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Comment by joeax | Hacker News Reader

I was once a fan of Mayer when she first took over Yahoo, until she led a crusade against remote workers. As a remote worker myself I can tell you this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry. A lot of tech companies (especially outside the bay area) want to emulate the cool kids like Yahoo, Google, and Apple, and even the company I work for started questioning its WFH policies.

So no, I don't feel sorry for her one bit.

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Dude, Yahoo stopped being a "cool kid" a decade ago. That's really messed up if your company actually thinks it should emulate Yahoo because it's a cool company.

I never said my company emulates Yahoo. But "cool kid" or not their influence cannot be understated. Right after the Yahoo/WFH hoopla companies like Best Buy and HP followed suit. Remember this was back when she first took over CEO and everyone believed she was the "one" to turnaround the company.

I know someone at HP who suddenly had to go in to work. This put him in a situation where he had to pay thousands for day care and he threatened to leave until they finally let him work from home again.

So, an employee was doubling as a full time care giver for his children while remote working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives remote work policies a bad name in the first place.

If I found out one of my employees was taking care of his kids while working at home, you better believe it would result in a conversation and a possible revocation of his use of the remote work policy.

You're ignoring their effectiveness.

Maybe they work better without coworker interruptions and in a familiar space, which offsets any negatives of caregiving.

And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock?

Humans aren't automatons.

>And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock?

Don't need a handle on it if you block access to them.

But my work found that blocking Reddit/Facebook actually made less work get done: people couldn't spend 5-10 minutes to unwind and then plug back in and work. That policy lasted a single week.

So, an employee was found at their desk chatting with the office mate all afternoon while working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives on-site work a bad name.

If I found out one of my employees was using their office as a social lounge while working at my company, you better believe it would result in a conversation and possible revocation of their on-site privileges, forcing them to work in solitude at home instead so I could see real results.

I'd love to hear the explanation for how checking up on a toddler every so often is akin to him grossly neglecting his job.

> I'd love to hear the explanation for how checking up on a toddler every so often is akin to him grossly neglecting his job.

If we generalize that to "what is wrong with frequent distractions" - open plan offices would fall into that category. For an answer, I would direct you to read any one of the many well-articulated anti-Open-plan rants on HN. Toddler care has all the downsides of an open plan office without the (possible) upside of increased team-productivity.

Do you have a toddler? I'm not a parent but my understanding is that you can't expect them to just play quietly by themselves for any more than short stretches.

Depends on the toddler, and on the age.

Would you care to share where you work, so I can mark it down as a nightmarish hellhole I should forever shun?

While that's generally been true since the late 90s, when Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo did have quite the honeymoon period. Yahoo genuinely became "cool" for at least a year or 2, and everyone was glowing about Mayer being one of the best CEOs in the tech world.

Maybe that's what yahoo should do to get out of their short term problem at the moment, hire another female CEO to get some hype back in the company.

Don't read "How Google Works", "Work Rules" or "In the Plex" then. Meyer was just repeating the Google playbook which places a high emphasis on getting staff in the same physical space

Cargo cult style.

Can confirm. My boss killed everybody's 'work from home one day per week' policy and cited Yahoo's actions as his justification for it.

Sadly, that used to be the most productive day of the week for me.

She laid out a good reason for doing it. I think the decision was justified.

In the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, he uses Mayer's firing of remote employees as an example of a toxic work culture that values signalling over production. Here's the excerpt:

> In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for nor spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."

"Batching" email to specific times in the day is a pretty well-known productivity win, especially for people whose job it is to engage in deep work.

> "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."

Like a boss I had that thought programming was just typing and didn't understand why I:

1) Wrote a lot on paper and whiteboard;

2) Sat back in thought a lot;

3) Spoke with my colleagues.

I became "more productive" in his eyes by hiding in the testing lab to do my thinking. I was actually testing, too, but I didn't watch the test cases closely so I'd be writing/reading/thinking for a few minutes after each one ran.

> thinking

This is something that always bothers me when I'm forced to pair program. I constantly feel pressured to put code on the screen instead of sitting back and thinking about how to tackle a problem. When I am tasked and allowed to do something on my own I often spend more time thinking ahead about the problem then actually implementing the solution, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Programming is as much an art as it is a science, you can bang a keyboard all day but without putting thought into it (which typically requires pause or maybe a change of scenery even) it can often result in a worse product.

That's how corporate culture works - it does not necessarily reward actual work, but it does reward being visibly "busy" as in quickly responding to e-mail, attending meetings etc.

This is precisely how corporate culture works. /sigh

I take back what I said. I hadn't seen this before, thanks for sharing.

Once a company has hit the ... point of maturity to where signaling is more important than production, there's not a lot you can do about it. Because in that case, the signaling probably is more important.

And I got news for her - you can't visibly tell if I am busy or not short of standing behind me all day.

Still, you get the feeling she was sort of the sucker at that particular poker game.

Not only is that terrible management, it's audacious micromanagement that the CEO went to great personal lengths (based on the story anyways) to gather evidence to go after remote workers. That probably paints the best picture for me of why yahoo failed: a company with great institutional and market issues, had its CEO conducting an unscientific survey of the effectiveness of remote workers

To me it reads more like she didn't like the policy and went out to find a reason to justify removing the policy. Whether it made sense or not was irrelevant.

VPNs are used for a lot more than checking email. They are used to access source control, build/CI systems, QA servers, etc.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if the data Marissa looked at was skewed because the corporate Yahoo VPN was atrociously terrible.

People who routinely worked outside of the office, or just wanted to be able to read their e-mail at home without the VPN client randomly panicing their system, had devised various workarounds to get things done.

The corporate VPN is distinct from production, so you could still do actual work without using it too.

> The corporate VPN is distinct from production, so you could still do actual work without using it too.

Are you suggesting that people should have worked directly on production servers instead of using the VPN to work in a development environment?

I'm stating the fact that when I worked at Yahoo, one did not need to utilize the VPN to connect to production (which is where most staging / pre-prod environments existed as well).

Someone whose job pertains to operations does the bulk of their daily work on actual production hosts, for instance. Some tools (like the bug tracker) also didn't require use of the VPN.

and she had a nursery built by her office so she could see her child, pouring salt into the wound

That's horrible management. It's the busy body mentality.

what was the reason she gave?

>this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry

Were there any other companies that followed yahoo's lead?

Mine did. But it was a smaller company with about 500 people, who were mostly older with families. We had maybe 1 full-time remote worker (who was actually pretty good), and the rest of the people would simply work from home one day a week. But after hearing about Marissa's crusade, they killed that off. Didn't change performance, but it did kill morale.

Yeah, Gannett started limiting remote workers when Yahoo did. They followed in Yahoo's footsteps because to upper management it sounded like a good idea. Get everyone together!

...except for developers who were already largely working between remote teams anyway and caused some fellow employees with family and health responsibilities but were still good developers to have trouble and eventually leave the company. Cutting out existing options and freedoms to employees does not in any way help the culture of a company. I don't work there any more but every developer was very upset that I talked to at the time.

Any company I work for in the future I want at least the ability to work remote. I personally enjoy being in and around coworkers, but there were a few times when I wanted to work remote for periods of time to help with family. Being in an office can help _certain types_ of work - but it doesn't help all types of work, and development is one that can be remote.

Yes, like I stated above Best Buy announced a similar plan a couple weeks later. I will mention though that companies like Dell and Microsoft later openly stated they were expanding their WFH policies so the anti-remote working trend was short lived.

I don't know if it was in direct response because I wasn't here at the time and it also coincided with the MSNBC split from Microsoft, but I understand that NBC Technology severely curtailed its remote working policies around the same time.

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