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And perhaps putting extra emphasis on educational background over talent and achievements is running things aground.

"Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college."

http://www.businessinsider.com/mayer-refused-to-hire-gwyneth...

To be fair, I would balk at hiring Paltrow, too, but that's because she's a crazy person who gives unsafe advice, not because she didn't go to college.

Both your and the parent's suggested explanations seem to me to be more about pushing an agenda than an actual explanation. I'm sure there's no one reason that people are leaving Yahoo. It's possible that their interest in educational background in hiring and retention, and/or the work-from-work policy that received several orders of magnitude more media coverage than its actual effect on employees, have been factors in some departures. But it's much more likely that the biggest factor overall, and probably the single most important factor to most of the people who have left, is the fact that Yahoo is a zombie. There's little or nothing interesting happening there, the company is shrinking steadily, and its long-term prospects are not going to inspire or excite anyone. At this point, it's basically another AOL; the days of it being an important player are long gone and will not be coming back regardless of who the CEO is, what kind of strategy they pursue, or just how long the company continues to exist on paper (which may well be a very long time; e.g., AOL). It's over, and it's been over for a long time. People who have other career options don't tend to stick around such places, and it's hard to blame anyone for leaving.

It doesn't seem that any of the people who left were remote workers. I mean--maybe they had felt some solidarity with their remote-working coworkers--but I suspect that Yahoo's problems run a little deeper.

The company promised a turnaround that hasn't happened. The people leaving largely seem to have been in positions to have a strong sense for when and how such a turnaround would come to fruition--and their actions suggest to me a lack of confidence.

I do agree that the memo didn't really help the company in any notable way. Whatever it could have helped was surely more than offset by what it could have--and did--hurt.

Banning remote workers may not be the catalyst, but it may indeed be a valid symptom . When that memo happened I actually thought to myself that, hmm, that doesn't seem to be the kind of company I'd like to work for. And now along with this story, the first thing I remembered was that memo as it left a pretty strong impression over me.

And don't get me wrong, I understand why some companies may want people to always be present in office during business hours. But what bothered me the most was the tone, because that memo was a threat against people that, for better or worse, probably helped build Yahoo and made it what it is today.

In other words, the morale of employees could have been affected by such decisions. And unhappy employees in the creative sector are not productive employees. So you could say that they missed the turnaround. But what if they missed that turnaround because of how things are managed internally? It's not that far fetched.

Yahoo has been poorly managed for several CEOs, it's not a new turn of events. She hasn't helped things, but it's not like Yahoo was a rocket ship before she was hired. She had an amazing opportunity to change things while Alibaba was keeping Wall Street happy, but that window has closed and she has nothing to show for it other than making herself very very wealthy. She'll be gone soon.

I missed why Yahoo! divested themselves of their large ownership stake of Alibaba, why did they do that?

Expected to happen at end of year because shareholders basicly insisted on it.

Yahoo owns a minority stake in Alibaba - a huge fast growing company. Yahoo is worth $30 billion but the Alibaba stake is worth $23 billion* and they also have a minority stake in Yahoo Japan worth $2 billion* and $5 billion in cash.

It doesn't make sense for an operating company to hold investments worth many times more than their core business. Yahoo today trades more on what happens to Alibaba than anything Yahoo management has control over. This has perverse effects like huge management incentive bonuses based solely on Alibaba's success. Not to mention they would have saved billions in taxes if they had spun it off years ago.

*-pre-tax

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/21/yahoos-business-now-worth-les...

They haven't fully, but want to spin it off into its own company so that taxes don't have to be paid. That's not going well for them (the IRS didn't say they were A OK) and meanwhile BABA shares have tanked (ended the first trading day at $93.89 and is currently at $69.75).

tl;dr Mayer can no longer hide behind everyone's hopes and dreams of a monster Alibaba IPO.

The buzz about their work from home program was that people were abusing it and not doing actual work. I agree, they should be able to work from home, but when she did this, she was basically firing a buncha losers. They should allow people to work from home again, though.

What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it?

Either way, you're right about needing to open it back up. The impact to morale overall must have been huge when these people had to scramble to protect their livelihood.

It appears there were at least some insiders who agreed that there was a lot of dead weight [1]. What I wonder is who's budgets these people were on? Shouldn't it be in some organizational unit's interest to cut people who are not productive, regardless of where they work from?

* [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-may...

> Shouldn't it be in some organizational unit's interest to cut people who are not productive, regardless of where they work from?

Well... if you have, say, 80 people working for you, and you discover 15 are dead weight... cutting them would mean you can do your division's job with 65 people. You wouldn't have any room to argue for budget increase. That's a cynical view, but one I've seen played out a couple of times over the years in my travels.

Firing people is emotionally taxing. That's honestly probably 85% of the reason why shitty employees can keep their jobs. Managers hate firing people and most will procrastinate endlessly if that option is available.

This is great news, I'm saved!

> What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it?

VPN usage statistics. We have to take Y!'s word for it, but most news stories about the policy change say that Mayer looked at usage statistics to find that many work-from-home employees were working less than full time. I can't find a cite right now, but I thought I read that several employees would go weeks without logging in once.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-marissa-mayer-figured-out...

>What proof is there that these people were "losers" and slackers as you put it?

Shitty Yahoo products.

And your evidence that they were shitty due to the remote workers exclusively is what, exactly?

You're asking for evidence to back up an assertion that was not made.

So fire the people who are abusing it, along with people working on site who aren't hitting the performance Yahoo wants. Don't tar everyone with the same brush

The problem with this is, how would she know who was abusing the work-from-home facility and who was not? Mayer would have to rely on the dinosaur of Yahoo middle-management, which at best is a self-serving beast.

Mayer did not trust them, and hence her fiat action of banning working from home.

Fire the managers you can't trust first then. I get that Yahoo's internal culture at the time was highly dysfunctional, but I very much doubt the root cause of that was Marisa Mayer not being able to roam the floors and check nobody is using Facebook.

Well not every job is well suited for remote work. As a developer, you know if they're not cranking out code. You miss sprint goals. Sprint demoes are a disaster. You don't see commits. When QA or design work from home, it's not as easy to tell whether or not they're actually working. That's been my experience at least.

That said, I think it was a poor choice to abolish the WFH policy.

When QA or design work from home, it's not as easy to tell whether or not they're actually working

How do you tell whether or not they're actually working when they're in the office?

It's difficult to manage something if you don't have measurable outputs. The emphasis is on the word "measurable". Give a manager some way of objectively measuring what you're doing and most of them will be happy.

It's easy for them to measure office hours or lines of code or commits or bugs fixed, etc. This does not logically imply that the person is actually doing any "real" work but it creates the perception and it's easy to measure and so managers are fond of it.

At the end of the day you need to manage the perception that you're working or not working. When you're not working in an office it's even worse. You just lost the easiest way: creating the perception that you "put in the hours". Don't make this difficult for your manager. That's my experience anyway.

If QA or design doesn't work, you still hit sprint goals and have non-disastrous sprint demoes?

I would say there's a more universal difficulty of understanding the productivity of jobs different from our own.

Surely a design or QA lead would easily detect when someone is not actually working?

When designers don't work, your developer or your marketing department (or whoever they produce designs for), they will tell you they are missing the designs and are blocked for this or that.

When QA does not work, there will be very few bug reports, and your support will see the number of tickets shoot up.

But you must have some process in place to really identify the bottleneck. Something I assume a big company should have.

The people leaving according to article are quite high ranking. I don't think they would care for work from home and in case they do yahoo would make exception for them.

Maybe... or it could be a thousand other things. Not that I was a fan of what you're talking about, of course.

> Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the whole "work in our offices or quit" memo sent to virtual employees a while back not paying the dividends she had hoped.

I really doubt it. The "no work from home" edict applied to about 150 employees total; and the vast majority of them were deservedly kicked out. There were a handful who were doing a tremendous job, and the were allowed to WFH.

It's not the personnel affected, it's the level of morale it affected was my point. People see hypocritical leadership decisions and look for the exit right away usually.

[citation needed]