

It's easy to blame minorities - johnmwilliams
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3455-its-easy-to-blame-minorities

======
jmduke
> Most estimates put the number of remote workers between 300 and 500.

Which estimates are those?

Overall, this post reeks of victimizing.

> So yes, remote workers are keeping Yahoo from being the “absolute best place
> to work”.

Stop attacking a strawman! Nobody's arguing that remote workers are the one
stumbling block between Yahoo and mountains of glory. But there's clearly a
culture that needs to be attacked, and if one of the elements of that culture
is that remote workers ARENT LOGGING INTO THE VPN then maybe Yahoo shouldn't
have remote workers for the time being.

It's also cute that DHH chose not to disclose that he's releasing a book about
remote work (which, you know, might be a slight conflict of interest.)

~~~
rayiner
People on HN are very quick to pull the conflict of interest card. People who
write books about telecommuting unsurprisingly believe its a good thing and
have a negative reaction the a major company cancelling it.

~~~
waps
What amazes me beyond anything else is that there is anyone at all, aside from
upper management, that even attempts to defend the killing of telecommuting.
Anyone who isn't an exec at a large company does not have any real data on
whether it's better or not. They may have anecdotes, they may even have a few
anecdotes, but that's it. And, frankly, for execs there's an inherent conflict
of interest. Just take Marissa Mayer :

[http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/28/how-yahoo-ceo-
marissa-...](http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/28/how-yahoo-ceo-marissa-
mayer-is-building-a-nursery-by-her-office-and-dissing-working-moms/)

This woman is ... I am sorry to use this word, she's disgusting. I have zero
respect for someone who asks people to come into the office every morning, and
says this makes things better, see she does it herself ... building a nursery
into the fucking office, and for all I know she takes a helicopter to avoid
the traffic.

This is about as honorable as an army company standing outside an indian
encampment, armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, saying how they've
"fairly negotiated a transfer of land".

These people are the reason we live in bland, empty inner cities with zero
space for anyone and tiny apartments except for the super-rich. Telecommuting
could solve that problem, and we should be fighting for it. To be exact, we
should be fighting people like Marissa Mayer and other execs to get it.

Why the fuck don't we do that ?

------
atonse
I don't see anywhere that people are blaming remote workers for all of Yahoo's
troubles.

People are starting to care about Yahoo now and not just look at them with
pity. Mayer is trying to clean up that company. When you are turning around a
large institution like Yahoo, you're going to piss off a lot of people. These
are all signs that someone is actually trying to turn things around there,
instead of continuing the status quo like the previous CEOs did. This is just
one of many moves.

I think remote work is great, but reading elsewhere shows that there was a lot
of abuse of the policy _at Yahoo_. When a policy is rampantly being abused,
you can revoke it until you can figure out how to better measure its effects.
I'm sure they will re-institute this policy once they have better control over
it, but that probably won't get any press.

I still have a generally favorable opinion of what Mayer's doing so far, and
will try to hold my personal judgement to see how Mayer's moves affect Yahoo
in the long term.

~~~
MartinCron
It sounds like you may think that Mayer knows more about running Yahoo than a
random person on the Internet does.

------
tokenadult
One large company with an uncertain future shutting down opportunities to work
from home is an opening in the market for several smaller companies with more
upside to their futures to offer such opportunities to new hires. In a diverse
business ecosystem with free enterprise, customers like you and me decide
which companies' products and services will be monetizable, and the companies
decide which personnel practices help them meet market challenges. I know of a
SaaS company, much smaller than Yahoo but apparently growing and profitable,
that has an explicit "results-based management" policy. That means the
managers don't care how often their developers come into the office, and as
long as developers finish their projects with reasonable quality and speed,
and keep up with their support tasks (ALL the developers do rotating shifts on
support, to stay near customer concerns), then the managers are happy. Not all
companies can organize that way, but then again not all companies have to
organize just like Yahoo either. Yahoo is one model of running a company. The
37 Signals model appears to work for 37 Signals, but not everyone wants to
follow their model. Each company gets to try something out, and we consumers
get to pick the winners.

------
kmfrk

        Gruber summed up this sentiment as “Yahoo employees have
        been allowed to work remotely, and they have not
        excelled”.
            In other words, Yahoo is a rudderless basket case, so
        it must be because of those 2-4% of the work force who are
        “goofing off”. Heh.
    

How the hell did he contort himself into inferring that from what Gruber
wrote?!

~~~
papsosouid
>How the hell did he contort himself into inferring that from what Gruber
wrote?!

It is called dishonesty. It is the entire reason anyone knows who DHH is.

~~~
_pius
_It is called dishonesty. It is the entire reason anyone knows who DHH is._

I understand you may not like the guy, but I'm pretty sure DHH's fame came
mostly from creating Ruby on Rails.

~~~
papsosouid
I don't think it did. What's the name of the guy who created django? I know
the only reason I know of DHH and not django-guy is that DHH spent years
dishonestly promoting rails/trashing java.

~~~
_pius
_I don't think it did. What's the name of the guy who created django?_

Adrian Holovaty et al.

~~~
papsosouid
<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rhetorical+question>

~~~
_pius
Yeah, I got what you were trying to do. The rhetorical question you chose
didn't support your point.

~~~
papsosouid
Yes it does. Compare how many people know django guy vs how many people know
DHH. One specific individual knowing who django guy is doesn't invalidate the
argument.

------
ssharp
I can't believe how much coverage this story has gotten, particularly in
popular media. I expected lots of dust in the tech community, but CNN has been
publishing op-ed's everyday since the announcement.

I just don't get the idea that the remote workers are slacking off so much
that they need to make a sweeping policy change. If the remote workers are
performing properly, then it's a 100% obvious management issue. Managers
aren't properly managing remote workers and the hiring process is unable to
properly weed out slackers and lazy people.

~~~
kmfrk
1\. A subtle discussion of "work-life balance", i.e. how women aren't suited
to have time-consuming careers.

2\. It's an opportunity for linkbaiters to occupy contrarian or coarse
viewpoints (Forbes, Slate, etc.)

3\. It's a way for people to pretend like they know anything about managing
Silicon Valley tech companies by chiming in on this.

------
Millennium
Well, the article makes for very interesting rhetoric: poisoning the well for
people arguing against telework by equating it with categorism. The heavily-
loaded language is a dead giveaway.

But without data to back it up, it's still just rhetoric. The fact is, even a
relatively small group of people can ruin something for everyone. Ask anyone
who has worked on teams for any length of time, and they'll tell you just how
much damage even one person can do.

How do you predict who these people will be, or what kind of damage they'll
do? By and large, you don't. That doesn't mean people don't try: the so-called
"poisonous people" phenomenon has plagued the open-source community for long
enough that entire books have been written on the subject. But the problem
remains, and there's still no fair and reliable way to predict who will turn
toxic.

Without that, you've basically got two options. You can decide that the costs
associated with abuse are worth preserving the privilege, and mitigate the
damage as best you can. Or, if the damage is too severe or the problem too
persistent, you can declare that the poisonous people have ruined it for
everybody. Yahoo took the former approach for a long time, and it hasn't
worked out for them. Now they're trying the latter. Is it truly fair to blame
them for that?

------
jsight
How do we know that the number of people who work remotely are only 300-500?
It seems to me that one of the big issues here is that Yahoo! has lumped
together three types of workers:

1) Those who work remotely (not near an office) 2) Those who work near an
office, and work from home 1-2 days per week 3) Those who work near an office,
and have a regularly scheduled day off ("work from home") 1-2 days per week

I suspect that he may be right that there are only 300-500 of category 1. IMO,
these are the people that are getting unfairly hit by this particular move.

Categories 2-3 need to be sorted and dealt with as appropriate. This move
seems like a reasonable thing to do for Yahoo! to deal with them, under the
circumstances.

------
peterevans
I think this is probably the best point to be made over Yahoo's change in
policy -- there just aren't that many remote workers at Yahoo. With the
emphasis they'd put on this particular change in policy, it's natural for
people to conclude that Yahoo thinks that having everyone come into the office
to work is a significant change necessary to right the ship. When so few
workers are remote, can that really be the case? Does Yahoo know what they're
doing?

I don't know the answers, but those are the questions running through my mind
right now.

------
zaidrahman
This is not a case of blaming the "minority". To understand, let me digress a
little – the case where we can easily get away by blaming a minority is when a
school blames a small subset of students for spoiling a school's average test
scores. That is called blaming a "minority" and it works.

However, what has been done here is purely for work optimisation. Mayer is
clearly trying to change the culture of Yahoo, and in the attempts of doing so
she has found that remote workers don't fit in the type of culture of strong
collaboration and unity she wants Yahoo to become. And therefore, she has
decided to change that. Simply stated.

There can't be any way for us to understand whether these remote workers under
performed at Yahoo or not! However, when you try to make a defining culture,
even the smallest of things matter. And perhaps, remote workers are not in
line with the culture Yahoo is building. Regardless of how small the workforce
is.

What will be interesting to me is how many of these remote workers are truly
remote? As in, how many of them work in a completely different location than
Yahoo HQ? To be honest, going down to work when you're living 5 blocks away
from the office isn't particularly characterised as remote, knowing that the
boss can call you in any second.

------
justinph
I don't get the sense that Yahoo was attempting to blame all it's ailments on
remote work. DHH is reading that into this. Is it a component? Perhaps. But
not the root cause.

------
Kurtz79
"But that’s exactly why it’s been so easy to place the blame on them for
Yahoo’s ails. "

One thing is shutting down telecommuting because it is believed it's not
working, another is "blaming" it for Yahoo ails, a statement that I haven't
seen anywhere else apart from this article.

It's probably part of a larger set of measure that the new CEO has been
undertaking to revive a stagnating company, talking about "blaming minorities"
is plain exaggerating.

~~~
MartinCron
It's not like this is the first or only change that Mayer has done as CEO.

------
rushabh
I think the most important aspect in remote working is not only whether the
company believes in a result oriented culture or not. What gets ignored, is
that a lot of knowledge is embedded in the culture. Like a random conversation
in the hallway or how someone reacts to a crisis. What remote workers also
miss is the level of energy and the optimism/pessimism that is going around.

Without high fidelity feedback, a remote worker may be totally mislead about
certain issues, including his or her own performance. Hence the onus is always
on the remote worker to stay in deep contact with her or his peers. And
companies that allow remote working should also make this explicit.

Will be interesting to read how 37signals works around these issues.

------
dominic_cocch
This post wasn't very well thought-out.

"Gruber summed up this sentiment as “Yahoo employees have been allowed to work
remotely, and they have not excelled”. In other words, Yahoo is a rudderless
basket case, so it must be because of those 2-4% of the work force who are
“goofing off”. Heh."

That was a leap of logic, for sure. What this really says is: if 2-4% of your
workforce isn't working out because they're remote, then 2-4% of your
workforce should not be working remote. It does not place the blame entirely
on those remote workers, though.

I imagine this is a small move in a larger, company-wide shift. It just seems
to be getting the most press for some reason.

~~~
jholloway7
It's clear to me that he didn't parse that Gruber sentence correctly and his
misinterpretation invalidates the entire post.

------
LordIllidan
Why does every one think they know better than Yahoo's CEO about how to manage
Yahoo itself?

~~~
zem
it's a common problem in the tech press. back in the day, everyone knew how to
solve sun's problems too.

~~~
Evbn
Did Sun's CEO know better?

~~~
pwthornton
The idea that CEOs always know how to run their company better than outsiders
is suspect argument. If this were the case, CEOs would never get fired and
replaced by outsiders. And if this were the case, CEOs wouldn't drive
companies into the ground.

But this isn't the case. CEOs are just like everyone else. Some of them have
bad ideas. Some of them make gambles that don't pay off. Some of them don't
really understand their competitors that well.

I'm not making a judgement as to Mayer's ability to run Yahoo, but the idea
that an outsider can't have good suggestions for a company and CEO is crazy.
Yes, a lot of people in the tech press like to make recommendations to
companies that aren't well thought out and are perhaps done for linkbait
reasons, but there is a lot of data on the merits of remote work, especially
when done part time. I don't see any harm in pointing that out, and a debate
about working environments and work-life balance is important.

Mayer is not like most employees. Most people can't afford to hire help and to
have a nursery built next to their office at work. She can, and she doesn't
have to deal with the same issues that most of her employees do.

Saying that we can't have a debate about this because we're not the CEO of
Yahoo is crazy.

------
jkonowitch
While his claims certainly aren't airtight, ie the cynical idea that Yahoo is
blaming its remote workers for the trouble, I do think there is some truth to
the general sentiment; failing companies often grasp for any action they can
take to stop the bleeding, and these actions, undertaken in haste or amidst
great anxiety, can yield very little value or even cause harm. I'm not sure if
that is what is happening at Yahoo, but I've definitely seen it happen before.

------
alberth
Lets be honest here, 37signals is being a wolf in sheep's clothes here with
their recent Yahoo posts.

Yahoo just ended their remote workforce program because they need better
collaboration to occur which they believe can only happen face to face.

37signals sells colloborarion software for remote employees.

People seem to miss that it's in 37signals best interest to bash Yahoo for
this move.

------
pablasso
To be fair to Yahoo, nowhere do they mention that the remote workers are at
fault for the company or the workforce struggles. They only want them
performing better.

I'm pro remote working, but I can't see the fault in that.

------
xfour
DHH is leaning toward looking obsessed with this, at this point. But, I think
Yahoo, no matter the reason for original attempt has received so much negative
press that this will in the long run end up costing them.

------
rednukleus
Why are people still posting and upvoting these articles? DHH has made it
clear that he doesn't want his articles on Hackernews, which he described as a
"cesspool".

------
3minus1
It's easy to make asinine generalizations about things.

