Yahoo Ceo Marissa Mayer Explains How She Worked 130 Hours A Week

[interestrateripoff]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-explains-how-she-worked-130-hours-a-week-and-why-it-matters-a7174201.html

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is known for her strong work ethic.

She's regularly pulled off all-nighters during her time at Google, and even worked from her hospital bed shortly after having her twins last year. It's why former Yahoo director Max Levchin calls her “the hardest working CEO in Silicon Valley, bar none.”

Mayer says hard work is an important part of any business and an often overlooked part of Google's success. She shared more details around her 130-hour workweeks and why it matters in an interview with Bloomberg:

“The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, 'Could you work 130 hours in a week?'

“The answer is yes, if you're strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week, except when I was on vacation — and the vacations were few and far between.”

Mayer added that hard work is what separates startups that succeed and fail, and that she's able to tell which ones are more likely to succeed — without even knowing what they do — by simply looking at their work ethics.

“Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don't happen. They happen because of really hard work,” she told Bloomberg.

I wonder how many businesses that fail have staff who work long hours and the weekend and still fail? Perhaps if you shared the workload better you wouldn't need to work 130 hours a week and more people could have a job?

[porca misèria]

Bloomin' part-timer.

[Trampa501]

Done well at Yahoo? Oh...

[Funn3r]

I used to pull all-nighters... now I can barely pull all-dayers...

Seriously I suppose the nearest thing to Marissa in the normal world are junior doctors. I know one and she really does work intergalactically long hours.

I've done my share but making (or enabling/encouraging) people to work stupid hours is just wrong.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-36767868

[Frugal Git]

This is all very well (if they are OK with it) for people on 7, 8 figure salaries, with stock options etc or if you own the business.

Where this becomes stupid is if you're a sub $250k p/a underling and it remains the expectation, or in some cases I know of, the employee does it out of a bizarre 'love' for the company/hyper professionalism despite being paid relative peanuts.

My feeling is even in a salaried job, always think about your effective hourly rate ;-) mine matches those paid 3x my full time salary and without all the stress that goes along with their role.

[Frugal Git]

I am strategic about when I shower and go to the loo though.

I do it at work!

[LiveinHope]

The big part of that 130 hours is that they were probably all fun and she was with people also having fun. I expect everyone had a 'can do, make it happen' mentality. The 130 hours probably flew by and, having worked long hours in California in the early 90s, I expect a fair amount of the 130 hours were also happy hours in the bar across the street or around the blackjack tables in Tahoe.

Edited August 7, 2016 by LiveinHope

[ChewingGrass]

The biggest mistake salaried people make is thinking they are irreplaceable, I've known a handfull who thought they were, got a terminal illness and within two weeks they were forgotten about. These were also people who would not book extra hours worked to the job (plays havoc with costing), would not use all their holiday entitlement and really believed they were important/essential to the business.

Needless to say it was a one way street as far as the company was concerned and at the end of the day they were just an employee number like everyone else.

I find the indirect inference we should all indulge in this sort of thing disturbingly reprehensible.

[LiveinHope]

The biggest mistake salaried people make is thinking they are irreplaceable, I've known a handfull who thought they were, got a terminal illness and within two weeks they were forgotten about. These were also people who would not book extra hours worked to the job (plays havoc with costing), would not use all their holiday entitlement and really believed they were important/essential to the business.

Needless to say it was a one way street as far as the company was concerned and at the end of the day they were just an employee number like everyone else.

I find the indirect inference we should all indulge in this sort of thing disturbingly reprehensible.

I'd say there is a difference in being part of a founding group in a startup and being an employee in an established company, the latter you are just a number. The saying often attributed to Charles de Gaulle, but which may not be from him, goes "The graveyards are full of indispensible men".

Edited August 7, 2016 by LiveinHope

[knock out johnny]

I always thought the sign of a cr@p boss/manager was the inability to delegate

As my old boss said to me when I was pulling all-nighters "I'm paying you more than other people so that YOU make them do the work"

[StainlessSteelCat]

Survivorship bias - which sadly doesn't seem to have paid off at Yahoo. I'd say she'd lost her sense of priorities working 130 hours/week. I used to regularly do 60-70 hour weeks in the early days of my career - and will still occasionally do so if the work is interesting enough.

I once stayed til past 4am on a Friday for a boss who f**ked off himself having insisted we needed to get the work done so he could impress a client. The lazy sob decided not to bother after all. I somehow managed to cycle home ten miles afterwards.

Never did it again, and never will.

[Guest TheBlueCat]

If you're the CEO of somewhere the size of Yahoo, there is more or less an infinite amount of work you could do. The real skill is in picking the right 40-50 hours worth, anything else is just a futile attempt to boil the ocean. Anyone who regularly works a genuine 130 hours (on-call but asleep doesn't count) is either incompetent or has some kind of behavioural disorder.

[LiveinHope]

I always thought the sign of a cr@p boss/manager was the inability to delegate

As my old boss said to me when I was pulling all-nighters "I'm paying you more than other people so that YOU make them do the work"

But a crap boss is also one who goes home before the workers.

[Si1]

Done well at Yahoo? Oh...

This

[Greg Bowman]

I'd say there is a difference in being part of a founding group in a startup and being an employee in an established company, the latter you are just a number. The saying often attributed to Charles de Gaulle, but which may not be from him, goes "The graveyards are full of indispensible men".

Our favourite in IBM was '' A career is just a job without overtime '

[knock out johnny]

If you're the CEO of somewhere the size of Yahoo, there is more or less an infinite amount of work you could do. The real skill is in picking the right 40-50 hours worth, anything else is just a futile attempt to boil the ocean. Anyone who regularly works a genuine 130 hours (on-call but asleep doesn't count) is either incompetent or has some kind of behavioural disorder.

+1

I understand working all the hours in the day if it's a fledgling company and the necessary number of staff can't be hired due to cash-flow constraints

Buy CEO (or whatever) of Yahoo or Google? With a basically limitless budget to hire and delegate

fck off

Edited August 7, 2016 by knock out johnny

[knock out johnny]

But a crap boss is also one who goes home before the workers.

I didn't do that - but it was my first managerial position and foolishly I was trying to impress both my boss and the workers

I just came over as an ineffective tool

My old boss had been about and was a pretty clued up cat

[Si1]

I suspect mm could be intimating she has no idea how to judge her employees beyond who works the longest hours. Suspect her staff morale could potentially take a hit for this.

[reddog]

Couldnt the reality be that she had the dumb good look to be an early employee of Google? She could have just as easily joined some other exciting startup, that ended up going nowhere. In which case we would be debating an article written by someone else imploring us to work our ass's off.

She wasn't able to transfer the Google success over to Yahoo. In fact Yahoo was sold for a lot less than its value when she took over. In many ways if she was a good ceo, she would have advised to sell Yahoo on her first day in the job. Thus saving her the need to do all that work, and also saving the shareholders many billions of dollars.

The older you get, the more you realise that luck has just as much to do with people's success as talent.

Edited August 7, 2016 by reddog

[StainlessSteelCat]

I suspect mm could be intimating she has no idea how to judge her employees beyond who works the longest hours. Suspect her staff morale could potentially take a hit for this.

Let's not forget that one of her early changes was to attempt to get everyone working in the office instead of remote working etc. I suspect morale isn't that great anyhow.

Frankly, she sounds like a poisonous boss to work for.

[One-percent]

I have the pleasure of working 3 days a week. I don't earn mega bucks and am qualified to doctorate level. I made/make the choice to work 3 days and get paid commensurate with this. I'm getting fed up with having the accusation of 'not being committed' levelled when I refuse to work hours above and beyond. I get that in an emergency it might be needed but not on a regular basis.

It seems to me that it is an expectation that people will work for nothing but all this does is rob someone else of paid and gainful employment

[Motor_Blade]

Working harder is only the solution when not working hard enough is the problem, which it rarely is.

Working too hard is a sure fire route to burn out & doing a crap job - and how have Yahoo been doing under her stewardship?????

[LiveinHope]

I didn't do that - but it was my first managerial position and foolishly I was trying to impress both my boss and the workers

I just came over as an ineffective tool

My old boss had been about and was a pretty clued up cat

Ahh, never try to impress.

[OnionTerror]

How effective can you be, doing 130 hours p/w?

I find the word "career" is cobblers...Forever dangling carrots in front of you without being able to catch one... Promising better pay, profit share, and so on, that never actually appear...and they think of nothing of getting rid of you in 2 minutes...

Your a long time dead...

Edited August 7, 2016 by Dave Beans

[knock out johnny]

I suspect mm could be intimating she has no idea how to judge her employees beyond who works the longest hours. Suspect her staff morale could potentially take a hit for this.

I suspect mm is being lauded because she is a ladyeeee

If it was a bloke, he'd be a b@5tard dinosaur, denying career progression to talented women by not promoting a family/child friendly environment

It's cobblers

I suspect she's a cnt to work for

Edited August 7, 2016 by knock out johnny