I was at Yahoo from 2010-201X. It was really bad. Tons of remote employees you couldn't count on to give you the time of day, let alone do anything meaningful.

I was at Yahoo from 2010-201X. It was really bad. Tons of remote employees you couldn't count on to give you the time of day, let alone do anything meaningful. Was the problem remote jobs? No, probably not. The problem was complacency: Complacent employees who didn't want to work and used remote jobs as an excuse not to do anything. Complacent managers who didn't know how to manage remote employees and didn't want to learn. Did we have remote employees who were amazing? Hell yeah. Did lazy employees overwhelmingly choose to become remote because it was the easiest way not to do any work? Hell yeah. There were more than a few stories (not from management, even) about employees who hadn't even logged in in a couple months. It was beyond the typical "bad employee gets no work done," it was just "bad employee doesn't work one iota." My takeaway was that managing remote employees is a skill that many managers don't possess, and bad employees knew that and capitalized on it very effectively. So you're correct that it was a move to facilitate a rapid mass layoff, but the part that's unsaid there is that the people being laid off were overwhelmingly the worst employees anyway. Their managers should've been given the boot as well.