This Is Why You Can’t Have Nice Things, Yahoos

Marissa Mayer. She's doing this right. It's the velvet glove on the iron fist. She starts with food and modern cell phones. She tosses out the bad execs. She eliminates the dumb trademark symbols on all the physical signage. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief – these changes are good news.

The message is clear: your boss knows what you need and wants to take care of you.

But she's not all cupcakes and kisses.

With the tone set properly, she identifies the dead wood. From what I hear, shitloads of people are checked out at Yahoo. That's a cultural problem that's tough to lift. Imagine being checked out and outside of the day-to-day social nudges that keep you feeling a little bit like your job expectations have consequence.

Mayer's an optimizer. Years at Google taught her all about getting the best ROI from the simplest operation. With one stroke, she can identify who really cares about Yahoo's mission and who is just along for the free gravy train. Yahoo isn't going to get out of trouble by casually, lazily sidling to the promised land.

It's going to take work. And now the boss wants a sign of commitment to that work.

The hysteria about this move is misplaced. She nailed it. Great call.

If people are coasting at home OR at the office you can tell that by their work output. Where they do their work doesn't enter into it.

Adopting a Results Only Work Environment (http://gorowe.com) would allow them to have folks who work from anywhere and give management the tools to fire under-performers.

If this were only a temporary measure, a "reset" so to speak, then I still don't agree with it (I think you can do that without the disruption), but it would be understandable. As they have not said that this is temporary, I have no reason to think it'll come back in the future, which is the tragedy.

It doesn't have to be like this.

Wow. The WFH ban is starting to sound like the beginning of a bigger shake-up. I suspect Yahoo will want get rid of a ton of its unproductive employees and rebuild around a small core of talent, some of which will presumably be poached from Google.

if this is indeed the problem, then how is bringing in non productive engineers under the same incompetent and uninspired managers going to improve the situation at all? is this going to at least indirectly aid in culling the unwanted, laggard staff?

you can still slack off even when reporting to the office, especially if you commute by car.

if they have VPN logs, can't they just fire engineers using this evidence? it's not like we:re in Italy or France where firing workers is next to impossible.

I somewhat blame their direct managers. It's always tempting for lower-level employees to game the system, especially if they are having personal issues (young kids, bad marriage, low workplace morale). Managers should provide guidance to bring their reports back into line.

Then again, the managers in question were busy fighting org politics and seemed happy just to have an extra "soldier" on their roster.

So maybe Marissa's stalinist purge of remote workers will prove to be a blunt but effective instrument for flushing out the bludgers.

The problem is and always will be unproductive people. It comes down to leaders and leadership. If someone isn't working out, cut bait. That includes managers, execs and programmers.

Any exec worth their salt would attack the problem, not a symptom of the problem. This shows me that Yahoo still doesn't get it.

And if this IS about unproductive people, this is essentially a ban hammer on something b/c of some bad apples. Again, awful leadership. Fix the problem.

I work from home. Everyone on my team works from home. The entire company I work for works from home. We are a big company. It does take good leadership and strong management to make that work. It also takes good developers and, frankly, strong guidance if something isn't working out.

It sounds like Yahoo has none of the above, or, perhaps more tellingly, maybe Mayer knows that (giving her the benefit of the doubt, after all) and that is really an indication of a much bigger problem.

And to those who claim that they are as effective working at home, let me challenge you in this way: how do you really teach, inspire, and build morale if not in person? Someone may be a great coder, but they might also be an incredibly motivating person who lifts up those around them to much higher levels. I've never seen that occur remotely. Yahoo needs help badly, and they need their best people on site, walking the halls, building a culture that means making Yahoo great again. I don't see how said people can do that over VPN.

Think about why that perception exists. It implies that unless you have someone looking over your shoulder you wont do any work. Like a child in a classroom.

Most people are not children. Most people want to do a good job and support their team members.

If you behave like a child then you should never have been hired in the first place. If you are hired then your lack of delivering results will be very visible.

If a slack employee can get away with slacking off, the company has a much more serious problem about the way it works. Putting people in an office will not solve this problem.

I'm happy to argue about the pros and cons of local vs remote teams. Effectively communicating, mentoring,team bonding etc are all debates worth having.

The slacking off argument is not worth having. Its rubbish. This initiative sounds like busy work.

John Lilly (of Mozilla fame and former Apple employee) recounts the atmosphere at the time:

"[Steve] said 'You know what, we're going to build a great company. We're going to reinvent the world. And anybody who believes me, let's get moving. If you don't believe that will happen then get the hell out.' And this was an amazing act of leadership because it was so clear who was in and who was out. And I'll tell you, people in the room would have followed Steve everywhere and anywhere, just about anywhere. Now it turns out me and my friends left and we're happy with that decision although economically it probably would have been better to stick around. We've all done okay. But what an act of leadership by a guy who nobody believed in at the time, nobody believed it."

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3067 (Listen from 13:50 to 16:40 for the story containing the above quote)

In my opinion, the problem with remote workers is it is FAR too easy for superstars to sandbag and still perform in the upper quartile. They look at it as a value proposition: if I can turn out a weeks worth of productivity for an above average programmer in just 2-3 days of effort, I can slack for the remainder of the work week or not even check in.

Contrast that to a place that enforces the face-to-face time. It's much harder to slack and sandbag when you have people there. That super-star who is now in the office, will churn out super-star material 5 days a week, instead of 3.

I think it's brilliant, and wish them well. I would love to see Yahoo rise up from the ashes.

* apologize for the term superstars, but you know what I mean. Some people just have ability that far exceeds their peers, and they use that ability to shift their work/life balance. I think it's entirely fair, but I can see how an employer would want to optimize in their favor.

The decision was obviously exclusively related to Yahoo and only pertinent to this current point in time.

How about just figuring out what people goals are and, if they can't meet them, they're let go. Wouldn't that work just as well without causing everyone to come into the office because some people can't manage to work from home?

The real question is: why are there so many unmotivated, unproductive people? Is it bad hiring or bad project management? I don't think there are a large number of intrinsic underperformers, so much as people demotivated by contexts that leave no real opportunities for achievement. Perhaps there are a lot of pointless projects that have no career upside, but that people can't escape from, so they use the bog as an excuse to retire on-the-job. I'm not saying that that's right-- it's not-- but, if this is the case, then it's important to deal with the underlying problem instead of the symptom only.

One of the things that executives get wrong on this is that, if you want to preserve morale, you've got to put a "shit sandwich" (good-bad-good pattern) around your crackdown. First, you do something related and good for the employees (like give them more opportunities to pick what they work on). Then, you deliver the crackdown (reduced WFH). Finally, once you've achieved what you're looking for, you scale the crackdown back or add a perk that makes it more acceptable.