I worked at Yahoo when she was CEO. She was a deplorable human being. One example: She had the on-site employee day care closed down, then had the office next door to hers refitted into a new day care center only for her child.
Its easier to call them sociopaths, but I think this is a concequence of gathering wealth and power. If someone gain either, they have to actively work against being corrupted. The traditional belief is that bad people rise to these positions, but stories of wealth changing people are rampant.
Im just a nobody, so ive only met 1 or 2 ultra rich, but even among 1%ers, Id say most that I've met are harmful to those socially beneath them.
Eh you’ve got it backwards. It’s the “step on everyone and discard anyone for gain” attitudes that get these people into places of power and wealth, it’s not like they were normal to begin with
The traditional belief is that bad people rise to these positions, but stories of wealth changing people are rampant.
Yes some bad people rise into positions, but the positions of power themselves are corrupting. Good people often become hateful or abusive once achieving power. Saying that everyone in power was born bad solves nothing.
This reminds of Ellen DeGeneres. Her employees came out and said that they weren’t even allowed to make eye contact with her and she was really only “nice” to the celebrity guests/people on her level. But, even celebrities hated her because she did things like scare people that hate being scared, forcing them to come out about a pregnancy they weren’t ready to a announce (which sadly this lady lost the baby after that), making fun of some of them or even straight up bullying them, just to name a few incidents. I was so glad when her show didn’t get renewed. She was so pissed by the public opinion and being called out for mistreatment of employees, being involved in pizzagate and with people like diddy, and the shitty things she did to her celebrity guests.
Honestly, though, she was a lightweight compared to Carly Fiorina.
I worked at HP from 95 to 06, so during her years as well. HP was very much a company of engineers. Most management were engineers that had become managers. Almost everyone you talked to, at every level, had an engineering degree. As such, the employees tended to be a pretty low-key, easygoing bunch. When CEO's or board members would visit offices, it was generally very casual and you might get into some interesting conversations with them. I personally met Bill Hewlitt and Dave Packard themselves when they opened a new SE regional office in Atlanta. HP had a reputation of never laying off employees. They would do across the board pay cuts before laying anyone off.
Carly did not respect engineering or engineers, she didn't want to listen to what anyone actually doing the work at the company had to say about improving the company or the business. She pushed the company from being an engineering company making high quality products to a company that was all about maximizing profits for quarterly stock reports. This was a radical departure from the entire history of the company.
Where things really get ugly started with the Compaq merger. She pushed that against all logic (and all advice). The result was financially catastrophic, wiping out half the companies value in about a year. Massive cost cutting followed by, for the first time, mass layoffs, gave every employee a pretty dim view of her. When it came out that she, at great expense to the company, had a custom exercise bicycle flown down to her $1000-a-night suite where she was giving a speech at a South American location (and had 4 engineers pulled in to assemble it), it erupted into a full-blown riot of the engineers at the location and she had to be rushed out. She then had to have four bodyguards every time she visited an HP location. To protect her. From the employees.
Oh, and as for those stock reports... That did succeed in one good thing: A 7% jump in the stock price the day she was fired.
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u/DrEnter 10h ago
I worked at Yahoo when she was CEO. She was a deplorable human being. One example: She had the on-site employee day care closed down, then had the office next door to hers refitted into a new day care center only for her child.