Yahoo’s backwards move | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo’s backwards move

medium.com

Seems like this is the popular outrage for today. I posted this on another thread earlier --> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5271940

Am I the only one who isn't that outraged by this? I'm as big of a proponent for remote workers as anyone (I basically quit my last job over it), but it makes a lot of sense for yahoo in this case.

1. They're regrouping, reorganizing and refocusing their vision. All of which are much easier to do in person.

2. The group buy-in that she needs to shift Yahoo's culture, product and focus is much easier to get when they're all in one centralized location.

3. Remote workers count for a fraction of their workforce? It's not like it's going to be a massive change for 50%+ of their workforce. They're just getting the few remoters back in house.

Like I said, I'm a big proponent of remote working, but this seems a little overblown to me.

Furthermore, this article's entire argument seems predicated on the idea that the remote workers in question are all above-average star performers:

> Having a great team with distributed members still far out perform a co-located average team

No evidence is presented in support of this basic assumption.

I'm not going to defend the author's work. He should have pointed to some stats that support his assertion, which are plentiful and available on the web.

Well put.

Few people seem to make a distinction between what's good most of the time and what's good when you're trying to turn around a moribund giant whose dysfunctional processes are a big part of the problem.

    Seems like this is the popular outrage for today.

Seems like this is what people use Medium for. I still have no idea what the value proposition of Medium is. At least I usually know what I'm in for, when I see an article coming from the platform.

If they want to change culture then it is far quicker when people are physically in the same place.

Im sure if Yahoos culture worked well then they wouldnt be doing this.

I'm not sold on the working from home argument.

Studies I've seen have been for work that's partially commission based. Anyone have better?

And I will admit it will work for some people but that doesn't mean it will work for a company.

It's hard to say to some people you can work from home and to others you can't because I don't trust you. And how can a company work out if you are a person it works for?

I think what many people forget is everyone is different and systems aren't perfect. You might be able to work efficiently from home but allowing you to do it might make the team worse off because the best system the company can put in place won't be as efficient.

Because we all know companies suck at a lot of stuff and it's just adding another thing they can stuff up in this non utopian world.

But as above interested to see any studies people have.

Based on prior experience with "no more work from home" at a large company, I suspect this move is in part to bring the team closer together and in part to force a group of rooted employees out of the company. At least in the case when I saw this done in the past, we had a couple of folks who "worked" from home at least a few times a week. Well, they said they worked, but in reality I think they were plucking weeds in the garden, looking at LOL cats and so forth... Driving them insane by having to spend at least 8 hours in the office was a great way to have 'em retire early. </end speculation>

Not surprising comming from a workaholic who sleeps 4 hours a night and thinks one should have a baby and get back to work the same week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com