8 ms·

This Is Why You Can’t Have Nice Things, Yahoos

89 points by coloneltcb 14y ago

InclinedPlane 14y ago
The WFH ban is just a band-aid. The fact that it was necessary is a symptom of the fact that many yahoo employees had simply given up. They'd stopped putting in effort, they'd started staying at home and pretending to work. Now with Mayer's ban they will simply come into the office to not work. It's a classic "the beatings will continue until morale improves" measure. It won't work, it'll just remind unsatisfied yahoo employees how much they hate their jobs and lead to an even more dysfunctional workplace and evaporate away all of the talent that was ever at the company.
- coloneltcb 14y ago
  yea, I can see that. But I think MM is sending a message here, and the WFH crowd were among those that cared the least.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    What is the message? "Stop goofing around, get to work"? She's sending the wrong message to the wrong people, it'll have exactly the opposite effect she imagines. The value of a software company is in its developers. The best developers are almost always intrinsically motivated. And the best developers are the ones who typically end up being the heart of the company, they're the ones who keep the whole system working through the thousands upon thousands of little things they do that aren't mandatory but are necessary in order to ship any quality software. Mayer's efforts here are to treat the developers as spoiled children, and it will serve only to further alienate and demoralize the best developers who have just been too lazy to leave and find better work elsewhere. It doesn't even matter if the developers actually are acting like petulant children, if you drive them away they still go away. And then once they evaporate you're left with the dregs, and then shockingly somehow it becomes orders of magnitude to ship anything of any quality on time. The worst part of this is that I'm sure this cycle has already played out multiple times at yahoo. You can't treat creative knowledge workers like factory drones, even when they're misbehaving. The only thing that will actually help Yahoo is tackling projects and creating a work environment that encourages intrinsically motivated devs to work, everything else will follow naturally. If they want to continue on their long slide into the dust bin of history then by all means they should create a workplace that is optimized for mediocre devs and mediocre projects.
    - omfg 14y ago
      So you're essentially saying that the people in the WFH program have given up because it's not inspiring work. And Mayer canning that program to cut the dead weight is bad because it gets rid of them? She's trying to shift the culture over there and it's going to be hard to do that with a bunch of people outside the main HQ, especially when they aren't actually doing anything. Another way to look at it might be that employees who work from home, who aren't exactly feeling inspired, feel re-energized being on the main campus again and get a new spark for doing great work. Lot's of spin, lot's of angles. I'd give her a bit more time before raising the pitchforks.
      - InclinedPlane 14y ago
        Let me try an analogy. Let's say you are an allied soldier in the early parts of World War I. You're in your trench in dirty clothes, you can feel your feet rotting away inside your boots as you stand in knee deep water, mud, and filth. Most of the buddies you had a year ago are dead or gone away, having lost limbs or sanity in the war already. You spend your days watching your squad mates shit their guts out from dysentery. You've been over the top before, you've run across hundreds of meters of cratered moonscape filled with mud and barbed wire, all the soldiers around you are getting ripped apart by ferocious machine gun fire. And you know how futile it is to attack enemy trenches head on. You've seen thousands upon thousands of men killed by shelling and machine gun fire before they even got close to the other trench, it's a suicidal strategy and yet it is the only strategy the commanders have come up with. You think about deserting. You think about getting a group of friends together to rise up against the officers. But your friends are dead or gone, and desertion or rebellion are a certain route to execution. You start to think seriously about acquiring some sort of injury that would send you home, maybe if you shot your own foot. But your thoughts are interrupted by the announcement that tomorrow morning there is another attack planned, you're going to go over the top and attack the enemy trenches again. Your morale, and everyone else's, in this situation is obviously low. The solution the commanders have for this problem is that if you don't do your job you'll be shot. The result of this genius was the destruction of a significant percentage of an entire generation. The problem in this situation wasn't the soldiers. As many historians have detailed many of them "fought like lions", and many of them were intrinsically motivated to fight the enemy to the utter limit of their abilities. But morale was still low and a lot of people deserted and some even rebelled. The problem was the strategy and the commanders. The problem was that the actions being undertaken were hugely wasteful of men and resources without having any reasonable chance of success. You don't win this sort of war by ordering yet another mass assault backed up with the threat that anyone who doesn't comply with the order will be executed. You fix it by changing your strategy and tactics.
coloneltcb 14y ago
Agree with this wholeheartedly, as it jibes with a lot of what I've heard of the Yahoo WFH experience. Don't think it's fair for outsiders to judge, and I think that this was a courageous choice by MM. She had to know she'd come under fire for this
hkmurakami 14y ago
There was and is rampant abuse of the Yahoo work-from-home policy — it was a joke. “Working at [Yahoo] HQ was like paying taxes in Greece,” said Twitter’s Patrick Ewing, who also had friends who cheated the system. The fact that the Yahoo parking lot is relatively empty (compared to, oh, Facebook’s) at 5pm is why you can’t have nice things. if this is indeed the problem, then how is bringing in non productive engineers under the same incompetent and uninspired managers going to improve the situation at all? is this going to at least indirectly aid in culling the unwanted, laggard staff? you can still slack off even when reporting to the office, especially if you commute by car. if they have VPN logs, can't they just fire engineers using this evidence? it's not like we:re in Italy or France where firing workers is next to impossible.
- yuhong 14y ago
  I think Marissa is trying to get rid of these managers too.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  Not all people are fully self-motivated. There are plenty of very smart people who on their own will fuck around a lot, but in a well-managed office with (for example) a daily 5 minute standup, will get motivated and add a lot of value. Then there are just people who will fuck around under any condition, and never add value. Bringing everyone into the office is the first step to sorting the former from the latter.
minimax 14y ago
”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN…” Wow. The WFH ban is starting to sound like the beginning of a bigger shake-up. I suspect Yahoo will want get rid of a ton of its unproductive employees and rebuild around a small core of talent, some of which will presumably be poached from Google.
- mhurron 14y ago
  > ”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN…” So why were they still employees? No Yahoo, that is why you can't have nice things.
  - prostoalex 14y ago
    I haven't been a Yahoo! employee for 7 years, but back in my days (dusts off his old cane to tell the kids to stay off the lawn) the product was run by product management, while engineering was responsible for development and maintenance. With top management shakeups every week or so I'd imagine the product management part of Yahoo! being in a state of disarray, with some people leaving on their own, some getting the boot, random new people showing up, but nobody sticking long enough to make any product decisions. Reliability is the only remaining thing on the engineering plate, and with good infrastructure a lot of smaller projects from here http://everything.yahoo.com/ http://everything.yahoo.com/ just run themselves most of the time.
- awj 14y ago
  If that's the case, pulling people in is still stupid. You're going to drive off good remote workers who don't want to be in the office just to cut the chaff.
  - eksith 14y ago
    How many good remote workers? They're already calling the lax attitude and loss of productivity a cancer and we all know killing cancer also means losing some healthy cells along the way. I'm fairly certain they'll be able to pinpoint the problem actors immediately and those needing more flexibility will receive it after review. And by the looks of it, those dedicated employees understand why this is necessary for the survival of the company. FYI, I do work mostly from home except when I need to go see a client or if I'm training someone. Slacking off is still impossible since a lot of my work is needed on very specific deadlines that can't change under any circumstance. In that regard, my work location is flexible, but total time spent isn't.
MattRogish 14y ago
Why does pulling people into the office finally give Yahoo the ability to fire under-performers? You don't need to see butts in seats in order to identify people who are not pulling their weight. If people are coasting at home OR at the office you can tell that by their work output. Where they do their work doesn't enter into it. Adopting a Results Only Work Environment (http://gorowe.com http://gorowe.com) would allow them to have folks who work from anywhere and give management the tools to fire under-performers. If this were only a temporary measure, a "reset" so to speak, then I still don't agree with it (I think you can do that without the disruption), but it would be understandable. As they have not said that this is temporary, I have no reason to think it'll come back in the future, which is the tragedy. It doesn't have to be like this.
- darkxanthos 14y ago
  I like the point someone raised that part of the point is to avoid firing people as that gets very costly. Instead they'll hopefully quit.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Who's going to quit though? The people who care, the people who know they have better options elsewhere. The talentless hacks who still don't give a shit about the company but are willing to go through the motions for a paycheck? They're like barnacles you'll have to get rid of by scraping them off and using a blow torch. The way to get rid of underperformers is by firing them, period, there's no other hack or workaround that makes things easier.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    If that's her plan they would need to be careful to avoid running afoul of the concept of "constructive dismissal". If you make the work environment so intolerable as to make someone quit the law generally treats it as if you had simply fired the employee. Can most claim that actually having to go to work is "intolerable" if they've not so much as logged into the VPN? Probably not. But the stay-at-home moms who can demonstrate they've been producing while teleworking might have a leg to stand on there.
hkmurakami 14y ago
if there is one thing I miss about print journalism, it's actual descriptive, concise headlines. why can't we be treated with "yahoo crippled by delinquent, unresponsive engineers and managers"?
voidr 14y ago
So instead of implementing a proper way to measure employee performance they are banning remote work. I think people who were unproductive at home will remain unproductive in the office unless they actually find a way to measure productivity, this is why I feel that this effort is not only futile, it also does harm.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Yeah, all this article says is that broad measures are being taken which affect the productive and unproductive alike. I've seen that road, and it leads to utter and complete disaster.
drhayes9 14y ago
Fire their managers, too.
kyllo 14y ago
If someone has been not-working from home and has never logged into the VPN, why do you even want them to come into the office now? Just fire them.
danilocampos 14y ago
You know who I like? Marissa Mayer. She's doing this right. It's the velvet glove on the iron fist. She starts with food and modern cell phones. She tosses out the bad execs. She eliminates the dumb trademark symbols on all the physical signage. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief – these changes are good news. The message is clear: your boss knows what you need and wants to take care of you. But she's not all cupcakes and kisses. With the tone set properly, she identifies the dead wood. From what I hear, shitloads of people are checked out at Yahoo. That's a cultural problem that's tough to lift. Imagine being checked out and outside of the day-to-day social nudges that keep you feeling a little bit like your job expectations have consequence. Mayer's an optimizer. Years at Google taught her all about getting the best ROI from the simplest operation. With one stroke, she can identify who really cares about Yahoo's mission and who is just along for the free gravy train. Yahoo isn't going to get out of trouble by casually, lazily sidling to the promised land. It's going to take work. And now the boss wants a sign of commitment to that work. The hysteria about this move is misplaced. She nailed it. Great call.
- jpdoctor 14y ago
  I mostly agree. She is in a turn-around situation. Want the same results? Keep doing the same things. So instead: Shake up everything. See who reacts well and can adjust, see who can't adjust to even minor changes. If you can't handle lifestyle changes while making way the hell above median income then the company can probably apply your salary to more effective purposes than feathering your nest.
  - bitcartel 14y ago
    Except nothing has changed at the top. In fact, she's getting paid even more than the previous CEO with a package worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe its the Board of Directors who need some shaking up. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/adding-up-marissa-mayers-pay-at-yahoo/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/adding-up-marissa-may...
- taligent 14y ago
  Sorry but have you EVER worked at a large company before ? Because none of what you said makes any sense. There is no evidence that people at Yahoo are more or less "checked out" than any company. And it is ridiculous to think she can magically weed out those select few who are not committed to the company's mission. And this underlying assumption that there is a relationship between working remotely and productivity/innovation is simply unproven. Especially when you realise that much of the innovation in our industry comes from open source projects where everyone is disconnected.
fingerprinter 14y ago
This is silly, just silly. The problem is and always will be unproductive people. It comes down to leaders and leadership. If someone isn't working out, cut bait. That includes managers, execs and programmers. Any exec worth their salt would attack the problem, not a symptom of the problem. This shows me that Yahoo still doesn't get it. And if this IS about unproductive people, this is essentially a ban hammer on something b/c of some bad apples. Again, awful leadership. Fix the problem. I work from home. Everyone on my team works from home. The entire company I work for works from home. We are a big company. It does take good leadership and strong management to make that work. It also takes good developers and, frankly, strong guidance if something isn't working out. It sounds like Yahoo has none of the above, or, perhaps more tellingly, maybe Mayer knows that (giving her the benefit of the doubt, after all) and that is really an indication of a much bigger problem.
michaelochurch 14y ago
It seems to me like Yahoo has several years of undesirable cultural legacy. The company needs to reinvent itself. Redefining WFH is a part of that, but the problem is that there are a large number of things that Yahoo needs to do and getting the order right is important. Cracking down on WFH before dealing with the other problems is a bad call. The real question is: why are there so many unmotivated, unproductive people? Is it bad hiring or bad project management? I don't think there are a large number of intrinsic underperformers, so much as people demotivated by contexts that leave no real opportunities for achievement. Perhaps there are a lot of pointless projects that have no career upside, but that people can't escape from, so they use the bog as an excuse to retire on-the-job. I'm not saying that that's right-- it's not-- but, if this is the case, then it's important to deal with the underlying problem instead of the symptom only. One of the things that executives get wrong on this is that, if you want to preserve morale, you've got to put a "shit sandwich" (good-bad-good pattern) around your crackdown. First, you do something related and good for the employees (like give them more opportunities to pick what they work on). Then, you deliver the crackdown (reduced WFH). Finally, once you've achieved what you're looking for, you scale the crackdown back or add a perk that makes it more acceptable.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  There are two big questions that yahoo faces. What the fuck do they want to be as a company? And what do they intend to do with the engineers they have right now? They haven't come up with an answer to the first question so far as I can tell, which is a bigger problem than anything else. For the second question they are faced with a lot of problems. If they want to try to retain as much talent as possible they're going about it the wrong way. If they want to instill discipline and transition down to a smaller more mediocre more "enterprisey" company that pumps out crappy line-of-business apps then they're doing a damned fine job so far. If I were forced to try to turn yahoo around I'd start by identifying the major projects that yahoo should execute on and then I'd either fire almost everyone and start from scratch or I'd work by replacing the company from the inside out by growing a "bubble" that was a new division built with new rules with new management that hired both from outside the company and from within yahoo and was highly results oriented and, at least initially, worked on fast iteration projects that are easier to judge success on. A couple good candidates for projects that could serve to help re-energize the company are flickr, yahoo stores, and yahoo hosting services. Revolutionize those, iteratively, make them competitive, and you could go a long way toward revitilizing the company and providing projects that people actually want to work on.
callahad 14y ago
Does anyone else find it strange that the author of the article interjected one of her own tweets in the middle of the article?
- natrius 14y ago
  It's not her tweet. It's a tweet from a parody account. Her actual account is @alexia.
nikatwork 14y ago
When I was at Yahoo in 2008, some staff were always "working from home" but never responded to IM or email. They'd surface for a day or two, squeeze out an artefact, then vanish again for a week. I somewhat blame their direct managers. It's always tempting for lower-level employees to game the system, especially if they are having personal issues (young kids, bad marriage, low workplace morale). Managers should provide guidance to bring their reports back into line. Then again, the managers in question were busy fighting org politics and seemed happy just to have an extra "soldier" on their roster. So maybe Marissa's stalinist purge of remote workers will prove to be a blunt but effective instrument for flushing out the bludgers.
- wutbrodo 14y ago
  That's what confused me. I'm wary of armchair-CEOing, given that I have no experience at that level whatsoever. However, it seems like there would be an easier solution to "people who WFH and don't do anything": deal with people who _don't do anything_ (whether at home or in the office). Try as I might, I can't see the benefit to this blunter approach that would justify the cost to recruitment and legitimate remote workers.
  - nikatwork 14y ago
    Yahoo is a big company. It's not like a startup or even an small enterprise, where everyone knows Johnny is on facebook all day and Terry takes a 3 hour liquid lunch. There's too many places to hide in a big org. So to identify unproductive people using a top-down approach, you'd need a metric to measure staff productivity and force the managers to implement it. Which do you think would be less popular, a) curtailing remote work or b) implementing and enforcing an org-wide productivity metric?
LVB 14y ago
While the WFH ban is getting some criticism here for being a tactical response and not fixing the problem, I can see how it fits into a larger house cleaning. It sounds like Yahoo is in a serious spot both economically and culturally, and I can imagine Mayer saying that Yahoo needs to be rebuilt, right here (on campus), by people who really want to make it work. The ban addresses both parts. It gets people back together, in person, and it weeds out those aren't going to make that sacrifice for the company. And to those who claim that they are as effective working at home, let me challenge you in this way: how do you really teach, inspire, and build morale if not in person? Someone may be a great coder, but they might also be an incredibly motivating person who lifts up those around them to much higher levels. I've never seen that occur remotely. Yahoo needs help badly, and they need their best people on site, walking the halls, building a culture that means making Yahoo great again. I don't see how said people can do that over VPN.
pshin45 14y ago
What MM is doing at Yahoo seems eerily reminiscent of what happened at Apple when Steve Jobs first came back in 1997. John Lilly (of Mozilla fame and former Apple employee) recounts the atmosphere at the time: "[Steve] said 'You know what, we're going to build a great company. We're going to reinvent the world. And anybody who believes me, let's get moving. If you don't believe that will happen then get the hell out.' And this was an amazing act of leadership because it was so clear who was in and who was out. And I'll tell you, people in the room would have followed Steve everywhere and anywhere, just about anywhere. Now it turns out me and my friends left and we're happy with that decision although economically it probably would have been better to stick around. We've all done okay. But what an act of leadership by a guy who nobody believed in at the time, nobody believed it." http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3067 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3067 (Listen from 13:50 to 16:40 for the story containing the above quote)
pbreit 14y ago
The fact that it was Yahoo that had to explain that the decision was not an indictment of remote working in general is pathetic. The decision was obviously exclusively related to Yahoo and only pertinent to this current point in time.
RHSeeger 14y ago
> It’s that the bunch of slackers that claimed to be working from home without actually doing any work ruined it for everyone. How about just figuring out what people goals are and, if they can't meet them, they're let go. Wouldn't that work just as well without causing everyone to come into the office because some people can't manage to work from home?
spydum 14y ago
To me, this sends the signal out that the CEO has lost confidence in her middle managements ability to evaluate who is delivering and who is not, and has forced them to get more involved. In my opinion, the problem with remote workers is it is FAR too easy for superstars to sandbag and still perform in the upper quartile. They look at it as a value proposition: if I can turn out a weeks worth of productivity for an above average programmer in just 2-3 days of effort, I can slack for the remainder of the work week or not even check in. Contrast that to a place that enforces the face-to-face time. It's much harder to slack and sandbag when you have people there. That super-star who is now in the office, will churn out super-star material 5 days a week, instead of 3. I think it's brilliant, and wish them well. I would love to see Yahoo rise up from the ashes. * apologize for the term superstars, but you know what I mean. Some people just have ability that far exceeds their peers, and they use that ability to shift their work/life balance. I think it's entirely fair, but I can see how an employer would want to optimize in their favor.
rollo_tommasi 14y ago
What keeps the valuable, skilled, and productive employees from switching to a more accommodating firm while the useless workers who couldn't find employment elsewhere scramble to hang on? Seems like this could easily backfire.
AlexDanger 14y ago
I hate this perception that working from home = slacking off. Think about why that perception exists. It implies that unless you have someone looking over your shoulder you wont do any work. Like a child in a classroom. Most people are not children. Most people want to do a good job and support their team members. If you behave like a child then you should never have been hired in the first place. If you are hired then your lack of delivering results will be very visible. If a slack employee can get away with slacking off, the company has a much more serious problem about the way it works. Putting people in an office will not solve this problem. I'm happy to argue about the pros and cons of local vs remote teams. Effectively communicating, mentoring,team bonding etc are all debates worth having. The slacking off argument is not worth having. Its rubbish. This initiative sounds like busy work.

89 points by coloneltcb 14y ago

The WFH ban is just a band-aid. The fact that it was necessary is a symptom of the fact that many yahoo employees had simply given up. They'd stopped putting in effort, they'd started staying at home and pretending to work. Now with Mayer's ban they will simply come into the office to not work. It's a classic "the beatings will continue until morale improves" measure. It won't work, it'll just remind unsatisfied yahoo employees how much they hate their jobs and lead to an even more dysfunctional workplace and evaporate away all of the talent that was ever at the company.

coloneltcb 14y ago
yea, I can see that. But I think MM is sending a message here, and the WFH crowd were among those that cared the least.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  What is the message? "Stop goofing around, get to work"? She's sending the wrong message to the wrong people, it'll have exactly the opposite effect she imagines. The value of a software company is in its developers. The best developers are almost always intrinsically motivated. And the best developers are the ones who typically end up being the heart of the company, they're the ones who keep the whole system working through the thousands upon thousands of little things they do that aren't mandatory but are necessary in order to ship any quality software. Mayer's efforts here are to treat the developers as spoiled children, and it will serve only to further alienate and demoralize the best developers who have just been too lazy to leave and find better work elsewhere. It doesn't even matter if the developers actually are acting like petulant children, if you drive them away they still go away. And then once they evaporate you're left with the dregs, and then shockingly somehow it becomes orders of magnitude to ship anything of any quality on time. The worst part of this is that I'm sure this cycle has already played out multiple times at yahoo. You can't treat creative knowledge workers like factory drones, even when they're misbehaving. The only thing that will actually help Yahoo is tackling projects and creating a work environment that encourages intrinsically motivated devs to work, everything else will follow naturally. If they want to continue on their long slide into the dust bin of history then by all means they should create a workplace that is optimized for mediocre devs and mediocre projects.
  - omfg 14y ago
    So you're essentially saying that the people in the WFH program have given up because it's not inspiring work. And Mayer canning that program to cut the dead weight is bad because it gets rid of them? She's trying to shift the culture over there and it's going to be hard to do that with a bunch of people outside the main HQ, especially when they aren't actually doing anything. Another way to look at it might be that employees who work from home, who aren't exactly feeling inspired, feel re-energized being on the main campus again and get a new spark for doing great work. Lot's of spin, lot's of angles. I'd give her a bit more time before raising the pitchforks.
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      Let me try an analogy. Let's say you are an allied soldier in the early parts of World War I. You're in your trench in dirty clothes, you can feel your feet rotting away inside your boots as you stand in knee deep water, mud, and filth. Most of the buddies you had a year ago are dead or gone away, having lost limbs or sanity in the war already. You spend your days watching your squad mates shit their guts out from dysentery. You've been over the top before, you've run across hundreds of meters of cratered moonscape filled with mud and barbed wire, all the soldiers around you are getting ripped apart by ferocious machine gun fire. And you know how futile it is to attack enemy trenches head on. You've seen thousands upon thousands of men killed by shelling and machine gun fire before they even got close to the other trench, it's a suicidal strategy and yet it is the only strategy the commanders have come up with. You think about deserting. You think about getting a group of friends together to rise up against the officers. But your friends are dead or gone, and desertion or rebellion are a certain route to execution. You start to think seriously about acquiring some sort of injury that would send you home, maybe if you shot your own foot. But your thoughts are interrupted by the announcement that tomorrow morning there is another attack planned, you're going to go over the top and attack the enemy trenches again. Your morale, and everyone else's, in this situation is obviously low. The solution the commanders have for this problem is that if you don't do your job you'll be shot. The result of this genius was the destruction of a significant percentage of an entire generation. The problem in this situation wasn't the soldiers. As many historians have detailed many of them "fought like lions", and many of them were intrinsically motivated to fight the enemy to the utter limit of their abilities. But morale was still low and a lot of people deserted and some even rebelled. The problem was the strategy and the commanders. The problem was that the actions being undertaken were hugely wasteful of men and resources without having any reasonable chance of success. You don't win this sort of war by ordering yet another mass assault backed up with the threat that anyone who doesn't comply with the order will be executed. You fix it by changing your strategy and tactics.

coloneltcb 14y ago

Agree with this wholeheartedly, as it jibes with a lot of what I've heard of the Yahoo WFH experience. Don't think it's fair for outsiders to judge, and I think that this was a courageous choice by MM. She had to know she'd come under fire for this

hkmurakami 14y ago

There was and is rampant abuse of the Yahoo work-from-home policy — it was a joke. “Working at [Yahoo] HQ was like paying taxes in Greece,” said Twitter’s Patrick Ewing, who also had friends who cheated the system. The fact that the Yahoo parking lot is relatively empty (compared to, oh, Facebook’s) at 5pm is why you can’t have nice things. if this is indeed the problem, then how is bringing in non productive engineers under the same incompetent and uninspired managers going to improve the situation at all? is this going to at least indirectly aid in culling the unwanted, laggard staff? you can still slack off even when reporting to the office, especially if you commute by car. if they have VPN logs, can't they just fire engineers using this evidence? it's not like we:re in Italy or France where firing workers is next to impossible.

yuhong 14y ago
I think Marissa is trying to get rid of these managers too.
snowwrestler 14y ago
Not all people are fully self-motivated. There are plenty of very smart people who on their own will fuck around a lot, but in a well-managed office with (for example) a daily 5 minute standup, will get motivated and add a lot of value. Then there are just people who will fuck around under any condition, and never add value. Bringing everyone into the office is the first step to sorting the former from the latter.

minimax 14y ago

”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN…” Wow. The WFH ban is starting to sound like the beginning of a bigger shake-up. I suspect Yahoo will want get rid of a ton of its unproductive employees and rebuild around a small core of talent, some of which will presumably be poached from Google.

mhurron 14y ago
> ”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN…” So why were they still employees? No Yahoo, that is why you can't have nice things.
- prostoalex 14y ago
  I haven't been a Yahoo! employee for 7 years, but back in my days (dusts off his old cane to tell the kids to stay off the lawn) the product was run by product management, while engineering was responsible for development and maintenance. With top management shakeups every week or so I'd imagine the product management part of Yahoo! being in a state of disarray, with some people leaving on their own, some getting the boot, random new people showing up, but nobody sticking long enough to make any product decisions. Reliability is the only remaining thing on the engineering plate, and with good infrastructure a lot of smaller projects from here http://everything.yahoo.com/ http://everything.yahoo.com/ just run themselves most of the time.
awj 14y ago
If that's the case, pulling people in is still stupid. You're going to drive off good remote workers who don't want to be in the office just to cut the chaff.
- eksith 14y ago
  How many good remote workers? They're already calling the lax attitude and loss of productivity a cancer and we all know killing cancer also means losing some healthy cells along the way. I'm fairly certain they'll be able to pinpoint the problem actors immediately and those needing more flexibility will receive it after review. And by the looks of it, those dedicated employees understand why this is necessary for the survival of the company. FYI, I do work mostly from home except when I need to go see a client or if I'm training someone. Slacking off is still impossible since a lot of my work is needed on very specific deadlines that can't change under any circumstance. In that regard, my work location is flexible, but total time spent isn't.

MattRogish 14y ago

Why does pulling people into the office finally give Yahoo the ability to fire under-performers? You don't need to see butts in seats in order to identify people who are not pulling their weight. If people are coasting at home OR at the office you can tell that by their work output. Where they do their work doesn't enter into it. Adopting a Results Only Work Environment (http://gorowe.com http://gorowe.com) would allow them to have folks who work from anywhere and give management the tools to fire under-performers. If this were only a temporary measure, a "reset" so to speak, then I still don't agree with it (I think you can do that without the disruption), but it would be understandable. As they have not said that this is temporary, I have no reason to think it'll come back in the future, which is the tragedy. It doesn't have to be like this.

darkxanthos 14y ago
I like the point someone raised that part of the point is to avoid firing people as that gets very costly. Instead they'll hopefully quit.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Who's going to quit though? The people who care, the people who know they have better options elsewhere. The talentless hacks who still don't give a shit about the company but are willing to go through the motions for a paycheck? They're like barnacles you'll have to get rid of by scraping them off and using a blow torch. The way to get rid of underperformers is by firing them, period, there's no other hack or workaround that makes things easier.
- mpyne 14y ago
  If that's her plan they would need to be careful to avoid running afoul of the concept of "constructive dismissal". If you make the work environment so intolerable as to make someone quit the law generally treats it as if you had simply fired the employee. Can most claim that actually having to go to work is "intolerable" if they've not so much as logged into the VPN? Probably not. But the stay-at-home moms who can demonstrate they've been producing while teleworking might have a leg to stand on there.

hkmurakami 14y ago

if there is one thing I miss about print journalism, it's actual descriptive, concise headlines. why can't we be treated with "yahoo crippled by delinquent, unresponsive engineers and managers"?

voidr 14y ago

So instead of implementing a proper way to measure employee performance they are banning remote work. I think people who were unproductive at home will remain unproductive in the office unless they actually find a way to measure productivity, this is why I feel that this effort is not only futile, it also does harm.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
Yeah, all this article says is that broad measures are being taken which affect the productive and unproductive alike. I've seen that road, and it leads to utter and complete disaster.

drhayes9 14y ago

Fire their managers, too.

kyllo 14y ago

If someone has been not-working from home and has never logged into the VPN, why do you even want them to come into the office now? Just fire them.

danilocampos 14y ago

You know who I like? Marissa Mayer. She's doing this right. It's the velvet glove on the iron fist. She starts with food and modern cell phones. She tosses out the bad execs. She eliminates the dumb trademark symbols on all the physical signage. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief – these changes are good news. The message is clear: your boss knows what you need and wants to take care of you. But she's not all cupcakes and kisses. With the tone set properly, she identifies the dead wood. From what I hear, shitloads of people are checked out at Yahoo. That's a cultural problem that's tough to lift. Imagine being checked out and outside of the day-to-day social nudges that keep you feeling a little bit like your job expectations have consequence. Mayer's an optimizer. Years at Google taught her all about getting the best ROI from the simplest operation. With one stroke, she can identify who really cares about Yahoo's mission and who is just along for the free gravy train. Yahoo isn't going to get out of trouble by casually, lazily sidling to the promised land. It's going to take work. And now the boss wants a sign of commitment to that work. The hysteria about this move is misplaced. She nailed it. Great call.

jpdoctor 14y ago
I mostly agree. She is in a turn-around situation. Want the same results? Keep doing the same things. So instead: Shake up everything. See who reacts well and can adjust, see who can't adjust to even minor changes. If you can't handle lifestyle changes while making way the hell above median income then the company can probably apply your salary to more effective purposes than feathering your nest.
- bitcartel 14y ago
  Except nothing has changed at the top. In fact, she's getting paid even more than the previous CEO with a package worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe its the Board of Directors who need some shaking up. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/adding-up-marissa-mayers-pay-at-yahoo/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/adding-up-marissa-may...
taligent 14y ago
Sorry but have you EVER worked at a large company before ? Because none of what you said makes any sense. There is no evidence that people at Yahoo are more or less "checked out" than any company. And it is ridiculous to think she can magically weed out those select few who are not committed to the company's mission. And this underlying assumption that there is a relationship between working remotely and productivity/innovation is simply unproven. Especially when you realise that much of the innovation in our industry comes from open source projects where everyone is disconnected.

fingerprinter 14y ago

This is silly, just silly. The problem is and always will be unproductive people. It comes down to leaders and leadership. If someone isn't working out, cut bait. That includes managers, execs and programmers. Any exec worth their salt would attack the problem, not a symptom of the problem. This shows me that Yahoo still doesn't get it. And if this IS about unproductive people, this is essentially a ban hammer on something b/c of some bad apples. Again, awful leadership. Fix the problem. I work from home. Everyone on my team works from home. The entire company I work for works from home. We are a big company. It does take good leadership and strong management to make that work. It also takes good developers and, frankly, strong guidance if something isn't working out. It sounds like Yahoo has none of the above, or, perhaps more tellingly, maybe Mayer knows that (giving her the benefit of the doubt, after all) and that is really an indication of a much bigger problem.

michaelochurch 14y ago

It seems to me like Yahoo has several years of undesirable cultural legacy. The company needs to reinvent itself. Redefining WFH is a part of that, but the problem is that there are a large number of things that Yahoo needs to do and getting the order right is important. Cracking down on WFH before dealing with the other problems is a bad call. The real question is: why are there so many unmotivated, unproductive people? Is it bad hiring or bad project management? I don't think there are a large number of intrinsic underperformers, so much as people demotivated by contexts that leave no real opportunities for achievement. Perhaps there are a lot of pointless projects that have no career upside, but that people can't escape from, so they use the bog as an excuse to retire on-the-job. I'm not saying that that's right-- it's not-- but, if this is the case, then it's important to deal with the underlying problem instead of the symptom only. One of the things that executives get wrong on this is that, if you want to preserve morale, you've got to put a "shit sandwich" (good-bad-good pattern) around your crackdown. First, you do something related and good for the employees (like give them more opportunities to pick what they work on). Then, you deliver the crackdown (reduced WFH). Finally, once you've achieved what you're looking for, you scale the crackdown back or add a perk that makes it more acceptable.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
There are two big questions that yahoo faces. What the fuck do they want to be as a company? And what do they intend to do with the engineers they have right now? They haven't come up with an answer to the first question so far as I can tell, which is a bigger problem than anything else. For the second question they are faced with a lot of problems. If they want to try to retain as much talent as possible they're going about it the wrong way. If they want to instill discipline and transition down to a smaller more mediocre more "enterprisey" company that pumps out crappy line-of-business apps then they're doing a damned fine job so far. If I were forced to try to turn yahoo around I'd start by identifying the major projects that yahoo should execute on and then I'd either fire almost everyone and start from scratch or I'd work by replacing the company from the inside out by growing a "bubble" that was a new division built with new rules with new management that hired both from outside the company and from within yahoo and was highly results oriented and, at least initially, worked on fast iteration projects that are easier to judge success on. A couple good candidates for projects that could serve to help re-energize the company are flickr, yahoo stores, and yahoo hosting services. Revolutionize those, iteratively, make them competitive, and you could go a long way toward revitilizing the company and providing projects that people actually want to work on.

callahad 14y ago

Does anyone else find it strange that the author of the article interjected one of her own tweets in the middle of the article?

natrius 14y ago
It's not her tweet. It's a tweet from a parody account. Her actual account is @alexia.

nikatwork 14y ago

When I was at Yahoo in 2008, some staff were always "working from home" but never responded to IM or email. They'd surface for a day or two, squeeze out an artefact, then vanish again for a week. I somewhat blame their direct managers. It's always tempting for lower-level employees to game the system, especially if they are having personal issues (young kids, bad marriage, low workplace morale). Managers should provide guidance to bring their reports back into line. Then again, the managers in question were busy fighting org politics and seemed happy just to have an extra "soldier" on their roster. So maybe Marissa's stalinist purge of remote workers will prove to be a blunt but effective instrument for flushing out the bludgers.

wutbrodo 14y ago
That's what confused me. I'm wary of armchair-CEOing, given that I have no experience at that level whatsoever. However, it seems like there would be an easier solution to "people who WFH and don't do anything": deal with people who _don't do anything_ (whether at home or in the office). Try as I might, I can't see the benefit to this blunter approach that would justify the cost to recruitment and legitimate remote workers.
- nikatwork 14y ago
  Yahoo is a big company. It's not like a startup or even an small enterprise, where everyone knows Johnny is on facebook all day and Terry takes a 3 hour liquid lunch. There's too many places to hide in a big org. So to identify unproductive people using a top-down approach, you'd need a metric to measure staff productivity and force the managers to implement it. Which do you think would be less popular, a) curtailing remote work or b) implementing and enforcing an org-wide productivity metric?

LVB 14y ago

While the WFH ban is getting some criticism here for being a tactical response and not fixing the problem, I can see how it fits into a larger house cleaning. It sounds like Yahoo is in a serious spot both economically and culturally, and I can imagine Mayer saying that Yahoo needs to be rebuilt, right here (on campus), by people who really want to make it work. The ban addresses both parts. It gets people back together, in person, and it weeds out those aren't going to make that sacrifice for the company. And to those who claim that they are as effective working at home, let me challenge you in this way: how do you really teach, inspire, and build morale if not in person? Someone may be a great coder, but they might also be an incredibly motivating person who lifts up those around them to much higher levels. I've never seen that occur remotely. Yahoo needs help badly, and they need their best people on site, walking the halls, building a culture that means making Yahoo great again. I don't see how said people can do that over VPN.

pshin45 14y ago

What MM is doing at Yahoo seems eerily reminiscent of what happened at Apple when Steve Jobs first came back in 1997. John Lilly (of Mozilla fame and former Apple employee) recounts the atmosphere at the time: "[Steve] said 'You know what, we're going to build a great company. We're going to reinvent the world. And anybody who believes me, let's get moving. If you don't believe that will happen then get the hell out.' And this was an amazing act of leadership because it was so clear who was in and who was out. And I'll tell you, people in the room would have followed Steve everywhere and anywhere, just about anywhere. Now it turns out me and my friends left and we're happy with that decision although economically it probably would have been better to stick around. We've all done okay. But what an act of leadership by a guy who nobody believed in at the time, nobody believed it." http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3067 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3067 (Listen from 13:50 to 16:40 for the story containing the above quote)

pbreit 14y ago

The fact that it was Yahoo that had to explain that the decision was not an indictment of remote working in general is pathetic. The decision was obviously exclusively related to Yahoo and only pertinent to this current point in time.

RHSeeger 14y ago

> It’s that the bunch of slackers that claimed to be working from home without actually doing any work ruined it for everyone. How about just figuring out what people goals are and, if they can't meet them, they're let go. Wouldn't that work just as well without causing everyone to come into the office because some people can't manage to work from home?

spydum 14y ago

To me, this sends the signal out that the CEO has lost confidence in her middle managements ability to evaluate who is delivering and who is not, and has forced them to get more involved. In my opinion, the problem with remote workers is it is FAR too easy for superstars to sandbag and still perform in the upper quartile. They look at it as a value proposition: if I can turn out a weeks worth of productivity for an above average programmer in just 2-3 days of effort, I can slack for the remainder of the work week or not even check in. Contrast that to a place that enforces the face-to-face time. It's much harder to slack and sandbag when you have people there. That super-star who is now in the office, will churn out super-star material 5 days a week, instead of 3. I think it's brilliant, and wish them well. I would love to see Yahoo rise up from the ashes. * apologize for the term superstars, but you know what I mean. Some people just have ability that far exceeds their peers, and they use that ability to shift their work/life balance. I think it's entirely fair, but I can see how an employer would want to optimize in their favor.

rollo_tommasi 14y ago

What keeps the valuable, skilled, and productive employees from switching to a more accommodating firm while the useless workers who couldn't find employment elsewhere scramble to hang on? Seems like this could easily backfire.

AlexDanger 14y ago

I hate this perception that working from home = slacking off. Think about why that perception exists. It implies that unless you have someone looking over your shoulder you wont do any work. Like a child in a classroom. Most people are not children. Most people want to do a good job and support their team members. If you behave like a child then you should never have been hired in the first place. If you are hired then your lack of delivering results will be very visible. If a slack employee can get away with slacking off, the company has a much more serious problem about the way it works. Putting people in an office will not solve this problem. I'm happy to argue about the pros and cons of local vs remote teams. Effectively communicating, mentoring,team bonding etc are all debates worth having. The slacking off argument is not worth having. Its rubbish. This initiative sounds like busy work.