I think remote works best when everyone on a team is remote. At my current employer, we have 6 people on our tech team. All except 2 of us are in different places. This forces us to figure out how to work effectively using chat, wiki, project management tools, etc.
When only a few people on a team are remote I've found that it just doesn't work as well. I imagine it could work but it would take very strong discipline from the people in the office.
I've been telecommuting for 10 years. When I'm the only remote employee, and there isn't a culture of remoteness, I believe it's my job to have the discipline and do the extra work to stay connected, not the rest of the team's. It's a challenging dynamic, but it's not impossible, and I just don't think it's reasonable to expect the entire team to adapt to the exceptional case, instead of the other way around.
+1 to that. I have been working 100% remotely, full time for a client based in Europe for 4 years now - I've never met the people on my team in person & we only have a 3 hour overlap in terms of working hours. I expect myself to be at least as productive as when I was in the office and then some - to eliminate any doubts people might have. Its very easy for my boss to tell how I'm doing....just take a look at my git log.
Not sure I could ever commute 5 days to work & sit in a cubicle or open plan office (those places remind me of a Chinese factory floor)....they would have to pay me a LOT of money to endure that again.
yeah, when I was at yahoo, the one guy who worked from home (well, we all did on occasion, but the one guy who always worked from home) was really, really good; My feeling was that he was good enough that he was able to say "let me work from home or I walk" - I don't know if he would have been more effective if he was in the office all the time or not, but he was probably the most effective person on the team as it was.
+1 to this as well -- I've been telecommuting for ten years now, and it's always been my view that I have to find the communication mechanism that suits the situation, not the other way around. I think because of this viewpoint, I don't get "left out" nearly as much because I don't give people the chance to forget about me.
That's not to say that I don't miss out on "watercooler chat" topics as they happen, but I still make a point of chatting with coworkers to make up for it. A simple "hey, you feeling better now" IM goes a long way.
As a second example to corroborate your point: my team has one remote worker who is unquestionably one of the lowest performers on the team. Not because he's less skilled, but because he hasn't dealt well with the difficulties presented by being remote (such as needing to be very intentional in spending time assimilating and documenting communal knowledge and in building relationships within the team and with extended teams).
Since he's the only one, he's constantly getting overlooked by the local folks (people forgetting to set up a concall bridge for meetings or set up webex for presentations, impromptu meetings to sync up on some issue that he gets left behind on, etc.)
This isn't particularly surprising, the policy at Google was (possibly still is) much the same. The theory is that you don't interact enough with your peers if you're not face to face.
I'm really rather surprised that this is extending to customer support - that's one area that actually seems pretty cost-effective and efficient to use remote workers for. Face-to-face is always a great boon, but it just isn't an option for support reps at an Internet company. (At least not when speaking to customers, which is the important part of their job.)
Customer support depends on two things: people skills and tech skills. Because of the nature of the job and its pay levels, you often cannot find all-rounders, so you get the best specialists you can attract in these two fields, and try to mesh them. In an office, you can balance the two in real time; remotely, this can be more difficult.
Google has bad customer support because they simply don't want to put in the necessary manpower. Customer support scales much less than linearly, and to effectively support billions of users, you'd need hundreds of thousands reps, which would dramatically change the internal politics. So they just say "f*ck it, we'll do the minimum required by direct-revenue-generating services just to avoid getting sued, and everyone else can google their way out, for what we care."
I don't think Google's support issues have anything to do with people, they have to do with a lack of people. Google treats customer / client problems as an engineering issue and tries to use algorithms just like they do with any other engineering issue. Unfortunately for Google it's a people problem and not a code problem. Google just needs more, vastly more, real people to be at the other end of the
email.
"The surprising question we get is: 'How many people telecommute at Google?' ” [Google's CFO] Mr Pichette said at a talk in Sydney on Monday. "And our answer is: 'As few as possible'."
> Good chance for a savvy startup to pick up some remote talent the big boys can't.
No, this is a chance to pick up talent the big boys don't need. "As few as possible" telecommuters means they do hire telecommuters. Apply, see if your skills make up for your telecommuting. As a telecommuter, your application will need to be particularly strong to make up for what the company risks and loses by not having you in the office - if it isn't, a big company won't take the risk on you.
> No, this is a chance to pick up talent the big boys don't need
Considering how bad they are at hiring, there should be very competent people there.
> As a telecommuter, your application will need to be particularly strong to make up for what the company risks and loses by not having you in the office -
Which is, almost nothing, unless they are not set up for remote work, which every minimal competent company today is/should be.
> if it isn't, a big company won't take the risk on you.
Tell that to Red Hat. A big majority of their development positions (if not all) are remote.
> Considering how bad they are at hiring, there should be very competent people there.
The company under discussion at Google. They're great at hiring, at least by their metrics: they have thousands of the world's best engineers.
> Which is, almost nothing, unless they are not set up for remote work, which every minimal competent company today is/should be.
You're ignoring context again. Patrick Pichette, CFO of Google, said regarding the number of telecommuters: "as few as possible." In my response, I was addressing that comment by pointing out it implies the company is equipped to work with telecommuters but sees telecommuting as a disadvantage.
> Tell that to Red Hat. A big majority of their development positions (if not all) are remote.
Red Hat is a great example of a company whose unique business model lets them rely heavily on remote developers. It's unsurprising given the work they do: they take existing open-source software and package it, maintain it, and support it. This is work that can be largely done independently. They don't write OSes like the biggest software giants do - they keep the lights running for Linux, the FOSS community's shared OS.
Red Hat is an open-source utility company, and their margins (~10% - one of the lowest in software) reflect that. Few think there's room for many such large companies, given that Red Hat has only just hit $1b in revenue last year (woohoo!).
>The company under discussion at Google. They're great at hiring, at least by their metrics
Yes, I know about the context. "At least by their metrics" which can be good, but certainly not great. To be fair they have a never ending flood of candidates and have to deal with that.
But the main issue is that it only gets candidates with a very narrow set of skills.
"it implies the company is equipped to work with telecommuters but sees telecommuting as a disadvantage"
Not necessarily, it can be a one-off setup for the few telecommuters.
"It's unsurprising given the work they do: they take existing open-source software and package it, maintain it, and support it. This is work that can be largely done independently. They don't write OSes like the biggest software giants do - they keep the lights running for Linux, the FOSS community's shared OS."
You are underestimating heavily what Red Hat does. Especially the amount of development that goes there.
> This sort of attitude is precisely why the big boys don't stay the big boys in tech.
Are you saying telecommuters are the key to staying big in tech? To encourage innovation big companies want happy engineers in close proximity, talking spontaneously in varied, positive environments. Hence the free food. And the massages. And all the other perks.
Well, this says "no exceptions", but at least at Google, there are exceptions.
I was an exception for a while, one of my employees was an exception for 6 years :)
I have a very specialized set of degrees/knowledge/experience (Actual high level software engineering on real projects and also an IP/patent lawyer who specializes in open source lawyering) that can be hard to find.
Also, there was an office at least moderately nearby (within 2 hours).
I eventually became officially part of the DC office, and started a small eng team there.
Note that hiring remotees required very high level approval, even back then, and some areas of Google simply won't do it. 7 years ago, Google was also a little more lenient. :)
Nowadays I would expect that they grandfathered in most of the earlier remotees, and that there are no real remotee hires anymore, they have enough small sales/whatever offices that they just make them part of those offices, or don't hire them.
You can leverage JD/eng into a job at most good tech companies.
You just have to contact the right folks there, instead of applying through recruiters that are doing keyword scanning.
You won't be able to get work at a large law firm doing anything but lawyering, of course.
Open source lawyering = I specialize in open source related issues (be they licensing, compliance in general, whatever).
If you want to work more on the law side, pretty much any sufficiently big software company is going to need someone like you. If you want to stick more to the developer stuff, try something in a more heavily regulated industry like healthcare or finance.
My employer won't take a new hire as a remote worker, but if you've worked on site for several years and have to move for family reasons they'd rather you work remotely than leave the company.
I kinda agree, it makes some sense. Its easy in an office environment to forget about remote employees even if they do a lot of work. Out of sight , out of mind is quite real. It seems to matter less if you don't have a strong team dynamic; such as teams that are pieced together from contractors or work that is done mostly alone.
I am aware of this sort of stuff that goes on, generally though I think of it as a management problem. But let me explain why I think that.
So perhaps "Bob" in our example really does have a job which allows him to work as effectively[1] at home as he can at work. Bob should also be aware of the schedule. So when the meeting comes up, Bob should be ready for it. And I've known folks working remotely who where chilling on the conference line waiting for the rest of the meeting to show up. But if either Bob isn't there when he should be, or the manager isn't organized enough to give Bob at least 12hrs notice of a meeting he should be attending, then you've got a management problem.
[1] First tip is that a manager needs to have a way of evaluating their teams effectiveness, if they don't then they can't really say if Bob is or is not as effective as others in his position.
I've worked on a lot of distributed teams. For an actual team (not just subcontractors) every place has had some level of "office hours". Normally a ~4+ hour block every day that you are expected to be "in office" and available for calls/chat. Some places do hardcore 9-5, even for remote workers. When teams have different time zones in play, normally everyone tries to have atleast a 2 hour overlap during a normal work day. It's during the office hours of someone the manager knows they are available for ad-hoc meetings etc.
Perhaps a more important note is that, in my experience, most distributed teams have /way/ less meetings than an in person teams. A lot of things are done informally over IRC/chat. I say informal, but since IRC is usually logged, if someone is not involved in the informal discussion at the time it takes place, they can just read it to catch up on why the decisions were made.
"But if either Bob isn't there when he should be, or the manager isn't organized enough to give Bob at least 12hrs notice of a meeting he should be attending, then you've got a management problem."
I agree with you, except for that part. For most jobs, it's incredibly valuable to have impromptu "hallway" discussions that can't be scheduled in advance, isn't it?
Your main point still stands - Bob needs to be available during office hours, even if he's at home.
>For most jobs, it's incredibly valuable to have impromptu "hallway" discussions that can't be scheduled in advance, isn't it?
No, it's not.
If your business is so undisciplined and random that it's "valuable" (and even more "incredibly valuable") to have improptu "hallway" discussions, then you're doing it wrong.
If your business is so undisciplined and random that it's "valuable" (and even more "incredibly valuable") to have improptu "hallway" discussions, then you're doing it wrong.
Disagree strongly. Creativity often comes from people synthesizing ideas that wouldn't ordinarily meet, and especially not in a way that can be planned by management.
In the typical corporate environment where employees are just expected to implement ideas handed down by management, there's no value in these unplanned discussions. However, if you're looking for creativity and organic development, then there's value in those sort of random encounters. That doesn't mean remote can't work. It does give it a different feel. But I strongly disagree that there's zero value to unplanned discussion.
>Disagree strongly. Creativity often comes from people synthesizing ideas that wouldn't ordinarily meet, and especially not in a way that can be planned by management.
That's totally orthogonal to "hallway" meetings.
To put it another way, if you can't do the above over IM/Skype/email/etc, you're doing it wrong.
I put "hallway" in quotes because it doesn't have to be a literal hallway. I agree that IM/Skype/email/etc is fine for them (and even better, in many ways).
"Don't bother. I just called him and he's at his kids swim lesson"
There are issues with telecommuting that are difficult to overcome, but this one is ridiculously simple.
The solution (well, a solution) is to have business hours during which everybody needs to be available. I have an arrangement like that with my employer - between 9 and 5, even if I'm working at home, my manager needs to be able to pick up his phone and have me be instantly available.
At first, he was a little doubtful, but he soon realized that he can actually get a hold of me more quickly this way when compared with walking across the building from his office to mine. (And no, he doesn't abuse this... haha) :)
It gets slightly trickier when people are in different time zones, but nothing that can't be overcome. People need predictable office hours; there can't ever be a "Bob's at his kids' swim practice" moment. Barring emergency, of course.
"I hate that stupid Bob and his kid's swimming lessons! Bob should be made to be like us and spend 9-5 in useless meetings and develop products for 13 minutes a day rather than be like dumb old Bob and spend the day with family and then work from 7pm to 3am in a solid sprint, coding."
What a ridiculous argument. You are talking about behavioural issues i.e. not being available for scheduled meetings not something inherent to working remotely. Or to put it more simply:
Where's Bob? He should be in this meeting.
He's outside having a coffee and cigarette with Jane.
Definitely, as long as persons performance is measured in their outcomes and not in the number of meetings they attend to or the "butt hours" they make, working from home is as productive as working in the office.
I think the sweet spot is when it is a combination of both.
Doing good work does not compensate for being allowed to blow off meetings at will, allowing such behavior decreases morale among the group and can lower productivity as a whole.
One thing that can help with this is to have an open "informal" chatroom for all your employees (or for teams). Now if the person is completely silent, well, that's another issue.
It's the secret meeting where they fiddle the figures from a APR system to fit what ever curve HR wants - and if you need to downsize do things like dump those poor buggers with cancer in the poor performer category.
Its the main problem with APR systems they get captured by sections of an organization who use it to achieve their own agendas with no though to what it does to the company as a whole.
Have you ever worked at or with MS? If so, you'd know that stack ranking is the reason MS has flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade.
As someone that works at Microsoft I know I can't really respond to this without being accused of being a shill/apoligist (even at a place that prides itself in logical thinking, like HN), but this is such a massive oversimplification, and likely so far off the mark as to possibly be on the wrong planet.
Microsoft has a well-known review system that engenders various feelings in various people, not all of them postive. I have posted here before how the stack ranking part is actually low on my list of objectionable things about the whole process, but it is what people know so it is what people cite. I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it, about how people are constantly obsessed with reviews and stabbing their teammates in the back left and right to get a leg up. I have never once witnessed that behavior or even heard of a remotely plausible instance of that happening. That said Microsoft is a big company, so I am sure it has/does happen somewhere. I dispute it is rampant or common.
I have heard stories of people that are terrible at working in groups and don't do well. I have heard stories of people that have an opinion of their own skills that seems objectively divorced from reality. I have heard stories of management hubris that ultimately doesn’t pan out. Some of the people that play a starring role in these dramas then invent conspiracies about plotting colleagues causing them to rank poorly, incompetent managers that didn’t recognize their delicate snow-flakism or any other number of explanations that conveniently don’t attribute any share of the blame to themselves. I suspect those tend to be fantasies made to soothe one’s ego.
I think anyone with knowledge of internal state at Microsoft could posit a much better explanation of why they have 'flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade' that doesn't involve Machiavellian competition between employees. Hell, reversion to the mean pretty much would cover most bases without any kind of comical soap opera drama needed.
I hadn't seen your previous reply, I don't always follow up on my own posts :) I wouldn't argue there is subjectivity in reward, there always will be. I don't work in Windows but I know a few folks that do. I haven't heard any stories of people feeling they got shafted and some doofus got a reward, but I am sure it happens, and I am sure it is not unique to Microsoft in any way. My argument is with people that claim it is the norm and they base that on their own (non-verifiable) experience, or worse on some troll blog like miniMSFT.
As for comments about seeing who got rewards based on title change, a title change doesn't always mean a large pay raise, and there are hidden rewards like gold star bonuses and HiPo groups that have little/no outward evidence, unless the recipient starts talking about them (which they tell them not to do), so I would say you probably aren't seeing accurate signaling based on job titles alone. The fact that some of the best rewards are secret is one of my beefs with the system.
Also, to clarify, I am not a fan of Microsoft's system, but when I hear stories of people who claim it leads to internecine wars, well that just isn't my experience in the last 8 years, or the experience of anyone I have talked to personally.
Ultimately there has to be some kind of ranking system as there is a fixed pool of rewards. The only alternative I could see would be exactly even sharing amongst a team. You could argue for that, but even as someone that has socialist sympathies I don't think it would work or be fair. There are people on my team that produce more than me, whether it be through being smarter, working longer hours, whatever. To say I should get the same reward as them is just wrong.
So if we agree there has to be ranking, well there's your stack ranking. You could argue with the curve fitting, but your claim that 1 in a group of 10 would get no bonus is just false. Curve fitting doesn't happen on a per team basis. It's more like 10 in a group of 100 or 100 in a group of 1000. There is nothing saying that an entire team couldn't end up in the top 10% of rewards. It may well be the case that on your team of 10 superstars one doesn't get the reward they feel they deserve, but that is because someone else in the calibration meeting was deemed more worthy, your teams ranking isn't done in isolation and in a team with 10 superstars there can be other superstars in the general vicinity, even more than 10. To claim that the system results in people plotting against the ones they are ranked against in order to sabotage them just sounds like conspiracy theory thinking. In my experience it results in people upping their game, or leaving if they feel they are unappreciated. Both are reasonable responses, some attempt at sabotage is not.
Easy for you to say. You're not being called apocryphal.
I thought readers could connect the dots but maybe a bit more explanation is due.
Having worked at the "new Microsoft" in recent history I feel like the part I quoted is highly indicative of someone who has their head in the sand. Across multiple divisions among people I've voiced opinions with openly I haven't talked to anyone at MS who shares his view. Even in his own DevDiv, I've heard people say that DevDiv is a bit better than the Microsoft average but yeah, it still has these problems.
At least, this is how I felt last month when replying to his previous comment. So I left a reply, even though it's taboo to talk this way about a former employer, even though I risked potential embarrassment attaching my name to this. And I said, hey, what they say about MS, what they said in that Vanity Fair article, it has a lot of truth in my experience, and I don't really know anyone who says otherwise without being a blind shill or a sociopath. (I'm saying it a bit more bluntly here but that was the idea.) I was reluctant to make that comment, but I did.
Then he goes around repeating still that all such comments are apocryphal and anonymous, despite the comment of a real person who is not writing anonymously. (Aside: He is probably not aware that current employees won't say this for fear of losing their job, and former employees probably feel the general taboo against speaking ill of a former employer.)
> Easy for you to say. You're not being called apocryphal.
You are literally just making my point over and over again. This sentence is, like the previous post, utterly devoid of logical content. Are you seriously taking offense at being called "apocryphal"? Nevermind that ryanmolden never actually called you apocryphal.
True that it may not be the reason they have flopped, but honestly every co-worker of mine that has worked at Microsoft states our review process drives performance above all else. And the sample size isn't small, I'm in SLU at Amazon.
Would you mind expanding on this a bit? How exactly does it contribute to Microsoft's performance in new fields? This is a completely genuine question. I'm not an apologist just trying to defend MS in a roundabout way.
People become obsessed with their scores and their peers' scores. They're wrapped up in internal competition and compete poorly with external players or when assessed honestly with most reality-based metrics.
I worked with MS (for a consulting company, first few years of my career) back in "the day", and I got to witness first-hand the craziness of this system. But rather than blab about my own experiences, here's a recent article that sums things up pretty well: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-dow...
Functioning planned culture: guild culture. Master crafts(wo)men and apprentices are clearly defined, but the managerial relationship is advisory and focused on mentorship. The major downside of guild culture (the rarest of the 4) is that it relies on employee loyalty to capture the value it generates.
Pathological planned culture: rank culture. (This is the most common corporate culture.) People rise or fall based on subordinacy, rather than the quality of their ideas or their level of effort. You end up with a lot of people who don't work hard because they realize that effort doesn't matter, and a lot of bad ideas getting into implementation. Rank cultures often can't compete on an open market or address new challenges.
Functioning market culture: self-executive culture. Here you have a flat hierarchy and employees have a lot of autonomy. However, they're usually expected to take responsibility for their own advancement. This is the Valve-style open allocation culture.
Pathological market culture: tough culture. High-stakes performance reviews, low trust of employees but similarly low guidance. This is the sink-or-swim culture.
Rank culture tends to turn into tough culture as it generates underperformers, and eventually the higher-ups get upset about the whole thing and have a crackdown. However, tough culture turns back into rank culture as the people who control the performance assessment become the new rank-holders and, in exchange for loyalty, offer safety and advantage in the evaluation process. So tough and rank cultures tend to fall into a degenerate, enervating pattern of oscillation from one extreme to the other. This back-and-forth eventually exhausts the company, leading to constant reorganization and turmoil.
When a company institutes permanent tough culture (stack ranking as an inflexible pillar, rather than a temporary measure) the political corrosion associated with rank culture still occurs, but there's a selection dynamic (similar to antibiotic resistance) where the forms of rank culture that survive are the least detectable. So you end up with a culture that's politicized and gamey like a tough culture, but inefficient and extortive like a rank culture, and ultimately you have a workplace where people put in lots of hours and apparent sacrifice, but there's little getting done and there's no vision.
The team(s)/business unit responsible for XBox had a ton of independence and freedom early on and it contributed to their success. That freedom has slowly been taken away and you can see the effect in the product(s) coming out of that part of the business now.
Kinect is successful and an interesting product, but they've had a hard time producing genuinely interesting or high quality Kinect games, either first or third party. The ones that are successful tend to actually make rather minimal use of the technology, or use it in odd ways. For a couple examples, IIRC Dance Central isn't able to use the actual skeletal tracking technology, and Double Fine's Kinect games likewise take a different approach that doesn't use the skeletal tracking. Most of the games shipping labelled as 'Better with Kinect' use it as a glorified microphone, which is kind of depressing. At this point there is also a general consensus that the Kinect camera's accuracy is too low for many serious game uses and that the field of view hampers its use in many homes. In their defense, it's rumored that they have addressed this with the next revision of the hardware.
My point is more regarding things like the dashboard updates - the XBox 360 dashboard slowly turned into a glorified billboard covered in ads that has incidental features tacked onto it. They've had consistent performance problems with their system software that have never really been addressed (though thankfully they've made slight improvements here and there) - at this point people who have to interact with it on a regular basis, like journalists, are barely able to contain their hatred for the user interface.
Google claims that its performance review system is "peer-driven", but what actually exists is a bicameral system where you need strong peer reviews and good calibration scores in order to get a transfer or a promotion. If you play one game and not the other, you can get stuck.
Calibration happens every quarter and a manager can unilaterally ding you. However, a supportive manager doesn't guarantee a good score. He actually has to get involved in the horse-trading and tit-for-tat of the whole process. Some people get screwed because their managers don't show up to calibration and they get low scores.
Finally, you often have no idea what your score is. Meets Expectations is everything from the 2nd to 70th percentile of the company. At the high end of that range, you're OK-- you won't get fired, you can get a decent transfer. At the low end, you're fucked. However, you may have no idea where in that range you are.
It's a play-for-play copy of Enron's performance review system, except with even more managerial secrecy and, therefore, less accountability. In short, it's why Google has less future than past.
I'm not trying to give Google a pass, but this sounds like every big tech company actually. Managing is hard I guess, and opaqueness arises naturally even in meritocracies.
Even though managing is hard, that's not an excuse for being a dick when you have huge reserves of cash and could be giving employees a lot more in the way of autonomy, compensation, and advancement. Companies like Google and Microsoft can afford not to be evil.
I agree with you that Google is probably no worse than the other large tech companies, but I wouldn't call that an endorsement. For one example of something I don't like about tech culture, these firms have a tendency to throw their employees under the bus when the economy gets bad. Banks have layoffs. It's just something you get used to on the Street. Good people get let go, take their severance packages, and find other jobs. No big deal. On the other hand, many tech companies, when they do the same thing, make it look like a wave of performance-based firings so they can say they've never had a layoff. Google still claims it has never had an engineering layoff, even though it's had waves of PIPs. That's slimy.
As in government, we can talk about "different ways" of doing things like communism or libertarianism, but each new way seems to have just as many, if not more, problems than the previous. So ya, meritocratic companies might be the worst ones to work for, except for maybe non-meritocratic ones.
I believe managers are just human: even Google will have good and bad ones, evil but effective ones along with good but ineffective ones (wrt to biz goals), and lots of other different combinations. Until we can come up with a system that removes inconsistent human nature from the equation, we'll just have to tolerate what we have. Sliminess is just one common trait of human beings, and I'm sure even Google can't avoid hiring and promoting sociopaths.
For many workers and managers this is true. For the manager with a crack staff in which many work offsite but are great communicators and productive employees this is a nightmare.
"As a manager, I can’t easily know how many hours each person on my team is working. This is actually good for me because it forces me to look at what they’ve done. It’s good for the remote person as well: they can’t fool themselves into thinking that just because they’re in an office, surfing Reddit for an hour is work. In a perfect world we’d both already have this perspective, but it’s amazing how easy it is to delude yourself into thinking that “going to the office” = work."
I certainly understand not hiring remote workers, but the transition will probably destroy value, especially if exceptions aren't allowed. A previous company of mine instituted a similar policy, and it was somewhat painful for my small team because we lost an experienced member who by all measures was amazing at her job. Fully replacing her probably cost a man year in value between the extra work for the rest of us and training someone new. And of course it was painful for her, as she had to find a new job after being promised her position was secure.
As someone who has worked full-time remote since 2006, I agree completely. There are plenty of ways to be a part of the team and be remote - in fact, I doubt 30 minutes goes by in my day when I'm not either on the phone or IM'ing with someone about some issue. It's the equivalent of stopping by my desk to talk about something.
As someone who lives in a small remote city, and is broke and really cant consider moving right now, the thought of less job opportunities out there in other states at good companies that would allow me to work remotely really discourages me. This was one of the biggest promises of the internet. The only way I would be able to climb out of this place is if I could start by working remotely somewhere. There are no tech jobs where I am.
Yahoo has been in it's death throes for quite a while. I'm sure they'll survive in a sort of AOL sense, but they are quite desperate to stay relevant. News is likely their last outpost and even that is starting to slip very fast.
It's sad to see, what used to be a crack directory, social hub (besides AOL one of the first true social networks), email, map and IM providers is now barely an afterthought and throwing the next cool "stand back I got this" manager to the wolves. But I can understand the frustration. Google and Apple both would have been happy to snap it up at one point, but it's too late and there is zero value left in the company besides the really nice Yahoo! name, and there's no big name to sell it to beyond perhaps AT&T or someone else that may want the infrastructure for something.
And turning down that job offer to work remote was a great idea. I was worried that they would suddenly require me to work from their HQ all of a sudden, and that was my only reason for turning down the job.
I feel sorry for the current employees that got sucker punched... but honestly, a majority of the good ones are long gone.
It was just the feel of the conversation. This was 2 years in the past though.
Me: "I'd like to work remotely from Japan"
Them: "We can't allow remote positions now"
Me: "I can't move to the US for family reasons"
Them: "Let me check with HR"
One week later
Them: "We will let you work remotely, when can you start?"
Just something was off it felt like. There was more talk than that of course, and a meeting when I was actually at HQ in CA for other reasons.
In the midst of cultural upheaval in a large company, this doesn't seem like an unreasonable move, at least in the short term. I can see how the inherent disconnectedness of remote employees might make a general sense of disconnectedness worse for the onsite employees. If Yahoo! can redefine itself clearly, this "disconnectedness infection" would find a far less vulnerable host. (People that were hired under the assumption that they'd be allowed to WFH indefinitely have my profound sympathies!)
I work at a Fortune50, and I have to admit that if Mayer manages to turn Yahoo around that this will set a dangerous precedent for other large companies.
The ability to work remotely is a huge perk to having a tech job, and if other corporations see Yahoo killing WFH and then managing to save such a large sinking ship, they might infer causality.
Until Yahoo actually becomes successful as a whole again, this is just them thrashing about desperately. I'll be worried if we start to see success in Mayer's methods.
I work at a Fortune50, and I have to admit that if Mayer manages to turn Yahoo around that this will set a dangerous precedent for other large companies.
The ability to work remotely is a huge perk to having a tech job, and if other corporations see Yahoo killing WFH and then managing to save such a large sinking ship, they might infer causality.
That's an interesting point. Up until now, I've thought of the Yahoo situation as a "I don't have a dog in this fight" kind of scenario... ie, I'm a mildly interested outsider with no stake in the whole thing. And since I usually like to root for the underdog, I have been hoping for a meaningful recovery for Yahoo under Mayer.
As an engineer, this makes me have less desire to be with Yahoo. This move is like something a parent would do to a group of kids they couldn't trust to do their job without supervision. How about they just bring in, or fire the bad remote employees? Why risk punishing quiet, smart guys (who might be slightly introverted) who serve important purposes? Our company has remote employees, and most of them are brilliant.
Pulling remote workers in is a sign you cannot measure the value of the output of remote workers - and it is not going to get any easier when they are filling up your corridors
That was, at least for me, the promise of all this communication technology, and one of the reasons for me to go into software: to work from home or any other place, spend more time with people I care about, no more commuting, no need to sit in a boring fluorescent lighted room for 8+ hours a day.
It really feels like business is taking a wrong turn lately. Back to reduced independence of workers and patriarchal policies. They decide what's good for you, and the office is a nice cosy place to be with your fellow workers, sit in this chair and you'll be sooo productive! Instead of deciding someones merit on the quality and timeliness of their work.
I suppose it's a sign of the times, to not take even small risks anymore, even if people end up better for it. Not to look at individual merit but take rash decisions. It's all about squishing the last bits of productivity using "proven" methods (dating from the industrial revolution?), which may just as well be self-defeating in the end. After all, remote working does allow picking the person with exactly the right experience to do a certain job from all over the world.
Same here - I now actually spend time with my children (which has its own set of challenges but ...)
I want my company to succeed - and I want to to succeed as a distributed remote company - mainly because I think that giving people back the time spent on commuting will benefit the communities they live in disproportionately
Absolutely true. Inability to handle remote workers is a undeniable red flag of incompetent management structure that has no clue how to manage, what is productive work, or how to evaluate who is contributing.
Remote work can work well, but it unfortunately puts more pressure on management. Basically, it requires a disciplined, thorough, and consistent style of management. (Notice that these are all good things, no matter where your team is.) Many organizations, unwilling or unable to achieve this, resort to a more informal style that includes dropping by, looking over shoulders, and generally using visual confirmation that employees are doing what you think they should be.
It's a shame, because there's an increasing amount of research that shows that people are happier, more productive, and even healthier when they can work from home.
Successful incorporation of remote work boils down to a few things that sound simple but are difficult in practice:
1. Evaluate performance and progress as much as possible by results that are objective and measurable in some way (this goes for company goals as well, not just personal).
2. Communicate the same way with everyone, whether they are remote or local. If people in the office chat in person, but only email with their remote colleagues, they will definitely end up being marginalized.
3. Avoid any discussion that could, indirectly or directly, stigmatize people for being remote.
If you have full organizational support for the above, remote work can be very productive.
> It's a shame, because there's an increasing amount of research that shows that people are happier, more productive, and even healthier when they can work from home.
Can you please link this research from here? All the research I read said that collocated teams kick remote teams asses.
The Ctirp study last year showed that remote CSRs at a Chinese travel agency were more productive than the ones in the office. Of course that might not be applicable to other jobs.
Check this post from StackExchange [1]. One of the things I definitely took away from it is that while working remotely has benefits and affords flexibility to employees and employers, it incurs very real costs that have to be mitigated and accounted for. Making an explicit choice one way or the other can be better than muddling through halfway.
Does not get what? Remote employees are a commitment, a company cannot just have remote employees without making compromises and committing to doing it right. Mayer is trying to rescue Yahoo, if the remote employees are not providing enough value to justify that investment in remote workers then it makes no sense for Yahoo to retain remote workers.
Yahoo, which once was a place talented people wanted to work at (I have worked with some very bright ex-Yahoo-ers), is fighting for relevance which in part requires talented people.
Getting good folks to bet on a potentially sinking ship requires the appearance that it is not an unpleasant place to work. The commitment is on both sides, employer and employee. When many companies are shedding old traditions (like the one Mayer is instating) to attract talent, Yahoo seems to be doing the opposite in this move, less attractive to _current_ employees.
If you can't manage remote employees well enough to weed out those who do not produce, or you believe that dead weight will not still be dead weight when you move it in office, you just don't get it.
The ones that don't have any other options will stay ( you retain a higher percentage of people who are not top performers ), the rest that you would want to keep leave ( the best employees can just get another remote job right away )
This is the classic problem with voluntary buyouts and other discretionary layoffs - you only keep the people without other options.
They're wrong to equate being remote with not producing value. If people are not producing value for the company, sure, fire them. If they are doing well, then why force them to relocate? What's the business sense in that?
They have $X in their budget. If the remote employees are producing $Y value, where $Y>$X, then they are earning their keep. But suppose Yahoo believes they can yield 1.5Y for the same $X budget by having on-site workers?
It's not like companies are (or should be) altruistic democracies. I can see why a person affected by this would be sore, but they don't really have a valid gripe IMO. I'm personally a fan of at-will employment.
The article doesn't say that people were hired and promised 100% remote work. More likely, they have an office with their name on it already and they just have the ability to work from home whenever they want and so they never come in.
I don't see this as a bait-and-switch unless there's something to back that up.
This article is as much a statement about Yahoo as much as it is about remote vs. on-site work. Personally, I question Yahoo's long-term relevance anyway. As each year goes by, it seems they lag further and further behind, and are not part of the real momentum anymore. I'm curious if others agree. The most news I have heard about Yahoo in the last year or so was really all about the celebrity status of Mayer, being pregnant on the job, etc. Does anyone here foresee something relevant coming from that shop?
I remember working at Yahoo in the late 90's as a barista and watching all the people walking around with HTML for Dummies books under their arms while enjoying their free espresso and chai thinking nah, these guys won't make it.
I remember my friends working at Yahoo in the 2000's being all excited about the cult worship, good perks, then getting cynical about being stifled because they copied everything AOL was doing with project matrix management thinking nah, these guys won't make it.
I remember being at Google watching Marissa Mayer's user profile being delete right after the announcement got out that morning thinking nah, these guys won't make it.
But then I keep remembering, my mom still reads Yahoo Taiwan, uses Yahoo Mail, and sends me Yahoo News links. Then I keep remembering about the hundreds of products with plenty of inertia keeping the overall organization going.
Yahoo's in a great position. They still have good talent, have good traffic, and most importantly they can position themselves to be Apple's best friend by simply being Google's enemy.
Flickr, IntoNow, legacy stuff like Mail, Sports, Trave are still pretty diamonds that needs polish and TLC. They just gotta shore up profit to stay alive while out Google Google.
I can't help but think flickr (pro member here) missed the "social boat". Yahoo acquired them for $35 million. Instagram was $1 billion. If they had jumped onto sharing photos on twitter/facebook at the right time, facebook might not have ever even IPOed.
Instagram $1BB is an once in a lifetime situation brought on by the urgency of a company looking to block out competition and having the money.
Flickr isn't the same product as Instagram.
The real question is should Flickr change into an Instagram-like product or should Flickr stay as a photography community/product and can that still be profitable.
I don't know, but SmugMug, Behance, 500px etc are doing well. But the photo pie is getting bigger while Flickr's slice isn't necessarily growing at the same pace. This is a tough decision for executive management to double down, hold, or fold.
Now that the internet is mainstreamed why is this a bad thing? No, really, think it through. Why would having a good hold on the demographics that would actually pay attention to ads be a bad thing?
Yahoo's corporate DNA being a media company should make help, not detract, when new media is just media.
Kara Swisher has "issues" with M. Mayer. The typical ~snarky undertone oozes from this article (and everything else she writes for All Things D on the subject). She was a great reporter for the WSJ 10 years ago, though.
I've noticed people taking note of and commenting on Kara Swisher's take-charge, arrogant, brusque nature far more often than with many male tech journalists. Unexamined bias, or an expectation that female correspondents be softer and nicer?
In this case I don't believe it's sexism for one minute. Allthingsd (and specifically this author, I believe) are very well-known for aggressively publishing and criticizing leaks from Yahoo. Any motivations behind such a tactic would certainly bleed through into the aforementioned writing style.
There's a shortage of people who still want to work at Yahoo. I used to be one of them but they pulled a similar stunt with me and decided to change the terms of my hiring long after I had accepted an offer. Obviously we don't have all the details, but I don't think this was a smart move to attract new talent.
Being a news article, I am assuming they did their best to make it sound dramatic. In other words, "several hundred" probably translates to 307 remote workers. Still technically accurate, but a much less impressive headline.
That company is dying and it needs drastic changes to get it back to what it once was. Those changes are bound to piss off a lot of people, but the alternative is to continue on the same downhill route. Mayer is trying to change the cultural problems she perceives. I have a different opinion about that particular change she is making, but that doesn't matter... Good for her. I hope it works.
Ok. I actually do understand why a company might feel that having lots of talented people concentrated in the same area is better than having them all scattered in different work places. I'm not saying that I necessarily share this point of view, just that I wouldn't reject it as an idea.
Here's the thing - Google and the various other top high tech companies that are known for this go out of their way to make the workplace a mini paradise. Shuttles with wifi from noe valley, free and great food, extensive gyms and sports facilities, haircuts, dry cleaning, sabbaticals, tuition reimbursement, "take all you like" vacation policies... yeah, it's all designed to get you to stay at work 24/7, but at least they're trying to make it so nice that you'll want to.
I worked for a small company that eliminated telecommuting and pulled out the "google doesn't do this" line, but with none of the perks. Uh...
If yahoo wants to become a developer paradise, maybe they'll pull this off. If they want everyone to show up and work in a depressing cubicle all day, they'll be losing a lot of talent very soon.
I worked at a 'this is not Google!' company for while. I kept hearing that the place wasn't Google over and over. It got to be where you couldn't say the G word. They had a messed up telecommute policy where the privileged group could telecommute while the serfs had to work the cubes.
Thank God companies never hire consultants, use suppliers, open branch offices or collaborate with other people that aren't located IN THIS VERY BUILDING or they would never be able to get anything done.
I'm not too surprised by the move, I worked 6 years at yahoo and have always been amazed at how naive the company was with WFH. It may seem hilarious, but I strongly believe the company actually thought those employees would a) work and b) be at home!
It was not uncommon to see people getting 2 or 3 days per week at home. I personally rolled with 2 per week for several years and it was great. I'd do a few emails in the morning, and that was about it for the day. I'd generally go play a full round of golf or spend the day biking.
My startup sells database software to other coders. I think for this kind of startup, remote people are essential. They can get a perspective on your product and the perception of it in the marketplace, that you just can't get when you set in a room with the makers all day. That is, they see the world more like our users do, so it's often the remote folks who come up with big innovations.
Remote work often means out of the daily bustle work - thats one of the reasons folk say "let me work from home for two days, I have to get this done"
If you can translate that into a continuous cycle of working on the most valuable not the most urgent problem, and a cycle of picking the valuable problem that turns you on, productivity should go through the roof
All the crap that must get done - I am much more willing to do crap when I have hit a home run the day before
Edit: this sounds like one expects to do productive work day in day out - I don't think that's true - one should aim for a home run every two-four weeks and be prepared to learn and measure during that period.
I probably shouldn't feed a troll, but I'll try to reason.
A CEO's job is just flat out different from an engineers job. The CEO's job is often to be the public face of the company, to go out and make deals, to talk to key investors, to raise money in some cases.
Or put another way, a CEO of a publicly traded company wouldn't be doing their job properly if they were in the office every day.
As much as i hate to say it, probably the right thing to do to get a fresh grip on allocation & performance. I work at a place that frowns upon WFH and really wish it wasn't the case, my team would be 50% more productive if WFH few days a week. From my experience, lazy/bad managers find it much harder manage remote team, and often advocate no WFH policies.
More likely they will have to quit if they don't want to drive into the office every day... They all have an office they belong to presumably. It's not a big stretch to ask them to go there Monday to Friday.
It's not been a month since the last time I posted my list of research articles on the productivity drop you get from not having teams co-located so I won't post it again in full... but for those who are interested you may find these old discussions of interest:
Let's assume for the sake of argument that it is proven that onsite employees are more productive then remotes.
So what?
Some employers will do what Yahoo just did. Others may say: look, I want you to be productive, but more than that I want you to be happy. I prefer having great developers working at 90% of their capacity to squeezing every last bit of productivity from the mediocre ones I'm still able to retain.
I suspect this will do a great deal to give ammunition to 37 Signals for writing their book about remote work.
I'm a huge fan of remote working, and I think that the current corporate mindset against it... and company arguments against it... are mostly just complete bullshit.
Of course, working remotely doesn't work in every case, but I'm certain that it would work very well in far more situations than people are willing to admit, or try.
I've seen this happening with other companies recently. There may be a small trend away from remote working. I agree its unfair to the employee who was hired on flexibility, but I don't think it is a bad move for Yahoo. It takes a very specific type of individual to work at home with the same efficiency as in an office.
> It takes a very specific type of individual to work at home with the same efficiency as in an office.
Does it? If I want to slack off I find it just as easy in the office as I do at home. Heck I can even have music on at work or stream a video.
Frankly for me I find home working far less distracting than work. Work is noisy, people are coming and going, there are calls all around me, at home it is just me in a dark office only interrupted by things aimed specifically at me (Skype, e-mail, etc).
But this all boils down to the same old 1900s time mythos. You take intellectual workers and hold them to standards created for factory workers.
The theory goes that if I work longer I am more efficient. If they restrict access to distractions then I am more efficient. If they can look over my shoulder I am more efficient.
Personally I think this is all nonsense. The only way to track my efficiency is with milestones. The nice thing about milestones is that they are metrics which are flexible. If you fail to meet them you have a two way discussion about /why/.
I second this. I've been working out of hours a lot recently and find that my productivity is boosted dramatically when I am alone. Open plan offices need to go the way of the dinosaur.
My optimal work environment is working with one or two coworkers in a coffee shop. I'm something like six times more productive (in terms of code/feature points/tasks) than working strictly remote (as I do most of the time).
It's a reason why I'm looking to hire remote developers who are mostly geographically located near me--main office is in Nashville, I'm in Boston. WFH when you want, head into a coworking space when you want some company. Seems the best of both worlds to me.
There's a lot of research suggesting that people overestimate their productivity in remote working environments and that in general, max productivity comes from small, in-person working environments.
My guess is almost all of this is totally dependent on the environments you are discussing. Some people have built very productive home work environments but most have not. Most people's office environment is probably better than what they have at home (maybe they have multiple monitors, supplies, a nice chair and desk, etc) but I don't think there's anything specific to office vs. home aside from the investment into productivity of that space.
My guess is some of the folks on here hollering about being way better workers at home are right. They also probably spent several thousand bucks on a nice workspace, keyboard, extra monitor, stand up desk, whatever they need....
The research that I've seen supporting small in-person environments has all been carried out with low-skill workers (typically undergrad volunteers) on tasks that do not require deep critical thought or creativity. It's not at all clear that it generalizes to the sort of work that a senior technical staff member does.
I am not a researcher in the field, so its entirely possible that there is good work to support your claim, but all the research I've seen cited on HN in past discussions was crap or simply not relevant for the stated reason.
I've yet to see research that compares a modern distributed workflow with github/trac/unfuddle, IRC/campfire, IM, Skype, etc. compared to on site. Some of the remote developer studies are hilariously out dated.
Maybe there's a generation gap (People who grew up with IM/IRC can naturally use it communicate better?) or my experience is too colored by working only remote my whole career, but between the places I worked without distributed workflows and those I hear about from my friends in the industry, my anecdotal evidence says distributed teams are far far more effective.
Same here. Not everyone can focus at home though. I know I can get a TON of work done at home compared to office, but my girlfriend cannot get anything done at home. Definitely depends on the person :)
More than a specific individual, it requires a very specific type of workplace organisation.
Remote workers can be successful if and only if the communication and processes support it: all discussion within the teams must be electronic, on wikis, mailing lists, IRC or skype chats. Knowledge must be written down, not available via "ask Bob to fix the build on your computer". Now, these processes are useful on their own (more documentation, less interruption for all workers), but they do require effort by the on-site workers to avoid making decisions at the coffee machine. As a result, I believe remote work can work out well only if a sufficient fraction (perhaps over 50%) people are remote, not a small minority.
However, most discussions of remote vs. on-site assume that the people are the same. Yes, having the same team in a room is probably more productive than having them distributed. But by accepting remote work, companies have a much wider pool of talent available. Most people over 30 have partners with local jobs, kids in school, a house, relatives, and a set of friends they would not give up to move for a small improvement in salary or job satisfaction. Instead of comparing remote vs. on-site, it makes sense to compare an amazing remote team to an average on-site team.
In the Yahoo case, I expect that many of the developers will quit and find a job with a more local company, instead of moving or commuting for hours. Is that really an improvement of total productivity?
E.g. -- someone posted a link here to an article in which they describe using Google Hangouts for everything. There's a permanent one that everyone is on all damn day. There are special, throwaway hangouts for asides and meetings and anything else that might be needed.
You don't need to be in person, and many people would surprised how effective teams can be even when they're not in the same room. All it takes is good communication, and by that I mean: 1- good communication technology, like a good net connection and good chat software and good cameras, 2- good use of technology for communication (IM software is not sufficient), and 3- good communication practices (which amounts to: communicate early, communicate often).
I can certainly understand why current employees hired under the assumption that they could work from home are upset. But the fact of the matter is that if working from home isn't in your employment contract, then you shouldn't really count on it being acceptable forever. A company has a right to change its mind, in the same way that an employee might.
If an employee of Company X demanded to work from home two days a week for some reason otherwise he'd quit, Company X managers would weigh the cost of losing the employee against the cost of having him absent two days a week. And then they would make a decision.
I don't see how this is any different. Yahoo! has decided that being on site is a priority. Current employees may feel differently. These employees should weigh the cost of moving or commuting against the cost of finding new employment and make a decision.
All of that makes sense, but imagine you were hired away from a job at a great company within the last year. You probably can't go back, you haven't vested and you're essentially being pushed out after you were lured there with the promise of being able to work remotely. I understand that these people are free to quit, but that doesn't mean Yahoo! hasn't put them in a bad situation.
I agree it's worse when a company does it to an employee. Being forced into changing a job can have major negative effects on an individual's life, whereas Yahoo! will probably be just fine if any single person decides to quit.
It doesn't change the fact that it can happen, and this is a good reminder to the rest of us who have things promised verbally in an employment offer to have that stuff in writing. I am writing this as a warning to others and my future self.
The article specifically mentions customer service reps. Don't know what percentage is csr, and what are stereotypical "I can work anywhere I want" devs.
But for those remote csrs, besides the upheaval, it's going to be tough working in SV on csr pay.
And how much team building do you need to read troubleshooting prompts out of a binder anyway?
The one part I do not understand about all of this comes when you have a company with multiple locations and work that crosses locations.
Say you have east coast and west coast facilities. If people only worked within their local facility, I can see the reasoning and advantages. What I don't understand is where the value is when the work crosses facilities.
What you would need to do to bridge the gap between the workers in the different facilities is the same thing you should do to bridge the gap between remote workers.
How is having people that need to work together in separate facilities any better than the people working remotely?
Funny thing is, the different facilities are probably more problematic than remote workers. It can be more prone to politics and the organisation as a whole pulling in different directions.
The exception is where the remote does have some well defined autonomous reason for existing, for example a sales office.
In comparison remote workers obviously are usually tied to a particular office.
Can people please chime in with the names of any companies they know to be actively looking to hire remotely so we job seekers that don't want this yahoo move to become a trend know where to apply?
Making the assumption that Mayer slash Yahoo wouldn't implement a policy like this on a whim, I bet this comes out of a bigger plan. If one had a mandate to do X, studied how to do that, and found X would be more likely to succeed with a team working purely onsite, then you just do a cost benefit analysis and make a decision. You'll find out later if you're decision was a good one, so hopefully on the front end you've got good data, judgement, and moxie to effectively make bold decisions!
I completely agree with Mayer. As a student that took the Babson MBA program, it was a about building the team foundation, understanding that collaboration was key. My whole team was made up of mom, dads, parents of all sorts. The key goal was to assign a task and get it done in a timely manner while achieving our best result. It taught me to push myself, push global collaboration... beginning the foundation, allows for future growth.
You'd think they're doing this for security. I'm taking a security class right now and pretty much I've realized that remote computer systems are super insecure relative to anything on site. With the recent events of security fails like what happened at the nytimes it seems that the risk is becoming extremely high. I think it's a smart move by Mayer.
I had a talk with my supervisor a few days ago about working from home vs being in the office. We're "open office", which sucks in its current form, but I've come to realize has some definite advantages.
The problem is when you have these black-n-white policies. When we're in bug-fixing, hardening iteration I estimate that I'm almost 2x productive working at home, than I am commuting in and dealing with the chit-chat and distractions of being in open office.
The bottom line is that it's completely retarded for a CEO to make that kind of decision on a company-wide basis. Middle managers should be making that kind of decision.
When only a few people on a team are remote I've found that it just doesn't work as well. I imagine it could work but it would take very strong discipline from the people in the office.