Essentially, employment contracts for C-level executives are “unions” (that is, protection) for rich folks. However, actual unions for rank and file…nope!
The company where I work, the CEO has a contract that would make Trump wet his pants. (The contract, which is publicly available, stipulates huge payouts, continued benefits, continued office space, and on and on and on…no matter under what circumstance this dude leaves the company.)
is entitled to severance benefits valued at $54.9 million in case she is terminated without cause
I guess reducing the market value of Yahoo by billions over her tenure isn’t considered “cause”?
Same here. I’d probably do it for a million.
Guess I’m a bit of a slut, though…
But that would be a good thing.
Yep. I wish I could hit that tipping point where people seem to fail “up”
The issue is that you have to prove that it would have stayed higher under anyone else given the fluctuations in the internet. And that’s the real trick. Yahoo isn’t known for any one thing but being number two a lot of stuff. So there’s no real appeal to it without a real defining purpose and people were bound to tire of it.
Yahoo isn’t know for anything but being a lot of number two.
FTFY.
To be absolutely fair, if I knew that my next job would be resumé death - like being CEO of Yahoo! - then I’d probably want a big fat golden parachute written into my contract as well.
I often get the feeling that we UKnians believe USAnians - from usage evidence in headlines like this - have a ‘deserve’ connotation attached to ‘earn’ which we do not share. But I’m probably wrong and we’re just the same. The ‘entitlement’ connotation is probably common to both UK and US (and does not of course mean ‘deserve’) but - again - UKnian entitlement seems slightly more ennobled than USAnian.
It’s like when I hear “this - a fifty dollar value for only twenty dollars …” (my emph) I immediately think “Excuse me? I tell you what the value is, you don’t get to tell me”.
To be absolutely fair, I would want that too, even if my next job wasn’t that way. To be absolutely fair, I want a big-ass golden parachute in my present job.
And if it were necessary for you to be given the same in order for me to get it, I would want you to have it too.
Atchoo!
At least she can console herself that golden goodbyes for failing at C** level aren’t gender biased …
While I generally agree, Mayer got an MS in CS from Stanford, and worked on search AI at Google before she worked her way up to a team lead, a PM, a eventually a director. She worked her way up from the trenches more than most these days. She’s kind of the embodiment of your ideal.
I think the problem’s weighted heavily in the other issue you have, which is that people who are hired to do a job that really doesn’t take that high of a level of talent (management) are massively, massively overcompensated, and because of that they can all require deals where they’re rewarded for failure.
Yes, that’s what I was getting at.
And while she did work her way up the corporate ladder, once people make it to a certain rung, there is this division that happens and it’s two pronged.
One, you have people that basically bounce from place to place with zero accountability.
Two, you have a point at which there is a wall that divides those that are there to solve problems, create, innovate, run and maintain, etc… and those that are ONLY working from the point of view of this quarter. And because the way that shit rolls down hill, that wall can be pretty movable and even at the staff and supervisory level, you wind up with a director that is deaf to real issues.
Mission statements on the wall in poster form often talk about serving customers, saving lives, etc… but then you go into a meeting as an engineering team and say “Houston we have a problem” only to hear crickets or no one will actually make a decision. Till something explodes, then everyone runs around with their hair on fire.
*My edits after the fact were grammatical. 
Who the f*%k needs a “next job” after receiving $55 million?
She also dated Larry Page, and, when I was at Google, was a legendary political monster. She got some flack when she took over Yahoo for her “weekend re-branding exercise,” which was a continuation of her long-standing methods at Google. She stood in the way of progress on search (and the other front-facing consumer properties) for years. She was one of the major impediments to the adoption of good design standards at Google for her entire tenure with the company.
She is a very smart person with a pathological work ethic, but she has some enormous blind spots regarding her talent and the value of other people’s work. I think it’s very difficult to succeed as a leader if you have those problems.
It sounds like she was misplaced within the company. I don’t know much about Mayer or her time at Yahoo, but I did hear a commentator on NPR say that she’d committed the cardinal sin of being too ambitious too quickly and ended up spreading herself and other project managers too thin.
I think she was a terrible fit for Yahoo and a terrible fit for management in general. She would have done better either as an academic or an engineer since she is astoundingly bright, capable, and driven, but also astoundingly bad at dealing with human beings as human beings on pretty much every front. I mentioned that to note that being a person who was a talented technical person who was capable of executing well in that domain doesn’t necessarily help make a great manager.
On a side note, even someone with vision, skill at strategic thinking, talent at rallying the troops to do their best work, and optimizing logistics and finance to as close to perfection as possible would have had a nightmare job trying to turn Yahoo into a success.
How does this compare with other severance packages?
