"When I learned in September 2016 that a large number of our user database files had been stolen, I worked with the team to disclose the incident to users, regulators, and government agencies.
"However, I am the CEO of the company and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant this year and have expressed my desire that my bonus be redistributed to our company's hardworking employees, who contributed so much to Yahoo's success in 2016."
Yes, and all executives who resign after a scandle do so voluntarily. No one ever resigns because the people above them offered it as a mutually-beneficial alternative to getting fired. I'll totally accept her motivations at face value.
I never heard of an executive being pushed to earn less money the way executives are pushed to resign.
Usually is quite the opposite, companies pay resigning executives a wealth sum as it is in the best interest of the company that the burned executive leave as soon as possible and with no intentions to harm the company after leaving. The board usually couldnt care less about the money a leaving executive gets.
An executive leaving money on the table (and distributing among other employees) is extremely rare and I think your cynism have no logical thinking support here.
It is common enough that it has a name...claw back provision.
It's risen in popularity since the subprime mortgage crisis. Used more often to claw back bonuses for fraud, but used for lackluster performance as well.
Voluntarily forgoing your bonus versus an embarrassing board decision isn't that odd.
They don't pay them a wealthy sum when their actions lowered Verizon's buying price by billions. If you crunch the numbers, there is a 0% chance Marissa did this 100% voluntarily with no pressure on her.
>"No one ever resigns because the people above them offered it as a mutually-beneficial alternative to getting fired. "
When C level executives are involved in a scandal, this is exactly what happens. The folks above them "ask" for their resignation. The subtext is that it is mandatory. Resigning keeps them from the disgrace of being fired and also often allows them to keep certain things like bonuses, pensions etc.
Anyone note the "I expressed my DESIRE that it be distributed among hardworking employees?" To me that sounds pretty empty. How about actually making it happen, Ms. Meyer? It would be a lot more palatable if she said she's distributed her bonus among YAHOO employees, full stop.
The CEOs salary and bonus is negotiated by the board. What happened here is the board decided to not pay her, and she asked them to distribute it to the employees instead. It's not her pay to do anything with anymore.
The state Yahoo is in, I don't think anyone else in there expected less.
Public information on these bonuses shocked me, to be frank. Ok, you took a hard job, but you also failed. A culture that rewards upper management - even on failures - is a recipe for failure, especially when you employ a large portion of talented and educated individuals who can very easily move somewhere else.
> I doubt she would have taken the offer if it was conditional on Yahoo doing well.
But that's the point. What motivation does she have to do a good job and actually care about the well-being of the company if she gets extraordinary sums of money no matter what?
But does she care? Clearly if someone negotiates to get paid no matter what, they're putting themselves before the company. And based on how she's acted as CEO, I don't see any reason to believe she cares about saving Yahoo!
> The incentives for CEOs at today's ridiculous pay grades are all towards short-termism. That's how we get into messes like this in the first place.
That's a pretty weak criticism of Marissa Mayer. First, she was hardly set up for success - a first-time CEO placed at the helm of a company that had been struggling for years to find its market, and whose two predecessors were both fired in very public scandals. I'm not sure if anyone could have turned Yahoo around in those circumstances.
Furthermore, Mayer was not at all incentivized towards short term thinking. Yahoo's share price was largely driven by Alibaba from when she joined until the IPO, and it was literally one of the selling points used to recruit her: that she, unlike most CEOs of public companies, would be able to focus on executing a long-term vision without the pressures of worrying about the daily share price for the first couple of years (until the Alibaba IPO).
>"That's a pretty weak criticism of Marissa Mayer."
I don't believe the OP was criticizing her but rather the exclusive "CEO Club" where their compensation is 2200 times[1] what their average employees get paid, recieve bonuses in bad or unprofitable years, always get to resign and never fired, and if they do resign in a cloud of scandal they magically show up somewhere else and repeat the whole process anew.
Is it a cultural thing (american?) that everyone here is calling her "Marissa Mayer" or "MM" or "Ms Mayer"? No one would say "Mr Mayer", or "Dave Mayer" or "DM" in a hacker news comment, they just say "Mayer". Is that a traditional thing, or is it specific to Mayer?
Look up my post history, I referred to Warren Buffet as Mr. Buffet. It's a sign of respect for someone you are discussing but have no personal connection to. Nothing sinister going on here.
I've never heard the title Ms used in America much at all, especially not compared to use I've heard in several Commonwealth countries. It sticks out at me as being unusual in this thread. But then, even within the US you have big linguistic variations. In Silicon Valley you'll almost never hear anyone addressed as "Ma'am" or "Sir" as that seems too formal, but in the South many people use such titles even in more casual settings with anyone who is their superior or a relative stranger.
Most people I know (which is mainly people from Western states) would refer to her as Marissa Mayer, and the same with any other well-known executive (e.g. Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) How would you expect her to be named in conversation based on where you're from?
> "Zuckerberg" seems to be more frequently used than the full "Mark Zuckerberg".
Eh, I'm not sure I would agree with that.
> And quite a few Hackers seem to be on a first name basis with Elon and Linus.
They have fairly unique names. It's extremely unlikely that "Elon" and "Linus" would refer to anyone other than Musk and Torvalds in the context of HN discussions.
Definitely not the case for names like "Mark", "Bill", or "Steve".
Perhaps we should start adding the middle name like the media does w/ murderers. It could become a badge of dishonor for CEOs that kill companies while taking crazy pay.
Marrisa Ann Mayer / MAM may not have dealt the final blow to the already injured Yahoo but she added a few stab wounds and drew from the dwindling fortunes of an elderly Yahoo.
That's true, but the circumstances to which she is entitled the bonus are probably well defined. The article made it sound as if she was still entitled to the bonus, but was asked to not accept it. In this case, being asked to do something is a pretty loose definition, there's usually fallout from refusing these kinds of things.
What I imagine happened based on hints of what Ms Mayer wrote is that the breach affected all employees bonuses for 2016. Ms Mayer would have been under pressure to forego her bonus and put it into the general employee pool and even then bonuses are likely much lower than previous years.
I hope this is the start of something better. There's been a distinct lack of punishment for allowing and even hiding breaches across the industry that I've seen.
The employees at Yahoo have been kind and helpful to me. But the bureaucracy is a rotted waste who just doesn't care.
What am I supposed to do? Why can't you just allow accepting verification documentation like FB and Blizzard does.
The engineers are great. The managers are great. But the rotten core would screw over tens of thousands of people locked out of their account so as to not make one mistake with an identity theft.
How can I be sure my account wasn't one of the ones hacked in one of their many security fiascos?
The fact that you can present the Credit Cards that were used for billing and then the bank can prove provenance and all that is in your name would be pretty convincing to me. I'm surprised by their strict adherence to policy here.
That's exactly the problem. They're not willing to take information except what they prescribe. They didn't require much much in the first place. You can't be Yahoo, turn around after you require too little verifying information in the beginning, then place tens of thousands of accounts in stasis, when people are piling up willing to move mountains to show that it's really them.
After they've been hacked, how can I be sure that my info wasn't changed? What about with flickr had transitions, was any identifying on the accounts lost?
The photos I have can be matched to other public information I have on the net. I've provided those details already.
My name is on the account.
I was a flickr pro customer. I could give them my billing info of CC's I had around the time.
Blizzard doesn't keep driver's licenses on file before hand, but they use it to prove identity.
Was verizon sold for hundreds of millions less because of the leak? Did the ceo of Verizon hop aboard the titanic after the first iceberg and run it into another one?
I think it vastly more likely that the impact of the leak and the general performance of the company was meaningfully different than supposing gender had anything to do with it.
I think before we play the gender card it would be reasonable for the party posing the question ought to discover and consider before posing it if the idea is absurd on its face or worthy of further discussion.
Don't know why you're being down voted. I immediately thought the same thing. I'm all for CEO's being held accountable for these types of things, but it doesn't seem to happen very often. So, asking whether gender plays a role is absolutely fair game. Could also be, of course, that she's embattled, so it's easy to do.
"When I learned in September 2016 that a large number of our user database files had been stolen, I worked with the team to disclose the incident to users, regulators, and government agencies. "However, I am the CEO of the company and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant this year and have expressed my desire that my bonus be redistributed to our company's hardworking employees, who contributed so much to Yahoo's success in 2016."
So does that mean no one pushed it up the chain