Meet the Disgraced Yahoo Executive Who Made $34,000 an Hour
Maybe this is why Yahoo is doomed
Ted Rall
http://rall.comTed Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Down in the lower atmosphere, where I live, a then recently hired and then fired VP walked away with a $28,000 check per month paid over the next 36 months. I walked out to his car with him before his firing was announced and he seemed happy and in a more conversational mood than usual. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out why he seemed so above it all.
The take away is that you never get paid what you’re worth but only what–or all of what– you negotiate.
They key to negotiation is a position to negotiate from, making the ability to organize strikes so important.
Well said.
I realize the point of the post is more to bring attention to the obscenity of someone being paid so much in the first place, let alone for having anything to do with such a badly put-together site. Considering how cheesy Yahoo! is overall (from the shock-em-to-get-em-to-click headlines to the astrology column on the front page), I wouldn’t pay anyone working there more than $35,000 a year.
But it’s a chicken-and-the-egg sort of problem. Do the people who get paid so much do so due to their abilities or due to the people making the decisions being so far beyond their abilities and competencies that such ridiculous salaries are, somehow, justifiable?
I mean, seriously, look at the Yahoo! site. It’s a bunch of random garbage pasted on to the page. Right now, the “Trending Now” feature in the upper-right prime location? Two of the items are “Best Credit Cards” and “Mortgage Rates.” A third item is “Snorting Smarties.” When I click on “Best Credit Cards”? It brings me to a search result page.
That’s right: it doesn’t even frickin’ bring me to a Yahoo! article. Not even a listicle. It’s just a search page. Zero content. So I go to Yahoo! to get a Google search done, is that it?
Going down the front page? More of the same: the articles are all culled from other sites: Bloomberg, The Sideshow, Comcast SportsNet, Associated Press, Reuters, Pets.com, etc. And almost all of the content is filtered through the “Weekly Reader” mindset: keep it really simple and blandly entertaining. Lots of celebs, lots of gossip, throw in a little science (but no evalushun), make sure that no one emerges from the site any smarter than they were going in. Fill the empty little heads with empty little diversions.
The only problem? There’s a million sites for that. Yahoo’s chasing a vanishingly small piece of the pie.