Have you heard of Geoff Weiss? Neither had I until I was forwarded an egregiously offensive article by him. Geoff Weiss is an unkempt, inarticulate loser who thinks it’s OK to opine on the professional decisions of people who are enormously more successful than he could ever dream of being. He is also a rabid sexist and a promoter of PC-policing of the worst caliber.
In his recent article, Weiss pouts and whines about the hiring decisions of the eminently successful Marissa Mayer. The way this dense fellow starts his article is extraordinarily hilarious:
The best leaders are able to tread a tricky balance between reason and instinct. But for Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, these governing principles tend to be uniquely compartmentalized.
Note the ridiculous psychobabble (“compartmentalized”? Have been watching too much Dr. Phil lately?) and the need to make pronouncements about leadership. I wonder where Weiss gets his insights into good leadership if he never managed to lead anything or anybody.
The reason why this sorry excuse for a journalist condescends to Mayer is that she refused to hire starlet Gwyneth Paltrow to work for Yahoo. Apparently, believing that everybody should do the job they are qualified for awakens Weiss’s ire. That is not surprising, given that Weiss is obviously not qualified to do any job whatsoever. His hysteric insistence that bored amateurs should be handed the jobs of qualified professionals, no questions asked, is the result of his own discomfort with qualified professionals.
The article becomes really bizarre when Weiss accuses Mayer of. . . bias and discrimination for refusing to hire people without college degrees:
But most interesting of all, perhaps, was a curious bias that pervaded Mayer’s hiring processes. Namely, she “balked” at bringing Gwyneth Paltrow onboard as a contributing editor at Yahoo Food — despite the fact that Paltrow had a best-selling cookbook and was the creator of a popular lifestyle blog, Goop — simply because she hadn’t graduated from college. . . We’ve written before about the ways in which curating a unanimously like-minded team — a pervasive notion in Silicon Valley — can quickly veer into discrimination.
Note the eagerness with which this pseudo-journalist attaches labels of “bias” and “discrimination.” Weiss is obviously one of the participants in the irresponsible and offensive “You don’t need a college degree to succeed!” campaign. He is so desperate to contribute to this cause that he uses the words “bias” and “discrimination” in a way that completely dilutes their meaning. I wonder if Weiss would agree to be treated by a doctor without an MD or is he also guilty of discrimination against people who “simply” didn’t go to college.
The really sad thing is that Weiss’s article follows the recipe for a successful trashy piece of journalism to a T: he condescends to an extremely successful woman, inserts a stupid barb about her clothing choices, and throws around progressively sounding words to mask a fiercely conservative agenda. As a result, his article gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to every loser who hates success and is too stupid to get an education.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s an immensely stupid article, but a college degree doesn’t necessarily translate into click bait, which is what the company wants. Similarly, it does not follow that helming a vanity project that loses money will translate into success for a larger portal.
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Mayer is a lot more qualified than I (or Weiss) to figure all this out. We cannot possibly know why she doesn’t want to hire Paltrow. And why should we care, really? Paltrow is hardly about to go broke because of it.
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I don’t like Paltrow at all, but I think college degrees are overrated in many fields. Professions that need special permissions or licenses like teachers, lawyers, doctors or accountants are different. But who cares if the person who writes the recipe of Scrambled Eggs for Yahoo Food has a degree or not? If employers start to ask for degrees even for the most basic ad-sales jobs (like online recipe writing), then next what? Will toilet cleaners also need a college degree in Public Sanitation to get a job? Mayer is a public figure, I think it’s okay to criticize her business decisions. Btw I think the lack of the college degree was just an excuse on her behalf. The position Paltrow applied for is so insignificant, that it’s weird why the CEO of such a huge company wastes her time on it. It will rather be something personal. I agree that the article was terrible, and based on stupid gossips, but I would be genuinely surprised if Geoff Weiss would be more sexist or mysogynistic than Mayer herself.
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This has already happened. Employers don’t consider people without college degrees for office jobs. We just hired a person with a Masters of Fine Arts to be our office secretary with the salary of $22,000. We interviewed several people without college degrees but their cultural sophistication was so non -existent that it was impossible to hire them.
I also used to think this was ridiculous, and then I met the graduates of the local high schools and finally got it.
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We interviewed several people without college degrees but their cultural sophistication was so non -existent that it was impossible to hire them.
It’s so funny to me. Cultural sophistication is not something you pick up in community college or high school or an online university. What is this cultural sophistication that people pick up in grad school that you can attribute to grad school and not coming from a certain class background?
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There are highly-educated people who publicly lick their fingers while eating, or loudly sniffle their noses instead of asking for a tissue, or show up in business meetings in flower-patterned bermuda shorts, or go to the theatre in DIRTY SNEAKERS, so I don’t think it’s the grad school that gives people basic manners.
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“There are highly-educated people who publicly lick their fingers while eating, or loudly sniffle their noses instead of asking for a tissue, or show up in business meetings in flower-patterned bermuda shorts, or go to the theatre in DIRTY SNEAKERS, so I don’t think it’s the grad school that gives people basic manners.”
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“But I really don’t want to be the first immigrant EVER the new employee sees. I’ve met quite a few adults around here for whom I was the very first immigrant they EVER talked to. I’ve got to tell you, it’s not extremely pleasing. They start yelling at the top of their lungs because, apparently, I can’t understand English unless it’s pronounced very very loudly.”
Huh, I’ve never met this phenomenon, although I have a Dutch accent as I recently got to know. I only met one old Scottish woman who began to roll her eyes because I couldn’t understand her rural dialect (even other native English speakers don’t always understand the rural Scottish, as they use a different vocabulary). I’ve never meet these inconsiderate yellers though. They are really unhirable, especially because academia is full of foreign professors, researchers and students. It must be very disturbing to meet a yeller like that. I don’t even know what I would do in a situation like that.
“I do have an accent but my vocabulary in English is richer than that of 97% of applicants to graduate programs across the country.”
Yes, you really have a very wide vocabulary, that’s why I come here to learn new words. My (native) English teacher only taught me 2 new words in the English class I attended this autumn. Your ratio is much better than that :-).
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“My (native) English teacher only taught me 2 new words in the English class I attended this autumn. Your ratio is much better than that.”
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“What is this cultural sophistication that people pick up in grad school that you can attribute to grad school and not coming from a certain class background?”
As for the class background, the candidate who thanked me for being articulate and told us that one of her best friends was African American has never worked a day in her life because she never needed to. She has a rich husband. I mean, RICH.
You’ve got to understand the area we are in. People see crossing the border into the neighboring state as an enormous adventure. Having to work with a group where everybody has an unusual name and speaks with an accent is going to be extremely hard for them. They need exposure to immigrants, to other languages, to different ways of life. Where else can they get any of this but in college?
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I was asking about grad school though. Did the college graduates display this same lack?
In my experience, people who are so small town that being around immigrants and other languages is weird tend to keep that insularity. I went to a small college in a small town. I had a couple friends who were such people. One girl dropped out (she had other issues in addition.) Another girl decided to move to the whitest state ever — Utah and she was vocally uncomfortable with everything. The eye rolls and the sighs and the misapprehension of basic geography have nothing to do with sophistication and everything to do with attitude. We had a significant international student population for a small college. People who are rich enough to never work a day in their lives can afford to travel across the country and out of the country. So the idea that people can speak well in a second language shouldn’t be an absurdity because they’ve probably interacted with tour guides.
You could get that same basic level of understanding (not rolling eyes and sighing and not freaking out at accents) from incoming international students as freshmen or children of immigrants.
I have this understanding, but I attribute this to who I am and not college so much.
And graduate schools, depending on the field, tend to be much more homogeneous than colleges.
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In this area, the difference between people who have been to college (usually, ours) and people who haven’t is like the difference between me and Sarah Palin. Seriously, they come out transformed from our programs.
“People who are rich enough to never work a day in their lives can afford to travel across the country and out of the country.”
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She didn’t make a Huckleberry Finn/Driving Ms Daisy reference did she?
I suppose, had I not gone to the college I went to, I would have never known small town people. 🙂
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I agree completely with your assessment. I never heard of Weiss before either but it seems that his critique of Myers is fueled by misogyny . I somehow doubt that Weiss would be so critical of a male CEO (and descend in to picking apart his fashion choices.)
And the thing is: Weiss has no idea what really went down with the Paltrow hire. It’s not like Myer is going reveal the intricacies behind her hiring practices. Have you read Paltrow’s Goop? It’s horrible: annoying and badly written. Saying Paltrow doesn’t have a degree is probably a polite way of saying that Galtrow isn’t very bright.
I understand Paltrow’s Goop is popular. But it’s not popular enough to raise Yahoo’s profile. Myer has an enormous task on her hands. Yahoo is practically obsolete. And she’s not going to revitalize Yahoo based on the turgid “happy homemaker” prose of an aging starlet.
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Exactly. Mayer ‘s every move and clothing choice gets analyzed to death. I’d like to see Weiss deal with all this endless scrutiny. If he loves Paltrow so much, maybe he should hire her. Of course, to do that he would have to get the career of Mayer ‘ s caliber.
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Yahoo stopped being a technology company and now behaves like a mutual fund or a private investor in many ways.
When that happened, they became “obsolete” because they now follow the playbook that all large companies play before someone else revolutionises their market space..
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In this society, a college degree means an average difference in income of $30,000 per year. Since median individual income in the US is $27,851/year, that’s a substantial difference. So, when you face someone who doesn’t have a college degree, the hiring manager has to determine which of the following scenarios applies: (1) the person is highly skilled in a particular item the firm needs; (2) the person is intelligent and will do well if the firm is willing to invest in training (many are not); or (3) the person is oblivious to the difference in income or doesn’t want to work hard. Guess what? Persons 2 and 3 don’t get hired.
College degrees work like Linus’ blanket among HR people. Whether a job requires it or not, you may not get hired for a good position without it.
Melissa Meyer is a tough case. The financial performance of Yahoo under her reign has been mediocre at best. The company has made changes that alienate older users while failing to attract enough of the younger ones. Are her preferences in hiring linked to the company’s financial performance? Not clear.
Facebook hires college grads, even though the CEO is a dropout. So does Microsoft. Google only hires people under age 30. Some only hire people from the CEO’s home country. There is discrimination of one form or another all over Silicon Valley. No one is taking a stand against it. If anything, the universal solution to any hiring need is — “lets hire a grad student from China, Vietnam or India who can work for us under the H1B program; it’s cheaper than training.”
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“Google only hires people under age 30.”
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“Melissa Meyer is a tough case. The financial performance of Yahoo under her reign has been mediocre at best. The company has made changes that alienate older users while failing to attract enough of the younger ones. Are her preferences in hiring linked to the company’s financial performance? Not clear.”
I’m always happy when I see women in the technology sector, but I also find Mayer’s business performance quite problematic. She is a highly intelligent woman, and surely a good engineer, but as a CEO she behaves as if she still lived in the 90s.
“If anything, the universal solution to any hiring need is — “lets hire a grad student from China, Vietnam or India who can work for us under the H1B program; it’s cheaper than training.”
I don’t understand this. They also don’t have to train the American grad student. After all that’s why he or she attended the grad school, or isn’t it?
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Kool-Aid — insecure management wants you to drink it.
It’s not enough to hire labour that’s qualified — it’s better if you can hire someone who absolutely has to take the job.
The American H1/L1 visa programme has been fabulous for labour extracting companies who do better with somewhat standardised at-risk labour.
After all, they’ll hear very few complaints, at least if the hirelings are smart enough.
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Thanks for the information, I didn’t know that. The whole thing sounds horrible. I heard a story like that recently but I thought it was only a rare incident. I wonder what the American government would say if an oil-producing country in the Middle East pursued the same practice. I guess it would be a serious breach of human rights that requires an immediate action.
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Small correction, Gwyneth Paltrow has not been a starlet for a looong time, at least fifteen years (starlets do not win oscars by definition).
I find her acting kind of limited but occasionally pretty good. I think she was best in Shallow Hal (for my money her best performance).
I can think of lots of reasons to not hire her, though, without even giving her degree status a glimmer of a thought.
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I think we look at communication as always been faciliative and in that sense having a positive, or additive effect on society. But that may be wrong. I keep thinking there are sytems of eugenics at work that are very subtle. I don’t even mean that humans develop these on purpose, but rather that certain leaders or influential persons rise up to become Pied Pipers, playing a tune that leads people akin to them in spirit down particular paths to their respective destinies. There is a lot of Darwinian filtering in the way we manage our consciousness (is another way of saying it).
Look at what we may have here: a Pied Piper who will lead middle-aged men to perpetuate a system whereby they are less educated than their female counterparts. This is subtractive communication, because it informs a certain spiritual demographic of its limitations and coaxes them into accepting these (in this case, the limitation of not being educated).
I really don’t think we can do much about this subtractive communication mode, since there will always be people who want to retract into a smaller bubble of consciousness and close the walls around them.
Perhaps those who communicate using an additive style are the most rare, as they offer little by way of comfort. Above all, they do not permit the closing off of the limits of identity. (I could go on like this for says, as identity itself is only possible once the walls of consciousness close off the access to infinity.)
In any case, nothing much we can do.
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There are plenty of other reasons to distrust Mayer’s vision for Yahoo without getting into this kind of ridiculousness …
Yahoo tends to behave more like a mutual fund or investment firm than it does a technology company — in fact, it’s difficult to find much within Yahoo that actually does look like technology development.
Right now Yahoo’s doing well because of an investment in Alibaba, but that could have gone wrong — Mayer looks like a genius during this upswing for the same reason that Putin doesn’t during his downswing.
The most recent company report looked like vindication, but it’s deceptive: Yahoo’s fundamentals were improved mostly by shedding business functions that didn’t have a place in its near future. Had the Alibaba move not worked, we’d be talking about how Yahoo is yet another Hewlett-Packard, another once-famous company that also doesn’t do much in terms of technology anymore.
Admittedly, Yahoo’s present course is better than the twenty-year liquidation that’s been going on at IBM, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. Mayer may be better at running Yahoo than Jerry Yang ever was, but that doesn’t mean that’s good either.
In other words, if there were going to be massive validation for Mayer’s leadership, it should have happened by now with a resounding shout of mass approval in the marketplace.
It hasn’t, so we are now in the familiar position of wondering how good it’s going to get, since greatness appears to be off the table for now.
In Mayer’s defence, I will say that she did have enough sense about business fundamentals not to hire Gwyneth Paltrow for anything at all.
After all, what would be the purpose of that? 🙂
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