"People often talk about Mayer as the pinnacle of work ethic"

Not this guy, who worked at Google from the start:

http://www.amazon.com/Im-Feeling-Lucky-Confessions-Employee-...

I completely agree with your point, also made in the article: It would be not be surprising if some of these baccalaureate APMs wind up at Yahoo.

As the article pointed out, however, It’s not surprising that a high percentage of APMs go elsewhere. APMs are chosen for their ambition and independence. Those traits are often at odds with working at a big company

A successful executive at any organization could be expected to bring along X number of of loyal reports if they move laterally. It seems likely though that the especially ambitious and independent individuals discussed would be less likely to do so. This could be compounded by the reported personal difficulty some individuals had while working with her (Douglas Edwards' book http://www.amazon.com/Im-Feeling-Lucky-Confessions-Employee/...).

In all, the headline sensationalized the situation: she developed an employee incubator program at Google and some of the graduates will probably end up at Yahoo.

Edit:spacing

By an amusing coincidence the announcement of Mayer's new job came the day after I finished reading I'm Feeling Lucky[1], the memoirs of "Google employee #59". Its author makes it easy to read between the lines and get the impression that Marissa Mayer was an aggressively disruptive incompetent who could do whatever she pleased because she was sleeping with Larry Page. Whether that's actually fair I have no idea, but the book is interesting. The timing was such that the phrase "short sell!" popped into my head as soon as I saw the news.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547737394

By the way, if you're interested in search, Google, or SEO, it's a pretty good book: http://www.amazon.com/Im-Feeling-Lucky-Confessions-Employee/... There's several anecdotes about the early days of Google that help explain why parts of Google turned out the way they did.

Well, I appreciate the kind words about Xooglers 1.0. I'll admit that I'm rehashing some old posts and that I saved a lot of the best bits for my book (http://amzn.to/gVwlNz), but I'll see if I can't throw some meat into the stew in the coming weeks. Now that I know people actually care.