Why Yahoo's Decision Might Not Be So Wrong

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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.

If they were getting 25% less done, and had the data, they should have referenced that.<p>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.<p>No, its obvious to me that this was a "we did it like this at Google and Google was successful" move without data.

I like this response, its basically saying "don't assume anything".<p>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.<p>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...<p>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... ;)

The only thing we know for sure at this point is that Mayer sucks at PR when it comes to the tech community.<p>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.<p>Neither explanation speaks in favor of Yahoo, even though the decision itself might be a perfectly good one.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

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

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.<p>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.

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

I am confused why Brennen spent so much time to say so little.<p>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.<p>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.