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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.
Totally disagree
I work remotely but go to the office as well. It's the only place to trade pirated movies via sneaker net, check out cool YouTube videos people are watching, hit the snobby coffee place with the single brew snobby coffee
Am I forgetting anything?
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/
let me show you... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_(Gulliver's_Travels)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
My previous place had an unofficial no-meetings-on-friday policy, which meant most people worked - productively - from home on Fridays. Tons of flexibility, and it meant we, as a team, kept ahead of the game because everyone used friday to knock out not only the collection of "oh, if only I had time" pieces that collect over the week, but also those "I need 3 hours, uninterrupted, to really dig into this" big-think pieces. No one overly abused it, and the not-infrequent fade out ~4p still meant the week's overall work was more productive than if everyone worked that last, useless hour on Friday.
That being said, we were a globally distributed group, and had already adapted well to well-calendared and well-prepared-for remote interactions over chat, conference calls and video calls.
Yes, you lose out on the hallway-chats, so it becomes important to have some central hub of people, and to make sure that no one sub-team was completely disconnected from the pulse of the office, but it can be done, and done well.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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.
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.
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
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'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.
Did you get your work done though? If you did, then it shouldn't matter if you telecommute.
I get lots of work done at work. It's the only place that i work. If you aren't getting work done at work, then you're doing it wrong.
Yes, because what works for you, works for everyone.
What's a Yahoo?
A Yahoo?
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.)
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?
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.
She's an executive. She doesn't need to know those things. She has people who take care of that.
the feminists should have had a clue when she popped the baby out and asked for her laptop in the recovery room. Amazed she didn't have a surrogate. She'll now be paying someones to raise her child. Nothing wrong with that - happens all the time with those who aren't worth millions - but in her case, it was clear that she valued her work over being a mom to her child.
"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.
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.
Yeah, but there are also downsides to working from home.
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.
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.
If you resign- no unemployment benefits.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Even a little bit of reading on Mayer reveals that while technically female, she is messed up mentally and fairly inhuman.
She's very likely the classic "sociopath at the top".
Under our current set of laws (and under laissez faire capitalism) sociopaths are very effective leaders except when they realize they can make more money killing a profitable company than keeping it alive.
I've seen the last case... it was like "Hmmm, if they live, I get 3 years salary for 3 years work.. but if I kill them, I get 3 years salary for 1 years work and then get to go somewhere else."
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
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?
A half hour? really? If I was interrupted every half hour for frivolous or repetitious fraternizing, I'd never get anything done. You sound like one of those managers who's always calling meetings to discuss the smallest minutiae possible just to make himself feel important. You're attacking a stereotype. Not all developers are anti-social neckbeards. Many can, and do regulate their own communications/productivity balance with the rest of the team just fine. They don't need a bell ringing every 45 minutes like they're still in highschool. YOU may prefer to walk up to someone's desk and demand 100% of their focus/time, but while they're busy trying to make you feel better, they're not getting any work done. An IM message, or email allows asynchronous loading where he can order his thoughts and give you a thoughtful reply. I can't count the number of times I've been asked on-the-spot questions that really should be given some time for thought, then been told I'm anti-social for it. It's bullshit.
While everyone is 'sparring' and 'updating', no work is getting done. Programming is not the same as planning a party. Most programmers find it difficult to focus as it is, and here you are literally driving them to distraction with your attempts at playing therapist. Perhaps you're the only INSANE person in the office, and maybe the work of those canned employee's wasn't so bad. Perhaps it just didn't jive with the politically correct consensus-makes-fact attitude you bred in the office. There are many ways to solve problems.
Just because you find others' social awkwardness entertaining doesn't make it right to tell them where they must sit or talk with during lunch. This is, again, treating them like children because they don't socialize in the way you'd like. I've worked for managers like you, and frankly, they do little but drive everybody crazy.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Programming is not the same as planning a party"
No, but unless you're a 14 year old bedroom coder , programming is almost always a team activity. If you can't interact with other people then you're going to have a problem holding down a decent programming job. The days of the coder sitting silently in the corner of the office and tossing some finished code over the wall once every month are gone. If they ever existed.
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.
Heya boss - SEC on line 1 for you. Something about "maximizing shareholder value"?
I think this depends on the size of your business and organizations. How do you manage to make physical proximity versus remote meaningful (or even possible) in a large scale company with large lines of business, all around the world? If you have tens of thousands of employees (or over a hundred thousand, even), it becomes unrealistic to have everyone that would need to work close together out of the same office, in which case they may as well just be remote.
I also think that this idea that only in-office can be trusted is a mix of experience with unprofessional employees (ie, poor hiring) and paranoid management (ie, old guys or control-freaks). Failures are less a function of the remote nature and more a function of the company's culture, perhaps. If you're an experienced professional with a six figure-ish salary, do you really need a boss breathing over your shoulder in meat-space to compel you to do your job? And do you really need to be in the same stinky conference room to have a meaningful meeting instead of just dialing into the same conference line?
I work with incredible people and have for over a decade, so it's hard to differentiate one group from another, but I'll tell you -- the guys who work remotely? They're the ones who are on a thing until it's done. They aren't pushing the work onto someone else at 4:55PM, because they can't wait to get home. They're the ones on for hours after work, because work still needs done and fires still need putting out and they care about their work and their clients. They're the ones checking in over night or in the middle of the weekend just to see if everything is okay. They're the ones carrying pagers and cell phones to be available 24x7, even if they're not on stand-by. And since most of these people have ten or twenty years of experience (some even more), I would expect nothing less from them.
. . . and there's no lack of sense of team or camaraderie, either. We are in constant communication with each other on everything from work issues to water-cooler discussion and personal issues that impact work, 24x7. That's what chat rooms and IM and email and video chat and all the other modern convenience technologies are for.
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."
Unfortunately ...
There's a difference between a "team activity" and having an overzealous boss who prevents actual work getting done just so they can hear the sound of their own voice.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
Guess why the costs and overruns are out of control. Because the boomer and genx management has committed more and more to paying h1-bs 35k a year while charging $200/hour for their work.
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.
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