Of course, I'm generalizing. Even in areas that have relatively free media, there are plenty of people that happily choose to live in an information bubble and lap up propaganda. Life can be easier that way. But I suspect that there are more information skeptics in the USA than North Korea, which was largely my point. That may not be true in the future as Kim's information monopoly starts to wither.
China has indeed done that. It seems to me that The Kim regime knows it's not going to survive forever. Its large military, nuclear capabilities, and "crazy" persona are likely there entirely to keep the regime in power as long as possible. The reason China wants the DPRK left alone is because when the regime does collapse, China is going to be the one left picking up the pieces and dealing with North Korean refugees (and quite possibly an American military presence right on their border). IMO, the right thing to do is press for more free trade, more information in the hands of North Koreans, and eventually a peaceful regime change. In the mean time, Kim should be ignored, except to the extent that we should be prepared in case he does decide to do something stupid.
The DPRK has nuclear weapons and 1.1M soldiers in active duty, who have been slowly massing along the border to South Korea for years. How would you protect South Korea in the process? Keep in mind that DPRK has another 8.2M soldiers in reserve (~38% of the DPRK population is active or reserve duty).
With an active war on North Korean soil, people are going to be fleeing in droves, mostly into China. China isn't going to like that. Possibly, they may not even let them in. How many refugees will die for lack of basic necessities? Do you have a plan to address that?
China is going to be *pissed off* beyond words, mostly for being the one that's going to have to deal with the consequences. They're not going to tolerate an American military presence there. Does your $1bn budget include a contingency for a war with China? How do you plan to avoid one?
Step #1: Discontinue all aid until nuclear observers are allowed into the country and can operate freely (with NK observation but no interference). No aid without compliance, the blood and death is on those causing the problems, not on those who would try to help.
I think plenty of people would disagree on that last part. North Korea isn't self-sufficient when it comes to food (never having fully recovered from the famine after the Soviet Union collapsed). Stopping food aid would directly result in millions of deaths.
The North Korean government cares more about being in power than they do about feeding their own people. They've demonstrated that repeatedly. Giving the world yet another example by stopping food aid and blaming the regime won't change anything. Further, they view their nuclear weapons as a way of gaining leverage over South Korea and further protecting their power. Without nuclear weapons it becomes easier for someone to say "we've had enough", march in and topple the government.
So, you have a regime that isn't going to take any step that might weaken their position. They have a tremendous military. They can't feed their own population and rely on foreign aid. From their perspective, what options are left? Be belligerent and hold everyone else hostage for more aid. Maybe, provoke South Korea, the US and China into a war that, if nothing else, lets the regime go out with a bang, with fingers pointing squarely at anyone other than themselves.
Up until recently, North Koreans literally had no other sources of information than state-controlled propaganda. While I'm sure there were enough cases where propaganda disagreed with local reality for them to be skeptical of everything they read, if you hear a message stated as fact from the moment you're born through adulthood, and hear nothing to suggest that this might be a lie, why would you (much less the majority of people there) ever seriously consider it to be a lie? In the US we grow up hearing dissenting viewpoints for everything, causing us to be skeptical of everything. North Koreans don't have that.
There have been tens of thousands of people over the last few decades escape from North Korea to tell us about their experiences. Their perception of the world is essentially entirely drawn from state propaganda.
Increasingly, however, a market economy is beginning to fluorish, driven by trade mostly from China. Many parts of the border are largely open between the two countries. With trade in products comes trade in information, and so the propaganda machine is only now starting to lose power. But there are many people still quite insulated from this and who have no reason to believe anything other than what the state tells them.
You cannot get accurate information of today's problems for X, from people that today the don't work on X. You will get yesterday's problems on X or today's problems on Z.
I suppose it's possible that the company has changed so much since the senior engineers became senior that their ability to discuss the predictive power of VPN logs can't be relied upon. But it's also possible (IMO likely) that it hasn't changed all that much. So, to say that VPN logs can not have predictive power about productivity is false.
So you're asking the same people that created/allowed that problem to fix it.
What is the alternative? The new CEO single-handedly interviews everyone, comes up with her own system of performance assessments, and makes decisions about thousands of engineers? That obviously can't scale. Maybe the new CEO could fire the entire management structure and replace it? Probably not scalable either, and you'd lose lots of good managers in the process. Just fire everyone? How can you not rely on people that already work there? That's just not realistic. You have to work with what you've got.
Keep in mind that everyone at Yahoo is not oblivious to the problems at Yahoo. It is possible for problems to be known, and to persist, simply because of company culture and inertia. Nobody wants to rock the boat. Nobody wants to be responsible for taking away a perk. But change the culture, maybe some middle management, and bring in a CEO that doesn't mind if people get upset a little bit, and these problems (that everyone knows about) can get fixed while still relying on people that were part of the old system.
First, North Korea is not off-limits to everyone else in the world. Generally tour groups have minders, so your discussions with the populace aren't exactly open and candid, but...
Second, tens of thousands of people have successfully made it out of North Korea in recent history. These people have all shared their experiences and have allowed us to learn quite a lot about how the country works and how the people think and what they believe.
- Senior devs and dev managers do a different job than a dev. So what you're going to get instead of a reality check is a "my usage" or "what I'd like"
Generally senior engineers once did the things that the junior engineers are now doing. If I were doing this, I would specifically talk to senior engineers who once did the things that the junior engineers are now doing, just in case you're going to make the case that some senior engineers were hired at the senior level. This makes them distinctly (and possibly exclusively) experts on the question of "how much is VPN use predictive of engineer productivity"?
My speculation about how this could have been done rationally is simply speculation. If it's possible to do this rationally, that means the point that this must be irrational is false.
- Carefully considered, means that somehow someone did some thinking and pulled a metric from his...:?
Are you trying to say that it is impossible to take a piece of data and apply it to a real-world situation? If it helps, I would define "carefully considered" to mean something other than "retrieve conclusion from ass".
Also are you asking the same managers that haven't detected the lack of productivity till now?
Why do you believe they haven't detected it? Maybe they did, but couldn't make the tough decisions.
It's also not necessary to talk about productivity in absolute terms. Maybe the managers themselves have a good idea (possibly backed with real data) about the relative productivity differences between their employees. Maybe a trend toward poor performance from WFH employees was a trend that you could only see statistically once you started looking at the entire company. Possibly, any one team's performance disparity could still look normally distributed when looking at it locally.
I think that's up to Yahoo to define, yes? And presumably their more senior engineers know this? I guess it's possible that the respected senior engineers were brought in from the outside with no knowledge of how anyone else at the company works. If that's true, then my speculation about how they could have made this decision rationally would seem to be wrong, but that doesn't prove that it's impossible to make this decision rationally.
I think it is more likely that people at Yahoo know how a typical Yahoo engineer works.
The rest of what you say is largely arbitrary, there's no real scientific method there, how do you predict the low performers?
Ask Yahoo.
how is confirmation done in a verifiably objective manner?
Why is that necessary? Can you name a single company that does its employee performance ratings in a "verifiably objective manner"? I imagine Yahoo would rate engineer productivity in a manner that makes sense for Yahoo. If they can't do that, then how can they do regular performance reviews? It would seem like they'd have bigger problems.
you're just desperately trying to defend your viewpoint with no basis for doing so once more.
My viewpoint is that your viewpoint--that the use of VPN logs for this purpose has no value--is wrong. It is not necessary for me to prove that Yahoo does things in any way that resembles my speculation. It is sufficient to demonstrate that they could do things that way. If VPN logs could be used in a way that results in a net gain for a company, then the assertion that VPN logs can never have value is proved false.
showing executives Yahoo's VPN logs to justify her work-from-home ban
Are you under the impression that this is the only piece of information used to justify eliminating the WFH program?
She simply said the logs show they didn't sign on enough- something completely arbitrary.
According to the press. Do you believe what you've read in the press is a complete factual account of everything that transpired related to the WFH ban? Maybe she did say that. Maybe those were even her actual words. I rather suspect, though, that there was more to the conversation than that, and that questions were asked and answered that we don't see in the press. It seems improbable to me that the entirety of the Yahoo chain of management would accept such a thing with only VPN logs as evidence with no questions asked. It also seems improbable to me that Mayer (or any executive with an engineering background) would accept one metric like this and use it exclusively to justify a decision of this magnitude.
Your argument appears to hinge on the belief that you know at least as much as Mayer does.
that removing work from home from all employees makes absolutely zero sense when there are bound to be at least some who use it properly and who would be a loss to Yahoo if they were pushed out the company. A blanket ban is a bad decision even if based on valid data, let alone that seems not to be the case.
Zero sense? Neither of us has the full picture here. You seem to be asserting that there can't possibly be a picture that allows this situation to make sense. I'm "desperately" trying to point out that there are solutions to this conundrum that don't require people to be utter morons.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were people that were productive working from home who are ticked off by the loss of their WFH privileges. Some of these people may even leave Yahoo, which means Yahoo's losing productive engineers. But it also seems quite probable to me that there are non-productive people abusing WFH. Some of these people don't actually want to go into the office and work, and so Yahoo is probably losing non-productive engineers as well. O
The two aspects of my post are somewhat independent. For a single case where you literally have chosen the "best" option, there is nothing "better" for you to say they should have done if you have a bad outcome. My point is that demand for expensive services exists from two different directions: patients demanding something new and fancy (because they aren't paying for it), and doctors demanding unnecessary and conservative (because they pay if they miss something). Another way to look at it:
1. New technology gets invented 2. Doctors don't use it yet because (a) it's not proven to be sufficiently effective or (b) it is, but it's not worth the expense 3. Patients see "ooh shiny" and take their business someplace that provides it, regardless of 3(a); or 4. Patients learn about it and say "that could have saved my loved one" and sue because it wasn't used (despite 3(a) or 3(b)) 5. Hospitals and doctors are now more likely to use it, either because this gets them more business, or because it reduces the number of people suing them for not
I'm saying expensive cancer drugs are banned because they would increase healthcare costs to US levels:
This is the key point. The American health care system is expensive because we demand expensive health care.
For those of us with insurance, we pick the best treatments, not the most economical. For those of us that can afford to choose what hospitals we get non-emergency treatment at, we pick the ones that have the experts, and the robot surgery facilities, and the fancy new MRI and PET scanners. Prices are set by contract with the insurance company, so why wouldn't we pick the one with the best marketing/facilities?
When we have bad outcomes, we sue the doctors, the hospital, the equipment manufacturers. We (via our lawyers) say things like, "they should have done more." This encourages them to practice medicine defensively: use the more expensive drugs, book more time on the expensive imaging devices, pay out settlements as a cost of doing business. And so, as time goes on, consumption of expensive health care rises as expensive health care options proliferate. In some ways this is good (sometimes the expensive options actually are better), but usually it's just wasteful.
It's easy to blame "free riders" and EMTLA, but this is a small fraction of healthcare expenses in the US.
If you think VPN logs are a valid metric for measuring productivity, and that some kind of citation is needed to show otherwise then there's no point you even discussing this sort of thing.
I've never stated that; I'm just challenging your assertion that they aren't.
It seems more likely to me that they have: - carefully considered how often a typical developer should need to use VPN, discussed it with respected senior devs and dev managers - produced a hypothesis about correlating WFH productivity with VPN use - ran the numbers (perhaps not just limited to VPN logs) - pulled out a sample of cases that they predicted would be low performers for study - confirmed their hypothesis - considered the consequences of eliminating WFH (loss of upset high performers) - made special considerations for those that deserved it - eliminated WFH for the rest
All of that seems quite rational to me, and entirely consistent with what they've said publicly, and doesn't require anyone to be an idiot. Are you of the belief that all of the facts about this decision and the data leading up to it are the things that have been made public?
If someone asked me to try to measure WFH activity, and there were services like this that did not require VPN, I suspect I'd look at more than VPN logs. I also wouldn't conclude that low VPN activity means less productivity unless I understood factors such as these. Either Mayer and her staff are all idiots, or they're working with more information than they've chosen to publicly talk about. I rather suspect the latter is more likely true.
Do you want to use remote desktop / VNC to code
No; I code over SSH. I get it: there are some IDE-heavy workflows that make it more pleasant to code on a local workstation/laptop than remotely over a VPN. What I mean when I'm talking about company resources is stuff like:
- Documentation, design docs, specs - APIs for other services I'm going to be interoperating with - Code search ("Surely this is a solved problem somewhere else in the codebase") - Distributed build systems - Actually running my code in a production- or production-like setting
But, again, maybe Yahoo is just really different from what I'm used to (entirely likely), and so the things I can't imagine coding without are things Yahoo devs don't really use/need.
Interesting factual assertion there. Do you have a citation?
I think what you mean to say is, "I don't understand what useful information you can get from VPN logs on this. Hence the decision that I don't understand." It's easy to play armchair CEO from outside the company when you have no idea what data they ARE using and what other factors are contributing to their decisions. All you know is what they've chosen to publicly say.
The claim was that these people's employment status is being changed because they have extensive data and they know who is and isn't executing.
Sorry, you're right. I agree that if they have specific data, they could use it in this fashion. And maybe they are, at least for individuals that are clearly "unsalvageable". But maybe they only see a productivity concern in aggregate? If the data show that, on average, WFH employees perform 10% less than WFO employees, but when you look at any one individual employee, it's hard to say there's really a performance problem per se, you could still make the case that moving everyone away from WFH is the right thing to do.
In theory, perfect management would be able to identify that 10% productivity problem in every employee. Even assuming Yahoo could eventually get to that point, it's going to take time to fix their broken management to do it. In the mean time, if you have data suggesting WFH (in aggregate) is holding you back, I think it makes sense to eliminate it, even though you're going to end up with good employees getting angry and leaving. So long as the ratio of good:bad employees isn't going down, it's probably acceptable. Big changes like this are always going to result in a shakeup.
When you reach the point where your individual contributors are being fairly assessed and management is reliably handling poorly-performing employees (and teams), it's possible a WFH program could then succeed. And maybe I misunderstood the article, but I don't get the impression Yahoo is there yet.
Wow, my post got butchered by my use of less-than and greater-than signs. Let me try to replace the lost bits from memory:
What Mayer seems to be saying is that (A+B) / (C+D) is less than E/F. This says, broadly, that WFH correlates more with poor performers than WFO does. That alone should be sufficient to consider getting rid of the program. Even if it results in the loss of high performers, so long as the ratio of high performers to low performers lost is less than the ratio staying, it's a net positive for the company, though I expect she'd want to minimize that.
Taking this further, though, you could make the case that A/B is greater than C/D, or that a correlation exists between whether you, as a WFH employee, use VPN and whether you're productive....
A. Productive WFH, using VPN a lot B. Productive WFH, not using VPN much C. Non-productive WFH, using VPN a lot D. Non-productive WFH, not using VPN much
You also have:
E. Productive WFO F. Non-productive WFO
What Mayer seems to be saying is that (A+B) / (C+D) C/D, or that a correlation exists between whether you, as a WFH employee, use VPN and whether you're productive. This could be true even if A/B is quite low (implying a lot of people are productive despite not using VPN, which is sort of the point you're making) if there's a larger ratio of people being non-productive without using VPN. So while you make a valid point, it doesn't imply that eliminating WFH is the wrong thing to do here. It depends on what the data say.
There's also the other reasons she's given for this: she's trying to change Yahoo's culture.
Possibly she is trying to attack the problem from multiple directions simultaneously? She should only work on improving management while continuing to let the WFH program be abused? Or do you think she is simply ignoring the management problem?
The problem is that separating the productive from the non-productive is a process that could take months: you first have to fix management to identify the poor performers, then you have to at least try to whip the poor performers into shape. It's far cheaper to spend months rehabilitating an employee than it is to try to replace them (at least in Silicon Valley; all of the good talent is already happily employed).
In that light, temporarily eliminating a perk (or is it a concession?) for productive employees seems worth the benefit of dealing with the poorly performing employees abusing that perk. Once you've dealt with the poor performers, you can think about giving it back.
In my experience the only "together" available person-to-person is social. So meetings become opportunities to socialize and play status games (I called a bigger meeting than you so I have more status than you) rather than tools to accomplish business objectives
This is entirely dependent upon the company culture. Many companies are quite corporate, full of office politics, fiefdoms, and, as you put it, "status games". These companies are deeply dysfunctional and while some succeed, it is in spite of themselves. In my experience, successful tech companies in Silicon Valley don't usually operate like that. While exceptions to that rule exist, they're fairly well-known, and I don't believe Yahoo is on that list.
It seems to me that the "fixation" is on productivity, and it looks to me like she's attacking that problem from multiple directions. It is possible to address a management problem while working with broad strokes to address the problem from a different direction. In combination the multiple approaches seem likely to have more of a positive impact in less time than focusing solely on improving how managers deal with poorly-performing employees. Fixing managers could take months. Once the managers are fixed, they then have to fix their poorly performing employees, which takes more months.
If there's good data showing that the WFH program is being abused, and there's a correlation between that and poor performers, ending that program has the potential to fix a significant chunk of the productivity problem literally overnight. That doesn't mean it's the only, or even the best solution to the problem in the long term, but I don't see anyone claiming that that's the case. Once their productivity and management problems are sorted, they can always reinstate WFH.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I'm generalizing. Even in areas that have relatively free media, there are plenty of people that happily choose to live in an information bubble and lap up propaganda. Life can be easier that way. But I suspect that there are more information skeptics in the USA than North Korea, which was largely my point. That may not be true in the future as Kim's information monopoly starts to wither.
China has indeed done that. It seems to me that The Kim regime knows it's not going to survive forever. Its large military, nuclear capabilities, and "crazy" persona are likely there entirely to keep the regime in power as long as possible. The reason China wants the DPRK left alone is because when the regime does collapse, China is going to be the one left picking up the pieces and dealing with North Korean refugees (and quite possibly an American military presence right on their border). IMO, the right thing to do is press for more free trade, more information in the hands of North Koreans, and eventually a peaceful regime change. In the mean time, Kim should be ignored, except to the extent that we should be prepared in case he does decide to do something stupid.
The DPRK has nuclear weapons and 1.1M soldiers in active duty, who have been slowly massing along the border to South Korea for years. How would you protect South Korea in the process? Keep in mind that DPRK has another 8.2M soldiers in reserve (~38% of the DPRK population is active or reserve duty).
With an active war on North Korean soil, people are going to be fleeing in droves, mostly into China. China isn't going to like that. Possibly, they may not even let them in. How many refugees will die for lack of basic necessities? Do you have a plan to address that?
China is going to be *pissed off* beyond words, mostly for being the one that's going to have to deal with the consequences. They're not going to tolerate an American military presence there. Does your $1bn budget include a contingency for a war with China? How do you plan to avoid one?
Foreign policy is hard.
Step #1: Discontinue all aid until nuclear observers are allowed into the country and can operate freely (with NK observation but no interference). No aid without compliance, the blood and death is on those causing the problems, not on those who would try to help.
I think plenty of people would disagree on that last part. North Korea isn't self-sufficient when it comes to food (never having fully recovered from the famine after the Soviet Union collapsed). Stopping food aid would directly result in millions of deaths.
The North Korean government cares more about being in power than they do about feeding their own people. They've demonstrated that repeatedly. Giving the world yet another example by stopping food aid and blaming the regime won't change anything. Further, they view their nuclear weapons as a way of gaining leverage over South Korea and further protecting their power. Without nuclear weapons it becomes easier for someone to say "we've had enough", march in and topple the government.
So, you have a regime that isn't going to take any step that might weaken their position. They have a tremendous military. They can't feed their own population and rely on foreign aid. From their perspective, what options are left? Be belligerent and hold everyone else hostage for more aid. Maybe, provoke South Korea, the US and China into a war that, if nothing else, lets the regime go out with a bang, with fingers pointing squarely at anyone other than themselves.
Up until recently, North Koreans literally had no other sources of information than state-controlled propaganda. While I'm sure there were enough cases where propaganda disagreed with local reality for them to be skeptical of everything they read, if you hear a message stated as fact from the moment you're born through adulthood, and hear nothing to suggest that this might be a lie, why would you (much less the majority of people there) ever seriously consider it to be a lie? In the US we grow up hearing dissenting viewpoints for everything, causing us to be skeptical of everything. North Koreans don't have that.
There have been tens of thousands of people over the last few decades escape from North Korea to tell us about their experiences. Their perception of the world is essentially entirely drawn from state propaganda.
Increasingly, however, a market economy is beginning to fluorish, driven by trade mostly from China. Many parts of the border are largely open between the two countries. With trade in products comes trade in information, and so the propaganda machine is only now starting to lose power. But there are many people still quite insulated from this and who have no reason to believe anything other than what the state tells them.
You cannot get accurate information of today's problems for X, from people that today the don't work on X. You will get yesterday's problems on X or today's problems on Z.
I suppose it's possible that the company has changed so much since the senior engineers became senior that their ability to discuss the predictive power of VPN logs can't be relied upon. But it's also possible (IMO likely) that it hasn't changed all that much. So, to say that VPN logs can not have predictive power about productivity is false.
So you're asking the same people that created/allowed that problem to fix it.
What is the alternative? The new CEO single-handedly interviews everyone, comes up with her own system of performance assessments, and makes decisions about thousands of engineers? That obviously can't scale. Maybe the new CEO could fire the entire management structure and replace it? Probably not scalable either, and you'd lose lots of good managers in the process. Just fire everyone? How can you not rely on people that already work there? That's just not realistic. You have to work with what you've got.
Keep in mind that everyone at Yahoo is not oblivious to the problems at Yahoo. It is possible for problems to be known, and to persist, simply because of company culture and inertia. Nobody wants to rock the boat. Nobody wants to be responsible for taking away a perk. But change the culture, maybe some middle management, and bring in a CEO that doesn't mind if people get upset a little bit, and these problems (that everyone knows about) can get fixed while still relying on people that were part of the old system.
First, North Korea is not off-limits to everyone else in the world. Generally tour groups have minders, so your discussions with the populace aren't exactly open and candid, but...
Second, tens of thousands of people have successfully made it out of North Korea in recent history. These people have all shared their experiences and have allowed us to learn quite a lot about how the country works and how the people think and what they believe.
Yes, thanks.
- Senior devs and dev managers do a different job than a dev. So what you're going to get instead of a reality check is a "my usage" or "what I'd like"
Generally senior engineers once did the things that the junior engineers are now doing. If I were doing this, I would specifically talk to senior engineers who once did the things that the junior engineers are now doing, just in case you're going to make the case that some senior engineers were hired at the senior level. This makes them distinctly (and possibly exclusively) experts on the question of "how much is VPN use predictive of engineer productivity"?
My speculation about how this could have been done rationally is simply speculation. If it's possible to do this rationally, that means the point that this must be irrational is false.
- Carefully considered, means that somehow someone did some thinking and pulled a metric from his ... :?
Are you trying to say that it is impossible to take a piece of data and apply it to a real-world situation? If it helps, I would define "carefully considered" to mean something other than "retrieve conclusion from ass".
Also are you asking the same managers that haven't detected the lack of productivity till now?
Why do you believe they haven't detected it? Maybe they did, but couldn't make the tough decisions.
It's also not necessary to talk about productivity in absolute terms. Maybe the managers themselves have a good idea (possibly backed with real data) about the relative productivity differences between their employees. Maybe a trend toward poor performance from WFH employees was a trend that you could only see statistically once you started looking at the entire company. Possibly, any one team's performance disparity could still look normally distributed when looking at it locally.
What is a typical developer?
I think that's up to Yahoo to define, yes? And presumably their more senior engineers know this? I guess it's possible that the respected senior engineers were brought in from the outside with no knowledge of how anyone else at the company works. If that's true, then my speculation about how they could have made this decision rationally would seem to be wrong, but that doesn't prove that it's impossible to make this decision rationally.
I think it is more likely that people at Yahoo know how a typical Yahoo engineer works.
The rest of what you say is largely arbitrary, there's no real scientific method there, how do you predict the low performers?
Ask Yahoo.
how is confirmation done in a verifiably objective manner?
Why is that necessary? Can you name a single company that does its employee performance ratings in a "verifiably objective manner"? I imagine Yahoo would rate engineer productivity in a manner that makes sense for Yahoo. If they can't do that, then how can they do regular performance reviews? It would seem like they'd have bigger problems.
you're just desperately trying to defend your viewpoint with no basis for doing so once more.
My viewpoint is that your viewpoint--that the use of VPN logs for this purpose has no value--is wrong. It is not necessary for me to prove that Yahoo does things in any way that resembles my speculation. It is sufficient to demonstrate that they could do things that way. If VPN logs could be used in a way that results in a net gain for a company, then the assertion that VPN logs can never have value is proved false.
showing executives Yahoo's VPN logs to justify her work-from-home ban
Are you under the impression that this is the only piece of information used to justify eliminating the WFH program?
She simply said the logs show they didn't sign on enough- something completely arbitrary.
According to the press. Do you believe what you've read in the press is a complete factual account of everything that transpired related to the WFH ban? Maybe she did say that. Maybe those were even her actual words. I rather suspect, though, that there was more to the conversation than that, and that questions were asked and answered that we don't see in the press. It seems improbable to me that the entirety of the Yahoo chain of management would accept such a thing with only VPN logs as evidence with no questions asked. It also seems improbable to me that Mayer (or any executive with an engineering background) would accept one metric like this and use it exclusively to justify a decision of this magnitude.
Your argument appears to hinge on the belief that you know at least as much as Mayer does.
that removing work from home from all employees makes absolutely zero sense when there are bound to be at least some who use it properly and who would be a loss to Yahoo if they were pushed out the company. A blanket ban is a bad decision even if based on valid data, let alone that seems not to be the case.
Zero sense? Neither of us has the full picture here. You seem to be asserting that there can't possibly be a picture that allows this situation to make sense. I'm "desperately" trying to point out that there are solutions to this conundrum that don't require people to be utter morons.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were people that were productive working from home who are ticked off by the loss of their WFH privileges. Some of these people may even leave Yahoo, which means Yahoo's losing productive engineers. But it also seems quite probable to me that there are non-productive people abusing WFH. Some of these people don't actually want to go into the office and work, and so Yahoo is probably losing non-productive engineers as well. O
The two aspects of my post are somewhat independent. For a single case where you literally have chosen the "best" option, there is nothing "better" for you to say they should have done if you have a bad outcome. My point is that demand for expensive services exists from two different directions: patients demanding something new and fancy (because they aren't paying for it), and doctors demanding unnecessary and conservative (because they pay if they miss something). Another way to look at it:
1. New technology gets invented
2. Doctors don't use it yet because (a) it's not proven to be sufficiently effective or (b) it is, but it's not worth the expense
3. Patients see "ooh shiny" and take their business someplace that provides it, regardless of 3(a); or
4. Patients learn about it and say "that could have saved my loved one" and sue because it wasn't used (despite 3(a) or 3(b))
5. Hospitals and doctors are now more likely to use it, either because this gets them more business, or because it reduces the number of people suing them for not
I'm saying expensive cancer drugs are banned because they would increase healthcare costs to US levels:
This is the key point. The American health care system is expensive because we demand expensive health care.
For those of us with insurance, we pick the best treatments, not the most economical. For those of us that can afford to choose what hospitals we get non-emergency treatment at, we pick the ones that have the experts, and the robot surgery facilities, and the fancy new MRI and PET scanners. Prices are set by contract with the insurance company, so why wouldn't we pick the one with the best marketing/facilities?
When we have bad outcomes, we sue the doctors, the hospital, the equipment manufacturers. We (via our lawyers) say things like, "they should have done more." This encourages them to practice medicine defensively: use the more expensive drugs, book more time on the expensive imaging devices, pay out settlements as a cost of doing business. And so, as time goes on, consumption of expensive health care rises as expensive health care options proliferate. In some ways this is good (sometimes the expensive options actually are better), but usually it's just wasteful.
It's easy to blame "free riders" and EMTLA, but this is a small fraction of healthcare expenses in the US.
If you think VPN logs are a valid metric for measuring productivity, and that some kind of citation is needed to show otherwise then there's no point you even discussing this sort of thing.
I've never stated that; I'm just challenging your assertion that they aren't.
It seems more likely to me that they have:
- carefully considered how often a typical developer should need to use VPN, discussed it with respected senior devs and dev managers
- produced a hypothesis about correlating WFH productivity with VPN use
- ran the numbers (perhaps not just limited to VPN logs)
- pulled out a sample of cases that they predicted would be low performers for study
- confirmed their hypothesis
- considered the consequences of eliminating WFH (loss of upset high performers)
- made special considerations for those that deserved it
- eliminated WFH for the rest
All of that seems quite rational to me, and entirely consistent with what they've said publicly, and doesn't require anyone to be an idiot. Are you of the belief that all of the facts about this decision and the data leading up to it are the things that have been made public?
and that I can get as web service using SSL
If someone asked me to try to measure WFH activity, and there were services like this that did not require VPN, I suspect I'd look at more than VPN logs. I also wouldn't conclude that low VPN activity means less productivity unless I understood factors such as these. Either Mayer and her staff are all idiots, or they're working with more information than they've chosen to publicly talk about. I rather suspect the latter is more likely true.
Do you want to use remote desktop / VNC to code
No; I code over SSH. I get it: there are some IDE-heavy workflows that make it more pleasant to code on a local workstation/laptop than remotely over a VPN. What I mean when I'm talking about company resources is stuff like:
- Documentation, design docs, specs
- APIs for other services I'm going to be interoperating with
- Code search ("Surely this is a solved problem somewhere else in the codebase")
- Distributed build systems
- Actually running my code in a production- or production-like setting
But, again, maybe Yahoo is just really different from what I'm used to (entirely likely), and so the things I can't imagine coding without are things Yahoo devs don't really use/need.
which is not a valid metric
Interesting factual assertion there. Do you have a citation?
I think what you mean to say is, "I don't understand what useful information you can get from VPN logs on this. Hence the decision that I don't understand." It's easy to play armchair CEO from outside the company when you have no idea what data they ARE using and what other factors are contributing to their decisions. All you know is what they've chosen to publicly say.
The claim was that these people's employment status is being changed because they have extensive data and they know who is and isn't executing.
Sorry, you're right. I agree that if they have specific data, they could use it in this fashion. And maybe they are, at least for individuals that are clearly "unsalvageable". But maybe they only see a productivity concern in aggregate? If the data show that, on average, WFH employees perform 10% less than WFO employees, but when you look at any one individual employee, it's hard to say there's really a performance problem per se, you could still make the case that moving everyone away from WFH is the right thing to do.
In theory, perfect management would be able to identify that 10% productivity problem in every employee. Even assuming Yahoo could eventually get to that point, it's going to take time to fix their broken management to do it. In the mean time, if you have data suggesting WFH (in aggregate) is holding you back, I think it makes sense to eliminate it, even though you're going to end up with good employees getting angry and leaving. So long as the ratio of good:bad employees isn't going down, it's probably acceptable. Big changes like this are always going to result in a shakeup.
When you reach the point where your individual contributors are being fairly assessed and management is reliably handling poorly-performing employees (and teams), it's possible a WFH program could then succeed. And maybe I misunderstood the article, but I don't get the impression Yahoo is there yet.
What they should've done before anything else is started getting an accurate measure about how much work people are actually doing from home,
Why do you believe they haven't done that?
More likely
Why?
Has this data made more public appearances than Elvis today?
Why should it? Do you commonly expect companies to release all of the data used to support their decisions?
How does Google make "money out of the box" from ChromeOS?
Wow, my post got butchered by my use of less-than and greater-than signs. Let me try to replace the lost bits from memory:
What Mayer seems to be saying is that (A+B) / (C+D) is less than E/F. This says, broadly, that WFH correlates more with poor performers than WFO does. That alone should be sufficient to consider getting rid of the program. Even if it results in the loss of high performers, so long as the ratio of high performers to low performers lost is less than the ratio staying, it's a net positive for the company, though I expect she'd want to minimize that.
Taking this further, though, you could make the case that A/B is greater than C/D, or that a correlation exists between whether you, as a WFH employee, use VPN and whether you're productive. ...
I think there are four likely possibilities here:
A. Productive WFH, using VPN a lot
B. Productive WFH, not using VPN much
C. Non-productive WFH, using VPN a lot
D. Non-productive WFH, not using VPN much
You also have:
E. Productive WFO
F. Non-productive WFO
What Mayer seems to be saying is that (A+B) / (C+D) C/D, or that a correlation exists between whether you, as a WFH employee, use VPN and whether you're productive. This could be true even if A/B is quite low (implying a lot of people are productive despite not using VPN, which is sort of the point you're making) if there's a larger ratio of people being non-productive without using VPN. So while you make a valid point, it doesn't imply that eliminating WFH is the wrong thing to do here. It depends on what the data say.
There's also the other reasons she's given for this: she's trying to change Yahoo's culture.
Possibly she is trying to attack the problem from multiple directions simultaneously? She should only work on improving management while continuing to let the WFH program be abused? Or do you think she is simply ignoring the management problem?
The problem is that separating the productive from the non-productive is a process that could take months: you first have to fix management to identify the poor performers, then you have to at least try to whip the poor performers into shape. It's far cheaper to spend months rehabilitating an employee than it is to try to replace them (at least in Silicon Valley; all of the good talent is already happily employed).
In that light, temporarily eliminating a perk (or is it a concession?) for productive employees seems worth the benefit of dealing with the poorly performing employees abusing that perk. Once you've dealt with the poor performers, you can think about giving it back.
In my experience the only "together" available person-to-person is social. So meetings become opportunities to socialize and play status games (I called a bigger meeting than you so I have more status than you) rather than tools to accomplish business objectives
This is entirely dependent upon the company culture. Many companies are quite corporate, full of office politics, fiefdoms, and, as you put it, "status games". These companies are deeply dysfunctional and while some succeed, it is in spite of themselves. In my experience, successful tech companies in Silicon Valley don't usually operate like that. While exceptions to that rule exist, they're fairly well-known, and I don't believe Yahoo is on that list.
It seems to me that the "fixation" is on productivity, and it looks to me like she's attacking that problem from multiple directions. It is possible to address a management problem while working with broad strokes to address the problem from a different direction. In combination the multiple approaches seem likely to have more of a positive impact in less time than focusing solely on improving how managers deal with poorly-performing employees. Fixing managers could take months. Once the managers are fixed, they then have to fix their poorly performing employees, which takes more months.
If there's good data showing that the WFH program is being abused, and there's a correlation between that and poor performers, ending that program has the potential to fix a significant chunk of the productivity problem literally overnight. That doesn't mean it's the only, or even the best solution to the problem in the long term, but I don't see anyone claiming that that's the case. Once their productivity and management problems are sorted, they can always reinstate WFH.