
This Is Why You Can’t Have Nice Things, Yahoos - coloneltcb
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/27/mayers-means/
======
danilocampos
You know who I like?

Marissa Mayer. She's doing this right. It's the velvet glove on the iron fist.
She starts with food and modern cell phones. She tosses out the bad execs. She
eliminates the dumb trademark symbols on all the physical signage. Everyone
breathes a sigh of relief – these changes are good news.

The message is clear: your boss knows what you need and wants to take care of
you.

But she's not all cupcakes and kisses.

With the tone set properly, she identifies the dead wood. From what I hear,
_shitloads_ of people are checked out at Yahoo. That's a cultural problem
that's tough to lift. Imagine being checked out _and_ outside of the day-to-
day social nudges that keep you feeling a little bit like your job
expectations have consequence.

Mayer's an optimizer. Years at Google taught her all about getting the best
ROI from the simplest operation. With one stroke, she can identify who really
cares about Yahoo's mission and who is just along for the free gravy train.
Yahoo isn't going to get out of trouble by casually, lazily sidling to the
promised land.

It's going to take work. And now the boss wants a sign of commitment to that
work.

The hysteria about this move is misplaced. She nailed it. Great call.

~~~
bitcartel
What happened to leading by example?

 _"Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer built a nursery in her office so she could bring
her baby to work, which has angered some stay-at-home employees following her
demand that all remote workers report back to the office.

'I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and
set em up in the cube next door?' the husband of one remote-working Yahoo
employee asked in an interview with AllThingsD's Kara Swisher.

Many employees are upset because they don't have the money or clout to build
their own nurseries at work. And many assume Mayer has a whole team of people,
from nannies to cooks and cleaners, helping her raise her son - after all, she
does have a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco
in addition to her $5.2 million 5-bedroom home in Palo Alto."_

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2284828/Yahoo-
boss-M...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2284828/Yahoo-boss-Marissa-
Mayer-angers-employees-building-nursery-baby-office.html)

~~~
danilocampos
When you, alone, have the power to turn a company around, you get more or less
anything necessary to ensure your success.

Let's be real.

This isn't CEO camp. Not everyone gets a turn.

Mayer is special. She's got a kid on the way. I'm sure the shareholders would
prefer she not have to choose between saving Yahoo and raising her kid. If
employees were able to deliver similar levels of value, I'm sure they'd be
first in line for their own special accommodations.

~~~
untog
How is it related to being a CEO, though? Fact is, Mayer had a child. She
realised that in order to be effective in the office, she needed a nursery, so
that she could be close to her child while also working.

Why does the same not apply to Yahoo employees with young children? Mayer may
be CEO, but the logic she used to install a nursery would apply to all
employees.

~~~
danilocampos
There is a cost associated with the accommodation (which Mayer was uniquely
able to pay for). There's limited physical space. There are practical
considerations.

Other employees don't deliver enough value to tip the equation in favor of the
accommodation. If tier-4 person has a nursery, you get a marginally better
contribution four tiers down. If Mayer has a nursery, she potentially turns
Yahoo into a fiercely competitive organization.

Is it fair? No. It's business.

Hell, why not give everyone a corner office? Give everyone a private jet?
Y'know?

~~~
untog
You know, there's a cost effective alternative to giving every employee a
nursery. It's letting them work from home.

That's kind of the whole point of why people are picking up on this.

~~~
danilocampos
And one day, when Yahoo is very successful and has a trusted, properly
incentivized workforce, I am certain they will explore such accommodation. In
the meantime, homegirl is running a turnaround; the French Resistance didn't
have featherbeds.

~~~
untog
It's hardly as if Yahoo employees don't have other places they could go. At a
time when tech companies are falling over each other to persuade people to
work for them, turning off prospective employees seems like a turnaround all
right.

------
MattRogish
Why does pulling people into the office finally give Yahoo the ability to fire
under-performers? You don't need to see butts in seats in order to identify
people who are not pulling their weight.

If people are coasting at home OR at the office you can tell that by their
work output. _Where_ they do their work doesn't enter into it.

Adopting a Results Only Work Environment (<http://gorowe.com>) would allow
them to have folks who work from anywhere _and_ give management the tools to
fire under-performers.

If this were only a temporary measure, a "reset" so to speak, then I still
don't agree with it (I think you can do that without the disruption), but it
would be understandable. As they have not said that this is temporary, I have
no reason to think it'll come back in the future, which is the tragedy.

It doesn't have to be like this.

~~~
darkxanthos
I like the point someone raised that part of the point is to avoid firing
people as that gets very costly. Instead they'll hopefully quit.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Who's going to quit though? The people who care, the people who know they have
better options elsewhere. The talentless hacks who still don't give a shit
about the company but are willing to go through the motions for a paycheck?
They're like barnacles you'll have to get rid of by scraping them off and
using a blow torch. The way to get rid of underperformers is by firing them,
period, there's no other hack or workaround that makes things easier.

------
minimax
”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the
VPN…”

Wow. The WFH ban is starting to sound like the beginning of a bigger shake-up.
I suspect Yahoo will want get rid of a ton of its unproductive employees and
rebuild around a small core of talent, some of which will presumably be
poached from Google.

~~~
mhurron
> ”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into
> the VPN…”

So why were they still employees? No Yahoo, that is why you can't have nice
things.

~~~
prostoalex
I haven't been a Yahoo! employee for 7 years, but back in my days (dusts off
his old cane to tell the kids to stay off the lawn) the product was run by
product management, while engineering was responsible for development and
maintenance.

With top management shakeups every week or so I'd imagine the product
management part of Yahoo! being in a state of disarray, with some people
leaving on their own, some getting the boot, random new people showing up, but
nobody sticking long enough to make any product decisions.

Reliability is the only remaining thing on the engineering plate, and with
good infrastructure a lot of smaller projects from here
<http://everything.yahoo.com/> just run themselves most of the time.

------
hkmurakami
_There was and is rampant abuse of the Yahoo work-from-home policy — it was a
joke. “Working at [Yahoo] HQ was like paying taxes in Greece,” said Twitter’s
Patrick Ewing, who also had friends who cheated the system. The fact that the
Yahoo parking lot is relatively empty (compared to, oh, Facebook’s) at 5pm is
why you can’t have nice things._

if this is indeed the problem, then how is bringing in non productive
engineers under the same incompetent and uninspired managers going to improve
the situation at all? is this going to at least indirectly aid in culling the
unwanted, laggard staff?

you can still slack off even when reporting to the office, especially if you
commute by car.

if they have VPN logs, can't they just fire engineers using this evidence?
it's not like we:re in Italy or France where firing workers is next to
impossible.

~~~
yuhong
I think Marissa is trying to get rid of these managers too.

------
InclinedPlane
The WFH ban is just a band-aid. The fact that it was necessary is a symptom of
the fact that many yahoo employees had simply given up. They'd stopped putting
in effort, they'd started staying at home and pretending to work. Now with
Mayer's ban they will simply come into the office to not work. It's a classic
"the beatings will continue until morale improves" measure. It won't work,
it'll just remind unsatisfied yahoo employees how much they hate their jobs
and lead to an even more dysfunctional workplace and evaporate away all of the
talent that was ever at the company.

~~~
coloneltcb
yea, I can see that. But I think MM is sending a message here, and the WFH
crowd were among those that cared the least.

~~~
InclinedPlane
What is the message? "Stop goofing around, get to work"? She's sending the
wrong message to the wrong people, it'll have exactly the opposite effect she
imagines.

The value of a software company is in its developers. The best developers are
almost always intrinsically motivated. And the best developers are the ones
who typically end up being the heart of the company, they're the ones who keep
the whole system working through the thousands upon thousands of little things
they do that aren't mandatory but are necessary in order to ship any quality
software.

Mayer's efforts here are to treat the developers as spoiled children, and it
will serve only to further alienate and demoralize the best developers who
have just been too lazy to leave and find better work elsewhere. It doesn't
even matter if the developers actually are acting like petulant children, if
you drive them away they still go away. And then once they evaporate you're
left with the dregs, and then shockingly somehow it becomes orders of
magnitude to ship anything of any quality on time. The worst part of this is
that I'm sure this cycle has already played out multiple times at yahoo.

You can't treat creative knowledge workers like factory drones, even when
they're misbehaving.

The only thing that will actually help Yahoo is tackling projects and creating
a work environment that encourages intrinsically motivated devs to work,
everything else will follow naturally. If they want to continue on their long
slide into the dust bin of history then by all means they should create a
workplace that is optimized for mediocre devs and mediocre projects.

~~~
larsberg
> The best developers are almost always intrinsically motivated.

Have you managed a large team before? The single best way I know to demotivate
a highly motivated developer is to let them see a coworker at the same pay
grade do significantly less work without any good reason. (footnote:
individuals going through cancer treatment are the tricky complication here,
due to privacy issues)

And I should emphasize that for most of the developers I've managed, it wasn't
a fear thing like, "oh, he'll fire me if I don't work" but rather a removal of
the sentiment that, "why should I keep working so hard when others here don't
pull their weight and are being rewarded for it?"

That's a large part of the reason I like semi-enforced distributions in curve-
oriented review systems. Many managers, particularly first-level leads, tend
to pull their rewards towards the mean (barely rewarding high performers and
still rewarding low performers) instead of focusing on doing the right thing
at the tails. Though that's certainly no guarantee of success; I got a
decently sized development and test organization (~60 of each) merged into our
organization and it took nearly a month of full-time work for myself (and one
of my peers) to sort out the years of misrewarded individuals to get neglected
high performers promoted and HR action started on people who'd been resting
and vesting.

~~~
InclinedPlane
These aren't comparable situations necessarily. How you fix a mostly
functional organization with problems is different from how you fix a
fundamentally dysfunctional organization. If you have a functional
organization then it makes sense to get rid of all the low performers,
regardless of how much "effort" they're putting in. And if you end up with
someone who is able to work fewer hours and still be as productive as other
team members you would be silly to get rid of them even if other team members
were upset.

~~~
lsc
and, I think, Engineers have their own hierarchy; we understand that an hour
of the new kid's time is worth maybe 5 minutes of the really expert person's
time.

Generally speaking, if one person isn't working all that hard but is
contributing a lot (due to greater skill) the other Engineers can recognize
and appreciate this. We all understand the tradeoff between ability and
effort; The better you are, the less effort is required (but, there are
minimum levels for both effort and ability; no matter how awesome you are, you
need some minimum level of effort; even if you dedicate your life to the job,
you need some level of ability. - but, to some extent, ability can make up for
a lack of effort, and effort can make up for a lack of ability.)

------
nikatwork
When I was at Yahoo in 2008, some staff were always "working from home" but
never responded to IM or email. They'd surface for a day or two, squeeze out
an artefact, then vanish again for a week.

I somewhat blame their direct managers. It's always tempting for lower-level
employees to game the system, especially if they are having personal issues
(young kids, bad marriage, low workplace morale). Managers should provide
guidance to bring their reports back into line.

Then again, the managers in question were busy fighting org politics and
seemed happy just to have an extra "soldier" on their roster.

So maybe Marissa's stalinist purge of remote workers will prove to be a blunt
but effective instrument for flushing out the bludgers.

~~~
wutbrodo
That's what confused me. I'm wary of armchair-CEOing, given that I have no
experience at that level whatsoever. However, it seems like there would be an
easier solution to "people who WFH and don't do anything": deal with people
who _don't do anything_ (whether at home or in the office). Try as I might, I
can't see the benefit to this blunter approach that would justify the cost to
recruitment and legitimate remote workers.

~~~
nikatwork
Yahoo is a big company. It's not like a startup or even an small enterprise,
where everyone knows Johnny is on facebook all day and Terry takes a 3 hour
liquid lunch. There's too many places to hide in a big org.

So to identify unproductive people using a top-down approach, you'd need a
metric to measure staff productivity and force the managers to implement it.

Which do you think would be less popular, a) curtailing remote work or b)
implementing and enforcing an org-wide productivity metric?

------
fingerprinter
This is silly, just silly.

The problem is and always will be unproductive people. It comes down to
leaders and leadership. If someone isn't working out, cut bait. That includes
managers, execs and programmers.

Any exec worth their salt would attack the problem, not a symptom of the
problem. This shows me that Yahoo still doesn't get it.

And if this IS about unproductive people, this is essentially a ban hammer on
something b/c of some bad apples. Again, awful leadership. Fix the problem.

I work from home. Everyone on my team works from home. The entire company I
work for works from home. We are a big company. It does take good leadership
and strong management to make that work. It also takes good developers and,
frankly, strong guidance if something isn't working out.

It sounds like Yahoo has none of the above, or, perhaps more tellingly, maybe
Mayer knows that (giving her the benefit of the doubt, after all) and that is
really an indication of a much bigger problem.

------
voidr
So instead of implementing a proper way to measure employee performance they
are banning remote work. I think people who were unproductive at home will
remain unproductive in the office unless they actually find a way to measure
productivity, this is why I feel that this effort is not only futile, it also
does harm.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Yeah, all this article says is that broad measures are being taken which
affect the productive and unproductive alike.

I've seen that road, and it leads to utter and complete disaster.

------
LVB
While the WFH ban is getting some criticism here for being a tactical response
and not fixing the problem, I can see how it fits into a larger house
cleaning. It sounds like Yahoo is in a serious spot both economically and
culturally, and I can imagine Mayer saying that Yahoo needs to be rebuilt,
right here (on campus), by people who really want to make it work. The ban
addresses both parts. It gets people back together, in person, and it weeds
out those aren't going to make that sacrifice for the company.

And to those who claim that they are as effective working at home, let me
challenge you in this way: how do you really teach, inspire, and build morale
if not in person? Someone may be a great coder, but they might also be an
incredibly motivating person who lifts up those around them to much higher
levels. I've never seen that occur remotely. Yahoo needs help badly, and they
need their best people on site, walking the halls, building a culture that
means making Yahoo great again. I don't see how said people can do that over
VPN.

------
coloneltcb
Agree with this wholeheartedly, as it jibes with a lot of what I've heard of
the Yahoo WFH experience. Don't think it's fair for outsiders to judge, and I
think that this was a courageous choice by MM. She had to know she'd come
under fire for this

------
AlexDanger
I hate this perception that working from home = slacking off.

Think about why that perception exists. It implies that unless you have
someone looking over your shoulder you wont do any work. Like a child in a
classroom.

Most people are not children. Most people want to do a good job and support
their team members.

If you behave like a child then you should never have been hired in the first
place. If you are hired then your lack of delivering results will be very
visible.

If a slack employee can get away with slacking off, the company has a much
more serious problem about the way it works. Putting people in an office will
not solve this problem.

I'm happy to argue about the pros and cons of local vs remote teams.
Effectively communicating, mentoring,team bonding etc are all debates worth
having.

The slacking off argument is not worth having. Its rubbish. This initiative
sounds like busy work.

------
pshin45
What MM is doing at Yahoo seems eerily reminiscent of what happened at Apple
when Steve Jobs first came back in 1997.

John Lilly (of Mozilla fame and former Apple employee) recounts the atmosphere
at the time:

 _"[Steve] said 'You know what, we're going to build a great company. We're
going to reinvent the world. And anybody who believes me, let's get moving. If
you don't believe that will happen then get the hell out.' And this was an
amazing act of leadership because it was so clear who was in and who was out.
And I'll tell you, people in the room would have followed Steve everywhere and
anywhere, just about anywhere. Now it turns out me and my friends left and
we're happy with that decision although economically it probably would have
been better to stick around. We've all done okay. But what an act of
leadership by a guy who nobody believed in at the time, nobody believed it."_

<http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3067> (Listen from
13:50 to 16:40 for the story containing the above quote)

------
hkmurakami
if there is one thing I miss about print journalism, it's actual descriptive,
concise headlines. why can't we be treated with "yahoo crippled by delinquent,
unresponsive engineers and managers"?

------
kyllo
If someone has been not-working from home and has never logged into the VPN,
why do you even want them to come into the office now? Just fire them.

------
spydum
To me, this sends the signal out that the CEO has lost confidence in her
middle managements ability to evaluate who is delivering and who is not, and
has forced them to get more involved.

In my opinion, the problem with remote workers is it is FAR too easy for
superstars to sandbag and still perform in the upper quartile. They look at it
as a value proposition: if I can turn out a weeks worth of productivity for an
above average programmer in just 2-3 days of effort, I can slack for the
remainder of the work week or not even check in.

Contrast that to a place that enforces the face-to-face time. It's much harder
to slack and sandbag when you have people there. That super-star who is now in
the office, will churn out super-star material 5 days a week, instead of 3.

I think it's brilliant, and wish them well. I would love to see Yahoo rise up
from the ashes.

* apologize for the term superstars, but you know what I mean. Some people just have ability that far exceeds their peers, and they use that ability to shift their work/life balance. I think it's entirely fair, but I can see how an employer would want to optimize in their favor.

------
pbreit
The fact that it was Yahoo that had to explain that the decision was not an
indictment of remote working in general is pathetic.

The decision was obviously exclusively related to Yahoo and only pertinent to
this current point in time.

------
RHSeeger
> It’s that the bunch of slackers that claimed to be working from home without
> actually doing any work ruined it for everyone.

How about just figuring out what people goals are and, if they can't meet
them, they're let go. Wouldn't that work just as well without causing everyone
to come into the office because some people can't manage to work from home?

------
callahad
Does anyone else find it strange that the author of the article interjected
one of her own tweets in the middle of the article?

~~~
natrius
It's not her tweet. It's a tweet from a parody account. Her actual account is
@alexia.

------
rollo_tommasi
What keeps the valuable, skilled, and productive employees from switching to a
more accommodating firm while the useless workers who couldn't find employment
elsewhere scramble to hang on? Seems like this could easily backfire.

------
drhayes9
Fire their managers, too.

------
michaelochurch
It seems to me like Yahoo has several years of undesirable cultural legacy.
The company needs to reinvent itself. Redefining WFH is a part of that, but
the problem is that there are a large number of things that Yahoo needs to do
and getting the order right is important. Cracking down on WFH before dealing
with the other problems is a bad call.

The real question is: why are there so many unmotivated, unproductive people?
Is it bad hiring or bad project management? I don't think there are a large
number of intrinsic underperformers, so much as people demotivated by contexts
that leave no real opportunities for achievement. Perhaps there are a lot of
pointless projects that have no career upside, but that people can't escape
from, so they use the bog as an excuse to retire on-the-job. I'm not saying
that that's right-- it's not-- but, if this is the case, then it's important
to deal with the underlying problem instead of the symptom only.

One of the things that executives get wrong on this is that, if you want to
preserve morale, you've got to put a "shit sandwich" (good-bad-good pattern)
around your crackdown. First, you do something related and good for the
employees (like give them more opportunities to pick what they work on). Then,
you deliver the crackdown (reduced WFH). Finally, once you've achieved what
you're looking for, you scale the crackdown back or add a perk that makes it
more acceptable.

~~~
InclinedPlane
There are two big questions that yahoo faces. What the fuck do they want to be
as a company? And what do they intend to do with the engineers they have right
now?

They haven't come up with an answer to the first question so far as I can
tell, which is a bigger problem than anything else.

For the second question they are faced with a lot of problems. If they want to
try to retain as much talent as possible they're going about it the wrong way.
If they want to instill discipline and transition down to a smaller more
mediocre more "enterprisey" company that pumps out crappy line-of-business
apps then they're doing a damned fine job so far.

If I were forced to try to turn yahoo around I'd start by identifying the
major projects that yahoo should execute on and then I'd either fire almost
everyone and start from scratch or I'd work by replacing the company from the
inside out by growing a "bubble" that was a new division built with new rules
with new management that hired both from outside the company and from within
yahoo and was highly results oriented and, at least initially, worked on fast
iteration projects that are easier to judge success on.

A couple good candidates for projects that could serve to help re-energize the
company are flickr, yahoo stores, and yahoo hosting services. Revolutionize
those, iteratively, make them competitive, and you could go a long way toward
revitilizing the company and providing projects that people actually want to
work on.

~~~
spydum
I think you are right on this point: they need to figure out the strategy and
direction of the company, and then blast it out everywhere (isn't this the
CEO's job)? Define the vision, communicate it, then arrange your resources to
aggressively pursue it.

