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Comment by keithpeter | Hacker News Reader

"If a hiring process weeds out some qualified candidates, it doesn't mean it's broken. Whether or not it's broken is determined by whether the company finds a suitable candidate, how long it takes and how expensive it is."

Absolutely. But changing terms and conditions after a person has been employed is different, and, in the UK at least, may be illegal. I suspect it is the change for existing employees that surprised people.

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One thing may be possible - that they actually took a look at who worked remotely and who worked on site. From that they decided that the 100% remote workers were not producing as well, or were acceptable to lose.

It could be that Yahoo didn't set up their remote work procedures very well and so it lead to poor productivity from remote workers.

Obviously they're willing to risk losing employees so I would guess they put some thought into it.

This was speculated in the following article. Compared to announcing a round of layoffs, reigning in remote workers is probably much less damaging to morale, and they can always ease the restriction or set up a more rationale policy down the road.

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Why...

The article actually makes a lot of sense. In the case of an organization that wasn't set up properly for remote working and then grew out of control for many years - there's probably a lot of people who simply aren't contributing. It saves Yahoo the negative attention that a round of layoffs would bring.

"From that they decided that the 100% remote workers were not producing as well, or were acceptable to lose."

I'm getting the picture that US has few employment rights! It will be interesting to see if any of those directly affected by this break cover and discuss it in public.

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