Former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos Talks About Managing Remote Workers (Video)

Millions of pixels have been used to talk about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to ban telecommuting and her reasons for doing it. Today's interviewee, Mårten Mickos, built MySQL AB into a billion-dollar company with 70% of its workers, all over the world, telecommuting instead of working in offices. Now he's CEO of another young open source company, Eucalyptus, and is following a similar hiring pattern. Mårten says (toward the end of the video/transcript) that he believes people working out of their homes is entirely natural; that this is how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution.

Comments

Performance Metrics

[djl4570]

All you need is a method to accurately measure productivity.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Aviancer]

Pfft. Everyone on any given team knows who is good and who is dead weight. Listen to people, and make appropriate decisions. Yes, metrics are good to show improvement over time, but a weak, immature and cowardly way to identify poor performers.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

All you need is a method to accurately measure productivity.

And a nice frosty cup of piss.

Re:Performance Metrics

[h4rr4r]

Which is exactly the same thing you need with in office workers. It changes nothing.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Kenja]

How about "do they do their job". This metric can be applied to everyone, not just those telecommuting. Now I work from home, writing software for very dull business processes. I do not think I would be nearly as productive at a desk 9-5 simply because some of my best ideas and breakthroughs happen at night when I'm winding down.

Re:Performance Metrics

[djl4570]

Within the scope of a team I agree with you except for the "weak, immature and cowardly" part. Metrics allow management to document performance. This is important when the recently dismissed dead weight sues for wrongful termination.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft. Everyone on any given team knows who is good and who is dead weight. Listen to people, and make appropriate decisions. Yes, metrics are good to show improvement over time, but a weak, immature and cowardly way to identify poor performers.

I agree. If your team has a lot of weak members then your senior people may be spending more time answering questions and bringing people up to speed. If you decide to let people go who are improving the team because you fail to identify their contribution then you would be making a serious mistake.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me know when they invent one. My employer is still working with "source lines of code per week" and "defects found per KSLOC".

Yay, CMMI Level Five!

Re:Performance Metrics

[firex726]

And therein lies the problem with what Yahoo was doing.

They had few performance metric and feel that by having the seats warm they will get more productivity.

So they just moved the slackers from the home to the office.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

unless the recently dismissed was able to game your metrics to show they were the highest performing member of your team, and uses that data against you to win their case.

Re:Performance Metrics

[gweihir]

Indeed. And metrics are easily gamed or done wrong. The results are usually strategic mistakes, sometimes severe, as Yahoo will likely find out.

There is no replacement for a competent manager with high personal integrity that actually has a well-founded expert opinion about all of the ones he manages. I see a primary task of a manger to create the environment where those in his/her care can work with the least amount of trouble from outside and at their most productive. This means that a manager actually serves his/her "underlings", not the other way round. Every good manager understands that.

Re:Performance Metrics

[gweihir]

And therein lies the problem with what Yahoo was doing.

They had few performance metric and feel that by having the seats warm they will get more productivity.

So they just moved the slackers from the home to the office.

Indeed. This will not help. On the other side, they will severely inconvenience and anger a lot of those that worked productively from home. And these can easily get other and (now) better jobs. All this move does is to consolidate the low performers and make them the core of the workforce of Yahoo.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

i am old enough to know that this is bull shit

how people view you counts for more than what you do. how people view you is determined by how you present yourself, speak, etc.

i don't think of my self as a star performer and get good reviews every year. in my 20's i thought i was the most knowledgeable in what i did but i can tell you for a fact that others didn't think so. in the last 20 years i learned to be more outgoing and talk about things people like. it counts for a lot.

Re:Performance Metrics

[kelemvor4]

Pfft. Everyone on any given team knows who is good and who is dead weight. Listen to people, and make appropriate decisions. Yes, metrics are good to show improvement over time, but a weak, immature and cowardly way to identify poor performers.

Or you could just generate metrics that do a better job of showing who is good and who is dead weight. If you have accurate metrics, there is no need for a debate on the topic.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

All you need is a method to accurately measure productivity.

I really hate it when people just casually blurt that out as if it solves everything. Usually its an MBA or a manager saying that too. I am a QE team lead for two different small QE teams. I personally have an incredibly hard time to come up with any objective way to measure my personal productivity, especially on day-to-day granularity. Even for my testers, how am I supposed to objectively measure their productivity? By how many issues they test and close off? As ludicrous as measuring a developer on lines of code. By how many bugs are caught by them? Thats a measure of how bad the code is, not how good QE is. By how many issues are logged afterwards by customers? Even if thats a valid measurement (and its more a measurement of the complexity of features and how many customers might use a particular feature) - how does that translate to a day-to-day measurement? Or even to a measurement for an *individual*?

'Metrics for productivity' is, in many cases, a phrase management loves because they can see some number go up or down, but in the real world, in complex environments, there simply is no simple way to 'accurately measure productivity'. There are few people just cranking out identical widgets every day and you just count how many widgets were produced.

So I have to use my own judgement to see if my team members are pulling their weight and contributing.

Re:Performance Metrics

[mcmonkey]

There is no replacement for a competent manager with high personal integrity that actually has a well-founded expert opinion about all of the ones he manages.

Right on. If you don't trust your managers, or don't know which managers to trust, you've already lost and all the metrics in the world won't help.

To me this is the same issue as standardized tests. If you don't (or can't) trust your teachers, testing won't change that feeling. But how does the governor of a state know which teachers can't be trusted or should be replaced? She doesn't and shouldn't need to.

The teacher in the classroom identifies which students are falling behind and need more help. The department head gets summary reports on student performance and monitors teachers. The school head gets summary reports on teacher performance and monitors the department heads. The head of the district gets summary reports on department performance and manages the school heads. And so one up to the governor, president, etc.

No one other than the teacher in the room and that student's parents should be involved with an individual student's day-to-day performance. Not that the department head doesn't care about students, but the best way to express that concern is by putting the best teachers in place and giving those teachers the resources they need.

Likewise, if the CEO is concerning herself with the day-to-day productivity of individual contributors, sounds like a company with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. The CEO should be able to pick trust-worthy executives. Those executives should be able to pick able department heads. Department heads should oversee managers. Managers should manage people.

That there may be a few slackers here and there is not a moral failing. But for the issues in a company to be so wide spread as to require a policy change of the magnitude we're seeing at Yahoo, you've got bad managers no able to motivate or replace bad workers, and bad department heads not able to identify bad managers, and bad executives not able to identify bad department heads, and a bad CEO not able to identify bad executives.

Now that may be the case with Yahoo, which is why there is a new CEO and that CEO is making these changes. But she is bound to fail. The CEO should be concerned with getting the right executives in place. Those executives can retrain/replace department heads as needed. The department heads can get the managers on the right track. And then those managers can decide who needs to be in the office and who can work best remotely.

A CEO jumping over a half dozen (or more) layers of management to tell a worker how to do their job makes as much sense as having the Secretary of Education sit down with each individual 3rd grade to check their sums.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

lol - yes that's true. But if you don't know how to do that with someone remotely I would posit that you would be no more so successful if they were in the office. The measure of success or lack of it should be output based. If I give you a project that normally takes x hours to complete do you get it done in that time? If not, we have a performance issue. Any manager that has worked in the department and knows the work should have a rough idea of what work needs to be done, and how long it takes to do it. The problem comes in when you have ding dong fools managing something they know nothing about because someone happened to like them for the position.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Synerg1y]

Wait what? This dynamic changes very quickly with remote teams, when you don't see the people you're working with, you many not recognize the lame duck till the project's about to fail and take you with it. Performance metrics are a way to circumvent & try to prevent that, especially on a per milestone basis.

Simple ex. You're working with Joe on a year long project, Joe says he's going to do parts D, F, G, & X as his duties, he creates the UI and says he'll add functionality later, 1 month to finish, you find that parts D, F, G, & X don't work with the rest of the system & the project fails. In a workplace, a manager would see that Joe isn't doing what he's supposed to, remotely, not so easy.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Synerg1y]

In a properly managed system from the start, I would completely agree, but once you start slipping, sometimes the only way is to "restart", go back to the traditional model and expand from there.

My comparison is Jeans in the workplace, they're preferred by most employees and a lot of places just don't have a business need for business casual so employees wear Jeans, but when employees start showing up in faded Jeans with chains & logos, they're going to lose that privilege because at this point their dress code is interfering with the business. Same with remote workers, if they're managed properly and have clear expectations, no problem, you can actually save money through reclaimed office space, but if you have people on the payroll remotely, and you don't know what they do, that's when decisions like TFA are made. Let's be honest here, it's not like Yahoo's star was shining brightly before this change. It'll be interesting to see the results a year or two in the future.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

In this context, management gets creative with numbers, and will have "dead weight" transferred to their most remote location until they terminate themselves wrongfully. Sort of applying "Rand Corporation Metrics Guidelines To Managing People".

Re:Performance Metrics

[Bucc5062]

That comparison would only seek to enforce what the OP stated. If employees have a dress code, whether it is Business casual or jeans then it is up toe the immediate management to enforce that policy. If it gets/got out of hand then it is the immediate manager's problem, not hte company. To change that example, I come to work every in my clean, un-holed jeans wearing a decent shirt and shoes. Around me folks attire is failing so my reward for others bad behavior is to be punished for following the existing rules and required to go back to wearing a suit, because a manager could not enforce a rule. That is just wrong thinking.

The same then applies in telecommuting. There are ways to measure performance, be it completion times, lines of code or some other metric. If management fails to measure shame on them. If they measure and fail to act again shame on them. That is their job thus the term Management. take away my telecommute, because others are irresponsible is throwing the baby out with the bath water, a poor management practice and like the OP said, a company that is rotten in the core and will soon fall.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Vancorps]

There is more to productivity of the company than just your productivity to consider. You and I are alike that we do our best work at night or later in the day. If you are not around for people that have their ideas during the day then you will miss out on getting potentially valuable information.

Personally, I don't think anyone should telecommute 100% of the time, they should at the most make it 50/50 so that you can get input from other stake holders. If all of your stakeholders are night owls then you can consider adjusting as necessary. This is rarely the case in my experience though.

Given that I am involved in software that automates dull business proccesses I can tell you that getting input from the end users is critical, if they are working during the day then you should too. When people work remotely there is a detachment that occurs on a social level which prevents other people from being as open as they would be in person. There is also the issue of less technical people that use an application than need to show you what they want in person.

Policies are tricky business, they are supposed to be blanket, but they probably shouldn't be draconian either.

Re:Performance Metrics

[ShanghaiBill]

Indeed. This will not help.

Actually, it almost certainly will help. Some people are marginally more productive at home. More people are drastically less productive. So on average, moving everyone back to the office will be a win. People are beating up Yahoo about making people come to the office, but they are ignoring Google which has always been much more stringent about telecommuting.

they will severely inconvenience and anger a lot of those that worked productively from home.

The people most inconvenienced and angry will be those using their "day off" to skimp on daycare fees and catch up on Desperate Housewives.

All this move does is to consolidate the low performers and make them the core of the workforce of Yahoo.

You are assuming that the drop in performance when telecommuting is correlated with being an inherently low performer in the first place. I don't see any reason to assume that is true.

Re:Performance Metrics

[HornWumpus]

Remote workers have nothing to do with integration testing.

What you say could just as easily happen in the office.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Synerg1y]

There's departmental policies and company policies, when a problem exists across all departments, a company directive is typically what is issued. I do however completely agree, that in the perfect world, the managers should be held by the tie on this, and fired alongside their unproductive remote workers, while everybody else is left as is. Unfortunately, this can also be considered corporate culture decline. Yahoo just took a huge hit on attracting new prospects and talent.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Synerg1y]

There's always some quirks when integrating modules, but let me clarify, I'm talking complete failure... Joe doesn't know what he's doing and has been collecting a salary for a year. In the office, Joe not knowing what he's doing would be spotted by his co-workers / bosses relatively quickly and people would see Joe everyday and eventually single him out as the weakest link rather than take his word for it that it's going to be done correctly.

What I would argue though is that at some point you gotta have some trust in your employees at least, there's employers that believe in monitoring remote works through webcam. I think you may be right though, you gotta be able to asses who you're working with as an employee, or manager. It's just a very idealistic solution that doesn't factor in that some managers & employees have a hard time telling their left from their right. Performance metrics is just as flawed, my 10 lines of code may do more than Joe's 200.

Re:Performance Metrics

[aaarrrgggh]

The telecommuting does often make it difficult to determine if their job is actually worth doing though. I imagine the purpose of Yahoo's change is to cull 10-20% of the workforce and become leaner in the process. Sure, it will be a rough couple years, but hopefully they can focus the energy on the things that provide the most value to the company.

Happy to not be going through that myself, and I am sure they will lose some good people. At the same time, the company is a disaster.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft. Everyone on any given team knows who is good and who is dead weight. Listen to people, and make appropriate decisions. Yes, metrics are good to show improvement over time, but a weak, immature and cowardly way to identify poor performers.

But that's because you work next to them. When all you know is the work in front of you, that kind of goes out the window. Some types of jobs are well-suited for working remotely, for various reason. But some types of jobs are not, and especially with large groups of people it can be tricky to make sure everyone is pulling their own weight and not gaming the system. Some types of jobs are well-suited to metrics, provided the metrics are written properly... but that's usually the problem with them. In the absence of direct supervision, metrics are about all you have to gauge performance on.

Re:Performance Metrics

[HornWumpus]

You start integration testing earlier.

In the office or out, if they aren't even looking at the alpha builds of one of their team they aren't managing, much less testing.

Unless the modules are completely independent the team will have spotted the air thief. It might take longer when telecommuting, but incompetence speaks loudly.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way to measure productivity is customer feedback. If they produce something then they have customers. Find out who they are and ask the people who are buying.

This isn't perfect but coupled with other basic measurement it can/should be a crucial influence on productivity/performance.

Re:Performance Metrics

[gweihir]

Actually, it almost certainly will help. Some people are marginally more productive at home. More people are drastically less productive.

I would dispute that for knowledge workers that want to work from home. It does not make any sense. There are those that do not want to work from home, and they certainly should not be forced to. But knowledge work is all about putting oneself in the right frame of mind and for some, that is easiest at home. There is also the factor that you cannot get quite a few of the ones in the higher competence range to work for you if that means moving.

The people most inconvenienced and angry will be those using their "day off" to skimp on daycare fees and catch up on Desperate Housewives.

No, the ones most inconvenienced will be those that took the job because working at home was part of the deal and allowed them not to move to another city. Those that just slack off at home will be angry, true, but they are not an issue, I completely agree with you there. But they cannot leave easily either. Higher skilled people that only took the job because they would not have to move will likely not be too angry, but just move to a better employer. And that is the real problem.

You are assuming that the drop in performance when telecommuting is correlated with being an inherently low performer in the first place.

It is not obvious to you? I find that surprising. Keep in mind, I am only talking about people that want to work from home.

From my experience, there are some that cannot focus at home, but then will seek out the workplace, i.e. they do not want to work at home anyways. I also saw this a lot in students: There are those that are low performers, no matter what. There are those that perform well, and some say they need a lab space to do it (we would always give them basically a regular workspace, including lockable table, etc.) and others that perform well, but say they work best at home. What I have never encountered was a high performer without a distinctive preference, or a low performer that was sabotaging him/herself by choosing the wrong work environment. That is among the stuff you figure out pretty fast, if given a choice. And one thing universally true for high-performers is that they want to be high-performers. They will try to fix anything that hinders them from being.

Re:Performance Metrics

[ShanghaiBill]

Actually, it almost certainly will help. Some people are marginally more productive at home. More people are drastically less productive.

I would dispute that for knowledge workers that want to work from home. It does not make any sense.

It may not make sense, but that is the way it is. My company allows telecommuting on a case-by-case basis, and for many people it does not work.

But knowledge work is all about putting oneself in the right frame of mind and for some, that is easiest at home.

Zoning out in front of the TV is also easiest at home.

You are assuming that the drop in performance when telecommuting is correlated with being an inherently low performer in the first place.

It is not obvious to you?

No, it is not obvious, and it does not mesh with my experience. Some high-performers do better at home, some don't. Some not-so-high-performers do better from home, some don't. My experience is that the best predictor of how well telecommuting will work are:

1. Does the employee have young children? Bad.
2. Does the employee have a stay-at-home non-working spouse? Bad.
3. Does the employee have a spouse that also telecommutes? Good: they keep each other honest.

Of course, these are too politically incorrect to be actionable policy.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

Childish. Viewing a dress code as either a reward or punishment is just plain silly.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Zontar The Mindless]

If I am *arbitrarily*, *for no reason related to my conduct* required to wear 3x as many clothes to do the same job, I'd tend to view that as a punishment, yes, and an unjust one at that.

P.S. Home worker more often than not, sometimes in my underwear. In other news, water is still wet, and software manuals still get written. Film at 11.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

100% WRONG. Quote from the transcript: "But if you think you must observe them and monitor them and command them, and control them, then it won’t work for you."

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Everyone knows half of any marketing/advertising is dead weight. The problem is identifying which half to fire.

Your approach works only for production personnel.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Xest]

"Simple ex. You're working with Joe on a year long project, Joe says he's going to do parts D, F, G, & X as his duties, he creates the UI and says he'll add functionality later, 1 month to finish, you find that parts D, F, G, & X don't work with the rest of the system & the project fails. In a workplace, a manager would see that Joe isn't doing what he's supposed to, remotely, not so easy."

What? No source control to check what's been submitted and by whom?

No wonder your theoretical company is doomed.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh! Just count the number of lines of code written and commits made!

Re:Performance Metrics

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way to measure productivity is customer feedback. If they produce something then they have customers. Find out who they are and ask the people who are buying.

This isn't perfect but coupled with other basic measurement it can/should be a crucial influence on productivity/performance.

Its a good idea, but again, too simple for the real world where there (generally) are no such easy 1-1 relationships.

Individual testers on a team don't have individual customers. Instead, QE as a whole would be judged by customers. Just like individual coders on an app don't have customers. The customers (even if its the product manager who requested the app) just judge the app as a whole, they dont know (nor care) which developer was responsible for which part.

Re:Performance Metrics

[Common Joe]

Joe doesn't know what he's doing and has been collecting a salary for a year. In the office, Joe not knowing what he's doing would be spotted by his co-workers / bosses relatively quickly and people would see Joe everyday and eventually single him out as the weakest link rather than take his word for it that it's going to be done correctly.

[Sniff] Well, if that's how you feel about me. But I'll have you know that I do an excellent job! [Sniffle.] You get all up and arms because I ask you to explain something that is not obvious from time to time... like how to use if-then statements and why functions have those parameter things. That's hard stuff, man! I don't know why you're going to back stab me like this! In a public forum nonetheless!

TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Cannot find the TFA, does anyone else see a video/transcript somewhere?

Re:TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Robin: Marten, what percentage of your MySQL workers work from home?

Mårten: We had 70% working from home when we were 500 employees in total.

Robin: Okay, okay. 70%?

Mårten: We were based in 32 countries across 18 time zones.

Robin: 32 countries, 18 time zones.

Mårten: Yeah.

Robin: How did you manage those workers?

Mårten: I wonder if I did, meaning I mean something with it, I think when you manage a distributed team, you cannot manage through command and control; you must manage through vision and culture.

Robin: Okay.

Mårten: You must get the vision across to everybody. You must agree on how you behave, and what the company culture is. And then you let them do what they know they need to do. And that is how it works. But if you think you must observe them and monitor them and command them, and control them, then it won’t work for you.

Robin: Okay. So you need very self-motivated people, that you are telling me.

Mårten: Very true. I call it the fishing village analogy. Meaning our people at MySQL and now at Eucalyptus are like fishermen. They live in a fishing village and are very social together, but every morning before the sun dawns, they go out in their small boats to sea and they are all on their own, and they come back only when they have caught fish.

Robin: Okay, now recruiting these fishing people, (that’s a beautiful analogy) recruiting these independent workers, is it different from recruiting people you are going to be able to watch at their desks?

Mårten: Yes and no. First you have to interview them like you do with anybody, you have to post your open reqs like you do with anybody, but of course you must check that they truly belong to the portion of the world population that is capable of working from home, because not everybody is. It is not for everybody. It is for some of the best people in the industry but it is not for everybody.

Robin: Okay, and in the industry, what jobs work best filled by remote workers? And what works worst?

Mårten: As main rules I would say if your product is an intangible product, then it works well. And it so happens that software was the first industry to do it, but you can do it in politics, medicine, science and arts as well. The second rule is that for this to work, people need to be able to go all in online. They need to be able to live not just their professional life, but convey their personality online as well. Because the argument against distributed teams is that body language doesn’t work, and you don’t get the sort of the closeness, but on the contrary, we say no, that is not true. You can bring your personality and even your body language online if you decide to do so. And that is how you make it work.

Robin: Now you are talking about creative people, programmers, scientists, the artists; what about people like finance and marketing? Are they good, as good remotely?

Mårten: They are. And I would say their job is increasingly creative. But we had people working from home in every part of the company. We had accounts receivables, which was operated as a home operation, marketing was done, some of the accounting as well; of course, there are functions where you have to be in an office, you have to put things on real paper and store them in a real cabinet. So I am not saying you can live completely without it. But I don’t see any part of the organization that couldn’t be at least partly distributed among people who work from their homes.

Robin: How much money does it save if you have a quantification, how much does it save with all these people working from home?

Mårten: We never did it for the purpose of saving money. And we told ourselves that what we saved in office costs, we spent in travel costs. And that is probably more or less true. Maybe we saved a little bit but not much. A benefit we got and whether that is a saving or not I don’t know, but we managed

Re:TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Meaning our people at MySQL and now at Eucalyptus are like fishermen. They live in a fishing village and are very social together, but every morning before the sun dawns, they go out in their small boats to sea and they are all on their own, and they come back only when they have caught fish.

Oh, shut the fuck up, you spoilt, useless idiot.

Fishing - and I come from a fisherman family - is nothing like sitting on your ass providing code for a second rate DBMS for the "good enough" generation.

MySQL has nothing going for it. It is what you choose if you have neither the expertise to use a decent system nor the money to buy Microsoft's offering. MySQL was nothing more than the lucky seller of easy-grip shovels during the first Internet gold rush.

Re:TFA

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Fishing - and I come from a fisherman family - is nothing like sitting on your ass providing code for a second rate DBMS for the "good enough" generation.

Are you sure? We're talking about MySQL here. Just try to image all that code smell!

Re:TFA

[alexgieg]

Robin: Now with MySQL I remember you having I don’t know, I guess annual big company-wide meetings.

Mårten: Correct. Yes. And we have the same tradition at Eucalyptus, we have at least an annual all-hands meeting typically in Santa Barbara but we may do it elsewhere as well, where we bring everybody together to the degree it is possible. We have had challenges with visas for everybody so we actually have employees who didn’t get visas to the US which is very sad. That was the reason we didn’t do the MySQL meetings in the US, the last one we did here was in Orlando.

Why don't such things surprise me at all anymore?

Re:TFA

[Zontar The Mindless]

Oh, shut the fuck up, you spoilt, useless idiot.

Fishing - and I come from a fisherman family - is nothing like sitting on your ass providing code for a second rate DBMS for the "good enough" generation.

That spoilt, useless idiot helped make it possible for me to keep the same job working at home for nearly 10 years while living in 4 different countries.

Along with lots of other folks putting in 15-hour days so you could have a free and libre software to piss on while you're using it, just like anyone else who's ever posted a comment to Slashdot.

So I'm thinking it's you who might be doing well to follow his own advice there, Junior.

one difference

[Trepidity]

These companies did it on purpose and planned for it, while it sounds like it just sorta "happened" at Yahoo, with management neither having a plan for how to manage it nor (apparently) really paying any attention at all to what remote workers were doing and how they were doing it.

Re:one difference

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Additionally, they are now admitting that they can't manage it, now that they have it. So now they are going to just scrap everything and start all over again.

I would hope that at least some managers there were doing a reasonable job about managing their home office workers. Why not look at how they were successful, and try to emulate that? Instead it just seems like they are tossing the baby out with the bathwater, throwing in the towel, and giving up on a modern worker model that functions well at other companies.

The industrial revolution improved productivity

[raburton]

Admittedly much of it do to the mechanisation, but this seems like a poor comparison. It's basically saying something is good because just it worked for a long time, not because it's actually better. We lived in caves for thousands of years too, but I wouldn't want to go back just because it's "entirely natural".

Re:The industrial revolution improved productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Cave houses are actually quite nice and are pretty energy efficient.

Re:The industrial revolution improved productivity

[Daetrin]

Not a nasty, dirty, wet cave, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy cave with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-cave, and that means comfort.

Re:The industrial revolution improved productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a bad analogy.
When people lived in a cave, whole families lived together, by choice.
Until the industrial revolution, women who made their own yarn and knitted, did so most of the time, together, weaving and such.

The basic problem is management.
You need to know if your team is doing the work, who is slacking and who is doing more than their share. It's not just about finding slackers, it's also about finding people who want to do more, because they want to get more and advance.

Management is not about getting the most work out of peons before they need replacing due to burnout. It's about creating a team and meeting the goals, and you can't do that with just a few sheeds of data. You need to meet the real live people, you need to talk, and chat a little each day, to really know them. And you can't chat with anyone through the phone or webcam, you need to also see body language, do they pay attention, or are just talking, pretending to work, while watching a game on TV.

Telecommuting certainly is good for people who had lousy management before, and found that work didn't end when they got home. But just the same, now you have people working remotely that only waste time and collect the paycheck.

I'd blame the employers, workers in the USA, have very few rights, look at Europe. They laugh at the French workers, because of the way they work little, but when they get out of the office, they stop working completely. That's respect for the employees, that American ones stopped getting years ago.

Re:The industrial revolution improved productivity

[khr]

How about one with a dry floor and some comfortable nooks?

Re:The industrial revolution improved productivity

[HornWumpus]

Colonel: (Graham Chapman) Now, I've noticed a tendency for this program to get rather silly. Now I do my best to keep things moving along, but I'm not having things getting silly. Those last two sketches I did got very silly indeed. And that last one about the beds was even sillier. Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do, except perhaps my wife and some of her friends. Oh yes, and Captain Johnson. Come to think of it, most people like a good laugh more than I do, but that's beside the point. Now, let's have a good, clean, healthy outdoor sketch. Get some air into your lungs. Ten, nine, eight and all that...

(Cut to two hermits on a hillside.)

Colonel: Ahhh yes, that's better. Now let's hope this doesn't get silly.

First Hermit: (Michael Palin) Hello, are you a hermit by any chance?

Second Hermit: (Eric Idle) Yes that's right. Are you a hermit?

First Hermit: Yes, I certainly am.

Second Hermit: Well I never. What are you getting away from?

First Hermit: Oh you know, the usual - people, chat, gossip, you know.

Second Hermit: Oh I certainly do, it was the same with me. I mean there comes a time when you realize there's no good frittering your life away in idleness and trivial chit-chat. Where's your cave?

First Hermit: Oh, up the goat track, first on the left.

Second Hermit: Oh they're very nice up there, aren't they?

First Hermit: Yes they are, I've got a beauty.

Second Hermit: A bit drafty though, aren't they?

First Hermit: No, we've had ours insulated.

Second Hermit: Oh yes?

First Hermit: Yes, I used birds nests, moss and oak leaves round the outside.

Second Hermit: Oh, sounds marvellous.

First Hermit: Oh it's a treat, it really is, 'cause otherwise those stone caves can be so grim.

Second Hermit: Yes they really can be, can't they? They really can.

First Hermit: Oh yes.

(Third hermit passes by.)

Third Hermit: Morning Frank.

Second Hermit: Morning Norman. Talking of moss, er you know Mr. Robinson?

First Hermit: With the, er, green loin cloth?

Second Hermit: Er no, that's Mr. Seagrave. Mr. Robinson's the hermit who lodges with Mr. Seagrave.

First Hermit: Oh I see, yes.

Second Hermit: Yes well he's put me onto wattles.

First Hermit: Really?

Second Hermit: Yes. Swears by them. Yes.

(Fourth hermit passes)

Fourth Hermit: Morning Frank.

Second Hermit: Morning Lionel. Well he says that moss tends to fall off the cave walls during cold weather. You know you might get a really bad spell and half the moss drops off the cave wall, leaving you cold.

First Hermit: Oh well, Mr. Robinson's cave's never been exactly nirvana has it?

Second Hermit: Well, quite, that's what I mean. Anyway, Mr. Rogers, he's the, er, hermit...

First Hermit: ... on the end.

Second Hermit: . .. up at the top, yes. Well he tried wattles and he came out in a rash.

First Hemit: Really?

Second Hermit: Yes, and there's me with half a wall wattled, I mean what'll I do?

First Hermit: Well why don't you try birds nests like I've done? Or else, dead bracken.

Fifth Hermit: (calling from a distance) Frank!

Second Hermit: Yes Han?

Fifth Hermit: Can I borrow your goat?

Second Hermit: Er, yes that'll be all right. Oh leave me a pint for breakfast will you? (to first hermit) You see, you know that is the trouble with living half way up a cliff, you feel so cut off. You know it takes me two hours every morning to get out onto the moors, collect my berries, chastise myself, and two hours back in the evening.

First Hermit: Still there's one thing about being a hermit, at least you meet people.

Second Hermit: Oh yes, I wouldn't go back to public relations.

First Hemit: Oh well, bye for now Frank, must toddle.

Colonel: Right, you two hermits, stop that sketch. I think it's silly.

Engaging work

[s1d3track3D]

If you have a cool product, interesting things to do and hire interested people, you will have good employees.
Many technical people work in the field because they enjoy it, how many people work on FOSS in their spare time anyway?

Working on new, interesting, challenging things is fun! Maintaining 'legacy' stuff, not as fun. No disrespect to Yahoo but Flicker, Yahoo Mail, YUI, OMG! (please), for me it would be hard to be excited about maintaining these.
Additionally, working in a smaller company where one person can really help shape things is huge, being just another worker bee in a huge corporate environment can be depressing. (especially one with a declining public image)

Obviously, just my opinion.

Eucalytpus =/= Eucalyptus

[Anonymous Coward]

roblimo is a moronpus

MySQL built for it

[hsmith]

But Yahoo! wasn't Some 500 out of 11000 employees teleworking is a bit different than 70% of your staff teleworking. MySQL was designed to work remotely, while it sounds like Yahoo! was shoe horned into it. Not saying Yahoo! can't adapt, but it is clear how Yahoo! has been dying that - something is critically wrong in the culture there. I don't see killing teleworking as bad - simply because, well, there is just a lot wrong with the company that needs to be fixed. Time will tell if it was a wise decision...

Re:MySQL built for it

[Anonymous Coward]

But Yahoo! wasn't Some 500 out of 11000 employees teleworking is a bit different than 70% of your staff teleworking. MySQL was designed to work remotely, while it sounds like Yahoo! was shoe horned into it. Not saying Yahoo! can't adapt, but it is clear how Yahoo! has been dying that - something is critically wrong in the culture there. I don't see killing teleworking as bad - simply because, well, there is just a lot wrong with the company that needs to be fixed. Time will tell if it was a wise decision...

Yes, but the problem with decisions like this is when the Yahoos and the Best Buys are long gone in this world, we will be left with the aftermath in the form of increased pollution and likely higher gas prices, because we're so damn dependent on a backwards mentality that I must drive 2 hours every day to sit behind the same keyboard and do the same job.

There may be a lot wrong with Yahoo, but there's a lot wrong with this decision too, and it affects more than some bottom line, and therefore should be met with a hell of a lot more scrutiny than sheer numbers. Ignorance isn't allowing it.

Re:MySQL built for it

[TankSpanker04]

Well put. I would add that working remotely works well for some companies and not others -- regardless of the industry. One might think Yahoo! being a tech giant would automatically mean remote-friendly. But as you said, it depends on culture and planning. I'm willing to bet Ms. Mayer did her homework before coming to this conclusion. Perhaps the majority of their remote workers really were either not pulling their weight or were becoming hermits.

Re:MySQL built for it

[hsmith]

You act as if 500 more people driving into work alone will drown NYC due to the ice caps melting. Face it, this has a minimal impact to anyone, even those working @ Yahoo. Your post is sensational. Yahoo clearly is failing and needs to right its course.

I telework, I am not managed, I just get my stuff done. I can see why people fall into the trap and aren't productive.

Millions of pixels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like an under-count by many orders of magnitude.

Re:Millions of pixels?

[Virtucon]

It's not pixels it's bits. Giga or Terrabits of wasted BS on this whole discussion. Look, we all know that for any situation there will be people who constantly try to game the system. Whether that's in-office or @home workers, there are those who will abuse anything. For any group of 10, there will be 8 productive people and there will be two slackers..

surveys that show at least 20 percent of the employees in any workplace
perform poorly.

http://www.workplacesthatwork.com/articles/Managing%20slackers.pdf

Slackers are everywhere, like dust mites and you just have to deal with them. @home workers aren't the problem, gaps in the system that allow slackers to ruin it for everybody else is what needs to be addressed. Now do I believe in all that "Diversity" nonsense and "bringing more women into the workplace?" Hell no. If your a man, woman, transgender whatever you call it you can either show up in the office, daily or if the company provides a suitable work at home support system, use that. Just don't get caught on your 4square status update that you're at Starbucks instead of working on that document.

Now Yahoo has been going through some difficult times, this may also serve as a wakeup call for their employees to start towing the line, yes ultimately leading to staff reductions IMO but again, if you work for a company with a flexible workplace policy, the simple answer here is not to abuse it and call out those privately who you see doing it to keep the benefits for everybody else.

Re:Millions of pixels?

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

Maybe some pixels on people's monitors burned out at the moment they read a Yahoo/Marissa Mayer story. Then maybe millions is a fair number, though I'd guess probably an over-count instead. :)

Re:Millions of pixels?

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

Ah damn, they said "used" instead of "wasted" in the original post.

When I "work from home"

[maroberts]

I've found the best way of doing it is to work at the nearby home of my parents or mother-in-law. Some separation of your work life from home life is necessary

Re:When I "work from home"

[Darinbob]

I'd absolutely hate working from home. My home is not a great place to work. My internet sucks compared to the office, the refrigerator is always empty, I have no one to talk to (and no, I will not skype or IM anyone), the place is a complete mess, there's no room on my desk for equipment, my office chair can get uncomfortable after a few hours, and I have no air conditioning.

Sadly, I dont' drink coffee, so I can't even go hang out at the coffee shops with the pretentious unemployed yuppies pretending to be entrepreneurs.

Really hard to do.

[Chirs]

What do you use for measuring "productivity"?

Lines of code? My happiest work days are when I end up removing more code than I put in. Also, this is really easy to game.

Bugs fixed? I usually end up working on the really nasty bugs...intermittent, only occur in customer sites, and under no circumstances can you shut down the system to debug it. Some bugs take weeks or months to track down.

Hours worked? Pointless, doesn't track if you're actually being useful during those hours.

While it's easy to measure productivity if you're making widgets, its *really hard* to measure productivity if you're doing creative stuff.

Re:Really hard to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you use for measuring "productivity"?
[snip]
While it's easy to measure productivity if you're making widgets, its *really hard* to measure productivity if you're doing creative stuff.

This, right here! Thank you!

I'd mod you up, but you know... anonymous coward.

Re:Really hard to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

points / week. As long as the points represent a agreed on amount of work and there is output control (e.g. peer review) you are fine.

how do you measure?

[Chirs]

What metrics will tell you that someone is doing good work?

Suppose I mostly review other people's code and make suggestions for improvement, answer lots of random questions about obscure corners of various specifications, work on really tricky bugs that take a long time to track down, look at upcoming roadmaps and figure out how they're going to affect us, etc.. What objective metric do you use to measure my performance? Lines of code submitted doesn't work, bug closure rate doesn't work--there is no simple numerical statistic to measure.

Re:how do you measure?

[kelemvor4]

What metrics will tell you that someone is doing good work?

Suppose I mostly review other people's code and make suggestions for improvement, answer lots of random questions about obscure corners of various specifications, work on really tricky bugs that take a long time to track down, look at upcoming roadmaps and figure out how they're going to affect us, etc.. What objective metric do you use to measure my performance? Lines of code submitted doesn't work, bug closure rate doesn't work--there is no simple numerical statistic to measure.

Well, if it was a programmer I was trying to measure I think I'd start with some combination of output and quality. Does the person meet deadlines consistently? How many bugs requiring rework are found etc. Combine them to develop a metric and refine the metric over time as best you can. Determine good ways to measure performance is one of the functions of a manager. Or you could have a bad manager that just rates employees on how much he likes them. If that's the case it's in the employees best interest to kiss ass rather than do a good job. Basically, your manager should be defining clear and measurable objectives. The measurements get used to rank and reward employees.
If it's the latter, hopefully the director will eventually become aware and do the needful.


Later you can add metrics for how many times the employee used the correct cover sheets on their TPS reports.

Re:how do you measure?

[RabidReindeer]

Lies, Damn Lies and Metrics. Metrics are what you use so that you can be blind to things that can't be/aren't measured.

Lines of Code is a classic. If I rip down an algorithm and replace it with one that's faster, more reliable, and 1/3 the size, I have negative LOC. And if LOC is all of the above that got metrics, I'm a loser.

I have a great respect for being able to measure things (where it's possible and meaningful), but unlike the legendary Statistical Bikini, it's what isn't covered that's as important as what is. Metrics should be a guide, but when you have people spending all their time fiddling with metrics, and other people spending time fiddly ways to look good under the metrics you're losing a lot of your productivity to metrics. And unless you are in the business of producing metrics, that's not good.

Re:how do you measure?

[ShanghaiBill]

What objective metric do you use to measure my performance?

Peer stack ranking. If your peers think you are deadweight, they you probably are. You can brown-nose or snow-job one manager, but you can't fool a whole team.

Re:how do you measure?

[HornWumpus]

Works while you have functional teams. When the team is dis-functional, not so much. Then it becomes a popularity contest.

Re:how do you measure?

[BigDaveyL]

Better stated: you need to know the context in which the metrics are stated.

Re:how do you measure?

[Anonymous Coward]

What metrics will tell you that someone is doing good work?

Hey Sam, if we had to let Ted or Wally go from the department, could you and would you be willing to do all his work for an extra $5k a year?

If Sam's answer is yes, re-assign Ted or Wally. If Sam was mistaken, put Ted or Wally back and fire Sam.

If Sam says no, repeat the process with Ted about Sam's job, etc, and everyone else in the group. Vary the $5k figure as needed.

When you have good people working together, no one says yes. If you have bad people working together, you're screwed anyway unless you clean house. If you have a coupel bad guys and mostly good, well, the good guys are glad to be rid of the dead weight for extra cash, because then at least they don't get "Wally's anti-work" [dilbert] to deal with anymore.

Re:how do you measure?

[seebs]

So, you're saying, the guy who solves the hardest problems that no one else could reasonably attempt is the worst employee? Because that guy's going to take more time to solve things, is gonna have more things that need to be reworked, and so on.

Think it through! If you have a simple task that any reasonably competent engineer could do, an average programmer should be able to do it quickly and reliably, right? So then you have stuff that's basically new research and trying to solve problems that no one's yet sure how to solve, and...

1. We won't have any way to make reasonable estimates, so estimated dates will be missed sometimes.
2. Amount of output will be small.
3. Likelihood of rework is high.

Look, seriously, if it were that easy, people would already be doing it widely enough that there wouldn't be a need to invent metrics, we'd have working ones. We don't.

Re:how do you measure?

[ShanghaiBill]

Works while you have functional teams. When the team is dis-functional, not so much. Then it becomes a popularity contest.

There are methods to keep it from being a popularity contest. For starters, you need to keep it anonymous. We have an outside consultant come for a day to administer it. All reviews are turned in directly to the consultant, and neither peers nor managers see them. Then the consultant throws out any "paired up" outliers to prevent backscratching. Managers only see the data in aggregate. Team members are only told which third (top, middle or bottom) they are in.

Another thing we do is make sure everyone works with everyone else. We rotate pairs for every sprint. We don't require pairs to sit and program together, but they do have to at least review and approve each others code. When you work that closely with someone, their competence is apparent.

Re:how do you measure?

[RabidReindeer]

Better stated: you need to know the context in which the metrics are stated.

That's only a small part of the problem. Factories in the 1960s were quite aware that they were spewing sulfuric acid. Their metrics failed to consider just how outraged people could become. You can fail because you didn't measure something critical or you can fail because you gave the wrong weight to something you did measure. And you can fail because you attempted to extrapolate a metric using the wrong functions.

If we ever actually managed to obtain truly accurate and meaningful metrics that actually mapped reality accurately, management would be something that you could replace with software. But just as software design has consistently failed to be something that can be reduced to a mindless rote process, so too has good decision-making.

Metrics are no more a "silver bullet" than 4GLs, OOP, CORBA, AJAX or countless other one-size-fits-all solutions. They are a tool. When they become disproportionately valued, the management process suffers.

Re:how do you measure?

[HornWumpus]

Sounds like your team is functional.

What I am saying is you will never turn a bad team into a good one with this method. When air thieves outnumber producers, producers get down rated for making the air thieves look bad.

Put more bluntly: When a team is busy circle jerking you don't ask them to vote for who gets raises/promotions.

My 0.02

[DaMattster]

Good for Mr. Miklos! Only the stodgiest, most anachronistic and paranoid manager would not consider telecommuting. When implemented by competent management, it cuts costs to the company and increases employee productivity.

Re:My 0.02

[Darinbob]

For some employees, they will be productive at home. Maybe even more productive than at the office. But for some different employees it will be worse. People actually do slack off at home, they will try to get only the minimum done, they will try to game the system. It is only a minority of employees who are self starters who are willing to work as hard as they can without self supervision as long as someone waves a stock option on a stick. But I see a lot of companies who mistakenly assume that most employees are that way and that employees enjoy working as hard as they can. The companies are probably naive in assuming employees are actually loyal.

It wasnt for me....

[axehind]

I worked for MySQL in about the 2006 timeframe for about 6 months. Yes most employees telecommuted including me. I found out in those 6 months that telecommuting wasnt for me. I couldnt focus on work very well. It was ok for short time periods like a week. But I would start drifting and my productivity dropped. I'm not against it, it just isnt something I was good at. Most emplyees there didnt have any issue with it.

A job-related article with no link to Dice!

[olip85]

Are things going back to normal?

Software development is about communication

[Anonymous Coward]

I have (always) been interested of two opposite ends of the software development: Extreme Programming and the Open Source development process. During the past 10 years I have been lucky to figure out that XP works very well because it maximizes the communication by having developers to pair program with each other, with testers, with the on-site customer. I have noticed that when you the coders are more than 2 feet apart, the communication starts to decrease very quickly in both quality and quantity. Also, I have noticed that the biggest mistakes that you can make in a software development process is to not communicate with your customer enough. It is very easy to assume something when you are away from the customer, only to find out one week (or half-a-year) later that you have just completed large amount of pure waste. Thus I think Software Engineering is all about communication - to co-ordinate with the customer and the other developers what to do and how (i.e. coding convention, the requirements).

On the other end of the spectrum there is Open Source development process, where you have highly distributed and volunteer workforce. Next I'd like to learn how to manage this approach, since I have also noticed how difficult it is to find talent even during the financial downturn. I think also for the Open Source the communication is the key. However, the tools are quite different (instead of pair programming, you use git). The bad thing is that you need to have Linus Torvalds, a couple of very motivated and hard-working lieutenants, and a much larger number of active contributors than what you need in a XP process to achieve the same. Also, I see as a big problem the co-ordination, what to do. As a Lean Process advocate, I see a lot of potential for waste :). I think that in open source development people develop what they feel they need themselves, not something that client Y would need as decided by their manager. It might be that you need to adopt your business model to the workforce, too.

Thousands of years?

[tralfaz2001]

"how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution."

So that is how the pyramids were built. Thousands of quarry workers, stone masons, and laborers all working from their condos.

Re:Thousands of years?

[Zontar The Mindless]

I believe that Mårten was referring to useful work, not to make-work vanity projects. The Pyramids are impressive, but they don't really do anything useful.

Millions of pixels!

[afgam28]

That's like, many monitors full of discussion!

Worse than that.

[khasim]

They had few performance metric and feel that by having the seats warm they will get more productivity./blockquote>From the other article, the "metric" was that the new CEO thought that the parking lot was too empty.

So it isn't even "performance" but more like "attendance".

Not really applies and oranges

[GodfatherofSoul]

Yahoo is more corporate. Their profit is coming from advertisers and all the account management and business contact that comes with it. MySQL is a software company that has many of the same elements, but when you've got a product used internationally the folks translating documentation into Farsi somewhere in Asia don't need the same kind of close contact.

Home Work was Piece Work

[westlake]

he believes people working out of their homes is entirely natural; that this is how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution.

Divide and conquer.

If you were producing for a market, home work was piece work --- with no labor laws or labor unions to prevent abuses.

When the textile mills of New England began opening jobs to young women --- their first taste of independence, education, organization and a real, substantial, pay check --- girls abandoned the rustic life and never looked back.

In union they found strength.

Yahoo competitors produce all the online tools

[gatkinso]

I can see why Yahoo would not want their workers collaborating using, say, a Google hangout, or Microsoft Skype.

Yahoo has a much more serious issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Who woke up this morning after a a late night hacking episode and said to themselves, hey I want to apply for a job with Yahoo?

Yep me either, they are a dead pool company ,treading water nothing and I mean nothing about Yahoo would compel me to work for them. In fact given a choice I might even pick a govt job over a spot at Yahoo.

Re:Yahoo has a much more serious issue

[Zontar The Mindless]

I think I can safely say that I'd rather take a cook's job in a fish & chips shop than go to work for Yahoo. (Free fish & chips, nomnomnomnom.)

Re:Everyone on any given team knows who is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Within the scope of a team I agree with you except for the "weak, immature and cowardly" part.

Yes and no. Team impressions can be gamed too. Some people can be unfairly given a bad rap. Others may be given more credit than they are due. It isn't unusual for some managers to be duped.

Management failure due to being lazy

[dbIII]

Instead of actually attempting to manage the lazy way out is to apply blanket rules when a case by case situation makes more sense. While I do too much stuff with hardware to be able to work from home there are others in the org I work for that can very effectively do work in batches from anywhere out of the rain with an electricity supply. One of the most productive people lives six hours drive away from the workplace, and at 65+ he's proved many times over that he can be trusted to get the job done without anyone micromanaging.

Re:Everyone on any given team knows who is good

[ILongForDarkness]

Also a lot can be team dynamics. A person can be a great worker but for whatever reason a few other team members decided that they don't like talking to them. So they are never included in conversations aren't seen as helpful when problems come up etc. But is it due to a real personality fault in that employee or that employee just having a different way of communicating, work style heck even extra curricular interests can come into play (people will generally go to the person that they can chat with for a half hour about the latest sports drama than the guy that is say a dungeon master (when sports are their interest and not role playing) or vis versa). That is part of the issue with remote work that needs to be considered not just individual work performance but how well will the team communicate without the queues you get from in person interaction? It can work and it can not work but you need to at least leave the option of going back to a work from the office model if the telecommute doesn't work for the employee (or you find other people's performance goes down because they aren't as available for helping out with random questions etc).

not a billion dollar company

[Anonymous Coward]

hyperbole - just because Sun over paid by a couple orders of magnitude does not make it a billion dollar company.

billion dollar company?

[Anonymous Coward]

MySQL was bought for a billion dollars. But just because multi-billion dollar Oracle used it's immense wealth to gobble a potential competitor doesn't mean the company was worth anywhere near a billion dollars. What was MySQL AB's actual revenue?