14 ms·

No more remote work at Yahoo

• shanelja 14y ago
  I think that this is all being blown far out of proportion, when people are in the office, there is a lot more intent, you are there to work, sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results. In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to. We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like, in addition to our $120,000 per year wages, our paid healthcare, our free office snacks and clothes washing and our free donated dairy cow. I wonder if, in a few years if the bubble pops, we will look back fondly on the days of decadence and wish things where still the same? ------------- Also, totally unrelated, just realized I've been a member of HN for 6 months, cool landmark :)
  • MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    > In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to. More productive for who? You? Better hope that person wasn't in the middle of something important when you broke his/her train of thought that will take a good half hour for them to recover.
    • shanelja 14y ago
      No train of thought takes half an hour to recover, that is massively scaled up to make my point sound ridiculous. That aside, if I feel it is important enough that it required an immediate response prompting me to go all the way to their desk, then it's most likely more productive for the entire company. I should probably post-face this with the fact that I am one of only 2 devs at my company, the rest are content production / design / marketing.
      • MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        > That aside, if I feel it is important enough that it required an immediate response prompting me to go all the way to their desk, then it's most likely more productive for the entire company. You must have some incredible judgment then. Do you trust all of your coworkers with having that same level of judgment?
      • tompko 14y ago
        Actually studies suggest that for "knowledge workers" like programmers 25 minutes is the average amount of time it takes to recover from an interruption to a task. So half an hour lost to an interruption isn't that bad an estimate. Anecdotally I've certainly had times deep into debugging complex problems where an interruption has needed a lot longer than 30 minutes to recover from.
        • zheng 14y ago
          This. I find I can generally get back into feature writing within 5-10 minutes. Debugging can take much longer. This is the number one reason for staying late, because I know that if I leave this issue now, it will take me half of tomorrow just to get back to this particular spot.
  • Justsignedup 14y ago
    I think of it in another way: The ship is sinking. It's bad. Time to throw out the gold crates. Time to throw out the limping crew. Sure the limping fellas can spot land. Maybe hes even good at it. Better than others. However the ship is going down, its time to try whatever possible in hopes of saving it.
  • corresation 14y ago
    sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results As someone who has worked independently and for others in offices and remotely, the above statement is the exact opposite of reality. When people are in the office non-production is perversely seen as production. Where warming a seat and having lots of busy work meetings and filling white boards full of inanity is "the gears of work". When working remotely, the sole indicator of accomplishment is actual production. All of the bullshit is pushed aside. We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like, in addition to our $120,000 per year wages, our paid healthcare, our free office snacks and clothes washing and our free donated dairy cow. As humorous as that is, your "heed the man" advice is quaintly archaic. A business like Yahoo is nothing but the combined work of a bunch of smart people. We've seen -- time and time again -- that many such companies are driven and succeed because of a subset of those people, so it is dangerous, dangerous ground to offend them. Because they become the upstarts that grind places like Yahoo into dust. The world has changed. We all have the tools, the technology, the capacity to scale, the communications mediums, and the audience. It is nothing like it was. EDIT: Places like Reddit, Digg, Slashdot are by far busiest during the North American work day. These are by and large people working in offices.
  • darkxanthos 14y ago
    You're unfortunately being down voted because others don't agree so I uprooted since you're on topic. I was a remote employee for the last almost two years at Cheezburger with many others. We had a culture of emails not taking forever and a day to respond to and if you needed a response now you could Skype, google talk, jabbr, phone call whoever you needed. The whole organization was committed to it. On top of that, everyone I knew worked like mad. There were definitely pros and cons and I'm sure the pros outweighed the cons.
    • shanelja 14y ago
      I'm finding the swinging karma quite humorous to watch, in any case. I agree mostly with your point, but the problem is this - the gargantuan size of the company leads to problems, there are always going to be a couple of ass holes who sneak under the radar, the people who do the minimum amount of work possible, working from wherever they want and being paid for it. It's a shame that the actions of these people can make employers naturally suspicious of hiring people to work remotely when I'm sure most are decent and hard working.
  • gcp 14y ago
    ...but you are under more pressure to produce results. No, really, it is the opposite. You're fine as long you as you sit on your computer from 9 to 5. Working from home, there's a constant pressure to produce actual results, because that's what you are judged by. I find it more stressful and there's more tendency to do overtime (you're already home anyway, right?). I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to. There are many ways around this, chat clients being the most obvious. Also, continuously interrupting people can be very counterproductive, specifically if you do intellectual work. We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like There's many people for which working remotely isn't actually a choice, barring a change of employer. I wonder if, in a few years if the bubble pops, we will look back fondly on the days of decadence and wish things where still the same? I've done consulting jobs both locally and remotely, and if you ask me, in a few years time we'll consider non-remote working (when it isn't necessary for the job) a thing of foolishness.
    • talentless 14y ago
      I think this is exactly right. It is easy to measure 'time in chair', but that isn't a metric of productivity. Productivity is harder to measure so 'time in chair' is often the substitute. When you work remotely you don't have 'time in chair' as a proxy for productivity so you have no choice but to prove yourself through your output. When in an office you can stare at the wall all day and have it considered "work". Working remotely isn't for everyone. Some people do not have the self-discipline. Don't allow those people to work remotely or don't hire them at all. There are other benefits to working in the same meat-space: culture, easy collaboration, etc. I don't believe pressure to produce results is one of them. I also think that most of those advantages are disappearing or gone with chat, email, skype, google hangouts, and other collaboration solutions.
  • _delirium 14y ago
    I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to It really depends on people/culture, but I find a shared IRC channel where people idle and are reasonably responsive to be the #1 way to have relatively friction-free quick coordination, even with people in the same building. Physical colocation is 2nd-best, email/Skype 3rd-best. In fact, I think local is superior to remote mainly in the opposite case: where you need lengthy meetings, especially with more than two people. In that case, videoconferencing and email get unwieldy. But for routine quick queries I find IRC a lot better than walking over to someone's office, to the extent that someone local who doesn't use IRC (or isn't responsive on it) feels more distant to me than someone remote who does.
  • ebbv 14y ago
    > In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to. That's great that this is the case for you in the situation you were in; but the assertion that "people who work in an office together share instant communication, and people who work remotely have slow communication" is obviously false. I've worked plenty of real world offices where communication was done only via email and took ages. On the other hand, the job I work at now, I work remotely 4 days a week and communication is instantaneous. We have a company IRC server and if you're working it's expected you'll be on there. There's always phones but IRC + email work 99% of the time. Remote work is the future; the reasons to work in an office together are evaporating. As remote video conferencing improves (and as someone who uses it every week, let me tell you, it still sucks) the benefits of being together in person disappear. This is an idiotic move by Yahoo!, and shows that they have no clue what the are doing.
  • brown9-2 14y ago
    This seems like an overly broad sword to cut with though - an explicit assumption that working in the office is by definition more productive than working remote. Employees can be unproductive in the office just as much as remote employees can be super-productive at home. Yahoo just seems to be taking the easiest to see metric for "productive".
  • simias 14y ago
    This is an old debate, but you getting immediate responses to your queries and them getting immediate responses to their work means that you're interrupting each other when an email would've been non-intrusive. That's basically my #1 problem where I work: we're in big open-spaces and you get interrupted all the time. Sometimes just having someone talk next to you can be enough to break your train of thought. That being said, I agree it's very helpful to be able to talk in person sometimes. I think the solution is just something hybrid, you work remotely a certain portion of the time and get to the office for the other days. I would be interested to hear yahoo's reason for giving up on remote work though. This article is a bit unsubstantial.
    • shanelja 14y ago
      At my company, we have a place called Quarantone, where people can go not to be disturbed for a couple of hours, that aside, if you are at your desk, it generally means that contact is fine :)
      • simias 14y ago
        That seems like a good compromise. But then you need quite a bit of spare room in the office dedicated to your "Quarantone". That can be quite hard to find if depending on where your company is located.
  • smackfu 14y ago
    >In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to. Corporate IM is one solution to this.
  • johnward 14y ago
    It sounds like you don't have very much experience working as a remote employee or with remote employees. I feel like I'm under more pressure when I'm remote. I'm constantly trying to stay focused because I'm paranoid that the company will say "you aren't doing anything" and remove my WFH privileges. In the office I spend more time on HN and other time wasting because it's much harder to make the argument that you aren't getting your job done when you are physically in the office for 9-10 hours.
• lowglow 14y ago
  I would guess they're changing culture, then firing those that don't fit (or have lost all intrinsic motivation) through performance reviews, then making the rest sing and dance until they get burned out, finally replacing those that left or were fired with new blood baptized by the new regime.
• jijji 14y ago
  I'm Sorry, but I would prefer to live in a place where on the hottest day in summer, the ocean water is not freezing cold. Or a place where my kids can grow up and not have to worry about drinking polluted groundwater. Or a place where even though I live 5 miles from work, it still takes me an hour each way to get there. Or a place where the housing is not so out of touch with reality that a 2 bedroom shack costs $600K, when in any other part of the country that same house would be less than $60K.
  • throwaway1979 14y ago
    What better place do you have in mind? I don't live in the bay area anymore because of some of these very problems. I moved to the New York area instead and am somewhat regretting it. The bay area has problems but it is a pretty decent place for tech folks. I'm genuinely interested if you have done your home work and know of better options. The other place we are considering is Austin. Chicago would be there too but we have had it with cold weather.
    • jijji 14y ago
      Well, my take on this is unique only because I did work for Yahoo for years, and in the beginning I worked on-site, but then for years after that I worked 100% remotely from my house in Spring Hill, Florida. The way I work is remotely, and I will work on-site for a small time, and after trust is built up, the work is largely done remotely from then on.
• infoseckid 14y ago
  People at Yahoo need to "work" first to qualify for "remote work". I think this is the right direction. Get the team together, develop team spirit and then transform the company.
• tribeofone 14y ago
  Get'em Dave
  • benatkin 14y ago
    I don't think he goes by Dave, any more than he drinks beer. :p
• jimwalsh 14y ago
  Are none of their teams distributed? I'd imagine if you have a distributed team, what's the difference if an employee works from home occasionally. The theory being that their boss or most of their team isn't in their location already. I can understand if Yahoo is making a shift to shore up some things in house. Hopefully if that is the case, they return to a policy that allows more work from home. This is a battle that Gen Y'ers are going to have with aging management who can only manage people they can see/touch/watch. I thought we as an IT culture were doing better moving away from those old tenants but news like this doesn't make it look good.
• swombat 14y ago
  As I posted on the 37s blog: Management paranoia is not the only reason why someone would want to decrease the amount of remote work. There are team spirit benefits to bringing people together physically, and depending on the type of work being undertaken, remote work may have more downsides than upside. I don’t see this as an aggression against remote workers, or an attempt at controlling remote workers more closely based on some paranoid perception that “they’re slacking” – it seems more like a change meant to help strengthen the culture at Yahoo by making it easier for teams to bond.
  • ebbv 14y ago
    I'm sure that's how the executives in charge of this boneheaded decision explain it to themselves, but try applying just a pinch of real world logic to that thought and it shrivels like a slug under salt. Do you really think that people who have been forced to start working in the office under threat of termination are going to form a positive, collegial bond? If they form a bond at all, it will be one based on shared resentment of the Dilbert-esque reality they now inhabit.
    • swombat 14y ago
      > Do you really think that people who have been forced to start working in the office under threat of termination are going to form a positive, collegial bond? If they form a bond at all, it will be one based on shared resentment of the Dilbert-esque reality they now inhabit. I think that in hard times, you either do form a bond or you go form a bond somewhere else. I think that's the decision that was just taken at Yahoo. They could just have fired all the remote workers - but that would have been truly stupid.
      • ebbv 14y ago
        Just firing the workers would have been even more stupid but what they did was already stupid.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
• michaelochurch 14y ago
  This is an excellent analysis of the situation. I generally prefer to work in the office over remote work, because it's preferable from a networking perspective, but a zero-tolerance approach to it is ridiculous. My personal hunch is that this is a move to reduce headcount. Yahoo's top management doesn't want to put the company through a layoff, and they're not organized enough to know which projects to cut, so this is their hail-mary complexity reduction step. It's a way to shave off a few percent without having to terminate people. Unfortunately, the cultural side effects are going to be massive. It's bad for the executive image as well. "We're out of ideas." WFH exists for sociological reasons in addition to the obvious benefits (geographic reach, lower stress levels). Engineers are smart. They know they're not all going to climb the ladder and become top dogs. Not everyone wants that, either. The right to WFH gives people the tacit ability to "grow away" to a 10-hour work week, taking pressure off the competition for visibility and rank and allowing the organization to actually function. It gives people a path whereby, instead of climbing the organizational ladder, their efficiency gains are paid back to them in the ability to retain employment with a reduced work footprint. If you're twice as efficient as a typical office drone (which is not hard) then you can work a 20-hour week. When you go back to the ass-in-chair regime, management has more control and the social stakes are higher. People aren't going to be happy putting in 40-50 dedicated hours and not having control. To a myopic executive who thinks everyone should be like him or her, that seems like a good thing because it makes people "hungry", but it's actually dysfunctional because the competition for rank is extremely counterproductive. Next up is the Micromanagement Death Spiral. Macroscopic underperformance leads to individual overperformance by managers, the problem being that managerial overperformance (heightened control, micromanagement) is toxicity. That will exacerbate the company's macroscopic issues and lead to more micromanagement... the vicious cycle.
  • jorde 14y ago
    No doubt will this reduce head count but on what expense? My guess is that it pushes more talented people out which can start the downward spiral. This is something we have seen in Finland with Nokia: when the company decided to give people the choice to leave and get a severance package, it meant that the best people left to join startups and to do something else. After you start to bleed talent like this it's hard to go back.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• mef 14y ago
  The author asserts that the new policy is based on "flimsy foundations". How does he know if the foundations are flimsy or not? Does he have inside knowledge of the productivity of remote vs. local employees at Yahoo? Is he assuming it's the same as at 37signals? Might it not be? He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". How does he know there was no consultation? How does he know local employees didn't give feedback to management that the extra communication overhead with remote workers didn't create difficulties in collaboration? He also writes that this policy change reveals that "Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not.". Why is this assumed? Why isn't it plausible that management studied the problem and found that having collaborators in disparate locations hampered progress? The entire article seems needlessly reactionary and assumes things about the working culture at Yahoo that may not be true. Perhaps this vehement reaction is due to the fact that the author has a new book coming out advocating remote working?
  • shawndumas 14y ago
    our quarterly review process is very through and includes a minimum of 3 peer reviews. our forth quarter reviews just finished
  • raganwald 14y ago
    Without agreeing or disagreeing with your first three paragraphs, I want to share with you that the very last sentence puts your arguments at risk of being derailed by accusations of Ad Hominem Tu Quoque--that you are speculating about the author's motivations with exactly the same lack of insight that you decry. Worse, that line is also likely to distract people who notice that it's an Ad Hominem Circumstantial. I personally think your argument would be best served by saying something along the following lines: The author asserts that the new policy is based on "flimsy foundations". He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". He also writes that this policy change reveals that "Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not." What evidence is there that any of these conjectures and speculations are true? That would make the point about the lack of evidence in the post rather than about the author.
• brown9-2 14y ago
  I didn't bother to read the original announcement but this line stands out for me: it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices Seems to be a statement that good collaboration is only possible when employees occupy the same physical space. Yahoo has offices across the glove, don't they? Are they going to also ban teams/employees in different offices from working together?
  • walshemj 14y ago
    Presumably the idea is that teams are collocated which is where most of the value of team bonding comes from.
• nikon 14y ago
  Working from home is boring. I spent 1 1/2 years working from home but now much prefer working in my client's office with the team. It seems no one else is either willing to admit this, or I am the only one who prefers the social interactions and the ability to resolve and issue face-to-face in 2 minutes rather than struggling on Skype, or waiting for emails.
  • leddt 14y ago
    I worked a year from home and came to similar conclusions. It was fun for the first month or so, but after that I was missing the face-to-face conversations, the happy hours and the general "buzz" of an office.
    • gcp 14y ago
      As someone working remote, it's telling to me that the fun part of working in an office are all things that are...not actually working :)
  • ebbv 14y ago
    There's advantages and disadvantages to both but I think you're in a minority if you overall prefer working in an office all the time. Personally I like working from home as the default and meeting in person when needed/appropriate.
  • gcp 14y ago
    the ability to resolve and issue face-to-face in 2 minutes rather than struggling on Skype, or waiting for emails. If you're not coordinating your remote workers on an IRC-like system, you're likely doing it wrong. (That's my experience, if someone else has successfully used other systems I'd like to hear about it) Also, if most of the team is on site and the remote people are a small minority, things are going to suck, unless management is also off-site.
    • codeordie 14y ago
      I think you are spot on - I've done a lot of working from home, but it's by far the most satisfying when there's a chat room (or IRC) system setup. It makes it fun, I feel more connected, and I think we are more productive that way.
• airnomad 14y ago
  I'd like to see ratio between remote and office employees for 37signals. My bet is they're not, contrary to the popular belief, mostly remote-work company.
• PakG1 14y ago
  All of the comments I keep reading that criticize this decision assume that the A-players were working from home, and that the A-players will hate the decision. Possibly true. But a lot of the anonymous internal feedback was that over the years, previous management had filled Yahoo up with B-players. If that's true, I can easily imagine that there's quite a large overlap between those who work from home and the B-players. It's such an easy way to slack off if you're not motivated or capable. And nowhere do I read people saying, "Hey, maybe this was what the situation was." I only read people saying, "Yahoo is boneheaded for not respecting their people." Let's consider all the possibilities.
• SethMurphy 14y ago
  I think a mandate having everyone work from home for a month would be more telling at who the real producers are. This would force succinct communication and everything is on the record. Working remotely forced you to communicate in a more transparent way and actually gives a good manager more evidence to judge an employee by. Of course counting hours is easier for a manager to do.
• redm 14y ago
  It's worth noting that the author doesn't really know how Yahoo arrived at that decision. Yahoo very well may have evaluated remote work productivity or be aware of other situations or metrics that make it clear, they needed to terminate remote work programs. I feel pretty confident that Marisa Mayer didn't just wake up and make a rash decision to terminate remote work without fully evaluating and understanding the situation, the impact and the benefits.
• djt 14y ago
  What works for a company the size of 37 signals may not work for a company with thousands of workers.
  • netrus 14y ago
    It works quite well at IBM, head-count around 400k.
• cujo 14y ago
  Wow. Why are we all of a sudden so interested in what Yahoo is doing these days? They aren't a leader in, well, anything, but now the internet is in a frenzy about this work-from-home recall. How's this for an idea? Let's see if Yahoo is a company worth looking at for leadership. They aren't? Oh. Then let their policies die with them.
  • eloisant 14y ago
    Well, people who like the idea of working from home don't like the bad publicity remote working is getting from the ban at Yahoo.
    • MitziMoto 14y ago
      Exactly this. As a full time remote worker, I fear the "monkey-see-monkey-do" fallout that could come of it. Yahoo may not be a "leader" in anything, but their CEO is one of the most respected people in Silicon Valley. When she makes a move such as this one, people notice.
    • cujo 14y ago
      I get that. It's just a dead horse at this point. The only ones keeping it alive seem to be the defensive work-at-home people.
• bcks 14y ago
  I have absolutely no data on this, but it struck me as a lazy and sneaky way of making layoffs. It looks tough and decisive "She has a vision!" without spooking Wall Street with the "Yahoo starts the layoffs!" headlines.
  • pyre 14y ago
    Sometimes Wall Street responds favourably to shedding employees. I guess it just depends on the general outlook of the company. If the outlook is good, then they are just 'cutting costs' and 'shedding cruft.' If the outlook on a company is shaky or bad, then it's just seen as a desperate move to keep the company afloat.
• pshin45 14y ago
  One crucial piece of info missing from this article is how long this "no more remote work" policy will be in effect. Yahoo's cut a lot of staff and (acqui-)hired a lot of new people over the past few months, and so for the sake of team re-building, I can see why they might want to have all staff in one place for a while. Even if staff are working remotely, it's always better for them to have met and bonded in person at some point - more trust, camaraderie, and goodwill. Maybe this is Marissa Mayer's way of getting everyone on the same page for a few months, and then afterwards people will be able to work remotely again as usual. If this is a temporary measure to team-build more effectively, then it makes sense. If it's permanent, then I agree with the author DHH that it's a foolish and shortsighted move.
  • netrus 14y ago
    If I now move my family close to an Yahoo office, only to learn that the measure was just temporary, I would be quite angry. Sure, invite all teams to meet at an office for 2-3 weeks of networking, team-building etc. That's a great idea, but not what is happening here.
• willvarfar 14y ago
  I'm a remote worker. I've worked remotely for teams based in the US for one of those big names you know and more recently for a London-based company with offices just a couple of hours commute from my house deep in the Swedish countryside. I've worked about 6 years full-time remote in the last 10. Working for home is not for everyone but for some of us its speeds us up not slows us down. The days I go into the office for meetings are the days I get nothing real done. Here and in all the remote-working threads people come along to say it doesn't work and that you need to sit together to be a team. Well, I guess these are inexperienced people who haven't worked out how to do it effectively is all. I hope there is a new enlightenment in remote-working for us programmers. There's so many diverse companies and meaningful organizations I'd be happy to dedicate my thinking hours too if their management could just consider it possible...
  • cbsmith 14y ago
    > Working for home is not for everyone but for some of us its speeds us up not slows us down. The days I go into the office for meetings are the days I get nothing real done. It seems like you've drawn a particular conclusion from this, but I think you are missing an entirely different one. If you "don't get anything done" every time you come in to the office, that would suggest there is something more important than your individual "getting things done" that doesn't get addressed when you aren't in the office. When you are there, taking advantage of the opportunity to address this exceeds the value of what I'm sure most people would describe as your primary job function. > Here and in all the remote-working threads people come along to say it doesn't work and that you need to sit together to be a team. Well, I guess these are inexperienced people who haven't worked out how to do it effectively is all. I would agree with this. Obviously remote working can work. That isn't to say that there aren't trade offs. There absolutely are. Like all trade offs, the exchange is a bargain for some contexts and an unacceptable price for others.
    • gcp 14y ago
      When you are there, taking advantage of the opportunity to address this exceeds the value of what I'm sure most people would describe as your primary job function. I think it's more a side-effect of the typical meeting. They tend to be so low bandwidth, that most people view any way out of them as increasing their productivity. I've not found remote meetings much better in this regard.
• jblock 14y ago
  I get the stigma of "cool companies" that have chefs that serve organic meals 4 times a day, but are those benefits really all that superficial? As a new graduate who has to move to likely a very expensive part of the US to work for them, making the transition easier by eliminating some worries from my life (like doing lots and lots of grocery shopping) is a pretty nice benefit.
  • ikailan 14y ago
    No, not at all. Serving meals makes it much easier to convince your team to go to lunch together (though many folks will eat at their desks, PLEASE DISCOURAGE THIS). Lunching together with your team frequently is the single best benefit of a company that offers cafes for employees. It's one of the ways non-urgent but important information propagates around an organization.
• britman 14y ago
  For me I think it's actually a clever marketing move by DHH and 37 Signals to create a "stir" around the issue. My guess is they don't really care what Yahoo's reasons are behind it but are very pleased with the timing...you can't help but notice at the bottom of the post - Interested in learning more about remote work? Checkout our upcoming book REMOTE: Office Not Required.
  • smw 14y ago
    I think it's likely that you're missing a layer. The book is really just marketing for the DHH/37signals/RoR brand. Developing that brand makes people more loyal to their products and ecosystem, which probably makes them a lot more money over the long run than book sales.
• jobu 14y ago
  We've had business relationships with Yahoo in the past and everyone we dealt with there had a complete lack of accountability. No one seemed to care when we found problems, and it would take months for simple things to be fixed on their side. This change will no doubt cause some loss of talented people, but if they want to drastically change the culture at Yahoo I don't see any other way. They need to get everyone working together both physically and mentally. Hopefully they'll move all development back home as well. Their dev teams in India were dreadful with turnaround times and bugs.
  • willvarfar 14y ago
    > if they want to drastically change the culture at Yahoo I don't see any other way Surely you can imagine other ways to make people accountable, dedicated, empowered and effective than focusing on the place and hours they work?
    • PakG1 14y ago
      Can you? If the situation was truly bad at Yahoo, I can't. That if is an important if, of course, but the question stands.
• 127001brewer 14y ago
  The following (from the posting), "When management has to lay it on so thick that they don’t trust you with an afternoon at home waiting for the cable guy without a stern “please think of the company”, you know something is horribly broken.", reminds me of this quote... How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?[1] [1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/111168-how-in-the-hell-could-a-man-enjoy-being-awakened http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/111168-how-in-the-hell-could...
• cletus 14y ago
  37signals comes down against a decree of no more remote working. I am shocked (shocked that there is gambling going on in this establishment). Much like hiring practices this is and will continue to be a divisive issue. This one however seems to be largely driven by personal preference: if you want to work from home, you can't understand why anyone is against it. If you don't, then you do. I fall in the camp of not necessarily being against remote working but it's not something I want to do, I understand why companies don't want it and I don't think working remotely scales. The last is the most important point. Many take the view that they can be much more productive with flexible work schedules and when people don't bother them with trivial stuff and when they don't waste time on the commute. Firstly, working from an office doesn't not exclude a flexible work schedule. I've gone through phases where I don't get into work until 3pm. A guy I know decided he would take Thursdays off and work on Saturday instead. My manager forgot I was going on vacation for a few days and I didn't get a call or email asking where I was until midday Tuesday (having not shown up on Monday). As far as not being bothered, this can certainly be true. This is actually part of the reason why I often wear headphones. Noise-cancelling headphones do a pretty good job of filtering out a lot of noise but just the act of wearing headphones I tend to find acts as a psychological barrier from others bothering you. As for commute, this much is true and is a particular problem in the Valley. For me, my commute is a 7 minute walk to work (in NYC). YMMV. :) But a lot of people make the same mistake with this issue that they make with hiring practices: they tend to think that the individual case matters. It really doesn't. If a hiring process weeds out some qualified candidates, it doesn't mean it's broken. Whether or not it's broken is determined by whether the company finds a suitable candidate, how long it takes and how expensive it is. False negatives don't matter (to a company) as long as you get a positive result. The same goes here. The individual thinks they can work from home and they may well be right but there are bigger issues. For teams--particularly large teams--to work together requires a certain camaraderie that is orders of magnitude easier to manage when physically colocated. This also applies to teams that are geographically split. All other things being equal, a team in N sites will perform better than a team in N+1 sites. The other issue, and this particularly applies to large companies, is one of culture. Culture like team cohesion is orders of magnitude easier to spread when physically colocated. For a company the size of Google (my employer), IMHO this is far more important than any individual perceived benefits about permanent remote work. Google has (IMHO) done a remarkably good job of maintaining cultural consistency such that transplanting an engineer from one team to another is relatively seamless. This isn't just about common tools either. Chris Dizon wrote a great post called Twelve months notice [1]. I like it because it articulates the primary difference (in my experience) between those who work remotely and those that don't. In my experience, those who work remotely tend to be far more in the transactional work category. While there's nothing wrong with this and I think it's particularly suited to freelance consulting, IMHO it is at odds with running and maintaining a large engineering organization. But I know I'm not going to convince anyone. This another polarizing issue. Just be aware there are bigger issues than the individual not wanting to drive to work. EDIT: Also, I disagree with the position that this "punishes" good employees. Yahoo wants to build (or rebuild) an engineering culture. They've decided this is easier to do with engineers physically colocated. This doesn't preclude workers from working from home on an occasional basis (eg waiting for the cable guy). It simply means the default is you come into the office. [1]: http://cdixon.org/2009/10/23/twelve-months-notice/ http://cdixon.org/2009/10/23/twelve-months-notice/
• ishansharma 14y ago
  This reminds me of of my college. There are so many times when I want to study myself but they have a strict attendance criterion which I have to fulfil. I do not like this new decision. Yahoo looked on a nice path after Merrisa coming back but this is a bad decision for workers. No matter they will leave soon!
• tristan_juricek 14y ago
  My sense is that Yahoo is about to start doing some reorganization. - There might be some trial and error runs of different managers (ergo, a period of quick reorganization) - Leadership might want to simply make their mark on the organization - It might be about establishing a culture of secrecy a la Apple (this is a stretch) I do sense it's a symptom of a serious cultural problem. Layoffs might be coming. However, I'd expect more people to just to be straight up fired, without the big "we're reducing headcount" sort of announcement.
• brandonbica 14y ago
  I'm generally a fan of 37 Signals and the way they treat their people. I also don't have any knowledge about any of this other than what I come across on the internet. My current company doesn't have a set WFH policy, it varies by department and sometimes seems hypocritical when you realize that there are overseas contractors. This is my disclaimer. I disagree with this post. From everything that I understand from what I've read it seems like one of the major issues at Yahoo is a culture thing. This doesn't seem so much like a trust thing to me. It comes across to me as a way to rebuild an identity by changing the environment and you can't control the environment when people don't come in to the office. It does seem to me like there is potential to lose some good employees up front, for sure. I don't assume this decision is a short term move. Whenever management makes a decision that is more restrictive, or against popular opinion, there is always out lash. Then it dies down. New people start and it's the only thing they know so it's not a big deal. The people are going to be the ones who change the company, and to change their mindsets, and reinvigorate them it seems like a culture change would be a good thing in the long run. The current policy clearly isn't working, how bad could this really be? I love the idea of working from home, being independent and working autonomously, but it has its place. It's situational at best and this might be the perfect example of a place where it's not currently working. This by no means is saying that it doesn't work for 37 Signals. It seems to work fantastically for them and for many of the customers who use their software. I loved Rework, and I'm definitely looking forward to Remote. Not everything is black and white.
• mschaef 14y ago
  A couple observations about this situation: Yahoo will likely be better off with a an all local workforce. Having spent time working both locally and remotely myself, being local and present with the rest of the team has significant benefits. That said, the personal costs for the employees in question are likely to be very high, particularly for those that telecommute from places that aren't in driving range of the Yahoo office. My hope is that Yahoo is treating these people as gently as they can. > Companies like Google and Apple can get away with more restrictive employment policies because they’re at the top of their game and highly desirable places to work. -DHH The causality my be wrong here... it may not be the goodness of the employer that enables the restrictive employment policy, it may be the restrictive employment policy that enables the goodness of the employer.
• kayoone 14y ago
  I do not understand the general uproar against this. I have been working remote alot in my life and i find its not the ideal way to work productive for me and it certainly isnt the ideal way to build a great working culture. Its more like everyone cooking their own meal, communication is hardly ever as good as it should be in remote teams and you are just more disconnected from the core. Personally i like my time alone and i get alot of stuff done in less time, but i enjoyed sitting in an office with 4 other engineers alot more. It was alot more fun and not alot less productive, if at all... Working remotely from home makes me feel alone after a few weeks now, i might even call it depressed. While i think working remotely for some time (1-2 days a week) is awesome, i dont see the future of work as being remote only... I dont want to mix private with work life too much, which happens alot when working from home and i want to feel relaxed at home and not always think about getting back to my desk to get some more work done. And i know alot of people that think the same.
  • tribaal 14y ago
    I'm currently working from "home" 100% (since about a year), and to remedy or alleviate this problem I rent a space in a coworking office full of other (mostly non-IT) entrepreneurs/remote workers. It's been working pretty well!
    • kayoone 14y ago
      exactly what i will be doing from March onwards, just got the keys :)
  • gcp 14y ago
    I do not understand the general uproar against this. I have been working remote alot in my life and i find its not the ideal way to work productive for me and it certainly isnt the ideal way to build a great working culture. This can be true, but for those whom it is ideal, why shouldn't there be uproar about it? Can we move your office to the basement, next to the drilling machine, while we take your stapler and forbid anyone to talk to you? This works for me so why are you upset about it? Working remotely from home makes me feel alone after a few weeks now, i might even call it depressed....I dont want to mix private with work life too much...not always think about getting back to my desk to get some more work done. These are valid points, and something important to take care of if you're working remote. I'd go batshit insane without friends on IRC, and it takes discipline to maintain a regular working schedule that doesn't venture into the night (too often). Nobody said working remotely is great for everyone. As long as you accept that on-site working is very suboptimal for others too.
• kjackson2012 14y ago
  I worked for Yahoo in the years surrounding the Microsoft debacle. Let me tell you in no uncertain terms that Yahoo was the worst company I worked for. I had very little work to do. Period. End of statement. I spent most of my time doing practically nothing except playing ping pong and foosball and getting paid for it. A lot of my coworkers and a lot of Yahoos were in the same boat. Needless to say, that once the Microsoft acquisition failed and the layoffs started happening, most of us were out of there. On top of that, there was very much a prima donna attitude around Yahoo, with a great deal of self-entitlement. I remember a couple of threads on devel-random complaining about the lack of ping pong balls, and how that insulted us as Yahoos since it meant that management didn't trust us. Oh the humanity of not providing everyone with $2 worth of ping pong balls! Yahoo was filled with lazy workers, and an extremely fat layer of lazy management. I vaguely remember Rasmus running a script that calculated around 70 employees per VP. As well, the internal politics at Yahoo was astounding. One of my friends worked on an iPhone app on his own free time, and when he tried to get approval, it was held up for months because people were arguing over things like color schemes, and which group should own the app. It was pathetic. I like what Marisa Mayer is doing. I think by getting rid of some privileges like remote working, it is enforcing a discipline that hasn't been at Yahoo, at least during the years that I was there. Showing up to work is a small price to pay for being paid a great wage and having the opportunity to work for what will hopefully become a first class company again. People need to show up and work and interact with their peers, instead of hiding at home and people not knowing wtf is going on with them. Sure, some people will quit, but quite bluntly, anyone worth their salt would have already left Yahoo by now. Anyone who is happy working in the environment that was Yahoo over the past 5 years is not an A player by any stretch, so it's safe to assume that you can afford to lose them.
  • lttlrck 14y ago
    "Anyone who is happy working in the environment that was Yahoo over the past 5 years is not an A player by any stretch, so it's safe to assume that you can afford to lose them." Great comment.
    • JoachimSchipper 14y ago
• PakG1 14y ago
  This article seems like an excellent response to OP. It was posted 496 days ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3123135 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3123135
• louischatriot 14y ago
  DHH points are valid, and I agree with him that this move shows how much Yahoo trusts its employees. That basically means they have no clue why they're falling appart and think the answer is "people need to work more". But we have to keep in mind that 37signals is a very differend kind of company. I'm not sure remote work is that suited to big companies. So they may be right in principle but they're handling it poorly. tldr of the article: http://tldr.io/tldrs/512b80b57ad42f2e2500000a/no-more-remote-work-at-yahoo-by-david-of-37signals http://tldr.io/tldrs/512b80b57ad42f2e2500000a/no-more-remote...
  • aoprisan 14y ago
    works fine for IBM
• webmonkeyuk 14y ago
  We all love a sensational post! "Of course not, you’re going to be angry at such a callous edict, declared without your consultation" seems a bit out of place when the pull quote from Yahoo! reads: "If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps"
  • aoprisan 14y ago
    it's really not, just less bs
• ap22213 14y ago
  Not allowing remote work seems as out-of-touch and inflexible as the types of companies that impose 3-year minimum laptop leases. It smells of an organization that is run by manufacturing MBAs and not creatives. These are the companies that straddle the past - vision-less, fearful, and clinging to hierarchy and control instead of embracing risk and riding and harnessing waves of change. These are the types of companies that see their employees as cost lines in a P&L spreadsheet, instead of as untapped resources with limitless potential for creation.
• mephi5t0 14y ago
  I SSH to REMOTE servers form home OR from office. So what difference does it make? Well, yes, it may change some interaction because you could grab a coffee with people. And I kinda like to work in office but I DO work from home a lot. And even if I am in the office I still talk to most people on IM. Yahoo's new policy is garbage. Or explanation why they do it is garbage.
• nirvana 14y ago
  TL;DR: Here's the thing: All engineering is "working remotely" because being "remote" is simply a matter of isolation. This is why even people in the same room use headphones, IM, etc. Everything that's not working remotely (eg: isolation) is "meetings" and the overhead of distractions. The only advantage of having engineers in the same office is a lower cost of meetings. The disadvantage is it makes engineering harder. -- This decision shows me that Meyer doesn't respect or understand engineering culture. She's bought into the management BS "accidental collaboration" rationalization for industrial age butts-in-seats ideology. Engineering culture comes, to a great degree, from the way you treat engineers and the process of engineering. Treating engineers like cubicle bunnies who just can't wait to get interrupted by their Pointy Haired Boss is not conducive to building a good engineering culture. In fact, requiring people to be in the office shows an anti-engineering mentality, because engineering, an effort of the mind, requires situations that are best for the mind. Two key things enable good engineering: Collaboration (which requires communication) and coherent thought (which requires silence or peace or the isolation from interruption necessary to do it.) This means that even if every engineer is in the same room, they're going to start "working remotely" by isolating each other via the use of headphones, and a preference for non-interruptive working (Eg: send email, or an IM rather than walk over and tap the engineer on the shoulder.) It's true that in an office getting together in a conference room to has something out is easier and more convenient, but the tradeoff is that even with all the isolation people try to put into effect interruption creep is a real thing- eg: meetings, etc. Working remotely prevents these interruptions at the slight cost of a higher level of effort needed to have a "meeting" (using a virtual whiteboard or just a phone call or whatever.) So, if you spend most of your time in meetings, then you need everyone together. If you value engineering and spend most of your time engineering, then whether people are together or apart physically, they are all isolating each other and effectively "Working remotely". IM, Email and other collaboration tools that allow engineer isolation work as well whether the engineer is in the office or across the country. Plus, lets not forget the minimum 2 hours of lost productivity that comes form requiring people to go to an office- either the commute (and the resulting need to get into work)-or the long lunches at those free cafeterias, and the endless cycle of distractions that are accepted non-work in offices. A "15 minute coffee break" at the office really has a 20-40 minute work interruption, because it often involves other people, while that same break working remotely can easily be exactly 15 minutes, and likely will be shorter because 10 minutes is enough to get the same level of relaxation from the day. Almost everything in an office is designed to distract you from engineering, and the cost of this overhead is significant.
• timrpeterson 14y ago
  this policy is probably just a means to weed out non-productive workers, normally like DHH but think he's sounding off on something he doesn't have the knowledge to
• outside1234 14y ago
  i'm not sure i would describe myself as a remote worker but instead, a worker that comes in when there are advantages to coming in: a set of meetings, a day where I need tons of facetime to nail things down, things that that are worth the commute. This is about 2x a week. I consciously batch these days up with as much of this as possible. I work at home the other 3 days (on average again, some weeks I'm in the whole week, some week I am at home the whole week). I find this incredibly productive. I crush the people that work in the office full time. I have time to be healthy with the regained hours from commuting (40min in my case). I can afford a house. Sorry, but the butts in seats mentality is crazy and I'm not going back. Even for Google (where I've worked), which was nice, but failed on this score.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• alan_cx 14y ago
  Firstly, I'm a huge fan of proper home working. Simply, it works for me. The general "vibe" I get from this is that that new management has arrived and is concerned about productivity. I assume that if new management has arrived, they would or should know what productivity levels should be and that yahoo remote staff are lacking. If so, then from a management POV, it does seem quickest and simplest to notionally get everyone back to base and kind of hit a reset switch. If yahoo is now a low ranked place to work, then I can well imagine that in general its employees are a bit low ranked too, and perhaps some of the more lazy ones looking for a lax easy life. Presumably the quality people will have left. In which case, remote working cant work well at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming the employees, this can only happen or go wrong if management lets it. But, I think one should support a new regime that is presumably trying to sort it out. Presumably, and if it were me, they will assess the situation and bit by bit allow people out of the office again, but with new procedures, guidelines or what ever. So, to be honest, I think I can see what yahoo is doing. Yes it is painful for the good remote employees that are left there, but if thing are going wrong, they need to support the attempts to fix it. Or...... I've missed the point somewhere.
  • smackfu 14y ago
    > I assume that if new management has arrived, they would or should know what productivity levels should be and that yahoo remote staff are lacking. That certainly sounds like what most new management thinks they know.
• vvortex3 14y ago
  I am a full time telecommute developer. I am slowly travelling around the world while telecommuting. The job is awesome and all that anyone has to do to achieve this is just to demand that any job they take be 100% telecommute. There are, however, a couple things that one should keep in mind. 1) Your competition is global and intense. (How many of you have worked with some of the better Russian or German developers? How do they get so good?) 2) Your pay must be set and comparable to a global standard so forget about silicon valley pay. 3) You are usually a contractor and have no safety nets. So save large chunks of your pay. Ok, that said, maybe I can relate this to the original article by saying that I've literally seen projects completed about 3x faster and at least 3x cheaper than any other corporation I've worked for that required the workforce to be in-office. Why? Well, I don't really have the answer. I can speak to my own experience in that I'm judged solely on deliverables. I don't really have a face and as far as the company is concerned I exist as my deliverables... so they better be up to par. The other reason is that working this way requires projects to be organized ON PAPER. Those who have worked at any corporation will understand why that is important. So many managers bullshit their way around doing things like clearly documenting requirements or tracking deliverables. This simply won't work in a telecommute environment. I really do believe that if I were to hire a team to complete a project I'd do so on a telecommute basis. It's simply cheaper and faster if done correctly and thus gives any company that does so an advantage. One last point: I don't believe any manager who is not him/herself an engineer is suited to manage such a team.
• donohoe 14y ago
  Basically, remote working works and is good. At Yahoo it was nor working - being abused, bad habits and policy engrained over years. Doesn't mean it won't be back down the road. I think they're just cleaning house.
  • just2n 14y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. If a person is unproductive or abusing a policy, you fire them, publicly. You don't ban the policy. Now everyone who wasn't abusing the policy but was only still working at Yahoo because of it will leave. This is called throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
• xyahoo 14y ago
  Sigh, not this sh*t again. Yahoo's problem is (and always has been for quite a while) bad middle-management. (See my earlier posts; like Punxsatawney Phil, I come out only on occasion). These middle MF'ers have been running the company into the ground with their lack of vision, petty infighting and sheer idiocy. This has led to MM and her cohorts to basically not trust the lower half of the company. So the rank-and-file are paying the price for MM's inability to weed out the rotten layer of middle managers. Instead of cracking down on the WFH crowd, she should crack down on middle managers. 1. Get rid of any manager who has less than 8 direct reports 2. Anyone of the level 'director' or above must justify their positions (there has been severe rank inflation in Yahoo in the past) 3. Anyone who has been at Yahoo for more than 2 years and in a position of authority must be forced to analyze why their property declined over that period, and what they could have done to avoid it. There is too much of 'shoot and scoot' at Yahoo: managers jump on any hot item, botch it up and then move on
• bpatrianakos 14y ago
  Any one of us could go off on a diatribe on why DHH is right or wrong (and some of us have) but I think this issue is actually much simpler and we're missing something crucial here. Whether remote work is a good practice or not is besides the point. I'd say, when done intelligently, it's a great thing. But don't you think Mayer knows that already? The bottom line here is that Mayer has to take a floundering company and turn it around. There must be something going within Yahoo! that makes this decision the right one. Yeah, there's going to be some blowback from employees and the media but at the end of the day it wouldn't be surprising if Mayer is reading all these articles and saying "Oh if you only knew what remote work is doing to this company...". Remote work as far as I'm concerned is a great thing - but it's probably hurting Yahoo! more than helping right now. I wouldn't be surprised to see Mayer turn this thing around and reinstate the remote work policy when the dust settles. It's easy to play armchair CEO, especially if you're a CEO, but what DHH is saying is basically "remote work is working for us therefore it should work for others". Well, it's great that it works for 37Signals but Yahoo! is a different beast and Mayer is not an idiot. It seems like she's willing to take some damage now to avoid a catastrophe down the line.
  • gfodor 14y ago
    Great comment. In such a dysfunctional company such as Yahoo I would bet that the majority of "remote workers" are just coasting and doing nothing. It's a shame for those productive remote workers who will either leave or be forced to start coming in, but if for every one of those people there are a hundred pieces of dead weight then I think the cost benefit analysis is pretty clear for a CEO to make.
    • bpatrianakos 14y ago
      Exactly. You said it better than I could in less words. The way I see it there's definitely a lot to discuss when it comes to remote work but as it applies to DHH's criticism I think what he says comes off as more of a way to kind of say "hey we're awesome and we promote remote working" and completely ignores what may be happening within Yahoo! to prompt this change. I wish DHH had framed his post differently because it comes off as very know-it-all-ish and doesn't seem to take into account that there might be anything else going on at Yahoo! other than what he thinks.
• senthilnayagam 14y ago
  on twitter my interaction with dhh me: @dhh been to yahoo office and things are recovering, just reserve your judgement till 3rd quarter results are out , hoping for a miracle dhh: @senthilnayagam No miracle forthcoming will be due to killing remote working programs. me: this one is a boomerang, it is targeted at yahoo management team and managers who are comfortable in their old ways me: those who wanted to abandon the yahoo ship have already done it, yahoo has to float first before it can sail again
• willholloway 14y ago
  I don't understand how serious software engineering is done in a lot of the start up offices I see in photos. These offices look like an Apple store. They are open floor plan. Instead of desks they have tables where devs sit across from each other working on 13" to 15" laptop screens. The ergonomics of these set ups are awful, and so are the economics. Real estate is expensive in this economy. Why double pay for space? Why have 9-5 work space and 6-8 home space? I know there is a separation of concerns argument, but in a competitive global economy I find that takes a back seat. I look at not double paying for space as one of the business advantages my consultancy has. A nice home/office with floor to ceiling windows slightly tinted to reduce glare and UV in a high rise building with panoramic view, a proper standing desk, a Kinesis Advantage contoured keyboard, Evoluent vertical mouse and dual 27" monitors is an incredible mood and productivity booster. The ratio of window area to wall area in non-luxury buildings in NYC is an abomination. In my far off utopian vision a glorious and massive urban renewal project demolishes all soul crushingly dark tiny windowed apartments and in their place stand gleaming solar powered monuments to the human race where our creative class toils happily producing works of the head and the heart for global consumption and a breath taking view is never more than a side-long glance away.
  • jes5199 14y ago
    Well, the short answer is: they mostly don't do "serious software engineering" - they do a lot of design (UX, mostly, but to some degree product design and graphic design) - and shuffle the UI around. The software engineering happens in short spurts, tucked away in conference rooms with the door closed, or after hours when the managers have gone home (...assuming the managers go home. I worked in an office where those people tended to still be there at 8pm)
    • speakingcode 14y ago
      I don't see what this scrutinization of stereotypical trendy startup environments has to do with remote working. If a company has budget for it and wants to make its employees comfortable with open space, and the employees like it, it's their business. To suggest that "serious software engineering" isn't occurring because of how you suppose their workspace is setup is, frankly, offensive. In software engineering, most of the work goes on inside the minds of the developers. Most of the remainder goes on in a keyboard and a screen. If you wanna get down to it, having more whiteboards and less fancy computer equipment is an indicator of better problem solving, not less. I sit with three 19 inch monitors on my desk at work. At home, I use a 10 inch netbook most of the time. I have not seen a difference in productivity because when I am focused, I don't need screen real estate for more distractions. Everything just tunes out. If you consider phd-level university computer science research as "serious software engineering" then I'd note that most research labs I came across in my days in academia were largely empty rooms with some tables and some work desks. Most of the students (phd students, mind you) worked on whiteboard and did coding and writing on whatever laptop they had. The workhorse machines w. big monitors were usually time-shared and dedicated to running heavy processing jobs. As far as working from home goes, it seems you each agree that being comfortable with ones workspace and environment impacts productivity. That said, one is more likely to have a comfortable and productive work environment when it is up to him/her to decide what equipment to use and where, which a home office lends itself to more than an office, especially on a corporate cube-farm level. Sure, some individuals may not be as productive at a comfortable workspace in the home, but that is the individual. Working from home is not for everyone, but those who find they are more focused and productive in the home environment ought to have that choice.
• laureny 14y ago
  I think we need to give Marissa a little more credit here, surely she's aware of the adverse immediate effect of such an announcement. Here is my interpretation: this is a way to flush people who are not productive enough. Yahoo expects them to have left the company by June. Once this is done, Yahoo will announce that it is restoring work-from-home policy and will offer some very attractive packages to attract talent.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I some times wonder if this is a test. We've all been looking at it from the engineering perspective, but I sometimes wonder if its a test of management. Is somebody trying to see if there is any manager inside of Yahoo that can justify remote team members? It is those managers who are going to lose people when those remote people quit or have to be laid off.
• lanna 14y ago
  Not surprising comming from a workaholic who sleeps 4 hours a night and thinks a woman should have a baby and get back to work the same week.
• fotoblur 14y ago
  Not surprised by 37 Signal's opinion as they've gotten remote to work because of their passion for creating tools that foster communication. For me, there are 2 ways to look at Yahoo's decision. One is they are flat out wrong, but thats OK, because they are making decisions (Steve Jobs spoke of this)! Decisions are what moves companies in directions, good or bad, its better than being frozen and stagnant. Two, I can attest to the cross pollination of ideas when you're together as a team, sharing lunch, sharing experiences, seeing each other in person, reading each other's body language, etc that just doesn't seem to happen at the same level when you're remote. If I were building a team from the ground up I'd want my team to be hanging out everyday ...the other meta of working together doesn't happen over Skype :). I can't tell you how many solutions were dreamed up on the walk to Starbucks. There is just something there that is hard to replicate with software.
• at-fates-hands 14y ago
  While I agree with many points in the post, there are some things the author is missing. I have several friends who have worked at large floundering companies cough Best Buy cough. As soon as a new CEO comes in, this is usually the first thing to go in terms of perks to the worker bees. They try and frame it up in many ways, but overall, it's an attempt to try and focus your work, and rally the troops in order to help stagnate morale. The ironic part was the lower managers immediately convened a meeting of developers after the CEO's announcement, and told everybody, "Yeah, this isn't going to affect our group - carry on and continue to do what you need to do. Even if it means working remotely a good part of the time."
• mikec3k 14y ago
  I worked for a company that's 100% remote workers. It didn't work for me, because I had too many distractions at home & my friends thought I wasn't working and always asked me to do errands during the day. On the other hand, it obviously worked for a lot of people, since they've been in business for 20 years doing custom programming. That taught me that I actually prefer working in an office, as long as I don't have to drive to work.
• gojomo 14y ago
  It is possible to believe both of the following: (A) Remote working is a good thing, and the best companies will embrace it, now and increasingly in the future. (B) Ending remote working arrangements is the right thing for Yahoo right now. There is a path-dependence in corporate structures and cultures. Yahoo needs big changes. Even somewhat arbitrary changes with collateral damage could help re-form habits of interaction.
• googoobaby 14y ago
  First, Yahoo has been drifting in mediocrity for a while, coming from the top as well as from the bottom. Second, they hired a CEO who was never a real manager from a place which was successful despite their own dysfunctional management structure. Two wrongs don't make a right. Replacing Yahoo's dysfunction with a childish copy of Google's prejudices is not the answer.
• guiomie 14y ago
  I see a lot of people whining about trust and dictatorship ... but perhaps the situation is worst then it seems from the outside, and that Yahoo is actually full of complacency and laziness, and getting them all under the same roof is the only way to clean the place correctly.
• koenigdavidmj 14y ago
  I wonder if someone's going to try to call this constructive dismissal. Probably somebody in a different state with a spouse who can't just up-and-leave.
• drgath 14y ago
  > Yahoo already isn’t at the top of any “most desirable places to work” list. Yahoo ranked #8 on this list. http://www.businessinsider.com/best-employers-in-america-2013-2?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/best-employers-in-america-201...
• speakingcode 14y ago
  in this day and age the notion that remote work hinders communication or scalability is absolutely absurd. Sure, it may hinder certain types of social interaction and communication, but in terms of collaborative engineering, it does not. Open source projects have managed tens, hundreds and even thousands of developers on single projects using rather primitive mailing lists, irc channels and source control. These days we have hangout and facetime, skype, hipchat... endless lists of intuitive textual, audible, and visual communication tools, project management tools, team management tools, code management tools... Using the right tools and practices, remote working is FAR MORE scalable than in-office working, because you can leverage a mass of employees from all over the world without the need to build out office space, infrastructure and other overhead to facilitate physical colocation. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-in-working-remotely/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-i...
  • millstone 14y ago
    Open source projects tend to be almost entirely remote. That’s qualitatively different from a company like Yahoo!, which I imagine to be majority in-office, with some remotes. From the link you shared (which I strongly agree with): There’s no halfsies in a distributed team. If even one person on the team is remote, every single person has to start communicating online... no more dropping in to someone’s office to chat, no more rounding people up to make a decision So the in-office members are forced into contortions to accommodate the remotes. That may be OK if the team is committed to the practice, like stack exchange is. But if Yahoo! is run like a traditional company, designed around in-office work with occasional exceptions made for remotes, then those remotes burden the in-office team members, and absolutely hinder communication.
• jasonjei 14y ago
  Here's a thought, why doesn't Linus Torvalds tell all the Linux core committers that if they want to continue to have commit access, they must show up at the office? When I was a kid, I learned most of my programming through IRC channels. I worked on projects on Campfire, Skype, Hangout. It's not only possible, but provides a written log and account of decisions made. As well as giving people time to reflect. The bottom line is that if you don't trust the people you hire, you've already hired wrong. Remote works if you trust your team. I had people working in person playing video games in the office. You can't coerce someone to work; you can only control this at hire time, not runtime. Yes, it's impossible to tell who will work well remotely. But it's usually pretty obvious. People who will look for new things to do will do so, and people that will steal time can probably only keep up the con for only so long. Hire right, and remote working works. That also includes in-person hires; they might be sitting there in seat...
• olefoo 14y ago
  I think Ms. Mayer is doing the right thing for Yahoo! at _this_ time. Yahoo! needs to be in high-contact mode for a time while it gets its company culture sorted out. There is no room for people who aren't willing to commit to full participation in the company and its day-to-day functioning in the highest bandwidth form there is; being present. This is not a strike at working remotely in general, its Yahoo! dealing with Yahoo!'s issues.
• Mankhool 14y ago
  At my corp of 40,000 souls we are, year by year, diminishing the number of full time resident workers in favour of mobile workers and home based workers, all as a way to cut costs, save office space and increase the bottom line.
• pshin45 14y ago
  New article from Business Insider with "inside information" for what that's worth: http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-mayer-is-right-to-ban-working-from-home-2013-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-may... "'For what it's worth, I support the no working form home rule. There's a ton of abuse of that at Yahoo. Something specific to the company.' This source said Yahoo's large remote workforce led to 'people slacking off like crazy, not being available, spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo! projects.'" "Mayer saw another side-benefit to making this move. She knows that some remote workers won't want to start coming into the office and so they will quit. That helps Yahoo, which needs to cut costs. It's a layoff that's not a layoff."
• voltagex_ 14y ago
  I'm in a wheelchair. Transport and accommodation is tricky. These policies really, really suck.