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

[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

[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

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.