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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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