Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Employees to Not Be Remote
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When only a few people on a team are remote I've found that it just doesn't work as well. I imagine it could work but it would take very strong discipline from the people in the office.
Not sure I could ever commute 5 days to work & sit in a cubicle or open plan office (those places remind me of a Chinese factory floor)....they would have to pay me a LOT of money to endure that again.
That's not to say that I don't miss out on "watercooler chat" topics as they happen, but I still make a point of chatting with coworkers to make up for it. A simple "hey, you feeling better now" IM goes a long way.
Since he's the only one, he's constantly getting overlooked by the local folks (people forgetting to set up a concall bridge for meetings or set up webex for presentations, impromptu meetings to sync up on some issue that he gets left behind on, etc.)
I wonder if secret calibration scores are next.
Functioning planned culture: guild culture. Master crafts(wo)men and apprentices are clearly defined, but the managerial relationship is advisory and focused on mentorship. The major downside of guild culture (the rarest of the 4) is that it relies on employee loyalty to capture the value it generates.
Pathological planned culture: rank culture. (This is the most common corporate culture.) People rise or fall based on subordinacy, rather than the quality of their ideas or their level of effort. You end up with a lot of people who don't work hard because they realize that effort doesn't matter, and a lot of bad ideas getting into implementation. Rank cultures often can't compete on an open market or address new challenges.
Functioning market culture: self-executive culture. Here you have a flat hierarchy and employees have a lot of autonomy. However, they're usually expected to take responsibility for their own advancement. This is the Valve-style open allocation culture.
Pathological market culture: tough culture. High-stakes performance reviews, low trust of employees but similarly low guidance. This is the sink-or-swim culture.
Rank culture tends to turn into tough culture as it generates underperformers, and eventually the higher-ups get upset about the whole thing and have a crackdown. However, tough culture turns back into rank culture as the people who control the performance assessment become the new rank-holders and, in exchange for loyalty, offer safety and advantage in the evaluation process. So tough and rank cultures tend to fall into a degenerate, enervating pattern of oscillation from one extreme to the other. This back-and-forth eventually exhausts the company, leading to constant reorganization and turmoil.
When a company institutes permanent tough culture (stack ranking as an inflexible pillar, rather than a temporary measure) the political corrosion associated with rank culture still occurs, but there's a selection dynamic (similar to antibiotic resistance) where the forms of rank culture that survive are the least detectable. So you end up with a culture that's politicized and gamey like a tough culture, but inefficient and extortive like a rank culture, and ultimately you have a workplace where people put in lots of hours and apparent sacrifice, but there's little getting done and there's no vision.
My point is more regarding things like the dashboard updates - the XBox 360 dashboard slowly turned into a glorified billboard covered in ads that has incidental features tacked onto it. They've had consistent performance problems with their system software that have never really been addressed (though thankfully they've made slight improvements here and there) - at this point people who have to interact with it on a regular basis, like journalists, are barely able to contain their hatred for the user interface.
Microsoft has a well-known review system that engenders various feelings in various people, not all of them postive. I have posted here before how the stack ranking part is actually low on my list of objectionable things about the whole process, but it is what people know so it is what people cite. I have heard stories, always apocryphal, never by anyone willing to put their real name behind it, about how people are constantly obsessed with reviews and stabbing their teammates in the back left and right to get a leg up. I have never once witnessed that behavior or even heard of a remotely plausible instance of that happening. That said Microsoft is a big company, so I am sure it has/does happen somewhere. I dispute it is rampant or common.
I have heard stories of people that are terrible at working in groups and don't do well. I have heard stories of people that have an opinion of their own skills that seems objectively divorced from reality. I have heard stories of management hubris that ultimately doesn’t pan out. Some of the people that play a starring role in these dramas then invent conspiracies about plotting colleagues causing them to rank poorly, incompetent managers that didn’t recognize their delicate snow-flakism or any other number of explanations that conveniently don’t attribute any share of the blame to themselves. I suspect those tend to be fantasies made to soothe one’s ego.
I think anyone with knowledge of internal state at Microsoft could posit a much better explanation of why they have 'flopped in just about every field it's entered for the last decade' that doesn't involve Machiavellian competition between employees. Hell, reversion to the mean pretty much would cover most bases without any kind of comical soap opera drama needed.
You said that the last time I replied to you. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5100751
I thought readers could connect the dots but maybe a bit more explanation is due.
Having worked at the "new Microsoft" in recent history I feel like the part I quoted is highly indicative of someone who has their head in the sand. Across multiple divisions among people I've voiced opinions with openly I haven't talked to anyone at MS who shares his view. Even in his own DevDiv, I've heard people say that DevDiv is a bit better than the Microsoft average but yeah, it still has these problems.
At least, this is how I felt last month when replying to his previous comment. So I left a reply, even though it's taboo to talk this way about a former employer, even though I risked potential embarrassment attaching my name to this. And I said, hey, what they say about MS, what they said in that Vanity Fair article, it has a lot of truth in my experience, and I don't really know anyone who says otherwise without being a blind shill or a sociopath. (I'm saying it a bit more bluntly here but that was the idea.) I was reluctant to make that comment, but I did.
Then he goes around repeating still that all such comments are apocryphal and anonymous, despite the comment of a real person who is not writing anonymously. (Aside: He is probably not aware that current employees won't say this for fear of losing their job, and former employees probably feel the general taboo against speaking ill of a former employer.)
You are literally just making my point over and over again. This sentence is, like the previous post, utterly devoid of logical content. Are you seriously taking offense at being called "apocryphal"? Nevermind that ryanmolden never actually called you apocryphal.
As for comments about seeing who got rewards based on title change, a title change doesn't always mean a large pay raise, and there are hidden rewards like gold star bonuses and HiPo groups that have little/no outward evidence, unless the recipient starts talking about them (which they tell them not to do), so I would say you probably aren't seeing accurate signaling based on job titles alone. The fact that some of the best rewards are secret is one of my beefs with the system.
Also, to clarify, I am not a fan of Microsoft's system, but when I hear stories of people who claim it leads to internecine wars, well that just isn't my experience in the last 8 years, or the experience of anyone I have talked to personally.
Ultimately there has to be some kind of ranking system as there is a fixed pool of rewards. The only alternative I could see would be exactly even sharing amongst a team. You could argue for that, but even as someone that has socialist sympathies I don't think it would work or be fair. There are people on my team that produce more than me, whether it be through being smarter, working longer hours, whatever. To say I should get the same reward as them is just wrong.
So if we agree there has to be ranking, well there's your stack ranking. You could argue with the curve fitting, but your claim that 1 in a group of 10 would get no bonus is just false. Curve fitting doesn't happen on a per team basis. It's more like 10 in a group of 100 or 100 in a group of 1000. There is nothing saying that an entire team couldn't end up in the top 10% of rewards. It may well be the case that on your team of 10 superstars one doesn't get the reward they feel they deserve, but that is because someone else in the calibration meeting was deemed more worthy, your teams ranking isn't done in isolation and in a team with 10 superstars there can be other superstars in the general vicinity, even more than 10. To claim that the system results in people plotting against the ones they are ranked against in order to sabotage them just sounds like conspiracy theory thinking. In my experience it results in people upping their game, or leaving if they feel they are unappreciated. Both are reasonable responses, some attempt at sabotage is not.
Its the main problem with APR systems they get captured by sections of an organization who use it to achieve their own agendas with no though to what it does to the company as a whole.
Calibration happens every quarter and a manager can unilaterally ding you. However, a supportive manager doesn't guarantee a good score. He actually has to get involved in the horse-trading and tit-for-tat of the whole process. Some people get screwed because their managers don't show up to calibration and they get low scores.
Finally, you often have no idea what your score is. Meets Expectations is everything from the 2nd to 70th percentile of the company. At the high end of that range, you're OK-- you won't get fired, you can get a decent transfer. At the low end, you're fucked. However, you may have no idea where in that range you are.
It's a play-for-play copy of Enron's performance review system, except with even more managerial secrecy and, therefore, less accountability. In short, it's why Google has less future than past.
I agree with you that Google is probably no worse than the other large tech companies, but I wouldn't call that an endorsement. For one example of something I don't like about tech culture, these firms have a tendency to throw their employees under the bus when the economy gets bad. Banks have layoffs. It's just something you get used to on the Street. Good people get let go, take their severance packages, and find other jobs. No big deal. On the other hand, many tech companies, when they do the same thing, make it look like a wave of performance-based firings so they can say they've never had a layoff. Google still claims it has never had an engineering layoff, even though it's had waves of PIPs. That's slimy.
I believe managers are just human: even Google will have good and bad ones, evil but effective ones along with good but ineffective ones (wrt to biz goals), and lots of other different combinations. Until we can come up with a system that removes inconsistent human nature from the equation, we'll just have to tolerate what we have. Sliminess is just one common trait of human beings, and I'm sure even Google can't avoid hiring and promoting sociopaths.
Also, resentment issues.
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Where's Bob? He should be in this meeting.
He's "working" from home today. (Makes quotation mark signs with fingers)
Don't bother. I just called him and he's at his kids swim lesson.
Oh, I'll wait until tomorrow to talk to Bob about X, when he's back in the office.
So perhaps "Bob" in our example really does have a job which allows him to work as effectively[1] at home as he can at work. Bob should also be aware of the schedule. So when the meeting comes up, Bob should be ready for it. And I've known folks working remotely who where chilling on the conference line waiting for the rest of the meeting to show up. But if either Bob isn't there when he should be, or the manager isn't organized enough to give Bob at least 12hrs notice of a meeting he should be attending, then you've got a management problem.
[1] First tip is that a manager needs to have a way of evaluating their teams effectiveness, if they don't then they can't really say if Bob is or is not as effective as others in his position.
Also, in the example, it may be that the employees griping about Bob are not even going to try to notify him.
I agree with you that this requires an organized manager. Unfortunately, a ton of managers lack this kind of organization.
I agree with you, except for that part. For most jobs, it's incredibly valuable to have impromptu "hallway" discussions that can't be scheduled in advance, isn't it?
Your main point still stands - Bob needs to be available during office hours, even if he's at home.
No, it's not.
If your business is so undisciplined and random that it's "valuable" (and even more "incredibly valuable") to have improptu "hallway" discussions, then you're doing it wrong.
Disagree strongly. Creativity often comes from people synthesizing ideas that wouldn't ordinarily meet, and especially not in a way that can be planned by management.
In the typical corporate environment where employees are just expected to implement ideas handed down by management, there's no value in these unplanned discussions. However, if you're looking for creativity and organic development, then there's value in those sort of random encounters. That doesn't mean remote can't work. It does give it a different feel. But I strongly disagree that there's zero value to unplanned discussion.
That's totally orthogonal to "hallway" meetings.
To put it another way, if you can't do the above over IM/Skype/email/etc, you're doing it wrong.
Perhaps a more important note is that, in my experience, most distributed teams have /way/ less meetings than an in person teams. A lot of things are done informally over IRC/chat. I say informal, but since IRC is usually logged, if someone is not involved in the informal discussion at the time it takes place, they can just read it to catch up on why the decisions were made.
Where's Bob? He should be in this meeting.
He's outside having a coffee and cigarette with Jane.I think the sweet spot is when it is a combination of both.
There are issues with telecommuting that are difficult to overcome, but this one is ridiculously simple.
The solution (well, a solution) is to have business hours during which everybody needs to be available. I have an arrangement like that with my employer - between 9 and 5, even if I'm working at home, my manager needs to be able to pick up his phone and have me be instantly available.
At first, he was a little doubtful, but he soon realized that he can actually get a hold of me more quickly this way when compared with walking across the building from his office to mine. (And no, he doesn't abuse this... haha) :)
It gets slightly trickier when people are in different time zones, but nothing that can't be overcome. People need predictable office hours; there can't ever be a "Bob's at his kids' swim practice" moment. Barring emergency, of course.
I'm really rather surprised that this is extending to customer support - that's one area that actually seems pretty cost-effective and efficient to use remote workers for. Face-to-face is always a great boon, but it just isn't an option for support reps at an Internet company. (At least not when speaking to customers, which is the important part of their job.)
Google has bad customer support because they simply don't want to put in the necessary manpower. Customer support scales much less than linearly, and to effectively support billions of users, you'd need hundreds of thousands reps, which would dramatically change the internal politics. So they just say "f*ck it, we'll do the minimum required by direct-revenue-generating services just to avoid getting sued, and everyone else can google their way out, for what we care."
"As a manager, I can’t easily know how many hours each person on my team is working. This is actually good for me because it forces me to look at what they’ve done. It’s good for the remote person as well: they can’t fool themselves into thinking that just because they’re in an office, surfing Reddit for an hour is work. In a perfect world we’d both already have this perspective, but it’s amazing how easy it is to delude yourself into thinking that “going to the office” = work."
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-i...
These exceptions are fairly rare though.
I eventually became officially part of the DC office, and started a small eng team there.
Note that hiring remotees required very high level approval, even back then, and some areas of Google simply won't do it. 7 years ago, Google was also a little more lenient. :)
Nowadays I would expect that they grandfathered in most of the earlier remotees, and that there are no real remotee hires anymore, they have enough small sales/whatever offices that they just make them part of those offices, or don't hire them.
Also, what is Open Source lawyering?
You won't be able to get work at a large law firm doing anything but lawyering, of course.
Open source lawyering = I specialize in open source related issues (be they licensing, compliance in general, whatever).
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/do-as-we-say-not-as...
Good chance for a savvy startup to pick up some remote talent the big boys can't.
No, this is a chance to pick up talent the big boys don't need. "As few as possible" telecommuters means they do hire telecommuters. Apply, see if your skills make up for your telecommuting. As a telecommuter, your application will need to be particularly strong to make up for what the company risks and loses by not having you in the office - if it isn't, a big company won't take the risk on you.
Are you saying telecommuters are the key to staying big in tech? To encourage innovation big companies want happy engineers in close proximity, talking spontaneously in varied, positive environments. Hence the free food. And the massages. And all the other perks.
Considering how bad they are at hiring, there should be very competent people there.
> As a telecommuter, your application will need to be particularly strong to make up for what the company risks and loses by not having you in the office -
Which is, almost nothing, unless they are not set up for remote work, which every minimal competent company today is/should be.
> if it isn't, a big company won't take the risk on you.
Tell that to Red Hat. A big majority of their development positions (if not all) are remote.
The company under discussion at Google. They're great at hiring, at least by their metrics: they have thousands of the world's best engineers.
> Which is, almost nothing, unless they are not set up for remote work, which every minimal competent company today is/should be.
You're ignoring context again. Patrick Pichette, CFO of Google, said regarding the number of telecommuters: "as few as possible." In my response, I was addressing that comment by pointing out it implies the company is equipped to work with telecommuters but sees telecommuting as a disadvantage.
> Tell that to Red Hat. A big majority of their development positions (if not all) are remote.
Red Hat is a great example of a company whose unique business model lets them rely heavily on remote developers. It's unsurprising given the work they do: they take existing open-source software and package it, maintain it, and support it. This is work that can be largely done independently. They don't write OSes like the biggest software giants do - they keep the lights running for Linux, the FOSS community's shared OS.
Red Hat is an open-source utility company, and their margins (~10% - one of the lowest in software) reflect that. Few think there's room for many such large companies, given that Red Hat has only just hit $1b in revenue last year (woohoo!).
Yes, I know about the context. "At least by their metrics" which can be good, but certainly not great. To be fair they have a never ending flood of candidates and have to deal with that.
But the main issue is that it only gets candidates with a very narrow set of skills.
"it implies the company is equipped to work with telecommuters but sees telecommuting as a disadvantage"
Not necessarily, it can be a one-off setup for the few telecommuters.
"It's unsurprising given the work they do: they take existing open-source software and package it, maintain it, and support it. This is work that can be largely done independently. They don't write OSes like the biggest software giants do - they keep the lights running for Linux, the FOSS community's shared OS."
You are underestimating heavily what Red Hat does. Especially the amount of development that goes there.
A 38 y/o CEO of a company that sells the "connected" world won't use the same connectedness within the business?
This is why you don't leverage yourself to the hilt and live paycheck to paycheck - so you can quit a job if it sucks.
It's sad to see, what used to be a crack directory, social hub (besides AOL one of the first true social networks), email, map and IM providers is now barely an afterthought and throwing the next cool "stand back I got this" manager to the wolves. But I can understand the frustration. Google and Apple both would have been happy to snap it up at one point, but it's too late and there is zero value left in the company besides the really nice Yahoo! name, and there's no big name to sell it to beyond perhaps AT&T or someone else that may want the infrastructure for something.
I feel sorry for the current employees that got sucker punched... but honestly, a majority of the good ones are long gone.
Out of curiosity, were you given any indication this would happen? Or were you drawing from Google's similar policy?
Me: "I'd like to work remotely from Japan" Them: "We can't allow remote positions now" Me: "I can't move to the US for family reasons" Them: "Let me check with HR"
One week later
Them: "We will let you work remotely, when can you start?"
Just something was off it felt like. There was more talk than that of course, and a meeting when I was actually at HQ in CA for other reasons.
The ability to work remotely is a huge perk to having a tech job, and if other corporations see Yahoo killing WFH and then managing to save such a large sinking ship, they might infer causality.
Until Yahoo actually becomes successful as a whole again, this is just them thrashing about desperately. I'll be worried if we start to see success in Mayer's methods.
The ability to work remotely is a huge perk to having a tech job, and if other corporations see Yahoo killing WFH and then managing to save such a large sinking ship, they might infer causality.
That's an interesting point. Up until now, I've thought of the Yahoo situation as a "I don't have a dog in this fight" kind of scenario... ie, I'm a mildly interested outsider with no stake in the whole thing. And since I usually like to root for the underdog, I have been hoping for a meaningful recovery for Yahoo under Mayer.
This is making me reconsider that position a bit.
"Yahoo continues its impressive drive down the fast lane of the information superhighway.
In your father's Oldsmobile. With the left blinker on. At 45kph."
Personally, I do believe that remote employees can work well but it is a very selective decision.
Pulling remote workers in is a sign you cannot measure the value of the output of remote workers - and it is not going to get any easier when they are filling up your corridors
It really feels like business is taking a wrong turn lately. Back to reduced independence of workers and patriarchal policies. They decide what's good for you, and the office is a nice cosy place to be with your fellow workers, sit in this chair and you'll be sooo productive! Instead of deciding someones merit on the quality and timeliness of their work.
I suppose it's a sign of the times, to not take even small risks anymore, even if people end up better for it. Not to look at individual merit but take rash decisions. It's all about squishing the last bits of productivity using "proven" methods (dating from the industrial revolution?), which may just as well be self-defeating in the end. After all, remote working does allow picking the person with exactly the right experience to do a certain job from all over the world.
I want my company to succeed - and I want to to succeed as a distributed remote company - mainly because I think that giving people back the time spent on commuting will benefit the communities they live in disproportionately
It's also why I resent subsidising railways :-)
It's a shame, because there's an increasing amount of research that shows that people are happier, more productive, and even healthier when they can work from home.
Successful incorporation of remote work boils down to a few things that sound simple but are difficult in practice: 1. Evaluate performance and progress as much as possible by results that are objective and measurable in some way (this goes for company goals as well, not just personal). 2. Communicate the same way with everyone, whether they are remote or local. If people in the office chat in person, but only email with their remote colleagues, they will definitely end up being marginalized. 3. Avoid any discussion that could, indirectly or directly, stigmatize people for being remote.
If you have full organizational support for the above, remote work can be very productive.
Can you please link this research from here? All the research I read said that collocated teams kick remote teams asses.
Or perhaps finding ways of shedding employees without actual layoffs?
[1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-i...
So are on-site employees, who can screw off just as much as an off-site one.
if the remote employees are not providing enough value to justify that investment in remote workers
Then fire them. This kind of draconian move won't get Yahoo anything but an even bigger talent hemorrhage than it already has.
That's exactly what will probably happen if they don't comply. I think giving people an opportunity to comply before firing is a good move.
The ones that don't have any other options will stay ( you retain a higher percentage of people who are not top performers ), the rest that you would want to keep leave ( the best employees can just get another remote job right away )
This is the classic problem with voluntary buyouts and other discretionary layoffs - you only keep the people without other options.
See http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d... for a fuller description.
So they were wrong to give them a warning that they are expected to relocate to an office? They should've just fired them? That's really how you feel?
They have $X in their budget. If the remote employees are producing $Y value, where $Y>$X, then they are earning their keep. But suppose Yahoo believes they can yield 1.5Y for the same $X budget by having on-site workers?
It's not like companies are (or should be) altruistic democracies. I can see why a person affected by this would be sore, but they don't really have a valid gripe IMO. I'm personally a fan of at-will employment.
Look at some open source initiatives - thousands of people "working remotely", while still being able to collaborate and ship.
Yahoo's issues lie way deeper than that.
And why does no one talk about how working in an office reduces productivity. I know I get far more done at home.
Getting good folks to bet on a potentially sinking ship requires the appearance that it is not an unpleasant place to work. The commitment is on both sides, employer and employee. When many companies are shedding old traditions (like the one Mayer is instating) to attract talent, Yahoo seems to be doing the opposite in this move, less attractive to _current_ employees.
If you can't manage remote employees well enough to weed out those who do not produce, or you believe that dead weight will not still be dead weight when you move it in office, you just don't get it.
Having a "no new remote workers" policy would feel a lot better to me than this.
I don't see this as a bait-and-switch unless there's something to back that up.
I'd certainly be feeling baited-and-switched right now if I hadn't already left.
(edited to fix typo)
I remember my friends working at Yahoo in the 2000's being all excited about the cult worship, good perks, then getting cynical about being stifled because they copied everything AOL was doing with project matrix management thinking nah, these guys won't make it.
I remember being at Google watching Marissa Mayer's user profile being delete right after the announcement got out that morning thinking nah, these guys won't make it.
But then I keep remembering, my mom still reads Yahoo Taiwan, uses Yahoo Mail, and sends me Yahoo News links. Then I keep remembering about the hundreds of products with plenty of inertia keeping the overall organization going.
Yahoo's in a great position. They still have good talent, have good traffic, and most importantly they can position themselves to be Apple's best friend by simply being Google's enemy.
Flickr, IntoNow, legacy stuff like Mail, Sports, Trave are still pretty diamonds that needs polish and TLC. They just gotta shore up profit to stay alive while out Google Google.
Instagram $1BB is an once in a lifetime situation brought on by the urgency of a company looking to block out competition and having the money.
Flickr isn't the same product as Instagram.
The real question is should Flickr change into an Instagram-like product or should Flickr stay as a photography community/product and can that still be profitable.
I don't know, but SmugMug, Behance, 500px etc are doing well. But the photo pie is getting bigger while Flickr's slice isn't necessarily growing at the same pace. This is a tough decision for executive management to double down, hold, or fold.
Yahoo's corporate DNA being a media company should make help, not detract, when new media is just media.
So... Yahoo was not big on remote employees.
Here's the thing - Google and the various other top high tech companies that are known for this go out of their way to make the workplace a mini paradise. Shuttles with wifi from noe valley, free and great food, extensive gyms and sports facilities, haircuts, dry cleaning, sabbaticals, tuition reimbursement, "take all you like" vacation policies... yeah, it's all designed to get you to stay at work 24/7, but at least they're trying to make it so nice that you'll want to.
I worked for a small company that eliminated telecommuting and pulled out the "google doesn't do this" line, but with none of the perks. Uh...
If yahoo wants to become a developer paradise, maybe they'll pull this off. If they want everyone to show up and work in a depressing cubicle all day, they'll be losing a lot of talent very soon.
If you can translate that into a continuous cycle of working on the most valuable not the most urgent problem, and a cycle of picking the valuable problem that turns you on, productivity should go through the roof
All the crap that must get done - I am much more willing to do crap when I have hit a home run the day before
Edit: this sounds like one expects to do productive work day in day out - I don't think that's true - one should aim for a home run every two-four weeks and be prepared to learn and measure during that period.
Oh. I see. That's different.
A CEO's job is just flat out different from an engineers job. The CEO's job is often to be the public face of the company, to go out and make deals, to talk to key investors, to raise money in some cases.
Or put another way, a CEO of a publicly traded company wouldn't be doing their job properly if they were in the office every day.
Why quit? More likely they would be terminated with benefits.
I work for a different large company in SV, and live 3,100 miles away from my office. Suffice to say, it would be a big stretch to go there Mon-Fri.
The most likely scenario though is a layoff package. Even at a few weeks pay, it's still less than the legal costs.
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145358
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5071701
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4800412
I'm always on the look out for new non-anecdotal research on the topic if anybody finds any!
Just sayin'
So what?
Some employers will do what Yahoo just did. Others may say: look, I want you to be productive, but more than that I want you to be happy. I prefer having great developers working at 90% of their capacity to squeezing every last bit of productivity from the mediocre ones I'm still able to retain.
I hope the second group wins over time.
I'm a huge fan of remote working, and I think that the current corporate mindset against it... and company arguments against it... are mostly just complete bullshit.
Of course, working remotely doesn't work in every case, but I'm certain that it would work very well in far more situations than people are willing to admit, or try.
Yes, one who knows how to communicate. But you wouldn't want an on-site employee who doesn't communicate, either.
You don't need to be in person, and many people would surprised how effective teams can be even when they're not in the same room. All it takes is good communication, and by that I mean: 1- good communication technology, like a good net connection and good chat software and good cameras, 2- good use of technology for communication (IM software is not sufficient), and 3- good communication practices (which amounts to: communicate early, communicate often).
Does it? If I want to slack off I find it just as easy in the office as I do at home. Heck I can even have music on at work or stream a video.
Frankly for me I find home working far less distracting than work. Work is noisy, people are coming and going, there are calls all around me, at home it is just me in a dark office only interrupted by things aimed specifically at me (Skype, e-mail, etc).
But this all boils down to the same old 1900s time mythos. You take intellectual workers and hold them to standards created for factory workers.
The theory goes that if I work longer I am more efficient. If they restrict access to distractions then I am more efficient. If they can look over my shoulder I am more efficient.
Personally I think this is all nonsense. The only way to track my efficiency is with milestones. The nice thing about milestones is that they are metrics which are flexible. If you fail to meet them you have a two way discussion about /why/.
It's a reason why I'm looking to hire remote developers who are mostly geographically located near me--main office is in Nashville, I'm in Boston. WFH when you want, head into a coworking space when you want some company. Seems the best of both worlds to me.
My guess is some of the folks on here hollering about being way better workers at home are right. They also probably spent several thousand bucks on a nice workspace, keyboard, extra monitor, stand up desk, whatever they need....
In America, the pursuit is for money and profits for your employer - an employee's emotional wellbeing is irrelevant.
Now be a good serf and pop your head back down into your cubicle.
I am not a researcher in the field, so its entirely possible that there is good work to support your claim, but all the research I've seen cited on HN in past discussions was crap or simply not relevant for the stated reason.
Maybe there's a generation gap (People who grew up with IM/IRC can naturally use it communicate better?) or my experience is too colored by working only remote my whole career, but between the places I worked without distributed workflows and those I hear about from my friends in the industry, my anecdotal evidence says distributed teams are far far more effective.
Having young kids at home might change your opinion.
Remote workers can be successful if and only if the communication and processes support it: all discussion within the teams must be electronic, on wikis, mailing lists, IRC or skype chats. Knowledge must be written down, not available via "ask Bob to fix the build on your computer". Now, these processes are useful on their own (more documentation, less interruption for all workers), but they do require effort by the on-site workers to avoid making decisions at the coffee machine. As a result, I believe remote work can work out well only if a sufficient fraction (perhaps over 50%) people are remote, not a small minority.
However, most discussions of remote vs. on-site assume that the people are the same. Yes, having the same team in a room is probably more productive than having them distributed. But by accepting remote work, companies have a much wider pool of talent available. Most people over 30 have partners with local jobs, kids in school, a house, relatives, and a set of friends they would not give up to move for a small improvement in salary or job satisfaction. Instead of comparing remote vs. on-site, it makes sense to compare an amazing remote team to an average on-site team.
In the Yahoo case, I expect that many of the developers will quit and find a job with a more local company, instead of moving or commuting for hours. Is that really an improvement of total productivity?
If an employee of Company X demanded to work from home two days a week for some reason otherwise he'd quit, Company X managers would weigh the cost of losing the employee against the cost of having him absent two days a week. And then they would make a decision.
I don't see how this is any different. Yahoo! has decided that being on site is a priority. Current employees may feel differently. These employees should weigh the cost of moving or commuting against the cost of finding new employment and make a decision.
It doesn't change the fact that it can happen, and this is a good reminder to the rest of us who have things promised verbally in an employment offer to have that stuff in writing. I am writing this as a warning to others and my future self.
But for those remote csrs, besides the upheaval, it's going to be tough working in SV on csr pay.
And how much team building do you need to read troubleshooting prompts out of a binder anyway?
Say you have east coast and west coast facilities. If people only worked within their local facility, I can see the reasoning and advantages. What I don't understand is where the value is when the work crosses facilities.
What you would need to do to bridge the gap between the workers in the different facilities is the same thing you should do to bridge the gap between remote workers.
How is having people that need to work together in separate facilities any better than the people working remotely?
The exception is where the remote does have some well defined autonomous reason for existing, for example a sales office.
In comparison remote workers obviously are usually tied to a particular office.
The problem is when you have these black-n-white policies. When we're in bug-fixing, hardening iteration I estimate that I'm almost 2x productive working at home, than I am commuting in and dealing with the chit-chat and distractions of being in open office.
The bottom line is that it's completely retarded for a CEO to make that kind of decision on a company-wide basis. Middle managers should be making that kind of decision.