I led the European billing engineering team[1] at Yahoo 2003-2005. We processed millions of dollars worth of payments for European premium services every year, so we had a very clear idea of our value to the business, and I had to deal with that exact same thing when we needed a server upgrade once in that three year period that cost a fraction of what I got approved in bonuses for my team every year.

Afterwards I tried to estimate the cost to Yahoo of the time of the dozen or so people, including one of the founders, and I don't remember my estimate, but I do remember it was many times the cost of the server.

[1] yes, Yahoo had multiple billing teams - that's a story in itself; my team existed almost entirely to protect the European businesses against the perceived inability of the US billing team to accept and respect the requirements of the European business. Of course we couldn't admit that to the US team, so my job was basically to repeatedly refuse to surrender an inch in terms of customer requirements whenever the US team tried to convince us to move something over to the US platform.

> Jerry Yang is Taiwanese...the cultural commitment to suffering is hard to explain...I can imagine he may feel like his employees should be grateful for the opportunity to exhibit their suffering.

Aaaand stuff like this is exactly why I say Asians face racism in tech and need to push back against the idea that they are "overrepresented" [1]. I really hope that if I'm in a management position, my reports don't feel like I have "cultural commitment that they should be grateful for their suffering" or some such tripe.

Oh, and never mind that apparently this is the same company that one of the parent comments is saying was "too nice" because it didn't let an employee go even after they stopped showing up. You really have to work hard to explain that one with an Asian cultural commitment to suffering, eh?

I would sincerely suggest to 'killjoywashere that they try saying out the same thing loudly about another minority (say Black people) based on some characteristic they were born with and see how it goes over. Better still, think a little bit about whether you have racist biases if this is your view on things, and maybe try to correct it.

> My usual joke with her is asking if she slept well on her bed of nails.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say your boss probably doesn't actually appreciate being asked stuff like that all the time. She likely just doesn't want to invite trouble by complaining about it.

Oh, and a cursory Wikipedia search reveals that Jerry Yang came to American when he was 10 years old, around 4th grade [2].

------------------

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23541590

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Yang

Since you want references, is survey data acceptable?

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3415130

how about forums?

https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/6aa3x9/what_is_wron...

News reports?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-16834258

> Jerry Yang came to American when he was 10 years old, around 4th grade

So ... his parents dropped their culture at the shoreline?

You know, there really are differences between cultures. That's thing. Italians, on average, really do tend to make better marinara. Find me a black person in America who doesn't know what fatback is (delicious component of certain Southern dishes, by the way). Convince me that the average white person does know what fatback is. Convince me that the average American knows what the Euro is (A night club? A style?).

If I said "I imagine Martin Luther may have liked beer and Weisswurst" is that racist?

> one of the parent comments is saying was "too nice"

Good point, yes, that's completely in line with the "work is next to Godliness" attitude I've observed. In that social norm, being nice is essentially the same as being grateful for the opportunity to take on more work. Nice = more opportunity to work. Now, there's also a bit of "forgive but remember" that goes with that. Those who need niceness all the time, maybe you don't hang out with them as much because you can only handle being so nice, you just can't take on more niceness, you're exhausted! May this dear friend share their opportunities to be nice to them a bit more with their other friends.

My point was that “Asians face racism”, because their culture is used to casually make stereotypes like this which may not be accurate.

If your boss is from Texas and they're overworking you, is your first reaction to pull out survey data about how 50% of Texans believe in suffering as a form of atonement? Or is it just to say “What a jerk”? When people talk about Peter Thiel, how many times do they link his behaviors to elements of German culture and history?

By all means, if Jerry Yang was overworking his employees, call it out on the basis of him overworking his employees! But I don't want to be stereotyped and targeted because of something people in the place I originally came from do. It could very well be that Jerry Yang's parents came to America to escape the overworking culture, and therefore he has a keener sense of not overworking his employees than the average American has. Maybe that's why he didn't fire people that stop showing up to work! You have no way of knowing, and you're idly speculating.

Also – I am Asian, was not born in America, and know perfectly well what fatback and the Euro are. Another data point perhaps for throwing out some notions about what people may or may not know.

Ok, let's assume Jerry Yang is an amazing boss, loved by all.

The point that culture is useful in thinking through possibilities stands. Half the world's population lives in the Valeriepieris circle (1), and half of that is is water. Without saying Asian, what if I argued that population density seems to incentivize hard work, and one would tend to suspect that folks who originate from high density populations are, on average, more likely to develop a culture that rewards hard work? I could then pile on with the cultural-difference-within-a-culture that cities exhibit. Would that be acceptable?

Applying "racism" as a label to the point I was trying to make is using a label to suppress an idea (2). Can you accept that I didn't have the idea fully formed and needed to argue it out a bit to get this better idea statement worked out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle

http://www.paulgraham.com/labels.html

Culture does contribute to management style and you're being really weirdly politically correct in not accepting it.

It does, for sure! Culture is one of the facets that can contribute to your management style along with a ton of socioeconomic factors.

My point is that this often works negatively against Asians, especially in management in a way that it doesn't for other racial groups.

Like you're way more likely to see people being okay with casually saying “Jerry Yang is Asian, therefore he overworks his employees” than say “Marvin Ellison is Black, therefore <some other negative characteristic>” in a conversation. That comment was up for more than five hours before I said something about it.

I think this is a problem. It's nowhere on the same scale as some of the problems that other minorities face across America. But in my opinion, it's important enough to call out occasionally.

The average person doesn't know or care what culture Jerry Yang grew up in or identifies with. He could associate himself with American hip-hop culture for all we know. So assuming Jerry Yang has the same culture as someone else because they're both racially Taiwanese is incorrect and there is nothing "really weird" about pointing that out.

Being the target of racism and being over-represented are two orthogonal things. Being the target of racism has no impact on your demographics in a population.

Being the target of racism sure as hell will impact demographics when the population in a group is voluntary.

How many african-americans join the KKK?

No, the point I was making is that you can’t point to racism or a lack thereof and make any statements about representation. Both over and under-represented groups can be the targets of widespread racism.

You are correct, and I was incorrectly conflating the two in my previous comment on this subject.

Since I can't edit it, the following might explain my position better: Asians get summarily excluded from a lot of minority-focused programs in tech on the basis of being over-represented. This should stop, and Asians should be included in minority-focused programs in tech. This is because (as you said, and as shown by this comment) they can be, and often are a target of casual racism and stereotyping.

It depends on the purpose of the program. If the purpose is to recruit even more, then they shouldn’t be included because they are already over-represented. Many of the minority-focused programs are about recruitment and increasing the pipeline.

Stereotype much?

Read it again. It's not a stereotype. It's his personal observation.

It's literally “My boss has this attitude. My boss is Taiwanese. Jerry Yang is Taiwanese. Therefore, Jerry Yang has this attitude.”

It is exactly nationality-based stereotyping, based on a single example.

This type of thinking, and the inability to see it even when pointed out, is why we have BLM.

I cannot see the original comment, but reading your comment, I cannot help solving the equation and determining he works for Jerry Yang.

The original comment specified that his manager was female, otherwise this would make perfect sense :)

It's his personal observation that Jerry Yang is the same nationality as his manager, and therefore thinks the same way.

It's my observation, a hundred times a day, living among a mixture of Asian cultures and traveling to various Asian countries (can I call them Asian countries? They are in Asia, after all) for the last two years, that a lot of these folks work really hard and will not say no to more work. There are lazy people everywhere, but the ones who work will work themselves to death.

I did not say Jerry Yang thinks the same way. I said I imagine he could. It's a thought experiment. Can you imagine what kind of life it must be to think that suffering is the mark of success? Open your mind and think about that. What it must be like. How it must affect your kids. How you must have been affected as a kid. Why, what geopolitical factors created that cultural norm? Think. Think. The point of the comment was to think.

Having lived and worked for almost 20 years in different Asian countries, I would be a lot more nuanced than you are. First, I completely disagree that suffering is the mark of success...

And, I would be hard pressed to completely generalize between say China, Taiwan and Japan. While you will find a lot of overtime and overwork in those countries, the way they happen is different and the cultural/social pressure behind that are different. And having worked with Asian Americans (both ABCs and people who came a bit later), I would vehemently disagree that you can easily generalize their behavior solely based on the culture of their country of origin, especially since they have lived in the US, spent time there, gone to school there and will have changed their values and culture over time just from this.

So, I don't think that saying Jerry Yang is taiwanese therefor will overwork his employees is a useful heuristic or likely to be true...

You HN people are all the same.

(Aren’t you?)

No

>2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered.

I personally I believe Hadoop took off at Yahoo because it was a way of getting computing resources that did not need to go through the committees. Big Data? Map Reduce? Less important than simply getting a machine to do things on even if it was just the gateway node (the game of trying gateway nodes till one wasn't at 100% cpu was always fun).

To get access to the Hadoop cluster you also needed special permissions and to go through a committee. At Facebook, access was given to all technical and non-technical (after an afternoon of training) people.

Sure but you went through the committee once and then had as much computing resources as you needed. I don't remember it being hard and my whole team got access pretty early and quickly. Compared to the five servers we had to nurse for 2 years because that's all we'd get before then.

Hard to tell without context, but that first example could easily be a positive: not only is extending grace to employees ethically a good thing to do, but it can also lead to increased productivity in the long run.

Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.

The point of being nice it seems that people were not repremended for bad behavior. That’s not a good thing for the culture because it’s demotivating for people who do things the right way as there is very little incentive in doing so.

People in general are hugely sensitive to perceived unfairness. This is a critical thing to maintain in any organization.

For example, you can take a group of five billionaires. Give the first four a little tax break for something, which totals up to only be a million each. No big deal, right? All these people are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, the pinnacle of wealth in the world. There's no way that little tax break would prevent the 5th billionaire from buying the private island he always wanted, or whatever.

In practice, though, that 5th billionaire will be pissed he didn't also get the tax break. He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break. Is that a good use of his time? He would be happier driving around on his 80ft yacht... if he could focus on that instead. But that's not how our brains are wired.

It's not just humans. This behavior seems to go pretty deep: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-animals-unfairly-dont.html

The cool thing is that cheat detection/unfairness detection seems to happen at the semantic level of reasoning. You can see this with kids - one example I recall is a friend's 5 year old being upset at seeing another kid with ice cream. $Parent said it was that kid's birthday (who knows), and her kid immediately got over it.

So if only billionaires were human, we could just suggest their semantic categories were wrong. <rimshot>

Maybe something about a previous life?

I'm fairly sure "it's their birthday, so they get a tax break" won't work.

Are we sure? Maybe no one has tried yet...

The monkey experiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg&t=71

> He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break.

It is a good financial decision to spend up to "$1M * <odds of success>" to get that tax break, or another better one. (especially if the ~$500K spent on retainered-lawyers sets you up to pay less due to future tax hikes.) Economics gets weird when any of the numbers get really big, or really small.

I don't like this example though, as it doesn't detail why the tax break was so specific. Did 4/5 of them have no taxable income that year? Do all of these billionaires live in a despotic-shithole where the rule of law doesn't apply equally to everyone? (to be fair, most billionaires do. /s)

It's a good financial decision for a business that is supposed to maximise profit for shareholders or employees or something.

But this example is not about that. First to answer your last question, it's the despotic shithole kind. The point being, the reason is completely arbitrary.

This is about a billionaire who can already buy whatever they want, regardless of said tax break. It won't make them directly happier because it doesn't allow them to buy anything they couldn't otherwise buy.

The point of the example is that given this is the case, we still have a built in biological desire for "fairness" and if this billionaire would realise and observe this desire having no logical basis, they would not fight it. (assume fighting it is not as enjoyable to spend their limited life time as they could be doing something else with the money they already have)

In an analogous situation, five people go to a fancy restaurant and for some reason four of them get 10 plates of food, and one gets 9 plates of food. Assume the restaurant is so generous one person can't possibly eat more than 2 plates anyway.

Why is it easier to imagine simply not making a big deal out of it and enjoying your meal(s), in this situation?

(Especially considering that the meal example is 100x more unfair)

While I agree this is common human nature, 1) you seem to be speculating about billionaires without actual evidence, even anecdotal, and 2) individuals differ - some may have the maturity and perspective not to worry about it.

However, in support of your point, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both say billionaires and other "better off" people should pay more taxes, to my knowledge, they haven't been unilaterally sending checks to the government for the difference between current taxes and their ideal amount. They seem to believe that their private foundation can make better use of their excess money than the government can. They're willing to advocate additional taxes for groups, rather than just for themselves.

Let's replace the term "billionaires" with "rational actors" then

"emotional actors"

What kind of idiot pays more than they owe in taxes? I'm sure you don't either.

I don't know why some people seem to expect that of billionaires. It's not rational behavior for them or anyone else, so why do you think they should be behaving that way.

I've seen this more than a couple times in HN comments and it always befuddled me.

I don't think they should pay more than they owe, and I'm not sure why you interpreted it that way. (Though I have paid more than I'm required to sometimes because of the pain of dealing with records and filing. Struggle with it until it gets to an acceptable level, then just pay to be done with it).

But Gates and Buffett both say that they SHOULD be paying more in taxes - but they don't. So what they're really saying is, all those other guys (the "well off") should pay more, and then they'd pay more, too.

This supports the original poster's contention that the billionaires would seek that tax break (for "fairness") even if they didn't need it.

> So what they're really saying is, all those other guys (the "well off") should pay more, and then they'd pay more, too.

The well off don't pay much tax, and they will probably pay none at the top end (they'll donate to charity, for example, which they work at, and the charity will fly them around to their meetings, pay for accommodation, etc). Generally it's the middle class who end up paying tax until it's not worth working any harder.

Reading it again, I think I must have missed "However, in support of your point" which changes the meaning.

marginal utility is much higher for the government (and the public) than for you

I think that statement is backwards.

Are you asserting that the government (and the public) will get more utility (benefit) from the extra 1 dollar on its $2.7 billion budget (increase of .000 000 04 percent), than I would from the extra dollar in my net annual income (on the order of a thousandth of a percent)?

That's a pretty incredible contention.

On a per-dollar basis, you indeed get more marginal utility from the extra dollar than the government would.

But on a percentage basis (in a progressive taxation scheme, and especially in the higher tax brackets) the government gets more marginal utility from a 1% tax increase than you would from a 1% tax break.

Nope.

In any bracket and at any percentage, the government will be adding $x to it's huge budget by taking $x from an individual or organization's much smaller budget.

(* Note that it really isn't valid to compare marginal utility between entities. It's an individual, relative measure, rather than an absolute quantity.)

The employee was taking off days without taking vacation to work on hobbies without telling HR or Management. He was just not showing up. This happened with many employees all the time.

My coworker at a Yahoo office in SF moved to Uruguay (where his wife is from) and then expected the company to fly him in for important meetings. He got away with it for a bit before HR caught wind. Even for them it was too much.

He got fired? Or moved back to SF?

Judging by the other stories I expect HR cracking down would be something “no more first class flights, only business.”

HR's issue was probably more along the lines of you're violating internal policies and probably various tax, etc. laws if you're supposedly living in one place and are actually living somewhere else--especially in a different country.

He reluctantly moved back after his boss got yelled at.

Makes me feel like a chump for not taking advantage when I worked there.

What kind of increase in productivity does just not showing up provide? People should be able to take sick days, personal days, mental health days, but disappearing should have raised concern from team members to see if that person is OK.

Management could have been aware of more personal details that coworkers should not know. I don't think it is necessarily a black mark against the company without knowing the whole story.

Management could also communicate to concerns coworkers that the absences are excused. They could also work with the employee to notify teammates in an appropriate way.

Just allowing employees to disappear with no notice or trace is an environment where I won’t want to work.

There are obviously situations where I have to not be at work suddenly (eg, medical emergency where I don’t want to share details) but I can just send a text to a boss or corworker and have them do the rest.

If HR said they didn’t want to act to not hurt feelings that seems like there was no additional info, unless they thought that was a proper way to protect medical info (it isn’t).

Sounds like a bad place to work and seems like a negative factor for companies wanting to do well or me awesome.

You can never be to certain what other people are dealing with outside of work. Sometimes, management knows things that they are not at liberty to share.

Exactly. There are a vast number of incapacitating health related reasons that could cause a person to be absent, e.g. panic attacks, stuck in a bathroom (IBS/IBD/Chron’s), migraines, depression. The type of thing that reasonably wouldn’t be broadcasted out to the entire team.

I think it’s better to just assume nothing unless you have direct knowledge that the employee is doing something blatantly unethical like working at another job (has happened before).

I’m guessing corporate or team policies about requesting time off may have been too restrictive. Depending on the team, having people take random days off on short notice might not be all that disruptive. But hopefully management enables that for everyone, rather than just forgiving it on a case by case basis.

Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on.

It would be very strange if they had no idea and didn’t care that an employee wasn’t showing up. That kind of culture would get swamped fast.

Yahoo was good at handling these types of things, but they were also good at keeping line management updated.

I did have someone in my team at Yahoo I had to go to HR to get approval for special considerations due to a family member with cancer, and it was approved literally in minutes.

But it's also well known that they were for a while very lax about handling unauthorised absence.

>Seems highly probable HR knew what was going on and was okay with it. Child died recently. Only one driving father to chemo appointments. Etc. not the kind of thing they would give any other employees a heads up on.

Is this based on direct knowledge or are you just listing possible examples? Because these examples are very different from what the ex-yahoo person mentioned in a follow-up comment: stuff like personal hobbies.

I am curious as to the niceness point. Are you sure he randomly decided not to show up? Perhaps he and management had a quiet agreement where when his chronic diarrhea showed up he stayed home. Work is informed but when you ask they make up some excuse, we don’t want to hurt his feelings, but really that is just the way of not telling you as his medical history is personal and not your business.

That “niceness” is a textbook example of “ruinous empathy.”

https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-hone...

Thanks for that link!

Marissa Mayer ruined Yahoo

Yahoo's decline predates Marissa. But she certainly failed to do anything to correct its tailspin into the ground.

The company inherited a billion dollars with the Alibaba IPO around the time she became CEO, and she couldn't make it work.

... and walked out with a fortune

Are you me? I had the exact two same issues when I was at Yahoo (2005-2007) basically due to Jerry & Filo. Somehow happy to know that I wasn't the only one :)

> a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work [... ] I took it to management

out of the context provided, this sounds likes like none of your business?

What if you need that coworker to do your job?

Then it would be a bad working environment, but for another reason. Companies should assume that anyone can be run over by a bus at any time and plan accordingly.

This doesn't seem reasonable. If you assume anyone can be run over by a bus, most ways of mitigating that risk involve some recovery time. If it takes 4 hours to recover that person's work and get up to speed, the company has planned accordingly, but it's still extremely inconvenient to lose half a day because someone didn't show up to work.

"out of the context provided"