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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[HornWumpus]

Remote workers have nothing to do with integration testing.

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

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.

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.

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: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?

[HornWumpus]

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

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).