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

Posted by Roblimo on from the some-can-do-it-and-some-can't dept.

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.

10 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Performance Metrics by djl4570 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All you need is a method to accurately measure productivity.

    1. Re:Performance Metrics by Aviancer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Performance Metrics by Kenja · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --

      "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    3. Re:Performance Metrics by firex726 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Performance Metrics by gweihir · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    5. Re:Performance Metrics by mcmonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Performance Metrics by HornWumpus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Remote workers have nothing to do with integration testing.

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

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  2. one difference by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  3. Engaging work by s1d3track3D · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Really hard to do. by Chirs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.