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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.
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/
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.
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
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 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?
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.
If you resign- no unemployment benefits.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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 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.
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!
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.
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."