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Mayer Terminates Yahoo's Remote Employee Policy
An anonymous reader writes "AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reported and tweeted that Marissa Mayer (CEO since July 2012) has just sent an all-hands email ending Yahoo's policy of allowing remote employees. Hundreds of workers have been given the choice: start showing up for work at HQ (which would require relocation in many cases), or resign. (They can forget about Yahoo advice pieces like this). Mayer has also been putting her stamp on Yahoo's new home page, which was rolled out Wednesday."
Because face time is so much more important that actual work.
After years of twitching on the gurney, Mayer is finally putting a bullet in Yahoo's head.
No surprises. Yahoo partnered with Microsoft and are now just a Bing reseller.
Looks like its time to chase away any employees with anything innovative or of value to offer.
Or another search engine and no longer use Yahoo.
I have a feeling (and it's only a guess admittedly) that this is Mayer trying to stamp her manner of working onto the company. Being present and having a hand in as many different projects as possible is a pretty good way to become a top executive in a company. But if everyone did that, would anything get done? Someone eventually has to get the details right, which is often best done away-from-the-fray.
Jason Fried argues that less productivity happens at the office.
Jason Fried
Basically this will just wash out the rest of the rats from the sinking ship. The boat is still going down buddy.
And in other news... Yahoo is still not visited by anyone.
Last time I looked, remote workers seemed to be the wave of the future. Then again, Yahoo's been living in the past for decades.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
What's a Yahoo?
There are some web pages - like the hords of image blogs at Tumblr - that might do fine with this "never ending page scroll" shit, but Yahoo's home page is not one of them, it's just extremely annoying.
Yahoo was at one time a great hotbed of interesting web development technology, but now it's just another shithole like HP than needs to merg with someone who actually has a product and vision, and go the fuck away.
The whole "portal" concept is dead.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Remote workers are not as useful for close knit development teams as ones in the office. Sometimes you need to speak face to face. All else being equal, of course.
First and probably primarily is security holes from supporting remote employees. Yahoo's email seems to have been broadly hacked, so much spam from address books of yahoo addresses. As a CEO, decisive action is made when no one else will speak of the elephant in the room, or assumptions need to be broken to progress.
Second, I have done lots of team work as well as remote work.. the physical interface of people is important for synergy. The problems I have solved by simply walking around the workplace and networking people who sit within 10m of each other are beyond counting.
Thirdly, Yahoo must really be in trouble and this is a sincere attempt to save it. Perhaps time to pay for their premium service.. They could use the cash, and i could use downloading my old emails.
The revenge effect from this decision could be nasty tho.. Security could get worse since some won't go and skills won't get transferred. People who worked remotely may not integrate well and may carry resentment into the workplace and the attempt to save it just might work just enough to drag the brand even lower. Good luck Yahoo! I for one am rooting for you.
So, regardless of the success or failure of their business model, (hint: it's a failure), senior management has decided that swimming against the tide will mysteriously lead to better customer service and/or lower costs?
I assume that this move has more to do with reducing variable cost, (payroll), by encouraging people to resign, than actually implementing a well thought-out strategic or tactical innovation. This because if everyone concerned actually turns up to the office, instead of quitting, then costs must inevitably rise. Of course, productivity gains will outpace costs, right? Wrong.
If management cannot manage remote workers today, with clear objectives supported by good processes and infrastructure, what makes you think they will be able to do it with everyone in-house?
Can't believe none of the Yahoo leadership has seen this:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-09-15/
The feminist lobby were so pleased that Mayer was appointed and waxed lyrical that now they have a fellow sister in the IT industry finally women in the tech industry will now start to get the rights, privledges and working practices that they think they deserve.
In one swipe she's now going to hit a large section of women who depend on remote access to juggle caring for child/parents and adjusting from maternity leave back into work.
This should be fun.
I wonder if her decision will also apply to work being outsourced by Yahoo outside the USA.
I have a feeling (and it's only a guess admittedly) that this is Mayer trying to stamp her manner of working onto the company. Being present and having a hand in as many different projects as possible is a pretty good way to become a top executive in a company.
You're absolutely right. This is very common, not just at the CEO level but at all levels of management. Whenever someone takes over a particular position they immediately begin making all sorts of changes and the reason is simple. If everything works out then they can take all the credit and say "I was responsible for that".
Unfortunately, this mindset frequently results in making lots of changes just for the sake of change. Things aren't better, they're just different. It also frequently results in making lots of changes that actually make things worse.
This is a move I expect out of a non-tech C-level. Like, I don't know, healthcare. "Yes, all employees must be chained to their desks by 0830 because otherwise we can't trust that work is being done."
Stupid, 1950's typewriter-and-adding-machine mentality. "Because that's how it's always been done."
The two most productive and profitable places I've been to not only allow telecommute -- they encourage it, and not for money. Their numbers tell them people do more work of better quality when free to work wherever.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
But I agree with this. This is the first time that I think that Mayer may actually be getting it in that the US workforce has gotten lazy.Yes, this is a broad stroke of the brush, but look at any large project in just about any large corporation and you'll see costs and overruns out of control. I think this is just the first step of her trying to say enough is enough, you people are well compensated, quit acting like spoiled brats thinking you are all so special and get the shit done. This goes for every segment out there, be it government, IT, Defense, you name it.
Thanks MM for breaking the home page...now its only allowing me the mobile version when using Chrome...Great work there Lou!
For Mayer, this is a nice way of creating an illusion of management. And it's a beautiful way of imposing attrition if you don't want to bother with severance pay just as in the good times remote worker flexibility was handed out in lieu of pay increases. But companies which unnecessarily force their employees to pollute the air, add to traffic nightmares, tear up roads, increase health and accident insurance costs for everyone just to create an illusion of management... should pay a tax for this privilege. Call it an a** on seat tax.
You dont attract the top people to your company by acting like a micromanaging jerk... This lady is proof that it's not your skills but who you know to become CEO.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This will just mean those bright and able will look for other employment, while those not so good will stay. And this will not only affect remote workers, as such a step is an insult to their employees and will lower morale significantly. Truly incompetent "leadership" at work, this is a beginner's mistake.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A lot of people are not suitable for remote employment, and a lot of people just aren't capable of involving off-site people. But if you've done it a while, hopefully you've weeded out those who couldn't and shouldn't and are left with good people you wouldn't otherwise have on staff. Doing anything like this without a grandfather clause sounds like chasing away a lot of good people that you've worked hard to find for almost no reason at all. But then I've never had any major issue with corporate suicides, unlike people they don't have any inherent reason to exist.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1. I didn't realize Yahoo still existed until I started hearing about this new CEO.
2. She's a little bit Martha Stewart, but still pretty cute (call me!).
3. When I went to the new Yahoo page, I immediately thought, "Oh, shit, how'd I wind up on Facebook?"
4. Remote work often means that you have to justify your billable hours, and that you're on call 24/7. In the office, it's so, so, so much easier to dick around looking up plans for raised gardening beds and writing horror fiction. Not that I'd know anything about that. And inclement weather might prevent you coming in, or necessitate your leaving early. And illness might require that you miss a day or two, etc.
5. They have this weird thing now, it's called teleconferencing. I'd love to tell Ms. Mayer about it some time. Maybe over drinks? Say, this Friday, around 6? I'll be the dashingly handsome yet rugged gentleman in his mid-30s staring winsomely into the middle distance.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
They're peeing all over it to mark their territory.
Just like some coders want to go through code, renaming things, changing the indentation, just to pee on it and mark it theirs. And to totally screw up source control.
Who hasn't seen a DB schema come back identical, just with _everything_ renamed. Some jackhole peeing on it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It impacts workers such as customer service reps, who perhaps work from home or an office in another city where Yahoo does not have one
It's far easier to concentrate and maintain that concentration when you don't have people constantly coming up to your desk and interrupting you. Since it's easier to concentrate, it's also easier to get into "the zone" and stay in "the zone" for a longer period of time. Further, since you don't commute, people who work from home also tend to work longer hours. So, you do more productive work at home for longer periods of time. I'd say people working from home are more useful for close-knit development teams than ones in the office.
Anyone else use an old yahoo address for their 'disposable' email? I use it for newsletters, technology reviews, less-than-trusted contacts, and people I don't want on my primary email. Outside banking, if it needs a password and email, it's getting the yahoo email address.
1. I obviously wouldn't screw over the remote workers if they're producing.
2. I'd order all existing pages to go into maintenance mode. No new features. Just maintain existing features and make sure they run in all current browsers.
3. For new spiffy pages, new spiffy URLs. Yes folks, you can have a DIFFERENT URL for new content. Funny how Mayer spent so much time in the biz and doesn't know that.
4. You wouldn't necessarily have to fire people, but at the same time if the people who are fucking up the current URLs are too much staff for the new URL project, then yes they should be let go. Too many web companies are unwilling to reduce staff in these cases. This results in long-time users getting broken pages because they add features to justify their jobs. This problem isn't unique to Yahoo.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I work for a close-knit high-level support group. Our problems are complex and varied enough that I cannot imagine working from home routinely. Nothing beats overhearing somebody in an adjacent cube mumble something about an issue that you dealt with vaguely six months ago, and then you hop up, scrawl something on a whiteboard, and then call over another couple people to check it out with you.
Yes, all this is theoretically possible via IM, (even the sketching, with special equipment), but things like overhearing others, and the instant, high-speed collaboration just isn't possible remotely. (I can talk much faster than I type, and there isn't any concept of "overhearing" a colleague discuss something if you are on other sides of the country.)
I was thinking of buying some Yahoo stock based on the idea the Mayer might turn that company around.
Now it is apparent she is not that type of leader.
This is probably a management oversight problem. We will see what becomes of it. It is not Yahoo!'s biggest problem. The problem with Yahoo! is that it doesn't have a point. I think many of us remember when it was a fairly useful directory of websites, and then transformed into a "web portal." I think that still translates to shitty web based AOL clone thing. Now, it seems like there are just a lot of other sites that do each individual thing better. Whether it is Google for search, Gmail for e-mail, tons of news aggregators for news, Pandora/Spotify/Grooveshark for Music, Netflix/Hulu/Youtube for movies and video, etc. Is the new home page better than the old one? I think so. It is much clearer with less cruft. Still at the end of the day if I am a web user why would I want to use Yahoo! for internet dating, when I can use match.com, pof, etc. Yahoo! brand itself doesn't convey anything anymore. It carries no gravitas, it is not associated with quality, speed, clarity, innovation, etc. To be honest, I associate it with spam and compromised e-mail addresses.
If they still want to be a "web portal" they need to really figure out a compelling reason for a web portal. Why should I come to Yahoo.com? What does a web portal do for me that google can't do just as easily? When they answer that question honestly, then they can figure out a way to move forward. Otherwise, they are a prisoner to their past that is not likely to return.
Ms. Mayer seems to see some of the problems. I guess the problem is whether the boat has hit the iceberg or if there is still time to turn?
This sounds more like a stealth lay-off than some sort of efficiency-promoting move.
I like how you assume everyone is a developer.
As a remote worker in a small development team I find this statement completely inaccurate. Most conversations take place in group chats and the only thing I lose as a remote worker is the unenviable disadvantage of being disturbed at work by miscellaneous passers-by asking for a quick feature (even though the answer is always: submit a feature request and bugger off you git).
Just checked out the Yahoo! page for the first time in years - the "new look" appears to be a paste-up of National Enquirer and People Magazine rejects. There is a media theory that "you can't underestimate the intelligence/taste of the general public." This theory is being severely tested.
a tech company I worked for relocated administrative functions FROM the bay area to another region of the country. It was a sold as a way to reduce cost-of-living expenses for admin types ... but it was a RIF wrapped in relo clothing. The ironic thing was that as the execs liked the bay area, they did't conceive that the 'rest of the people' didn't care for the bay area so much - crowded, cost of living etc. So most of the folks MOVED out of the bay area to houses that cost 1/4 as much, uncrowded schools which didn't have ESL as a class, etc. The RIF was a failure, as they had agreed to cover relo costs.
Full disclosure, I've implemented the 'Mayer relo' for WFH employees in lieu of the painful process of severing under-performing individuals. This move sniffs that it's an action to just reduce headcount. As unless you're in NY or LA, it life will be more expensive for you in the bay area than most anywhere else in the US.
Working from home can be just 2 steps away from a day off. It is useful every once in a while, so employees can wait for the repair man or handle the kids. However, from my experiences, when you work from home, your coworkers treat it as if you were out sick. When you work from home, you miss a lot of scuttlebutt, impromptu meetings, and hallway chats that electronic communications just don't make up for.
Meyer isn't an idiot. She knew the reaction would be strong and that some people would be lost in the process. This outcome is desired. She wants people to leave voluntarily because it plays better than "mandatory 10% reduction in staff". Also, I don't know many developers who would disagree that being in the same general area with your team makes you more cohesive and solves problems faster. I'm a developer and I *totally* get why she's doing this, esp. because Yahoo is all about Scrum.
In a large company most interactions are via some sort of electronic communication anyway. Whether said communication is done from the grayness of one's cube or the chair in one's house makes no difference. This points to an issue with how those remote workers are managed, not the fact that they are remote.
"All else being equal, of course."
I think this is the important part of your statement. If a person or team does not adapt to what works better for remote collaboration, then it does seem that productivity will suffer vs being face to face. Whether or not some people make up for this by being better or working harder isn't really an answer(just like the few workers who are so much more naturally productive could work through the impairment of being blindfolded lets say wouldn't justify the policy). I think what does answer this concern is that other things do not tend to be equal when working remotely. People do in fact adapt and in some cases, they find things about working remotely that make them even more productive.
I work remotely 99% of the time with my current team. My team is distributed in Seattle, San Francisco, Hawaii, and Beijing. I would say I have some experience on the matter. I've found that while loss of direct communication is dampening, there are things about working remotely that more than make up for it. First, we are very good about remote communication. We mitigate some of the costs of remote contact very consciously. Daily meetings for status are kept short, and we even use video to keep it personal. Group chat options are always available and it is standard behavior on our part to get everyone in one any time information needs to spread to more than just one person. Remote working means less time spent commuting that can instead be spent getting stuff done. It also means more flexible hours(since work can be done at any time instead of just office hours) so some of us have more fluid schedules that accommodate quicker response when there are problems outside of normal work hours. All of us take significantly less sick leave since working from home while sick is not nearly as onerous. Some of us use the freedom of remote work to choose work environments more suitable to our tastes. I myself like extreme quiet so I can focus, which I could not get being in the office. I can get in the zone of concentration and bang out a ton of code that I otherwise would not be able to do. One last example is remote options permit us to hire people who otherwise would not be viable. Sure, it might be more productive if everyone on my team worked in the office, but that statement omits the fact that we were the best fit for the jobs on this team and if remote work were not possible, we would not be working at all. It is not a choice of us working remotely with lower productivity vs going into a building and getting more done; the option is between us working remotely vs hiring less suited(but local) people to get the job done.
So I absolutely agree, all other things held constant, a team working remotely is going to be less productive than if they were in an office together. But other things do not stay equal when permitting remote collaboration.
Sounds like the typical anachronistic, psychopathic, short-sighted douche-bag of a manager.
If you need to stay in "the zone" then you don't have a close knit team. You bring up the barrier to be further from the team, not closer.
Furthermore close knit teams know perfectly well when to leave each other alone and know each others' work habits.
As for people who work from home, it's total BS. These people work no harder than anyone else and, in case of children, are in a house that is not conducive to concentration. Working longer hours is not the same as being more productive. There is such thing as a separation of work space and home space that gets in the way and kills performance and concentration.
However, working remotely is not a bad thing per se. It just has to be regularly interchanged with working in the office.
The bad did not do as much work as the local workers and would disappear for 15 minutes at a time. What were they doing? Going for a walk? Who knows.
The good had higher productivity than the local workers.
Never saw much success with teams with too many remote workers.
I'm sure it works great for brilliant people but for normal people, it was difficult to have adhoc meetings or expedite things.
Of course this was for working conditions with too much work. It was hard to do it locally (70 hour weeks). Almost impossible to do it remotely.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Remote workers and face time are not mutually exclusive.
I worked for over a decade in a "geographically diverse" group. We would see each other in person only occasionally, but we saw each other most every day via teleconferencing. Each of us had a small H.323 conferencing display on our desk all connected to a "virtual water cooler" on the organization's MCU. We all saw one another and could communicate on an ad-hoc basis. We also had a common jabber room. It all worked well for that group. We could and did mute audio and/or video when we were concentrating on something and did not want distraction, but social rules developed quickly that kept the noise level very low, so there was only an occasional need.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
makes her a slut
The quality of the Yahoo is dismal. Almost anything she does is an improvement.
She can either treat it as a liberating idea and try things, or continue to drag around this
half, nay 3/4, dead elephant.
She wants them to quit so she doesn't have to pay unemployment despite the fact that the company is the one changing the rules.
It depends... and I know that is a weasely cop out but allow me to try and explain for the purposes of (web) development, my field.
Coding is a solo task, you know what to do, you just got to come up with the code to do it. If you know how to do that, you can work alone pretty easily and the overhead of the going to the office and office life is just wasted time really.
BUT development is BEST a cooperative task. I have had to take over several projects in the past that had been done by single developers working from their home and I have formed an opinion:
Developers should be forced at gun point to go outside and interact with people and other developers. Or they go strange. Very strange. Fast. About 30 minutes seems to be the limit.
It not that the guys who worked on this projects were bad coders... but they were or had become bad developers. And I am not just talking about lack of comments or documentation or only coding for the optimal case and damn error handling.
I am talking about coming up with solutions to problems which seem to indicate that the person in question google all his answers but had google returning results in reverse order. Literally everything he did was done the least recommended way. Other examples I have seen include coming up with solutions to problems that don't exist. The weirdest data storage solutions for traffic the system would never experience in a million years.
Normally, in a healthy development team, when one developer gets a crazy idea, he has to present it to his fellow developers... and often just by speaking your idea out loud, you realize your mind has gone spongy and it is time you actually spend some time around people again, socializing. For developers, this means saying "Hi" in the morning. It might not be much but it stops your mind from playing the fairies and starting to think the NoSQL is a solution for you. And this is true because whenever you grow big enough for NoSQL to be needed/useful, your team will no longer consist of a single person thinking he talking to a commitee when he is talking to himself.
In theory, if you got a strongly compartmentalized system, you could have a coder working on it, solo at home with minimal communication. But if it is seats of your pants coding of a constantly evolving system because of customer demands where everything is closely linked, it does rather help to have everyone in the same office.
It is possible that the most socially capable and well balanced people could work from home and still be part of a team effort... but lets face it. We are talking IT here. We don't do socially capable and/or balanced. And again, I am not kidding, of co-worker developers the majority has had a medical diagnosis that in polite society would be described by flipping your index-finger across your lips. I swear that sometimes I am the only sane person in the office. Bleep.
I can see the use of sometimes working from home when you just have to punch in a lot of code but that is not where the core business is for a good developer. That is in finding out where there are shortcomings in the existing system, what the desires are of the end user and what new uses are possible that could help set your product apart.
And in bouncing ideas of each other to help weed the bad ideas from the good ones.
Invariably I have noticed that the less communication happens on a project, the worse it gets. I have worked at one office were there where never any meetings, everyone just developed on their own. Does it surprise anyone that the majority of bugs were regression bugs?
You might make it work with IM and email, I prefer to be able to walk to someone's desk and talk through an idea. As I have become older even with my stunted social skills I have learned not to fear personal contact so much anymore. Get your team to spar and discuss. Lots and often. It means everyone is keeping up-to-date. I have had to let go a number of developers who couldn't be part of the team and insisted
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... by cutting their connection to the doomed ship so they are not dragged down with it as it sinks.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If you resign- no unemployment benefits.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sometimes, not often in today's world of development. We have a group of 8 developers and the ones that need face to face time are generally the weaker ones of the group. No errors are unique these days. Every error I have ever come across can be fixed in 20-30 minutes with a simple google search.
Even if I merge someone else's code and something breaks, I can look at it for 20 minutes and figure it out. Same with multiple members of the group. We have one remote member that comes in one week every 2 months. He is one of the stronger members of the group. I envy him. When you are remote people can't come by and say "What does this error mean?" even though they have been told how to fix it 3 times before or is such a simple error that they shouldn't have asked the question to begin with. They are forced to email that person or IM them, which can be ignored for hours, like I wish I could do to them while I am in the office.
I've had the opportunity to do both, work on site and work from home. In my experience, there are pros and cons to both options. Some people will abuse the opportunity to work at home. Others will work even more than they would have. OTOH, yesterday at work, I found it very hard to concentrate on my work when I could overhear five distinct conversations at once.
My biggest concern with this change is the abrupt nature of it. It really seems like it was made without consideration of the affected employees.
I think remote employees come about in many cases because a traditional company has an employee or potential hire who is drawing a line in the sand and saying I can only work for you if I work remote. If that employee is good enough or important enough to the business, they might agree, even though everyone recognizes that it would be even better if they were local.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Yep. I'm thinking this is a golden opportunity for google to hire a ton of remote workers whose job description will be "come up with ways to destroy yahoo". They'll be extremely motivated to do so.
I have been very unimpressed with Mayer's performance at Yahoo. She's made quite a few moves that are pure pointy haired boss level bullshit.
Outsource your assignments to some dude in China.
It's far easier to concentrate and maintain that concentration when you don't have people constantly coming up to your desk and interrupting you. Since it's easier to concentrate, it's also easier to get into "the zone" and stay in "the zone" for a longer period of time. Further, since you don't commute, people who work from home also tend to work longer hours. So, you do more productive work at home for longer periods of time. I'd say people working from home are more useful for close-knit development teams than ones in the office.
All true, and more; I opted to start working from home to avoid morons in adjacent cubicles who thought it was appropriate to do things like: 1. Hold impromptu meetings in the adjacent aisle with everyone talking as loudly as possible, 2. Make personal phone calls with the phone on *speaker*. And then they would get PO'd at *me* for objecting.
And in addition, at home I have use of my own double-width rack of networking gear where I can replicate issues, and test proposed changes. Every instance I've seen of attempts to set up labs at the office always result in gear being commandeered for "emergency" deployment, or "temporary" use, never to be seen again. The result is the only thing left in the company "lab" is broken junk.
When I am in the office, people from different organizations continually come up to me to ask me questions and a lot of times they can figure it out themselves but they're too lazy. These distractions tend to disrupt my thought process and so when I go back to the task I was working on it takes a bit of time for me to get back into that thought process. Its worse when I actually have to go look at something for one of these people. I am also limited at how long I can spend at work due to being single and having two dogs who need to be let out roughly after 9 hours. That means if you take into account my commute I only work 8 hours.
When I work from home, I am only distracted as needed by people. Most times they send an email which I can respond to at my leisure. I also do not have a time limit and I can go let my dogs outside to relieve themselves and then go back to work. I end up actually working closer to 12 hours when I work from home.
I will say that yes if I were married and had kids I would probably have distraction at home but I would have to in that situation have a separation in my home where I had an office instead of working from my recliner in the living room.
A seagull manager: someone who flies in, shits over everything, and leaves.
I wonder if Mayer will end up being one of these.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
You can tell the difference between people who are dependent on their coworkers for help and the people who are constantly propping them up based on how appealing this is to a person.
Workflow for a remote worker: I think of a task in advance that needs accomplished and I plan ahead for it. I delegate it to a remote worker giving them a required completion date. I get a finished product on or before the required completion date.
Workflow for a local worker: I don't plan ahead and delegate tasks on a reactionary basis. I throw what human resources I have available at problems as they appear. I am mystified by why people are always missing their delivery projections because they can not plan ahead for the random musing that turns in to an additional task they get saddled with 5 minutes till midnight. This results in them having to work late and missing dinner with their family in an attempt to fit 2 tasks of shit in a 1 task schedule. Then I get angry at them for being late for work in the morning because they overslept.
100% guarantee the asshole who manages workflows such that they need a local worker goes home at 6pm everyday, elects themselves to leadership roles, and is constantly throwing people under the bus when upper management demands to know why everything is a total clusterfuck.
Great, and when I want to work for a creepy company that substitutes productivity and earned worker loyalty for forced team building and "face to face" meetings, I'll make that change. Right now though, I want to work for a company that cares about happy and productive employees. Missing a 30-45 minute commute each way, and letting employees choose what is the most productive environment for themselves is a net benefit. Who wants to work for a company that confuses management with out of touch mandates?
Most of the next-cube-over conversations are distracting. I can't concentrate nearly as well on my work when I am constantly bombarded by phone conversations, office conversations, and people shuffling around. We have a white noise generator. It doesn't work; it just makes everyone talk louder.
When I work at home, I get more hours in (since I work during the time I would otherwise be traveling to/from work), and I get a lot more done during those hours (because it is quiet and I can concentrate). People with families should set up an office, preferably separated from the house, if they need to avoid being pestered.
Furthermore, we have many remote employees where I work. We use skype and gotomeeting a lot, as most teams include at least one remote person.
It works fine.
Maybe the culture where we work is just better adapted to this, since we have always had and needed remote employees. I don't know. But the complaints I hear people making about working remotely just don't fit my experience having done it, and having worked with people doing it, for years.
Judging by the horrid web page redesign, I'm going to out on a limb and guess that this decision wasn't thought through as well as it could have been.....
And people are suprised big changes are happening? She's seen Yahoo rise from the outside, and fall from the outside. Now that she's on the inside maybe, just maybe she has seen the flaws in their culture and is trying to address it. My suspicion is that Yahoo has an inner culture that was allowed to grow in the craziness of when they could do no wrong. Fact is they are not Google, or Microsoft, or Oracle. They are a struggling company that has a lot of extra baggage from the dotcom boom and bust. She now sees that she needs to tear it down and try to start from scratch. Remote working is collatoral damage to that.
This is likely a reduction-in-force plan without having to fire anybody. Everyone has to come to Yahoo's office, but that's impossible. Some remote workers live too far away, and those who live close enough won't find enough desks to sit.
Yahoo's stock went up after this tough CEO announcement to slacking workers. If the CEO fired all those employees, then the stock might go the other way.
Managers are like dogs, all the way up to the executive level. When they enter a new area, they mark their territory by pissing all over everything.
It entirely depends on the individual, the company and the circumstances...
If I go into the office, the place is like a zoo... I am constantly interrupted, the environment is noisy, the seats are uncomfortable, the a/c doesn't work in summer and the heating doesn't work in winter, the network is slow and unreliable (and worse if more people are there), and most people are agitated having just suffered through an hour+ commute to get there.
If I work at home i have a quiet office room which is dedicated to work, which contains a comfortable chair etc. When i have lunch i only have to go as far as the kitchen, eat and then return to work instead of having to leave the building and stand in line.
If i need to communicate with colleagues they can email, im or call me depending on the urgency of the communication, and they know only to call (which forces me to stop whatever i'm already doing to answer) if its an urgent matter.
I don't have any children, i am here alone during the day.
I don't work longer hours at home, but it does mean that i get more relaxation time since i don't lose 3 hours/day to commuting (time which is totally non productive and wasted). But you are right about working longer hours not being more productive, as you get tired you become less able to concentrate and are more prone to mistakes... A lot of people fail to understand this however, and would prefer staff to work longer hours, they often think of their employees as machines in this respect.
So working from home i waste no time on commuting, i sit more comfortably and i have less distractions. I am generally able to get considerably more done when at home than if i was in the office.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Technically one can create a shared audio space. Just ask all the people who play multiplayer.
Then necessarily, close knit teams are unproductive. "the zone" is where the good things happen that make some individual programmers more productive than 10 others.
In truth though, close knit teams do have 'the zone' because they also recognize that a constant stream of yadda-tadda doesn't get the job done. They know when to shut up and code and when to talk things through. They don't get upset when they can't go hang out at other people's cubicles when they're bored.
When a person resigns, they are not eligible for unemployment insurance. What Yahoo is proposing is a restructuring of their work-force, a "lay-off." Unless they are offering a superior severance package, the ethical thing to do is lay these employees off, so they can collect the unemployment insurance they deserve.
None of them are resigning by choice, and if the alternative is that they will be fired for cause, Yahoo should be deeply ashamed of their new CEO.
... the results were a big improvement. My company had found remote employees were generally less connected with what we were trying to accomplish. HIred a new VP to adopt "Agile" and use Scrum, gave the remote folks a choice of which most decided to stay, moved work from India back to US and assigned separate independent work to India team.
Results: Schedules are now met, drama down, overtime greatly reduced, problems detected and dealt with. Is it perfect? Of course not, and no place is, but it is a lot better, and having folks easier to talk to in person much better.
Are there people who make remote work for software development? Probably, but my experience is that in person is better. Of course remote is ok for dealing with house repair and other issues, but not week in and week out.
>If you need to stay in "the zone" then you don't have a close knit team. You bring up the barrier to be further from the team, not closer.
You are a total and complete idiot who has no idea whatsoever about the difference between introvert and extrovert, and dopamine vs adrenaline driven minds. What makes it worse is that you go one and speak like you have to say something of importance. It's just the noise of an idiot.
Unlike football, programming involves lots of solitary mental exercise. 'The zone' is the mental state where thought happens most efficiently for the individual. Denying your programmers this out of some misconceived notion of 'team cohesion' only shoots your company in the foot.
However, I do agree that separated home/work space can help some people concentrate better.
This is my point. Close knit teams know when to leave each other alone. This means the advantage of remote working (not being disturbed) is lessened. And the advantages of having someone close by are there too.
I hear this fallacy a lot.
When I work from home, I'm still pairing up with another developer over skype/tmux, and I am super productive doing it.
It's 2012, there's no reason remote working should incur a penalty in collaboration.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Fired for just cause = no benefits either.
Whups, lol, year fail.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
"employees work because they are being paid ... Anyone who says differently is lying,"
Hi, I'm one of those liars that say differnetly. Companies exist for the same reason that you exist. You just do. While it's true that most companies must turn a profit to survive (except for those which are some rich persons vanity project), it doesn't mean they need to be driven by money.
Similary, employees have many reasons for working, although it's hard to give a company all your productive hours for free, you'll need to get something in return.
When I worked at Google, there were a lot of remote workers, since teams were put together for specific purposes, and the geographic locations varied widely between the best people for the task at hand. This worked as well, in 99% of the cases, as having the person locally in the office. But Google has a pretty big, pretty sophisticated teleconferencing infrastructure which perhaps Yahoo does not have/can not currently afford to buy.
It's also frequently very difficult to communicate corporate culture remotely; for this reason, when someone was hired permanently into a position in the team, even from another team already within Google, they were expected to spend several months with their coworkers in Mountainview. If the office containing most of the on-site team had been in Germany, they would have been expected there instead.
I imagine that it would be amazingly difficult to make a cultural shift in a company with remote workers, even if you imposed the same restrictions in terms of having them work locally, and if, as Marissa seems to be trying to do, you do it by throwing a big switch, that's a rather large up front cost, unless you own Marriott Suites or a similar housing complex.
That said, Marissa is apparently trying to turn Yahoo into a mini-Google. I don't know how this will work out for them, but it probably can't be worse than if they'd taken the purchase offer from Microsoft and become a mini-Microsoft.
My gut feeling is that this isn't going to be terrifically successful; I knew a lot of the people who were initially involved in Yahoo. I also know that a lot of managers dislike managing remotely on general principles; for those managers, the people "allowed" to work remotely were the "rock stars": people who were allowed to be remote not because the managers were OK with it, but because they would otherwise lose the talent. They've already had something of a brain-drain: I know several of the Yahoo top technical people already jumped to Facebook, Google, and other companies, some of them years ago, when it looked like Yahoo was starting to go down hill.
It really remains to be seen what, other than a mini-Google, Marissa is trying to build at Yahoo, but it should be interesting to watch.
Careful what you wish for, Slashdotters, if your job can be done from home it can be done from India.
It's funny how Marissa Mayer started her Yahoo career working from home - as a CEO!
But I would try to get a huge some in court first.
Got cognitive dissonance?
The cognitive dissonance of juxtaposing management okay for outsourcing globally and management not okay for remote access domestically is simply stunning.
By our own admission, you are a benefit to the team when you are at work. If you stay home, sure YOU can focus better, but those 'people from different organizations' all have to go figure things out for themselves (in other words reinvent the wheel) instead of simply asking you. The impact to the organization as a whole may be a wash.
Unless you are more important than "these people" or make substantially more, that is.
I know that when I work from home, it seems like I get a lot more done. But then, what was the aggregate impact of my not being in the office, therefore not contributing in meetings, not helping out the new guys, not answering questions for people, and so on? How well would the whole organization work if everyone was an island and never distracted by anyone else? That would be the opposite of teamwork.
Such a team can probably do well with a mailing list, perhaps a private IRC and the occasional conference call.
Some of the most successful software out there was written collaboratively by a team that has never met in person.
LMFTFY
Remote workers are not as useful for ad-hoc development teams that have ill-defined requirements.
I'll bet you my US Robotics modem this is simply about layoffs. Laying off people is expensive - However, if they quit, well that's much cheaper.
"You have to come into the office now."
"Come into the office? No way. I quit."
Step 1: Announce all remote employees come to office or be fired.
Step 2: Lots of employees quit/are fired.
Step 3: Announce outsourcing (many of recently freed) jobs to somewhere that labor is cheaper.
I'm not working for Yahoo (or in the US for that matter), but work from home 3 to 4 days a week on average (office is 170 km away). I have the telecommuting detailed in my contract. If you are a remote worker for Yahoo and the contract stipulates that your place of work is not at the office, can you really be fired with a just cause?
If you take a job with the understanding you'll be able to work remotely, make sure it's in your employment contract!
I made the mistake of not ensuring something verbally agreed to with interviewers at a particular company made it into the contract, and when that thing wasn't provided when they became my employer, I had no real recourse.
Unfortunately ...
It hurt my eyes.
I was hoping for a new portal but that is not it.
Holly Christ.
If I were those workers I would find a new job.
That is a sinking ship for sure.
Oh look, somebody's afraid to stand up and say, "Hey fellas, this little meeting's been going on for 5 minutes now, and you're getting noisy & really distracting me. Could you take it to a conference room, please?"
Your point about "better test labs" at home is fucking retarded, too. If your company doesn't give you proper gear to test with, then why in god's name would you buy it all yourself and make up their shortfall? Congrats on being a spineless jellyfish.
Yahoo is a large company that isn't doing so well. It's had countless acquisitions of smaller comanies which generally keep their middle management layers relatively intact. You have to figure there are hundreds of employees that are essentially dead weight or are at least vastly underperforming, which is made all the easier by being fulltime remote.
I read it more as "trying to shake things up / refocus / cut out dead weight" than "WFH is evil!!". I wouldn't be surprised at some exclusions or a change in the policy when things settle out and Yahoo is on a more sustainable path.
An Internet company that doesn't allow employees to work over via, um ... the Internet. Makes perfect sense
This way I'll be working in official Yahoo office space AND make a little money on the side!
To me this looks like she thinks the remote workers are a safe group to layoff without increasing the unemployment rates Yahoo pays. Workers who quit don't get unemployment, and workers who refuse to quit or relocate are insubordinate and can be fired for cause and also don't get unemployment.
New Yahoo looks like old AOL
If you resign- no unemployment benefits.
This is not necessarily true, but it varies on a state by state basis (some will grant benefits in quit or be fired situations if the firing was not due to misconduct, as well to relocation situations, although those can be hard to win). It'll be an interesting question to see whether Yahoo will be able to oppose benefits in all of the different jurisdictions they opposite in.
I will never go back to the hell hole of cube farms and people physically interrupting my work. Fuck that shit.
I say we fucking tax the living shit out of these dumbass corps that require knowledge workers to unnecessarily sit for hours in traffic everyday. The living hell that is silicon valley traffic would improve dramatically.
If your business is tech and your methods are luddite - you need to be punished until you figure it the fuck out.
Yahoo is beginning to circle the drain. Considering the level of hate, prejudice, and ignorance that I see in the majority of message postings after articles, I say good riddance. One less forum for people to spread hate and ignorance.
I've been reading a lot of comments that talk about close-knit teams that need to overhear people, get people to come over and look at their desks, and that's all well and good.
But screen-sharing, chat rooms for collaboration, and bridge conferences have been around for a while, and companies that have a strategic outlook on telecommuting (like IBM, for example), know how to use those to effectively replace the "face time" with something better.
Which is the ability for an employee to choose where they want to live, constrained only by their access to an internet connection, and not be concerned with commuting every morning and night. This allows a company to retain highly-skilled labor without paying them more money. An astute employee would figure out what economic benefit the lack of commuting provides in time and expense, and use that in determining how much money they should be making at a remote position versus on-site.
I have done the cubicle thing for over a decade, and I have done and continue to do the remote thing for a few years, and let me tell you, unequivocally:
Cubicles suck. You're sitting there in a tiny cubicle all day, looking at your screen, while your boss sits in a sweet office and demands that you come in at a certain time, because he has no other way of telling whether you are being productive or not. Then you get called at 1am to fix a problem from home. This is incredibly annoying when you have just spent all day at work, and may or may not be getting any overtime compensation or even paid for the extra hours you work. I know that I am personally much less annoyed when called about a problem at 1am if I have been at home all day, than I would be if I had been stuck in a cubicle all day.
Then again, the on-site office situation is great for a certain brand of middle manager, because again, they get a sweet office, and again, they don't actually have to figure out who's being productive, because they can simply look around and see who appears to be concentrating the hardest.
This may be Meyer's strategy, or maybe she's simply announcing that she's arrived, and she's in charge. Much like how Patton showed up in Europe and demanded that his combat troops all wear neckties. Or maybe she's trying to cut that payroll down with some attrition.
I worked with a team developing a complex OS from scratch that had one member working remotely 4 days a week. The manager urged several of the others, including the leader, to go home and come back when they needed to or wanted to get the team together.
It takes extraordinary people and a level of trust but we saw increased productivity with them working remotely due to the lack of interruptions. Sometimes two would work from someone's basement, sometimes one, sometimes nobody was in the office and they were all at home. Design meetings were in the office, generally a day a week. Now the weeks of early design were in the office, true. But 50% of the time was away from the office distractions.
So saying "always less productive" isn't true, it depends on the task, the people and the motivation. The management can help by protecting them from other managers but the people do it themselves.
Completely contrary to what is going on economically and socially.
I work with businesses everyday that face:
1) Huge Real Estate and tax bills for property.
2) Huge Tax bills for labor.
3) Huge and continuing increases in the costs of electricity, gas.
They will do anything to cut these and remote offices is a big booming market right now.
If you can get rid of a car, extra gas, insurance this is a gigantic plus for employees who work remotely. People work very hard to preserve their jobs when faced with a home office and businesses love the savings.
Yahoo's CEO is off the rocking chair and I suspect yahoo won't be around for very much longer.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
âoePhysically Togetherâ: Hereâ(TM)s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More is an followup to TFA.
If it gets taken down, here's some key phrases to search for:
"With the introduction of initiatives like FYI, Goals and PB&J, we want everyone to participate"
"for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration"
Comment: BP&J? Please tell me this has nothing to do with sandwiches.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Title says it all
My thought exactly. No COBRA for your insurance either. I am sure that HR will word the choice as "resign" hoping that as many dummies as possible will make that mistake. I would just refuse to make the choice and spend my days job searching until they officially kicked me to the curb.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
Still looks likes like someone threw up all the days news on a website and called it a day with a bar at the top that might search for crap. Google site is still better then any of the others because it doesn't has all the crap.
I give a big el shruggo to this one. My last couple of contract employers have been huge on working from home, and also teams made up of people in remote offices which comes to the same. I currently go into the office every day - and am often the only one on my team who is there! In theory, I'm still skeptical about this, about the productivity of the average or even above-average worker, working from home in their pjs with kids and dogs televisions and running family errands. OTOH losing two hours a day to commute doesn't improve overall productivity or concentration either. It's mildly odd to find an Interwebs leader like Yahoo cutting down on remote work. What next, they shut down home access to Yahoo and make customers go to storefronts?
Oh yeah, I just meant to add the critical thought, that putrid office space, tiny cubes, makes working "in the office" a joke anyway.
One Yahoo facility I saw down here in SoCal was just that putrid.
So, again, YMMV.
YAMU
Physically Together: Here's the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More
http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/
Aside from large parts that do not work, it is ridiculous to see a headline paragraph of every story in the group. Those are some horribly long pages.
I really have to question the good sense of anyone who thinks that is good web page design.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Shoot. Would have been nice to have snuck in a post like this before you realized your mistake:
Headline: Man works from home; does not know what year it is.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
In this day and age there is simply no reason. I work on a small team right now and the guy I do the most work with is remote all the time. Between IM, email, phone calls and video chat there is no drop off between him and anyone else I work with. Office time != face time. I agree that face time can be very important, but there are just too many tools available these days for physical location to matter.
For all the people here talking about the value of "office time" (they say face time but they mean office time) I have yet to find it. Meetings are mostly useless. Talking without a digital aid of some sort is inefficient a lot of the time. Video chat + IM is my preferred method when I need to really COMMUNICATE about something technical. I can trade links, code all while talking through something. There are people IN MY OWN OFFICE that I do this with because it is superior to talking face to face.
The people I know who suck at telecommuting generally suck when they're not. Whether it's Facebook and Imgur in the office or at home, it's still wasted time.
At least half the time I really need to get work done, I stay home. There are times when I'm working with physical equipment that going to the office makes sense, but when I'm tuning servers or something my location is totally irrelevant. There are just too many tools in this day and age to make telecommuting fantastic not to do it. Plus, how much can a company save on office space? This is big consideration if you're a small operation.
I made an observation about development teams. I guess in that way I assumed everyone was a developer, yes.
The best and brightest will find other employment, and the rest will move to HQ and be mediocre in person rather than from home. When given an option like this, everyone looks for another position, and the ones who have marketable skills get hired away, leaving the dead weight on board.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm surprised that people here are so against this. Despite the stereotype of programmers working alone in a dark basement, software development is a collaborative activity.
Yes it's good to get into "the zone" and distractions can break that. But this is more than offset by being able to get other people together to design something on a whiteboard, or have someone more familiar with the code help debug something with you. I can't count the number of times when I've spent ages searching for a bug, and had a colleague come over and spot it almost immediately. The same thing has happened the other way around on countless occasions.
Oh come on the moment I read the post it was obvious she's just getting rid of people without having to fire them.
And I mean... no checking email after 5pm.
No code reviewing that bug on Saturday morning.
No spending time on the drive home thinking about that tiling algorithm.
And definitely, definitely, no logging in and coding over the weekend.
I mean - fair is fair. WFH is the trade-off for always-on mode employees are often expected to be in. If Yahoo (or anyone else) is not happy with this trade-off - FINE. We shouldn't support them with free overtime.
I read an article on Mayer, it seems a disappointing move from such a progressive woman. Perhaps she is part of the boys club after all.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I was going to get indignant about this but it's Yahoo!. So you get kicked off the ship twelve months before it sinks? That just increases the likelihood that you'll get to watch the inevitable from dry land.
And in any event, anyone working from home and working for Yahoo! should have spent the last 2 years finding a better job.
Who cares? Isn't Yahoo just about as relevant as AOL these days? They won't be around much longer anyway.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Back in the day Yahoo provided a useful index of a ton of sites, with human review and higher quality than most similar sites. That was useful.
But a 'web portal' is something exists only to serve advertisers. Typically some nice but completely computer illiterate sod didnt notice a checkbox and it got set as their homepage within a few hours of turning the computer on, if it wasnt set that way by the OEM to begin with. Ever since, it has been "the first page on the internet" for these victims^wfolks and as a result they visit it frequently, and most often start 'surfing' by clicking a link from the 'portal'.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
"If you resign- no unemployment benefits."
That is not always true, especially in this case; check your state's laws on the subject. For example, in Washington State:
RCW 50.20.050
Disqualification for leaving work voluntarily without good cause
2(b) An individual is not disqualified from benefits under (a) of this subsection when:
[assorted other stuff]
(vii) The individual's worksite changed, such change caused a material increase in distance or difficulty of travel, and, after the change, the commute was greater than is customary for workers in the individual's job classification and labor market;
well, it's actually 2013 here where I am. Maybe you need to telecommute outside or buy a calendar? ;)
We're hiring Java web developers!
I'm still trying to figure out what this "Yahoo" thing is and how it might be relevant to the modern world. From the article title, it would appear to be some kind of business, maybe a small one because they need to have their employees physically in the building?
I vaguely recall some commercial advertisement in the 90s about some internet-based company with an annoying yodeling audio hook at the end. Is that the same company?
Hundreds of workers have been given the choice: start showing up for work at HQ (which would require relocation in many cases), or resign.
What this is is a way to cut staff without actually having to fire anyone, reducing liability and severance costs. Sounds like a company (still) in trouble.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I wouldn't think anyone would take the half hour remark literal. I thought most people would have the social skills to see this as clearly an exaggeration. Clearly I was wrong. Might I recommend you spend some more time around people and learn to pick up on when someone is being literal and when someone is exaggerating for comic effect?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
But you assume his job was to service questions from other organizations rather than do the job he was hired to do. How do you expect an employee to get their assignments done if they are crazily distracted all the time?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
"core hours" in 3, 2, 1...
Well, except its 2013.
"3. For new spiffy pages, new spiffy URLs. Yes folks, you can have a DIFFERENT URL for new content. Funny how Mayer spent so much time in the biz and doesn't know that."
You're an idiot.
Depends on the cause/state actually
I used to be a huge advocate of telecommuting and did it myself for the better part of a decade.
For years now I've been seeing a growing wave of Agile methodology, particularly Scrum, being adopted. Very much for the better. And while it's technically possible to use these methods with remote team members, it's far from ideal.
No matter how much technology you throw at the problem (IM, video, holograms), the reality is you throw away practically all the possible gains when team members are remote. Hell, just having the team spread out farther then a couple cubes away is incredibly detrimental. And it isn't about the ease of distracting your co-worker all the time (which anyone would agree is bad). No, it's about the ease of collaborating with your team member.
I'm seeing a significant re-thinking of the use of out-sourcing/off-shoring, specifically because a good Scrum team of half a dozen people in house can drastically outperform any number of off-shore contractors. The economics make more sense to keep the work in house. But they have to be a team, and they have to be co-located, period. Anything else and you just don't get remotely close to the same performance...which means there's no real benifit of an in house group, which means the most sensible choice is to out-source it to India.
--
If you're a Rambo-style rock star who is loath to work with anyone else, most especially face to face, your days are numbered. Simply because anyone with just half your skill can easily out perform you in every way if they are part of a solid Agile team and you're still a lone wolf. I'm not comparing you against an entire team, I'm comparing just you against just one member of a good team.
In other words, 6 lone wolf rock stars will get destroyed by 6 average, typical workers who work together as a team. And the team members will do it without working 15 hour days.
My
Oh look, somebody's afraid to stand up and say, "Hey fellas, this little meeting's been going on for 5 minutes now, and you're getting noisy & really distracting me. Could you take it to a conference room, please?"
I've told people that in the past. First, you end up looking like a jerk. Most people don't want to be considered a jerk by their coworkers. Second, your concentration and your productivity is already broken at this point. One of the main points of working from home is to prevent a scenario like this from occuring in the first place.
I think you may be underestimate the cost of interruptions of that sort, and how much those who ask frequent questions take that in to account. Some people just like to solve their problem by asking someone else to do it for them, and I've sometimes found myself essential doing someone else's googling for them whilst they stand and wait. People like that won't consider the 15 minute penalty their imposing on you, or try to group their questions together - and it's when you become known as the person who is good at solving those problems that you have a big problem (for all managers like the word 'teamwork', unless you're a manager yourself they'll still assess you on how much of your own work you do). That can be a serious issue in a mixed ability team, with the best people constantly prevented from being productive to help the worst do just a little. But others, of course, will work for ages on something without asking and waste a lot of time - or, worse, leave lots of bad code lying around for someone else to do a whole bunch of work to find and fix.
You can't have an effective team without having at least some people working effectively in it (nor one where everyone works effectively at the wrong thing because they don't talk). But managers tend to live in a world where interacting with people IS working effectively, so I suspect there's a tendency for them to push too hard in favour of lots of communication because it feels good for them.
I think it can be quite difficult to find a right answer. Remote working I think biases people a little more towards asking less, which is good when it's some people and bad when it's others. A supervisor/project manager/technical lead can try to make sure people aren't failing to ask good questions, and try to take most of the questions himself. Then he could all but give up trying to do serious development to manage. But if he's much more technically able that's not necessarily a good idea....
MS Paint? You must be kidding. Even the most crude drawing takes several times longer to complete in MS Paint (or any mouse-driven program) vs. a ballpoint pen or whiteboard.
And that OTS tablet app is also a non-starter in a corporate environment, which requires all confidential information to transit our corporate network/VPN, and only the corporate network. Any app that involves you logging in via phone number is probably routing data through a central (non-corporate) server.
Not to mention that tablets, while not overwhelmingly expensive these days, still aren't exactly standard equipment.
She is simply trying to make a name for herself beyond being a sperm receptacle just lucky to be there at the right time and at the right place, that and stealing some patents. Basically she left Google to avoid being seen as an empty head incapable of anything and just being along for the ride to be head of Yahoo and demonstrate the 'Peter Principle' for everyone to see. In the tech age shutting down remote working when it is working has to be the stupidest decision imaginable. Either she is a Google poison pill or she just wants the ego ride delusion of being able to direct each and every person each and every day because they are incapable of doing it themselves. The directors are going to start getting fidgety.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
2013 even.
... Will allow her to cull lots of workers without paying severance... Dn't think that will happen but whatever the reason, it's a gutless senseless move which will undoubtedly result in talent drain... Is she like a google plant?
kspacey join amnesty international www.amnesty.org
I worked in the office for 7 years and now I've worked for almost the same amount of time remotely.
People who work remotely usually have to be more accountable, they don't get paid just for showing up from 9 to 5, instead they have to justify thier pay.
No being lazy for about an hour with coffee reading blogs, no extended (paid) lunch hours with the boys.
Yes, I charge by the hour, of course. I do mostly consulting work, and I communicate very well (asynchronously, not on demand).
But I resent the idea that people who work in the office are more worth thier salary by a long shot. Maybe they haven't paid thier dues yet, maybe they are just not responsible enough (yet) to be worth paying to work from home or from another country... it takes a while to reach that level of responsibility.
Ironically, Google killing iGoogle may help Yahoo. My Yahoo is the only worthwhile part of Yahoo IMHO. I switched from it to iGoogle years ago, had all sorts of customized news feeds and widgets on it, and pretty much ignored My Yahoo. When Google announced iGoogle's impending execution, I went back to my abandoned My Yahoo! page, found they had cleaned up the design some, and was able to totally recreate everything I had on iGoogle.
My Yahoo supports more tabs, and has a reader feature that lets you preview articles without going to the site. Slightly different approach than the click-arrow to read a feed on iGoogle but gets the job done, in some ways better.
My Yahoo! is ridiculously unintegrated with the rest of Yahoo including even the Yahoo home page. That is a big part of where they fall down. They need something like the Google black bar (and the larger grey bar under it on some sites) that keeps you aware of the rest of Google no matter where you are. But as a portal page, My Yahoo works fine.
As for people who work from home, it's total BS. These people work no harder than anyone else and, in case of children, are in a house that is not conducive to concentration. Working longer hours is not the same as being more productive. There is such thing as a separation of work space and home space that gets in the way and kills performance and concentration.
I've done both, and I'm calling BS on you calling BS. See, I presented just as much evidence as you.
Working longer hours is not the same as being more productive.
Damn right, yet you're describing soooo many offices.
I was conflicted whether to use my moderation points here or comment. I choose to comment... I have been in this business a long time. I have spent years working at desks with and without cubicles. I made it through about half of the endless postings in this thread, and there were a number of things I never saw mentioned. For one thing, when you work remotely, you are not forced to share equipment.. Fighting over physical possesion of the equipment you need to do your job is highly counter productive. Staying up until all hours getting the hardware just so for the demo the next day, and coming in to find your manager gave away your equipment just before you arrived because a consultant is coming in and they need the equipment in the conference room, that can really stress you out. Everything seems to sprout legs and walk away, books, CD's, tools, instruments, listings. Manytimes it's hard to tell if you just lost something on your desk, or it really is gone. I was never more productive than when I had control over my work environment. I don't want to listen to other people's music, and listening to their phone calls drives me insane. I have never minded attending a meeting when I agreed there was a purpose, and sometimes the purpose was just to make sure we were all on the same page. I find that as a programmer, I have naturally occuring times of day when I am the most focused and creative. I find there are times I just cannot concentrate, and a half hour nap works wonders. I do believe remote workers need to make sure that perhaps half of their hours correspond with those of the on-site workers so effective communication can be had. Usually, my co-workers know I am focused and effective because when we do communicate, I have new code for them, and I want to talk about things I have thought through. It is important to have good team dynamics, and I want to know if I can help my teammates in some way, but please not to the point that I have to jeopardize my own promised schedule. We certainly have great tools for sharing audio/video remotely. Now the down side is really hard. Management doesn't really think you are on the team if they don't see you at the desk pounding keys, despite all evidence to the contrary, and when budget cuts come, the remote workers usually go first. This can be made even worse if you have enemies who drop comments about you out of your hearing. It is not being paranoid, it is just a reality that in many companies, staff are competing for advancement and commensurate raises. Lastly about the zone... Our ability to get into that concentrated, balanced state of mind. To load up our thoughts with everything that must be considered at once, and to make critical decisions, one after the other... That is what we mostly get paid for, and things that are counter-productive to that are to be strongly avoided. I believe individual managers should have descretion about remote workers, because there are occasional highly saught after people that can only be acquired with some accomodation. But there need to be guidelines to avoid jeolousy between groups about the degree of personal freedom accorded to other employees. All of that said, there is a lot more control in the office. If your staff are professional enough, they do not have to be tightly controlled. If they are not, the workplace can turn into a zoo without it. Some managers are consultative, some are authoritative. Some feel they are not doing their jobs if they are now asserting there authority. Some think their job is to remove obstackles that can slow down their team.
The end of telecommuting as we know it? Now if all these so-called brilliant CEOs can otherwise figure out how to eliminate these 1 or 2 hour commutes a good many of us have to go through to get to the damn office, I'm all for it.
...a class action suit!
This is a childrens dance where they are in a circle, hop back once, then hop forward three times.
"You put your right foot in!
You take your right foot out!
You put your right foot in,
and you shake it all about!
You do the Hokey-Pokey
and you turn yourself around,
That's what it's all about!"
Yahoo seems to have it backwards, where they hop forward ONCE, and hob BACK THREE TIMES!
THINK! It's patriotic
I'm seeing a significant re-thinking of the use of out-sourcing/off-shoring... because a good... half a dozen people in house can drastically outperform any number of off-shore contractors.
Are you sure it's productivity driving this change, and not the fact out-sourcing can go UP the chain of command even more easily than DOWN?
THINK! It's patriotic
Methinks you must have worked with vastly underpowered people...
Make personal phone calls with the phone on *speaker*. And then they would get PO'd at *me* for objecting.
I bloody hate that, along with it's cousin, the practice of using speakerphone to dial and only pick-up the handset once the call has been answered. beep boop beep hoop beep boop beepy boop. ring ring, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring "Hello" *picks up phone*
A cube-neighbour used to do the speakerphone call thing. He stopped doing it after I began joining in with his conversations.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Goodbye, Yahoo.
No one who is successful working from home does that. Not everyone has the discipline and self control to work alone without someone standing over their shoulder.
Support your bigoted opinions with facts or STFU!
Yahoo! are a waste. They're yet another company that somehow exists while producing nothing of value. This move will just cause all the talent to go elsewhere, thereby hastening their decline.
Good job! Thanks, Mayer, for helping to clear out more dead wood from our industry! =^.^=
They would be irrelevant except for people who can't be bothered switching to gmail or who don't realize how much better google services are.
Totally stupid banning remote employees. For one thing, it's almost impossible to recruit developers in some refined areas without seeking a remote guy.
I agree that this is just an excuse to downsize. Once they have to have some skilled guy who will or can only work remotely, exceptions will be made and the policy will eventually be dropped. That's if Yahoo are still around, about time they rolled over and died really.
I for one hope I never work in a battery-hen cube farm again. Hate them. I only ever want to work remotely, even if that means changing careers. I'm slightly Aspie and simply cannot stand impersonal cube farms. It also reminds me that I need to remain a contractor and never become an employee.
Unilaterally changing the contract == just cause ???
Marissa is just admitting that any collaboration products yahoo has are simply not good enough to enable people to effectively work remotely... If Yahoo isn't able to implement effective telecommuting for their employees, that says something about their capabilities as a company.
We do Scrum with remotes. It's not a problem if you set up a good electronic communication infrastructure and have the right culture.
I wish it were so, I really do. I miss working from home.
But honestly, there is just no level of electronic communication technology that can substitute for proximity. Companies have spent millions upon millions trying to provide every possible electronic communication method ever invented...and they still can't hold a candle to physical proximity. The perks of being remote really need to be huge to outweigh the negatives of being remote. For any job where strong collaboration, innovation, and low latency are key those negatives of being remote are huge, nearly impossible to overcome.
Most Scrum teams use Post-It note and a white board. Post-It notes! Not because excellent Scrum tracking software doesn't exist, but because time spent dicking around with "electronic communication technology" is completely wasted effort. Web cam doesn't work 'cause the kids are downloading p0rn, speaker phone has delays that interrupt people or force people to repeat themselves, the ticket software isn't allowing ticket type Foo to be converted to a type Bar, whatever.
When all is said and done nearly everyone that uses electronic communication technology spends as least as much time fighting it as they think they save by using it. All the while they're losing extremely important intangibles of a tightly bonded team, water cooler inspiration, etc.
My
I hear what you're saying (ie. your opinion). I just don't buy it.
I am consistently the top performer on my team and I work from home. Go figure... Been doing it this way for almost 20 years on market leading commercial products. Go figure...
Low latency? We are all on a multiperson Skype conversation all day long. Type and be heard by the whole team. Hit a different button for a conf call. Hit another button for a video call. Neither I nor my employer are seeing the negatives of which you speak. I don't spend any time fighting it. It just works.
Shoveling shite aside, if your boss doesn't know whether (and how well) you're working at home he doesn't know when you're at the office either.
It stands to reason that what's needed is a valid, scientific, objective measure. Like LOC/day or keystrokes per minute.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I agree with you, and in the initial brainstorming phase, you want to be there in person. Once the idea is decided and layout roughed in, the propagation of tasks and doing the minutiae (writing functions) can be done remotely. There's a creation phase, planning, execution, etc etc. I think creation phase is much efficient in person.
I want to add that the type of people matters. I've worked with people who in their 10 minute break would talk about football or their babies. I found them to be disruptive which didn't really add much to my work other than getting to know my coworkers better. My other workplace, we discuss ideas and brainstorm in our 10 minute breaks. It also disrupts my work, but I find it fun. In the end, we come up with new projects for the upcoming quarter and possibly a new product.
I think both cultures is disruptive, but the latter has a better long term implication.....unless you're good with office politics then the former would be better (which I'm not good at).