6 ms·

I was once a fan of Mayer when she first took over Yahoo, until she led a crusade against remote workers. As a remote worker myself I can tell you this crusade

by joeax 10y ago

I was once a fan of Mayer when she first took over Yahoo, until she led a crusade against remote workers. As a remote worker myself I can tell you this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry. A lot of tech companies (especially outside the bay area) want to emulate the cool kids like Yahoo, Google, and Apple, and even the company I work for started questioning its WFH policies. So no, I don't feel sorry for her one bit.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Dude, Yahoo stopped being a "cool kid" a decade ago. That's really messed up if your company actually thinks it should emulate Yahoo because it's a cool company.
- joeax 10y ago
  I never said my company emulates Yahoo. But "cool kid" or not their influence cannot be understated. Right after the Yahoo/WFH hoopla companies like Best Buy and HP followed suit. Remember this was back when she first took over CEO and everyone believed she was the "one" to turnaround the company.
  - IndianAstronaut 10y ago
    I know someone at HP who suddenly had to go in to work. This put him in a situation where he had to pay thousands for day care and he threatened to leave until they finally let him work from home again.
    - doublescoop 10y ago
      So, an employee was doubling as a full time care giver for his children while remote working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives remote work policies a bad name in the first place. If I found out one of my employees was taking care of his kids while working at home, you better believe it would result in a conversation and a possible revocation of his use of the remote work policy.
      - scott_karana 10y ago
        You're ignoring their effectiveness. Maybe they work better without coworker interruptions and in a familiar space, which offsets any negatives of caregiving. And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock? Humans aren't automatons.
        Nadya 10y ago
        >And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock? Don't need a handle on it if you block access to them. But my work found that blocking Reddit/Facebook actually made less work get done: people couldn't spend 5-10 minutes to unwind and then plug back in and work. That policy lasted a single week.
      - Salgat 10y ago
        I'd love to hear the explanation for how checking up on a toddler every so often is akin to him grossly neglecting his job.
        sangnoir 10y ago
        > I'd love to hear the explanation for how checking up on a toddler every so often is akin to him grossly neglecting his job. If we generalize that to "what is wrong with frequent distractions" - open plan offices would fall into that category. For an answer, I would direct you to read any one of the many well-articulated anti-Open-plan rants on HN. Toddler care has all the downsides of an open plan office without the (possible) upside of increased team-productivity.
        fibbery 10y ago
        Do you have a toddler? I'm not a parent but my understanding is that you can't expect them to just play quietly by themselves for any more than short stretches.
- jacquesc 10y ago
  While that's generally been true since the late 90s, when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo did have quite the honeymoon period. Yahoo genuinely became "cool" for at least a year or 2, and everyone was glowing about Mayer being one of the best CEOs in the tech world.
  - shard972 10y ago
    Maybe that's what yahoo should do to get out of their short term problem at the moment, hire another female CEO to get some hype back in the company.
  - shard972 10y ago
    Maybe that's what yahoo should do to get out of their short term problem at the moment, hire another female CEO to get some hype back in the company.
brian-armstrong 10y ago
She laid out a good reason for doing it. I think the decision was justified.
- chii 10y ago
  what was the reason she gave?
- ericdykstra 10y ago
  In the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, he uses Mayer's firing of remote employees as an example of a toxic work culture that values signalling over production. Here's the excerpt: > In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for nor spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive." "Batching" email to specific times in the day is a pretty well-known productivity win, especially for people whose job it is to engage in deep work.
  - petre 10y ago
    That's how corporate culture works - it does not necessarily reward actual work, but it does reward being visibly "busy" as in quickly responding to e-mail, attending meetings etc.
    - johnbellone 10y ago
      This is precisely how corporate culture works. /sigh
  - ww520 10y ago
    That's horrible management. It's the busy body mentality.
  - 10y ago
harryf 10y ago
Don't read "How Google Works", "Work Rules" or "In the Plex" then. Meyer was just repeating the Google playbook which places a high emphasis on getting staff in the same physical space
- omouse 10y ago
  Cargo cult style.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dominotw 10y ago
>this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry Were there any other companies that followed yahoo's lead?
- joeax 10y ago
  Yes, like I stated above Best Buy announced a similar plan a couple weeks later. I will mention though that companies like Dell and Microsoft later openly stated they were expanding their WFH policies so the anti-remote working trend was short lived.
- shepardrtc 10y ago
  Mine did. But it was a smaller company with about 500 people, who were mostly older with families. We had maybe 1 full-time remote worker (who was actually pretty good), and the rest of the people would simply work from home one day a week. But after hearing about Marissa's crusade, they killed that off. Didn't change performance, but it did kill morale.
- Leon 10y ago
  Yeah, Gannett started limiting remote workers when Yahoo did. They followed in Yahoo's footsteps because to upper management it sounded like a good idea. Get everyone together! ...except for developers who were already largely working between remote teams anyway and caused some fellow employees with family and health responsibilities but were still good developers to have trouble and eventually leave the company. Cutting out existing options and freedoms to employees does not in any way help the culture of a company. I don't work there any more but every developer was very upset that I talked to at the time. Any company I work for in the future I want at least the ability to work remote. I personally enjoy being in and around coworkers, but there were a few times when I wanted to work remote for periods of time to help with family. Being in an office can help _certain types_ of work - but it doesn't help all types of work, and development is one that can be remote.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  I don't know if it was in direct response because I wasn't here at the time and it also coincided with the MSNBC split from Microsoft, but I understand that NBC Technology severely curtailed its remote working policies around the same time.
glonq 10y ago
Can confirm. My boss killed everybody's 'work from home one day per week' policy and cited Yahoo's actions as his justification for it. Sadly, that used to be the most productive day of the week for me.

by joeax 10y ago

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

Dude, Yahoo stopped being a "cool kid" a decade ago. That's really messed up if your company actually thinks it should emulate Yahoo because it's a cool company.

joeax 10y ago
I never said my company emulates Yahoo. But "cool kid" or not their influence cannot be understated. Right after the Yahoo/WFH hoopla companies like Best Buy and HP followed suit. Remember this was back when she first took over CEO and everyone believed she was the "one" to turnaround the company.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  I know someone at HP who suddenly had to go in to work. This put him in a situation where he had to pay thousands for day care and he threatened to leave until they finally let him work from home again.
  - doublescoop 10y ago
    So, an employee was doubling as a full time care giver for his children while remote working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives remote work policies a bad name in the first place. If I found out one of my employees was taking care of his kids while working at home, you better believe it would result in a conversation and a possible revocation of his use of the remote work policy.
    - scott_karana 10y ago
      You're ignoring their effectiveness. Maybe they work better without coworker interruptions and in a familiar space, which offsets any negatives of caregiving. And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock? Humans aren't automatons.
      - Nadya 10y ago
        >And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock? Don't need a handle on it if you block access to them. But my work found that blocking Reddit/Facebook actually made less work get done: people couldn't spend 5-10 minutes to unwind and then plug back in and work. That policy lasted a single week.
    - Salgat 10y ago
      I'd love to hear the explanation for how checking up on a toddler every so often is akin to him grossly neglecting his job.
      - sangnoir 10y ago
        > I'd love to hear the explanation for how checking up on a toddler every so often is akin to him grossly neglecting his job. If we generalize that to "what is wrong with frequent distractions" - open plan offices would fall into that category. For an answer, I would direct you to read any one of the many well-articulated anti-Open-plan rants on HN. Toddler care has all the downsides of an open plan office without the (possible) upside of increased team-productivity.
      - fibbery 10y ago
        Do you have a toddler? I'm not a parent but my understanding is that you can't expect them to just play quietly by themselves for any more than short stretches.
jacquesc 10y ago
While that's generally been true since the late 90s, when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo did have quite the honeymoon period. Yahoo genuinely became "cool" for at least a year or 2, and everyone was glowing about Mayer being one of the best CEOs in the tech world.
- shard972 10y ago
  Maybe that's what yahoo should do to get out of their short term problem at the moment, hire another female CEO to get some hype back in the company.
- shard972 10y ago
  Maybe that's what yahoo should do to get out of their short term problem at the moment, hire another female CEO to get some hype back in the company.

brian-armstrong 10y ago

She laid out a good reason for doing it. I think the decision was justified.

chii 10y ago
what was the reason she gave?
ericdykstra 10y ago
In the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, he uses Mayer's firing of remote employees as an example of a toxic work culture that values signalling over production. Here's the excerpt: > In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for nor spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive." "Batching" email to specific times in the day is a pretty well-known productivity win, especially for people whose job it is to engage in deep work.
- petre 10y ago
  That's how corporate culture works - it does not necessarily reward actual work, but it does reward being visibly "busy" as in quickly responding to e-mail, attending meetings etc.
  - johnbellone 10y ago
    This is precisely how corporate culture works. /sigh
- ww520 10y ago
  That's horrible management. It's the busy body mentality.
- 10y ago

harryf 10y ago

Don't read "How Google Works", "Work Rules" or "In the Plex" then. Meyer was just repeating the Google playbook which places a high emphasis on getting staff in the same physical space

omouse 10y ago
Cargo cult style.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dominotw 10y ago

>this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry Were there any other companies that followed yahoo's lead?

joeax 10y ago
Yes, like I stated above Best Buy announced a similar plan a couple weeks later. I will mention though that companies like Dell and Microsoft later openly stated they were expanding their WFH policies so the anti-remote working trend was short lived.
shepardrtc 10y ago
Mine did. But it was a smaller company with about 500 people, who were mostly older with families. We had maybe 1 full-time remote worker (who was actually pretty good), and the rest of the people would simply work from home one day a week. But after hearing about Marissa's crusade, they killed that off. Didn't change performance, but it did kill morale.
Leon 10y ago
Yeah, Gannett started limiting remote workers when Yahoo did. They followed in Yahoo's footsteps because to upper management it sounded like a good idea. Get everyone together! ...except for developers who were already largely working between remote teams anyway and caused some fellow employees with family and health responsibilities but were still good developers to have trouble and eventually leave the company. Cutting out existing options and freedoms to employees does not in any way help the culture of a company. I don't work there any more but every developer was very upset that I talked to at the time. Any company I work for in the future I want at least the ability to work remote. I personally enjoy being in and around coworkers, but there were a few times when I wanted to work remote for periods of time to help with family. Being in an office can help _certain types_ of work - but it doesn't help all types of work, and development is one that can be remote.
__derek__ 10y ago
I don't know if it was in direct response because I wasn't here at the time and it also coincided with the MSNBC split from Microsoft, but I understand that NBC Technology severely curtailed its remote working policies around the same time.

glonq 10y ago

Can confirm. My boss killed everybody's 'work from home one day per week' policy and cited Yahoo's actions as his justification for it. Sadly, that used to be the most productive day of the week for me.