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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.
All you need is a method to accurately measure productivity.
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
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
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.
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.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.
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.
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.
Are things going back to normal?
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.
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.
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).