsible for their actions than a call center rep, in many large orgs. Why would you accept this as a board member?
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Feb 27, 2016 00:50
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm familiar with what stack ranking is, I just wasn't sure if it was specifically a way to justify gutting a company while extracting value. It sounds like the answer is "hell yes". Not really. I mean if you want to fire the lowest x% of performers you can do it pretty much under any performance assessment system you want. Stack ranking just makes the whole compensation/promotion/etc system a zero-sum game. Stack ranking is associated with lots of other undesirable things, but it's not intrinsically aimed at gutting a company or anything. Microsoft did stack ranking for basically forever and it wasn't primarily for firing people or lowering compensation or anything like that.
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Feb 27, 2016 00:59
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Gail Wynand posted:Also my understanding is that the no telecommuting thing at Google is often for security purposes. A lot of their source code and data can't leave the building for very good reasons. Geez, seriously? Doubtless many engineers there have laptops, and those laptops have hard drives. I assume all devices which connect to the private network are managed, which helps, but one of the problems with the private network approach is that it puts too much trust and authority on employees. There have been papers and presentations from Google people about the system they're moving to, where as many resources as possible will be exposed to the open Internet, and each request will be independently evaluated on who's making it, what they're allowed to do/see, and what state their device is in. I've never worked at Google but I have worked at secure facilities that have very serious rules against code leaving the premises (technically i suppose they were "laws"  ), and I've seen the practice have knock-on effects which...well, I'd be shocked if Google tolerated them. Or at least, intrigued to see how they avoided them.
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Feb 27, 2016 01:11
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's absurd because if you had the best 100 programmers in the world on a project you would be required to fire a certain number of them in that kind of system but like...if you have the best 100 programmers in the world why the gently caress would you fire any of them? Stack ranking is bad because it fosters an overly competitive environment and promotes distrust and a zero-sum mindset where you can only get ahead at the expense of a co-worker (or even team member). It also makes painfully clear that 95% of workers are simple cogs in a great machine, easily replaceable and anonymous numbers instead of real humans. Its not bad because "what if every employee was an amazing hard working person who deserved to stay on!" because that can never be proven and is easily dismissed by the bosses.
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Feb 27, 2016 01:53
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I think Yahoo! is a rare case where opening the checkbook for the CEO you want is actually pretty defensible. Huge company with money that is clearly in a bad spot and no clear path to a better place etc. Like yeah I'm sure a small voice is telling the candidate "if I pull this off I'm a legend" but you'd have to be grandiose as hell for that to drown out the "sinking ship!" klaxon.
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Feb 27, 2016 02:27
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Doc Hawkins posted:I've never worked at Google but I have worked at secure facilities that have very serious rules against code leaving the premises (technically i suppose they were "laws" Might I inquire as to what those knock-on effects are? Because, logically, if I had to manage source code I knew was pretty important, a secure premise would be one of the obvious solutions for doing that.
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Feb 27, 2016 03:46
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Doc Hawkins posted:Geez, seriously? Doubtless many engineers there have laptops, and those laptops have hard drives. I assume all devices which connect to the private network are managed, which helps, but one of the problems with the private network approach is that it puts too much trust and authority on employees. There have been papers and presentations from Google people about the system they're moving to, where as many resources as possible will be exposed to the open Internet, and each request will be independently evaluated on who's making it, what they're allowed to do/see, and what state their device is in. AFAIK laptops at Google aren't allowed to have production code on them and all employees have desktops, and I've also heard (from a separate employee) that even internal data has a lot of restrictions and permissions are required to access the data of any team besides the main one that you work on.
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Feb 27, 2016 03:49
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm familiar with what stack ranking is, I just wasn't sure if it was specifically a way to justify gutting a company while extracting value. It sounds like the answer is "hell yes". Consider a few different combinations of market share and market growth:  Private equity loves cash cows. Since there is little change in what is usually a stagnant industry, private equity can sell off assets, strip earnings, and load the company with debt for a long time before anything bad happens. Typically, the playbook is to make the company competitive again by firing lots of people, installing members of your PE firm on the board, and installing long-term contracts for management fees, with Bain being the most famous example. After the company is able to show earnings growth (remember, not much changes, so revenues are the same while costs are falling), the company is given another IPO and everyone makes a lot of money, except for the people laid off.
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Feb 27, 2016 04:02
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So everyone makes a lot of money, but the company must eventually get run into the ground if they fired a bunch of people and sold of assets that were presumably valuable to the company for some reason, right? Though I guess if a company needs a private equity firm, it may have a lot of unnecessary redundancy.
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Feb 27, 2016 04:35
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Ccs posted:So everyone makes a lot of money, but the company must eventually get run into the ground if they fired a bunch of people and sold of assets that were presumably valuable to the company for some reason, right? Though I guess if a company needs a private equity firm, it may have a lot of unnecessary redundancy. The private equity firm buys the company, the company doesn't hire the firm. Most companies that have been around a long time are filled with a lot of excess fat. Lots of useless managers, lots of underperforming assets, etc. In a stagnant market, there won't be any movement on this, since there's little pressure to increase earnings or seize market share. As a general rule of thumb, with any large business you can fire a huge portion of workers without any real drop in sales for at least a year or two. And even if sales fall, they probably won't fall faster than wage savings. Lots of big businesses you know and love get taken over all the time and PE shops outsource production/fire all the US workers while trading on the good name built over so many years in the past.
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Feb 27, 2016 05:07
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Hmm, that's depressing. Not surprising though. 
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Feb 27, 2016 05:21
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the problem arises, especially in tech, when you need to repeat this magical cost cutting measure because sales didn't hit their numbers and investors are worried they won't get the dividend they are expecting. so now you're actually looking at cutting good workers or perks that get you good workers. now you're in the viscous cycle where you can't get or keep talent and have actively destroyed your long term prospects because every 3 months Wall Street needs its pound of flesh.
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Feb 27, 2016 16:30
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blah_blah posted:AFAIK laptops at Google aren't allowed to have production code on them and all employees have desktops, and I've also heard (from a separate employee) that even internal data has a lot of restrictions and permissions are required to access the data of any team besides the main one that you work on.  Okay then, I was completely wrong. Thank you for the correction.Morroque posted:Might I inquire as to what those knock-on effects are? Because, logically, if I had to manage source code I knew was pretty important, a secure premise would be one of the obvious solutions for doing that. Well, now that we know I was wrong, thinking about it further, most of the big ones just boil down to "expense," so I suppose they just pay for it. I also suppose since they're basically an intelligence agency already, operating secure facilities makes more sense than I thought. Here's one of the talks I mentioned; it starts with a summary of the problems with the 'secure network' approach, and mentions the goal of googlers working from coffee shops, but did not communicate to me just how far they had to go.
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Feb 27, 2016 16:43
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go3 posted:the problem arises, especially in tech, when you need to repeat this magical cost cutting measure because sales didn't hit their numbers and investors are worried they won't get the dividend they are expecting. so now you're actually looking at cutting good workers or perks that get you good workers. now you're in the viscous cycle where you can't get or keep talent and have actively destroyed your long term prospects because every 3 months Wall Street needs its pound of flesh. Yes, this model doesn't really fit tech. Milking cash cows generally works best when there are serious capital barriers to a new entrant. A lot of success stories have been distressed retailers for this reason. Fire a bunch of workers, close lovely stores, securitize financial assets (store credit card accounts), and refloat. There's also options for financial engineering because a company posting huge losses has already taken a hit in the markets, but the accumulated losses are worth good money to a profitable company since they can be applied to the profitable company's tax returns.
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Feb 27, 2016 16:55
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on the left posted:
Repeat this enough times and what are you left with? The Trump electorate.
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Feb 27, 2016 18:40
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A map of organized unicrime:
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Feb 29, 2016 19:53
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Are these people all extremely smart? And then pair that with being rich after PayPal means the world is their playground? Like how do you found so many popular successful companies? Like what sets them apart from your average smart Google engineer or w/e else takes intelligence to work at but is more of a cog type job?
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Feb 29, 2016 20:32
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Holyshoot posted:Are these people all extremely smart? And then pair that with being rich after PayPal means the world is their playground? Like how do you found so many popular successful companies? Like what sets them apart from your average smart Google engineer or w/e else takes intelligence to work at but is more of a cog type job? From the looks of things they were in the right place at the right time and now pay people smarter than they are to make more things.
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Feb 29, 2016 20:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:From the looks of things they were in the right place at the right time and now pay people smarter than they are to make more things. Pretty much the right place and the right time. Paypal is pretty stupid but when it was created it was a massive leap forward in tech for buying poo poo on the internet.
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Feb 29, 2016 21:04
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Doc Hawkins posted:
This has been my experience at big companies in general (I've worked at Microsoft and Amazon). You're first extremely limited to what data you have access to, on a need-to-access basis. Then, there's often a big barrier between production systems and employee devices, and it often only opens for a short time. Employee devices are often strictly controlled and monitored for malware or even just programs that could cause a licensing suit. This even extends to phones, where you must give IT the right to completely wipe your personal phone if you decide to use it to access corporate email. You can usually download the source code you need for development, but are obviously tracked as you do so. It'd be a quick way to get reamed with an NDA suit. There's also now two factor authentication requirements based on smart cards, one-time pad dongles, or phone apps. Often these are only given to full time employees. Even if you do get to work at home (like I am right now!), you must do it through a VPN, which means that your actions can still be seen since all Internet access will be done through that. It's honestly probably a higher rewards/effort ratio to tailgate behind as someone walks in, or just listen in the nearby coffee shop.
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Feb 29, 2016 21:26
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At Google, when I was there, it was a point of pride that engineers could push experiments to the production systems. I have no idea if this is still in effect. In general, there was wide visibility into the production systems, and employees were expected to be aware of the resources their systems were consuming and adapt accordingly. That's all engineering employees, not just the sysadmins. I had a personal phone, and IT paid no attention to it at all other than requiring me to password it, and to use it for two-factor authentication with my laptop and with internal systems. There would have been severe and immediate consequences if I'd deliberately leaked anything to the outside world. Overall, the assumption (which, again, may have changed by now; I'm gone 5 years) was that I was a responsible and technically-sophisticated adult and would treat the company's best interests as my own. Judging by the "move fast, break things" attitude of Facebook, something similar must be in place with the production systems.
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Feb 29, 2016 21:58
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Phyzzle posted:I can't say that I know what Yahoo should have done differently. Microsoft might wish they could go back in time and drop the Bing stuff and make the first smartphone OS. Yahoo would want to go back in time and ...? Windows Mobile predates iOS. Windows Mobile was the closest thing to a usable operating system on a PDA at the time it came out. Microsoft never had the design staff or public reputation to pull off what Apple did with the iPhone, no amount of forethought on their part would have changed that fact. FilthyImp posted:MS developing a Smartphone OS would have been terrible terrible. They just wouldn't have the UI know-how that crazy Old Man Jobs had. And their hardware would have been shiiiiiiiiit. Steve Jobs had as much to do with inventing the smartphone as Thomas Edison did the lightbulb. Microsoft developed and had a smartphone OS for years before the iPhone came out. Jobs just refined the concept and marketed it better than anyone else did. The hardware was poo poo, it's true, though at the time the iphone came out the top windows mobile phones were also far better - they had 3g support and could take SD cards, and also had bigger screens, pull-out keyboards, etc. I think the actual specs were a little worse, but most of the "smartphones" at the time didn't need faster processors and more RAM. It wasn't the quality of the hardware that drew in consumers to the iPhone, it was the trendiness of the brand and the specific way the operating system was designed. Mostly that first thing, though. FilthyImp posted:This is MS under Bill Gates though. Notorious for asking 'but how does this allow us to sell more Office'. I'm going to guess you had a pre-6700 windows mobile phone, and data loss on those devices all comes down to the battery technology, not any actual design flaws in the hardware itself. Prior to the lithium ion batteries that everything has now, older smartphones used to have nicad batteries, and the on-board storage was dependant on these batteries remaining plugged in. A lot of older phones got around this by making it so you simply couldn't hotswap the battery. (Irony, lol, since the modern phones that don't have this limitation all have sealed battery compartments now. Thanks, Apple!) The very late windows mobile devices were actually pretty good as a whole. They didn't lose their settings so frequently, the people putting them out were actually in the business of making phones (HTC) and the people the products were being marketed for had serious needs. Windows Mobile pre-iPhone was designed to compete with two brands - Blackberry and Palm. A flip phone could have competed with a palm pilot in 2007 (and plenty did) so it really came down to who did Outlook Better, Microsoft or BES. BES had push, Microsoft had activesync, and consumer needs and usability didn't really matter for either. I worked with smartphones on a helpdesk for a major cell carrier in 2007. It was a very, very weird time to be in the industry.
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Feb 29, 2016 22:53
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Industry leadership is incestuous mess. News at 11.
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Feb 29, 2016 23:00
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Rigged Death Trap posted:Industry leadership is incestuous mess. That's true of business in general and has been for centuries.
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Feb 29, 2016 23:13
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