

Why Yahoo's Decision Might Not Be So Wrong - brennenHN
http://brennenbyrne.com/post/43992740383/why-yahoos-decision-might-not-be-so-wrong

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gigantor
Case study: At my last employer, we had a two remote workers and a project
manager. Our entire team knew they were doing very little work, especially
knowing one of the remote employees was maintaining a household with 4
children, and getting paid quite a bit more. One had the gall to ask us how to
access source control very late in a project. Morale was clearly affected by
those who had to come in every day and work their set 7.5 hours and had to
make a case to stay home for the cable guy.

To make things fair, we really wish this blanket policy at Yahoo was put in
effect, axed all remote arrangements, and reevaluate their remote arrangements
on a case-by-case basis and bring fairness back without individually
discriminating.

The reports of 'Yahoo is all against telecommuting' do not tell the entire
story and are taking advantage of sensationalist headlining. Telecommuting
works when everyone has a certain level of discipline, as it's far too easy to
take advantage of and end up being complacent. Places do exist that
essentially issue paychecks just because you're an employee in the system. I
wouldn't be surprised to know far too many Miltons from Office Space are out
there.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Case study: At my last employer, we had a guy who worked on-site and still had
the gall to ask us how to access source control very late in a project. Being
a moron who isn't held accountable doesn't get solved because you're not
remote.

~~~
gigantor
Allow me to clarify; there were no commits to source control on the very
project we were working on. That was proof to us that no work was being done,
unless there's one massive pending check-in waiting to happen, which would
violate our team's internal standards.

~~~
TallGuyShort
In this case it was the same - I had complained several times that this
individual had contributed absolutely nothing to the project, and this was
proof. He asked how to access source control, and then while showing me what
he was trying to access source control for it was apparent he didn't even know
which operating system we were running on. He had written no code, and had
never even successfully run the software. My point is that if people are going
to tolerate useless employees, it can happen on-site just as easily as off-
site.

------
busterarm
I guess I have a bit of a bias here as I'm a remote worker in another company
(almost entirely staffed of remote workers), but the initial news mentions
that a lot of these people are customer support folks.

I'm sorry, but there's almost no reason to have customer support folks on
site. It usually also costs the employer considerably more money to have them
on-site. I can't say this with any certainty for Yahoo, but this move is
commonly done with remote support workers as a stealth layoff. One of my
coworkers has had this done to him three times already (by Mcafee, Microsoft
and others). I've seen financial companies do it by relocating their IT
support from NY/NJ to places like small-town central Ohio (I'm looking at you,
JPMC).

The idea here being that it would cost Yahoo less to have some estimated
percentage of people work out of the office versus having to pay the increased
unemployment insurance rate based on the number of claims they'd have after a
mass layoff. That and they can layoff a bunch of people without it being
announced as a layoff.

Companies that hire remote staff have a tendency to attract people whom for
medical/disability reasons cannot work in an office -- they're the real losers
here.

Yahoo hasn't announced any financial relocation support for anyone moving to
work from the office. I find that pretty telling here.

------
VonGuard
I'm certain this won't hurt Yahoo! We all love remote working, myself
included, but it's not for everyone. And if yer trying to turn a company
around, perhaps having everyone under the same roofs is a good idea.

I'd wager remote working returns later on in the Yahoo! story, and that the
folks working from home right now are just being shoved overboard for lack of
productivity.

I mean, if a Guido or a Gosling shows up and wants to work at Yahoo!, but
wants to be remote, I'd bet they make an exception.

Right now, Yahoo! people are probably used to hiding their lack of
productivity, rather than producing cool software. It tends to happen in dying
orgs. Getting everyone together for a while might help!

And frankly, I don't worry about Marissa at all: she has one HUGE advantage
over every other CEO in the world: she understands how software is built, and
what is required of the people who build it. I don't think any other CEO in
the world understands that kinda stuff.

~~~
nickbarnwell
While I agree with the rest of your post

> I don't think any other CEO in the world understands that kinda stuff.

Larry, Zuck, and Tom Preston-Warner, among others would likely take issue with
that last sentence ;)

~~~
obviouslygreen
Not only that, the assumption people seem to make around here that many if any
CEO's at large companies set low-level policy like this is highly
questionable. You can have an exceptional understanding of development _and_
be a good CEO, but if setting development standards or processes is not
supposed to be part of your responsibilities (very likely), attempting to do
so means you're not doing your job and stepping on the toes of the people who
are supposed to be doing this.

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outside1234
If they were getting 25% less done, and had the data, they should have
referenced that.

My guess is that given that Marissa is so data driven (to a fault - eg. the
thousand shades of blue on the Google ad links as an example) that if she had
had this data she would have shared it.

No, its obvious to me that this was a "we did it like this at Google and
Google was successful" move without data.

~~~
gcp
_No, its obvious to me that this was a "we did it like this at Google and
Google was successful" move without data_

Gourmet chefs in the company restaurant, free massages and 25% pay raises for
everyone? Fair deal (if working at the office is practically an option).

~~~
whathappenedto
The massages were not free. They were $80/hour plus tip. Or you could
sometimes find 2-hour user studies to participate in that would give you a
massage coupon, but it still required a $20 tip.

------
jheriko
I like this response, its basically saying "don't assume anything".

How much experience does everyone have of remote working? My experience
outside of tech is that it gets used to enable daytime shopping, social
activities and other such.

In the industry I've not seen the practice abused, but then it is also rarely
offered, usually under the guise of naive security concerns...

I would love to work from home... then I could move somewhere cheaper. Its a
fantastic luxury, and it won't attract the best in the same way that not being
a tech giant will anyway... ;)

~~~
gcp
I've done it several times. It always was for geographical considerations -
I'm not able to relocate for personal reasons. If you can relocate or are
living in a relatively poor area, the financial consequences can be very
attractive, I've had colleagues from eastern block countries in that
situation. For me that part is a wash - but instead it allows to work for
companies I personally consider more interesting and better fit to my skills,
compared to the locally available jobs.

You can indeed shift some activities that normally happen after work (and the
two you mentioned are very typical) to moments during the workday, when such
venues are much more quiet. This saves you time. In my case (and current job)
it is also more interesting to work late in the evenings because I have to
coordinate with a team in the Valley, which is far away from me timezone-wise.

The time you save commuting is 100% won, either for your personal use or to
work more for your employer/customers. This can be very substantial.

Offering remote work isn't as easy a saying everyone can go home. You need
management that understands what the employees are doing and can judge their
output. You need infrastructure such as a secure chat and _reliable_
videoconferencing. The latter is for some reason very hard to get right. You
also need a good mindset that doesn't treat remotes as the exception, so you
need either teams that are substantially remote, or managers that are remote.

If you're working remotely, you need to deal with things such as potentially
being lonely (I have friends on IRC, which are essential to keep me sane,
other people go to co-working spaces or go grab coffee, etc), the risk of
slipping sleep/work cycles, and good separation of work/home time (this is
tricky, but my social life seems to be OK :P).

I've found IRC just as conductive to getting into the company atmosphere as an
office. It depends on the employer though. At least on IRC you don't risk
sharing the office with the most boring people in the company. You can also
regularly have real-life team meetings. My experience is that during those
nothing gets done (exactly like working in an office j/k) but you can get to
know your teammates a teeny bit better.

Productivity-wise, the advantage of working from home is that you can keep on
going if you're on a roll. You'll have bad days too, just like you can have
bad days at the office.

So: the downsides is that the company needs to invest a bit in this, and have
a setup that's workable (enough people remote!) with a management and IT that
can cope with this, and that it doesn't work as well for everyone.

The upsides: you have much more latitude in hiring people, and you win the
commuting time.

~~~
busterarm
There are wins for the companies, too.

When I worked for a midtown NY hedge fund, they made sure to remind us on a
regular basis that just giving us a desk with a computer and power cost the
company $2000/month.

------
onemorepassword
The only thing we know for sure at this point is that Mayer sucks at PR when
it comes to the tech community.

Which is worrying. If Yahoo really wants to attract top talent again, at the
very least they would have spun this better. Now there is only a leaked
(surprise) internal memo and a complete lack of control over the story, which
means they either don't give a damn or they had no clue.

Neither explanation speaks in favor of Yahoo, even though the decision itself
might be a perfectly good one.

For most of us Yahoo just earned extra points in the "places to avoid working
for" column. Not because of the decision to call in remote workers, but
because they apparently don't understand what it looks like to those people
they actually want to attract.

------
russelluresti
The article makes a point that the decision to take away remote working
privileges is probably based on data that Yahoo had about their remote working
employees. He's suggesting that remote working wasn't working for them, so
they nixed it.

But this is the issue I take with the article and the action from Yahoo -
remote working isn't a "it does/doesn't work for them/us" type of thing.
Remote working either does or does not work, and you are either doing it
correctly or doing it incorrectly. Since there is evidence out there that
shows that remote working can be just as effective as in-office working (and,
in many cases, more effective), I'm left to assume that Yahoo was just doing
it wrong.

I do not believe that the concept of remote fluctuates in its performance so
greatly - the concept is sound. It's the implementation that is flawed -
implementation at companies like Yahoo. There are ways to do it right, and
there are ways to do it wrong; Yahoo chose the latter.

So, now the problem is this: when you find that your company has been failing
at something, do you try to fix it or do you choose to cut it? Many things
that Yahoo has been failing at, in terms of business, have not been cut.
Instead, they're trying to fix them. When it comes to benefits for the
employees, however, they're more than willing to cut those benefits.

In my mind, the correct action isn't to cut the remote working program, but to
find what you're doing wrong and fix it. Cutting the program is only going to
demoralize employees and make the company seem less desirable to future
talent.

------
marshray
I liked the part about "The truth is that decisions like this one get made
based on data".

------
lobster45
There are many employees that are as productive working from home, as they are
in the office. It does depend on the employee's ability to manage their time,
as well as the management structure to manage their workload and collaborate
with the team. Our company has half of their employees in the office, and half
that work from home. The employees working from home are as productive as the
employees in the office but they work on projects together with the team in
the office and we have weekly meetings that touch base with the team. On the
other hand I can see how in a large organization you may have employees that
manage to get away with doing the minimum amount of work from home and it is
obvious to the employees in the office that they do not work as many hours as
those in the office. Factor in commute times, you can easily have in office
employees spending twice as many hours away from home with commute and work
than the home employees. This is a serious drain to morale and overall
productivity

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dsl
One of my previous companies did business with Yahoo. Every single Monday and
Friday was a "working remote" day for the dozen or so contacts I worked with.

If I had to guess this policy is less about the full time remote employees as
it is removing excuses for the 40%+ of Yahoos on the 3-days-week schedule.

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jusben1369
"or the ousting of Mayer which he sees as eminent" - I think you mean
imminent.

~~~
marshray
He may see Mayer as eminent, too. But maybe that would be more properly "whom
he sees as eminent".

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taligent
I am confused why Brennen spent so much time to say so little.

Of course we don't know the exact reasoning behind the decision nor whether
they have metrics to back it up. That is obvious and is the always present
caveat whenever there is a discussion about a decision that people weren't
directly involved in making. So we are always left to make judgements from
outside the box.

So unless Brennen knows something specific he isn't sharing I am going to
continue believing that either (a) this is a dumb decision which shows a lack
of understanding about how software development works or (b) this is a smart
way to reduce headcount without reducing morale.

