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Comment by bitcartel | Hacker News Reader

What happened to leading by example?

"Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer built a nursery in her office so she could bring her baby to work, which has angered some stay-at-home employees following her demand that all remote workers report back to the office.

'I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?' the husband of one remote-working Yahoo employee asked in an interview with AllThingsD's Kara Swisher.

Many employees are upset because they don't have the money or clout to build their own nurseries at work. And many assume Mayer has a whole team of people, from nannies to cooks and cleaners, helping her raise her son - after all, she does have a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco in addition to her $5.2 million 5-bedroom home in Palo Alto."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2284828/Yahoo-boss-M...

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I don't get it. She's building the nursery at the office, how does that contradict a no-working-from-home policy? She's explicitly not working from home.

Rank-and-file don't get nurseries in their office? Ok, they don't get a CEO salary and responsibilities, either. That's life.

Yahoo lists dependent care on their benefits page (http://us.careers.yahoo.com/benefits/tag/4754/lang/en); even without knowing the details that's already a lot more than a bunch of other companies offer.

When you, alone, have the power to turn a company around, you get more or less anything necessary to ensure your success.

Let's be real.

This isn't CEO camp. Not everyone gets a turn.

Mayer is special. She's got a kid on the way. I'm sure the shareholders would prefer she not have to choose between saving Yahoo and raising her kid. If employees were able to deliver similar levels of value, I'm sure they'd be first in line for their own special accommodations.

How is it related to being a CEO, though? Fact is, Mayer had a child. She realised that in order to be effective in the office, she needed a nursery, so that she could be close to her child while also working.

Why does the same not apply to Yahoo employees with young children? Mayer may be CEO, but the logic she used to install a nursery would apply to all employees.

There is a cost associated with the accommodation (which Mayer was uniquely able to pay for). There's limited physical space. There are practical considerations.

Other employees don't deliver enough value to tip the equation in favor of the accommodation. If tier-4 person has a nursery, you get a marginally better contribution four tiers down. If Mayer has a nursery, she potentially turns Yahoo into a fiercely competitive organization.

Is it fair? No. It's business.

Hell, why not give everyone a corner office? Give everyone a private jet? Y'know?

You know, there's a cost effective alternative to giving every employee a nursery. It's letting them work from home.

That's kind of the whole point of why people are picking up on this.

Exactly. Eliminating working from home punishes those who need the option most, Yahoo moms and dads.

Just for the record:

- The US is the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns

- The US is one of only three nations — rich and poor - that doesn't guarantee job-protected time off with some amount of income after the birth of a child

- New parents in the U.S. are guaranteed their jobs for 12 weeks after the arrival of a new baby, thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, but they do not have to be paid during that time and exemptions apply for small companies.

- California provides 60% pay for 12 weeks

- UK provides 90% pay for 280 days, Russia 100% pay for 140 days, Spain & France & Netherlands 100% pay for 112 days, Germany 100% pay for 98 days, China 100% pay for 90 days

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04/maternity-leave-pai...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/why-paid-le...

Letting people work from home doesn't help a person do their job if they still have to look after the child(ren). You might get a couple hours work done at nap time but otherwise young kids require all hands on deck.

And one day, when Yahoo is very successful and has a trusted, properly incentivized workforce, I am certain they will explore such accommodation. In the meantime, homegirl is running a turnaround; the French Resistance didn't have featherbeds.

It's hardly as if Yahoo employees don't have other places they could go. At a time when tech companies are falling over each other to persuade people to work for them, turning off prospective employees seems like a turnaround all right.

You're assuming that she turns yahoo around and doesn't just postpone inevitable.

I think the logic behind the nursery probably does apply to most Yahoo employees with young children. But that's an argument for on-site day care (does Yahoo offer it?), not working from home.

She is probably expected to work a lot more hours than the majority of employees. In fact doesn't she have a reputation for basically working 24/7.

This is a way to do that without having her kid basically raised by a nanny.

So the drones have to sacrifice their benefits to drive up the share price, but the C-suite gets extravagant bespoke benefits because they're delivering value...by tearing up other people's benefits.

Seems like good work if you can get it.

It is good work if you can get it. So is getting $10M a year to play basketball. If you have the rare talents that our 21st century economy demands from the top performers, a nursery in your office is the least of the perks you get.

If you have the less rare but still valuable talents of a yahoo programmer, you get no jet or crèche but you get six figures and free soda.

If you live in Detroit and know how to make fasteners, you get less than that in most cases today.

If you live in Somalia, well...

Fair it may not be, but I'm not crying for the poor Yahoo lead developer who has to go to the office now. It's a cold, cold world.

This is just an appeal to worse fallacy. Just because others have it bad doesn't mean we shouldn't improve our own situation.

The whole point is that cutting other people's benefits, salaries and jobs is not a talent at all. A robot built to mimic the average private-equity or management consulting firm could easily determine that brave, stringent cuts to employee compensation desperately need to be made, since that's what they always say.

Who cares? It's not her job to be fair, or to coddle the Yahoo employees.

The point of the article is the working remotely is built on trust; if you break the trust, you lose the privilege.

The whole thing screams of entitlement to me. Just because someone else has something, doesn't mean you deserve it too. If you want it, work for it and do it yourself.

I see this all the time and it makes no sense. Mayer has not eliminated maternity leave. She eliminated working from home. They are not the same thing.

You cannot work full time from home AND take care of a newborn baby. Anyone who has been at home with a newborn knows this. Working from home is about flexibility and focus, not cheaping out on child care. If you work from home, you still need someone to watch your kid(s). If you are watching your kids, you're not working to the same extent you would in the office.

So yeah, Marissa created a situation so that she could come back to work way earlier than most new moms do. I bet the board of Yahoo prefers that to a CEO who takes her federally-mandated 3 months of family leave.

It's usually a safe assumption that rules that apply to employees don't apply to C level management.

So build an onsite nursery onsite for all the working moms! This is a great idea! Though I'm sure they get maternity leave so its a bit superfluous (mayers isn't taking hers, I guess). But we can generalize into onsite pre-school care, that would be cool (or they could hand out subsidies, it might be cheaper).

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