I remember when this lady built a nursery near her office but wouldn’t setup a daycare for yahoo staff or allow wfh.
She took a lot of shit for that move. Kind of sad that she had every opportunity to connect with her kids and yet doesn’t know them at all.
“Also, find out whatever she’s into and add a reminder to my calendar to send her some of whatever it is on her birthday whenever that is. It’s a ‘she’, right?”
Not smart just ruthless describes nearly every CEO. Uncaring and lacking empathy should be screened for from a early age. Those kids should be identified to everyone so you know to avoid their schemes and thus preventing the harm they cause. That this woman is unable to see her daughters talents and positive attributes is just in line with their missing piece of humanity.
why do people keep having these fantasies that screening people for mental disorders and segregating them will fix any structural problems with society or magically prevent anyone evil from popping up ever again
Because it works. If you know someone is going to lie and manipulate you which all people who have those qualities will do without any hesitation, society will not tolerate them. These same people avoid being exposed at all cost. Anytime one of them get exposed in a social circle the circle gets better.
“Because it works” without any proof lmao. You esentially want to jail from birth anyone with a cluster B disorder and hope that fixes things forever, because obviously there’s an evil mental disorder that makes you forever evil with no chance of redemption and no one else is capable of lying or manipulating or becoming worse from their environment. You’re an eugenicist
Not jail. Recognition. Education of others what it means. Of course the people most against this are people like this. There is no chance of redemption as you put it for people who lack a basic human characteristic. You don’t really seem like you misunderstand. It seems like you understand just fine. What I think you don’t like about it is how it might leave you exposed. Having seen that in your words I’m gonna do what you should do on lemmy and block you
We forget sometimes that part of women’s liberation is that a woman is free to be just as big an asshole as a man.
I don’t understand why people are still taking this woman seriously. She is not a ‘girlboss’. She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been by grossly mismanaging every single one of their formerly valuable properties.
The fact that she is involved immediately makes this company lose credibility in my eyes.
The fact that she apparently needs an AI model to come up with three compliments for her own daughter only reinforces my opinion.
She sounds like a loser, I feel bad for her kid.
This is dystopian as hell.
I kind of like that the article points out a problem with a lot of stuff that is implemented on us:
Like, did we think about this for more than a second?
if anything, it shows Mayer performing the exact kind of cognitive offloading that any AI tool worth its salt should free us up to focus on rather than doing for us.
This has been the focus from the start, though. Almost all of the “killer apps” for AI that we’re being sold by the AI companies are about doing the creative stuff and human interaction for us. So we can spend more time being depressed, mindless worker drones, I guess?
Instead of typing a prompt and getting a response, Dazzle has users snap a photo as the starting point and lets the agent point to what it thinks the next course of action should be. “Snap a picture of a purchase you’ve been thinking about, a flat tire, or fridge ingredients, and Dazzle buys on approval, schedules repairs, or suggests recipes,” the company says.
Finally, what we really needed: ChatGPT for people too lazy to type a prompt
hey google why do i love my children
“This is an interesting question, why do you love your children?”
“omg it’s sentient”
This feels a bit like an ad for dazzle.
Because it is. She’s fully capable of coming up with three superlatives about her child, but she’d rather use her kid as a prop in a sales pitch.
She’s fully capable of coming up with three superlatives about her child
You may underestimate how much of a sociopath these people are…
I think this sucks but I also think the headlines have never given Mayer a fair shake at anything and that also sucks. “Marissa Mayer dared to speak and we’re here to get snarky about it” could apply to almost every headline I’ve seen that was about her. And this story charges straight to “girlboss.” Ugh. Isn’t there enough to criticize here without jumping straight to the kind of casual sexism we all laughed at in the 1980s? It’s unprofessional.
I remember that she was getting a lot of positive press because she was public about pregnancy or something but returned to full time work like 5 days after she gave birth which is dystopian as hell.
A real “girl boss” in a position of power and wealth and public visibility needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave and spend that time caring for the child and fighting to get those rights to everyone.
She got press that pointed out she was a CEO who had dared to get pregnant. It seemed to me they were pointing out that 1) a CEO who took time off to give birth was bad, and 2) a woman who wouldn’t take more maternity leave was also bad.
Way too much press about her was about her personal-life decisions rather than business prospects.
A real “girl boss” …
I read “girlboss” as strictly perjorative.
needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave
This is tantamount to saying: a CEO mom is impossible.
This is tantamount to saying: a CEO mom is impossible.
Uhhh… No, it is not.
Yahoo offers a generous 16 week maternity leave, and she took 2 and worked from home during. She said it wasn’t part of the consideration of giving her the job when she was six months pregnant, do you honestly believe that?
Do you honestly believe her offering to take only 2 weeks “leave” while working was a feminist or woman empowering decision? Not a compromise to land the job that wouldn’t have been offered if she wanted to take time to be with her child instead?
You and her are the ones perpetuating “CEO mom is impossible”, unless they take barely any time off to be a mom and still work remotely while being “off”.
I believe a mom can be CEO AND take the full maternity leave while knowing how to delegate and have minimal need to check-in for those 16 weeks. You believe she has to act like she didn’t just have a baby and return to work as soon as humanly possible in order to be a CEO.
I don’t see how you get this attitude, those conclusions, from anything I wrote.
Yahoo offers a generous 16 week maternity leave
Which is just a little bit shy of two years
Do you honestly believe her offering to take only 2 weeks “leave” while working was a feminist or woman empowering decision?
No. But I think that decision was up to her and that the press should have treated it as not-newsworthy. Any amount of maternity leave that she chose was doomed to be criticized by somebody as the wrong amount. And so, it was.
You and her are the ones perpetuating “CEO mom is impossible”
No. CompactFlax posited that “A real ‘girl boss’ in a position of power and wealth and public visibility needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave,” and I’m just observing there was no realistic possibility of that happening. If this is what you demand from a CEO mom, well, you’re not getting that.
You believe she has to act like…
I don’t understand how you think you know any such thing. I comprehensively don’t think like this. I don’t think there’s any “has to,” I think those arrangements should have been her own decision and it would be better to have minimal commentary on it.
The fact that everyone feels entitled to weigh in on her work/life balance and parenting decisions is the problem. Criticize her for her business decisions, criticize her for being an AI pusher, that’s fine, that’s appropriate.
When criticism focuses on “CEO mommy” topics, that is a mode and angle of criticism that no man ever seems to face in the tech/biz news. That is sexism. Obviously. What else would that be?
I was reacting to your wild conclusion.
“Choosing” your career over time with your newborn despite having the means to do so it’s not “feminism” or “woman empowerment”, it’s capitalism and shitty parenting. I didn’t like that you are conflating them.
At best I could accept the argument that she calculated the wealthy she could accumulate will serve her children long term better than spending time parenting them and leaving them with financial instability… But then that’s not a choice, that’s a difficult position forced on her but capitalism.
The idea that she “chose” to work through the two weeks and then return back to full time work and that choice being empowering is ridiculous. The idea that pointing that out is the equivalent of saying women can’t be CEOs is sexist.
I took less than 2 weeks of paternity leave, but I would never suggest I chose that. I chose not to lose my job and keep a roof over my newborn’s head, but that wasn’t much of a choice.
You don’t understand where I’m coming from because you’ve completely taken it for granted that of course Mayer’s every move should be publicly dissected under a microscope, not just for business soundness, but also to check if she’s setting a luminous enough example for all other women everywhere.
Which is a thing I’m refusing to do.
I’ve never considered her or put her under any kind of lense, I didn’t know who she was or her story until I stumbled across this post. I don’t care about CEOs in general and couldn’t name any except the openly evil ones.
Nice deflection though. I’m only engaging because your rhetoric frustrated me, when someone goes out of their way to accuse someone of being sexist and start bending logic to defend a woman’s actions not by their merits but for the mere fact that they were performed by a woman, it stands out as sexist.
You’re overcompensating. Was the girl boss comment unnecessary? Possibly, I don’t know if she ever referred to herself as “girl boss” explicitly… It’s irrelevant though, because the meat of the argument is that she literally said “Women, this is my own bias, tend to take more photos and are more visual, and so being able to work with A.I. in a visual medium is fun”.
She was being sexist, and you ignored that and flipped the table and was outraged that the author called her girl boss.
Not only is she suggesting we offload our emotional load to AI, she’s pitching that as a woman empowering move. You should not be defending her, quite the opposite.
I tried to look at old articles to see the sexism you claimed was displayed, which is how I discovered that she was 6 months pregnant when she took the job, but I couldn’t find any. Please correct me and cite some.
What I found is opinion pieces that referenced sexist discourse online and the stock market reaction to her. No shit people are sexist and would have been sexiest in their rhetoric, but that’s not what you claimed, you claimed every headline you could see criticized her for existing as a woman.
You don’t have to defend every woman just because they are women, that’s as sexist as degrading them for the same reason.
At best, she’s a victim of a sexist world who accepted perpetuating the sexist status quo for the sake of her kids, and at worst she’s a terrible parent, but nothing about her story makes her a feminist champion.
The first woman to vote wasn’t a hero, the women who fought for suffrage rights were. The first woman CEO isn’t a hero, she’s just a CEO who happens to be a woman, and she didn’t use her position to set a better precedent for women.
These people are so out of touch
It’s really interesting thinking about what changed in tech and why all the leaders are like this. It used to be people developing and fitting technology to goals - mapping the world, enabling democratic power or niche hobby relationships - and that generally ended up being exciting and helpful.
But at some point tech became captured by a few specific ideas and technology - SaaS, AI, data mining - and every CEO now tries to fit the goals to the technology. It no longer matters to these people what the benefit to the user is, they just work backwards from what the technology can do and rationalize whatever it is as the goal.
When they stopped being run by engineers and all became ran by MBA’s.
That’s not to say there aren’t MBA’s with engineering degrees etc but they didn’t actually build anything themselves. They sycophanted their way to these positions of power and they’ll never be able to bring the wonder and passion into tech because they have none. They have passion for business but if you get turned on by privacy policies scam story telling, who boy the world is your oyster right now.
Now you could argue zuck was a founder engineer and he’s terrible as well. I’d say he’s a bad example at being anything.
So there are exceptions. Sergey Brin is an example of an engineer that drifted but Larry was the brains. Just like woz to Steve, just like Bill to Balmer.
Always two. One genius. One cheerleader. The cheerleader is always trapped by what is making them wealthy to parrot.
Who is Sundar Puchai’s cheerleader? Prabhakar Raghavan? We are so far away from a Larry Page keeping an idiot like Sergey in line.
Or Satya? A sub contracted Sam Altman maybe?
There is no culture except the culture of business to these guys. Quiet strategic relationships, reduction of ego which means no risk, no research, no bravado, and no muscle for creating.
