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

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.