Marissa Mayer is killing telecommuting, and that’s a good thing
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Author mentions Facebook's "lockdowns" as evidence that other people are killing remote work. Except lockdowns are highly exceptional events - is asking your employees to stay late in a disaster situation at all like asking them not to telecommute?
> "It’s okay to say that. Sandberg and Mayer are giving up everything, so why can’t they ask that of everyone else?"
I'm going to be frank: because I have several dozen recruiter emails piling up in my inbox, and that's just from the last week. I have people swinging large six-figure paychecks in front of my nose day in, day out, all of whom are doing interesting things. I'd take them all if I could clone myself 100 times over.
That's why you can't ask me to give up everything. Free market, people, it cuts both ways.
You can ask your employees to come to work every day in lederhosen, too. We'll see how far you get with that.
As someone who dislikes remote work, but has no problem with other people doing it, the irksome thing about this topic is that is resembles the vegetarian/omnivore "debate". You can't seem to champion for one side without slamming the other.
Proponents of remote work constantly portray brick-and-mortar offices as stodgy, inflexible, archaic, etc.
Proponents of on-site work constantly portray remote work as lazy, inefficient, and for many reasons inferior.
Can we just accept that people work differently? And that people who subscribe to one way of working aren't out to destroy your way of life?
They're not giving up everything. In an immediate short term sense, they're giving up some things, but they also have a far more secured financial footing to deal with the next 50 years of their life. They can, tomorrow, stop everything, and do whatever they want to. Most of the rest of the company can't, and need to balance their current obligations with their wants/desires/dreams and family life today. And if they don't, they don't have the 8 figure bank balances to fall back on.
"Alas, with her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it maternity leave and her new policy banning working from home, it feels like Mayer is throwing darts at working parents everywhere. Her stand is even more egregious considering she’s apparently built herself a set-up most moms can only dream of: a nursery — paid for out of her own pocket — adjacent to her company 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?” wondered a husband on AllThingsD. His wife, a Yahoo employee, will soon have to stop working from home."
Source: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/28/how-yahoo-ceo-marissa-...
Yahoo has not removed workplace flexibility, PTO, or sick time. They restricted remote working, which has little to do parenting.
If they want to, sure, but nobody has a right to expect that from others, in the same way as founders have no right to expect the same level of dedication from employees without the same potential for reward.
[edited for minor punctuation]
They will not succeed without the thousands of people working beneath them. But most likely they'll have a decent golden parachute - probably several times the value of many of the employees they're forcing the hands of.
I do agree that people work differently. A large part of my job is paying attention to detail, which becomes harder and harder to do when the every day detail gets mired in coworkers stopping by my office to say hello or ask about the latest episode of Breaking Bad. Nobody has ever asked me if this was a good time...
So I suffered through the distractions and the interruptions and slowly came to the conclusion that with every distraction, came a slew of insufferable minutes trying to get back into the same thought process I was in prior to the interruption. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I didn't and would have to pick up where I left off later.
People without my particular mindset, may not understand this thought process as I may not understand yours. But please, please, please, let me tell you that I am wholly more productive if I can either shut my door and lock it....or telecommute and work flexible hours.
At my workplace, we're allowed to wear headphones. Nobody interrupts somebody wearing headphones unless it's really worth it, otherwise an IM or email suffices. I have ADHD, so I know all too well just how important not being interrupted is - those headphones are a great way for me to signal to my coworkers "I am having trouble focusing. Please let me get in the zone before quitting time!"
Given that example, have you considered that telecommuting was not the only way you could have reached a comfortable level of productivity?
Absolutely, but when your superiors had an "open door" policy, wearing headphones simply meant, please interrupt me often.
But to add, I could literally sometimes get sidetracked for days on particular projects because of the constant interruptions and meetings. When I moved myself to telecommute, people's desire to interrupt became drastically less simply because it wasn't as "easy" as dropping by my office on the way to the break room or bathroom. I called it "weeding out the riff raff" because the people who needed to get ahold of me, knew how to get ahold of me.
I was able to pound out coding work in a couple of days that would have taken me a couple of weeks in the office.
Alright, this makes sense. Your workplace overall was not conducive to work.
To stay on topic, do you think Yahoo is like this? Do you think people at Yahoo are working from home because Yahoo is an impossible workplace?
If it is, do you think that Marissa Meyer should be focusing on helping people leave the office because the office is so chaotic? Or should she be making the office a place where everyone can get their job done?
Do I believe that Yahoo is like this? Absolutely. I believe that people desire to work from home for as many reasons as there are items in your grocery store.
Do I think people work from home because Yahoo is, at times, an impossible workplace? Absolutely.
I can't answer the last question because it's a straw man argument.
Marissa should be focusing on how to attract top talent. When was the last time you heard anyone say, "I can't wait to go to work at Yahoo!"? Good talent exists in many forms but for the sake of argument, say the only two forms are those that can come into the office and those that have to work from home. Why would you wholesale dismiss 1/2 of them? This is an internet company...you know that ubiquitous utility that most of us have in our homes? Therefore it's reasonable to assume that an internet company can benefit, in many ways, from having a distributed workforce...that...you know..is on the internet. :)
Look, I cannot understand why this decision was made across the board for all of Yahoo! All I can assert is how this wouldn't work for me and for a lot of other developers that I know. Great developers at that. This decision seems short-sided and really odd considering all of the other battles Yahoo is going to face. BUT, I'm not privy to the intimate details of this decision either.
2. I am all for Lederhosen at work actually :-). Wearing a rather nice pair right now !
3. As a remote worker who has not actually met his co-workers, I can happily say that I am effective, but it takes more effort to stay in touch
My suggestion is : rapidly cycled development teams:
If we have remote workers, it is a lot easier for them to move jobs. If we have heavily decomposed applications (see micro-services) then we can bring people into a development, have them productive quickly (who cannot write an HTTP service of a few hundred lines) and bingo - what we find out is the important thing potatolicious refers to - how well do they work remotely? ANd with the team.
FOr me the fit is probably the biggest determinator of productivity once past basic competance. And if we can swap people artound quickly we can quickly find really well gelled teams
I envisage a world where a freelancer can "try out" in many teams till they find a really good fit, and then they can stay there and be sold as a complete development team.
For me it goes in spurts, but there's always at least a few recruiter emails per week. Most of them are not even a moderate fit for my skills, but some are.
I'm not sure how people can 'gel' if they're swapped around quickly.
Apparently in Google its possible to work on any internal project - you essentially have an internal market of freelancers, and the friction costs of bringing in a new guy for any project are surely dependnat heavily on how well decomposed the target sytem is.
The idea is to stop companies trying to hire a monolithic team of developers and trying to make a monolithic system work and instead have smaller teams on smaller components.
It is fairly "modularisation - duh" but its amazing how just this simple thing is ignored in both organisational terms and in code terms in many enterprises.
Its a thought in progress -
And, yeah, it seems like its just me !
No, it isn't.
Yahoo! is certainly not doing 'big and important' things. They are a search engine that can't figure out how to get it's rapidly decreasing market share from rapidly decreasing. And the CEO wants everyone in the company to give up everything - happiness, work life balance, a life outside of search engine work -for that cause.
Unless Yahoo! decides they don't need you all of sudden - you know, if headcount is too high or they decide your department isn't part of the 'goal'. Then they can cut you loose, despite the fact that you gave up everything for them.
So, translation: Yahoo! and other companies want you to give up everything for them, but they will give up nothing.
Deeper translation: Yahoo! is doomed.
Just because there are people that are willing to give up everything for a company, it doesn't make it right for companies to expect everyone to be like them.
This just shows how wrong our society is. Corporativism in it's true form.
[1] http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-...
> So, translation: Yahoo! and other companies want you to give up everything for them, but they will give up nothing. Deeper translation: Yahoo! is doomed.
slow clap
Yahoo's search has been Bing for almost 3 years.
No, no, no, no, no. This is not the way of the future, or even the way of today. This is a throwback to the past. Yahoo has a productivity problem because of incompetent management that cannot measure productivity, and sees butts-in-seats as the only way to start. They are regressing. Because of their dysfunction, they are trying to solve a problem that better companies already solved years ago.
A person simply cannot work productively for 12-16 hours a day over a career. You start to see diminishing returns at about six hours, and after nine or ten, the only reason you're still there is social climbing. And because you know you're not going home early no matter what, because you basically live at the office, you will naturally take breaks, screw off, and procrastinate. Working 8 to 8 for an Asian megacorp, I have seen it so many times. On the other hand, bankers, management consultants, lawyers, and startup founders who actually work hard 12-16 hours a day do not and cannot do it for a long career, they are running a sprint not a marathon to maximize short-term earnings in the hopes that they will reach their finish line, achieve "f--- you money" and be able to retire before they burn out.
The article does not even broach any of the important issues being discussed around telecommuting: trust, productivity, team gelling, etc. But instead takes advantage of a recent controversy and adds a little spin from Trunk's tired routine in order to generate page views and comments.
She once wrote that travelling is a waste of time (for her, but she projects it to everyone). After reading this a few years ago, I actively started to dislike this person immediately.
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/08/17/4-reasons-travel-fo...
Let's discuss the actual message of the post. Two paragraphs in I'm already in full rage mode. Giving up your life for a company is ok? I understand dedication, even the occasional extra few hours, but what Mrs. Trunk is proposing is literally living at work, which we all know is unmaintainable and unhealthy for most of us. Research has shown that there is a tiny portion of the population that can get 4 hours a sleep and maintain 16 hour days, but that's only about 1% of us. The rest of us have bodies and lives to maintain.
>Mayer doesn’t want to work with anyone who is working 60 hours a week. She is in Silicon Valley where an 80-hour week is full-time and 50-hours is part-time.
>I have written before that the reason women are not startup founders is that startups require 120-hour workweeks.
Really? People at Yahoo are working 80 hours a week?
According to this 2009 HN poll, 5% of respondents work 80+ hrs. 16% worked 60+.
Sincerely - I been working from home for full-time clients for a long time and having two dogs and two kids and kitchen smells around the house does not help to focus and be productive.
I actually like being [in the nice] office and communicate with [nice] people.
Marissa is cleaning the house and everyone is invited! :)
Does it? Because from all the information provided publicly it seems to apply to all remote workers - are you sure they're all lazy moonlighters? Doesn't seem probable.
And don't apply your own experience to everyone else where it doesn't apply - I work from home a lot too - I have no dogs, no kids, no smells - in fact I have a very nice office, with better equipment and environment than any client I've ever worked with. But that's just me, of course.
She needs to save the company and that's her choice.
If you work for Yahoo you choice is either [optional: bitch and] comply or find a better place to work :)
Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, 9gag, and countless other sites exist upon the 9-5 of office workers who aren't actually working. The notion that office workers are more likely to actually be doing something of value is utter nonsense.
Any manager who doesn't know what their employees are contributing to the company is completely incompetent and incapable of doing their job. The physical location of the staff is irrelevant.
If you work for Yahoo you choice is either [optional: bitch and] comply or find a better place to work
No one is arguing with that. They are saying, however, that the end result for Yahoo will probably be much worse.
I suspect they'll make token offers of, say, $5k towards relo expenses, and you'll be on the hook to pay those back if you stay less than a year.
"Companies move more efficiently if everyone is at the office"
Some companies do - companies that are geared towards physical face time. Many people work best like that - some don't. I'd say, more importantly, there are periods of time when I work better face to face with people - often a few week portion of a project, then there are other times when I'm far more productive getting stuff done working from home.
"that innovation happens faster if people work at the same office"
Yahoo's problem has not usually been innovation specifically, but following through on that innovation (how many things have come from yahoo's labs - yui, etc - that get half-hearted support, or then get killed?)
You can't tell me past leadership at Yahoo were all telecommuting. All those top-brass managers had plenty of in-office shared space facetime, and it didn't do a lick of good for them.
I understand Mayer is coming in and trying to change all of that, but I suggest changing people vs changing policies will get better results in the long run. I realize it's more problematic to define 'better' people, and policies are much easier to define, but they must realize they're also going to be excluding some otherwise great contributors because of the policy. Might these losses be offset by gains in productivity and innovation? Who knows?
"If the CEO had to choose between firing me or taking a pay-cut equal to my salary, what would he choose?"
The answer is almost always immediately obvious.
I kept looking for the <sarcasm/> tag.
"Penelope Trunk founded Brazen Careerist and two other startups. Her career advice runs in 200 newspapers. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons."
Let's not use it though. It comes with a few problems that can't possibly ever be solved. It's just a fad. It will never catch on.
Family historian Stephanie Coontz writes that today’s workforce is so demanding that families can only handle having one person in the workforce. She shows how the average work week does not allow for people to take care of children, which means that one partner needs to drop out of the workforce and take care of kids.
This is not Coontz's point at all. Coontz considers the status quo to be about "bad working conditions," and concludes (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-gender-...):
Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders.
In other words, the the status quo is hard on people; the problem is in the nature of work. My bet is that Coontz would have a lot of issues with Mayer's order.
And Yahoo decided not to do it. ( For a lot of reasons only they would know )
And yet the internet is making a big fuss about it.
We all know why: It is a stealth layoff. It's an easy way to cut some staff (many of whom will leave for greener pastures) without the negative market news of cutting staff.
It is important to the rest of us, however, as it's held as some sort of qualitative change for excellence. That it is proof that remote work doesn't work/office work is better, etc. We've seen dozens of articles using this as proof of...something.
When it's really just a way to save some costs -- even if longer term it hurts the company.
Of course, the first to leave will be the better employees who have other options.
That's some awesome managin' there, to be sure.
People say Yahoo did it because people were abusing work from home. What makes them think the people who didn't get any work done at home aren't just going to not do any work done at work? The problem is that people aren't productive, not that they're at home. So you fire the unproductive people. Except evidently yahoo can't tell who isn't productive or they would have already done that. So how is being in the office going to change anything?
First of all, I don't believe Mayer or Sandberg are asking/ demanding/ or hinting that employees need to give up everything. The economics of the job market and organization health don't really back that up (whether you're 'changing the world or not'). Second - as many people are mentioning here - the demand and economic returns to different employee levels completely skew the "Mayer gives up everything" - she (and Sandberg) also receive completely different benefits and calculate their commitment/ lifestyle tradeoffs with a totally different set of inputs & outputs from the hypothetical Yahoo! front-end guy who has been off-siting for 18 months... the whole thesis is beyond comprehension. The author of this post who "lives on a farm homeschooling her 2 children" has lost touch with reality/ is actually quite smart at driving page views, but is nonetheless wrong.
Really? Maybe for execs, but that's not the impression I have from people I know there. Anyone care to comment on Google's work/life balance?
I cry for America.
If you take this to its logical conclusion, every company should build a massive campus and locate everyone there, in the same time zone, even the same building.
I don't buy that Meyer is "giving up everything". She just had a nursery built next to her office (at her expense) so her infant can come to work with her. Is Yahoo going to give space for all the previously telecommuting young moms with infants to have a little nursery too?
Some companies may "move more effectively" if everyone is at the office, but I'm aware of several that have fully distributed teams, or significant numbers of employees who don't come into the office who are moving pretty fast- Basho and Automattic are two. (I think Couchbase does this too.)
I'd rather have someone living in one of the "flyover states" working for me from their home than the overhead of an office... offices are a cost and the assumed benefit may not exceed the increased cost. Certainly it can't be said that it always does.
The assumption that telecommuters are "less dedicated" is a prejudice. I've seen some evidence that they are more dedicated and put in more time. But further, it's assuming that you don't want to hire people who put in less time (for less pay, say a part time telecommuter.) Which seems silly. There are some people who you'd like to hire, but which you're going to be forced to pass on if you've got this "butts in the seats" policy, some of whome are quite good but due to family situations or simply optimizing their own lives, aren't interested in relocating to whatever big city you located your offices in.
Imagine DHH decided to go freelance. As the creator of rails it's safe to say he's the foremost expert, but this example works for anyone with significant expertise that would be valuable to lots of companies. Would DHH's value be maximized by working for one company 40 hours a week, and having all the work that doesn't require his particular expertise along with the really key stuff...or would it be better for him to work 10 hours a week for four different companies, maximizing his efforts on the areas where his expertise is completely unique? I know this is an even more radical idea, but I think it's the future of work.
I envisage it something like decomposing systems into micro-services, where the service is a independant, deployable thing (probably HTTP / Rest but who cares).
Then its a lot easier to outsource specific parts and bring in specific expertise - and also a lot easier to bid for those parts.
I like your DHH idea - and I suspect he or people like him do best at short bursts in many companies.
We destroy a lot of inprocess speed, but I suspect we shall rely on Moores law to help.