It's easy to blame minorities

> Most estimates put the number of remote workers between 300 and 500.

Which estimates are those?

Overall, this post reeks of victimizing.

> So yes, remote workers are keeping Yahoo from being the “absolute best place to work”.

Stop attacking a strawman! Nobody's arguing that remote workers are the one stumbling block between Yahoo and mountains of glory. But there's clearly a culture that needs to be attacked, and if one of the elements of that culture is that remote workers ARENT LOGGING INTO THE VPN then maybe Yahoo shouldn't have remote workers for the time being.

It's also cute that DHH chose not to disclose that he's releasing a book about remote work (which, you know, might be a slight conflict of interest.)

I don't see anywhere that people are blaming remote workers for all of Yahoo's troubles.

People are starting to care about Yahoo now and not just look at them with pity. Mayer is trying to clean up that company. When you are turning around a large institution like Yahoo, you're going to piss off a lot of people. These are all signs that someone is actually trying to turn things around there, instead of continuing the status quo like the previous CEOs did. This is just one of many moves.

I think remote work is great, but reading elsewhere shows that there was a lot of abuse of the policy _at Yahoo_. When a policy is rampantly being abused, you can revoke it until you can figure out how to better measure its effects. I'm sure they will re-institute this policy once they have better control over it, but that probably won't get any press.

I still have a generally favorable opinion of what Mayer's doing so far, and will try to hold my personal judgement to see how Mayer's moves affect Yahoo in the long term.

One large company with an uncertain future shutting down opportunities to work from home is an opening in the market for several smaller companies with more upside to their futures to offer such opportunities to new hires. In a diverse business ecosystem with free enterprise, customers like you and me decide which companies' products and services will be monetizable, and the companies decide which personnel practices help them meet market challenges. I know of a SaaS company, much smaller than Yahoo but apparently growing and profitable, that has an explicit "results-based management" policy. That means the managers don't care how often their developers come into the office, and as long as developers finish their projects with reasonable quality and speed, and keep up with their support tasks (ALL the developers do rotating shifts on support, to stay near customer concerns), then the managers are happy. Not all companies can organize that way, but then again not all companies have to organize just like Yahoo either. Yahoo is one model of running a company. The 37 Signals model appears to work for 37 Signals, but not everyone wants to follow their model. Each company gets to try something out, and we consumers get to pick the winners.

    Gruber summed up this sentiment as “Yahoo employees have
    been allowed to work remotely, and they have not
    excelled”.
        In other words, Yahoo is a rudderless basket case, so
    it must be because of those 2-4% of the work force who are
    “goofing off”. Heh.

How the hell did he contort himself into inferring that from what Gruber wrote?!

I can't believe how much coverage this story has gotten, particularly in popular media. I expected lots of dust in the tech community, but CNN has been publishing op-ed's everyday since the announcement.

I just don't get the idea that the remote workers are slacking off so much that they need to make a sweeping policy change. If the remote workers are performing properly, then it's a 100% obvious management issue. Managers aren't properly managing remote workers and the hiring process is unable to properly weed out slackers and lazy people.

Well, the article makes for very interesting rhetoric: poisoning the well for people arguing against telework by equating it with categorism. The heavily-loaded language is a dead giveaway.

But without data to back it up, it's still just rhetoric. The fact is, even a relatively small group of people can ruin something for everyone. Ask anyone who has worked on teams for any length of time, and they'll tell you just how much damage even one person can do.

How do you predict who these people will be, or what kind of damage they'll do? By and large, you don't. That doesn't mean people don't try: the so-called "poisonous people" phenomenon has plagued the open-source community for long enough that entire books have been written on the subject. But the problem remains, and there's still no fair and reliable way to predict who will turn toxic.

Without that, you've basically got two options. You can decide that the costs associated with abuse are worth preserving the privilege, and mitigate the damage as best you can. Or, if the damage is too severe or the problem too persistent, you can declare that the poisonous people have ruined it for everybody. Yahoo took the former approach for a long time, and it hasn't worked out for them. Now they're trying the latter. Is it truly fair to blame them for that?

How do we know that the number of people who work remotely are only 300-500? It seems to me that one of the big issues here is that Yahoo! has lumped together three types of workers:

1) Those who work remotely (not near an office) 2) Those who work near an office, and work from home 1-2 days per week 3) Those who work near an office, and have a regularly scheduled day off ("work from home") 1-2 days per week

I suspect that he may be right that there are only 300-500 of category 1. IMO, these are the people that are getting unfairly hit by this particular move.

Categories 2-3 need to be sorted and dealt with as appropriate. This move seems like a reasonable thing to do for Yahoo! to deal with them, under the circumstances.

I think this is probably the best point to be made over Yahoo's change in policy -- there just aren't that many remote workers at Yahoo. With the emphasis they'd put on this particular change in policy, it's natural for people to conclude that Yahoo thinks that having everyone come into the office to work is a significant change necessary to right the ship. When so few workers are remote, can that really be the case? Does Yahoo know what they're doing?

I don't know the answers, but those are the questions running through my mind right now.

I don't get the sense that Yahoo was attempting to blame all it's ailments on remote work. DHH is reading that into this. Is it a component? Perhaps. But not the root cause.

This is not a case of blaming the "minority". To understand, let me digress a little – the case where we can easily get away by blaming a minority is when a school blames a small subset of students for spoiling a school's average test scores. That is called blaming a "minority" and it works.

However, what has been done here is purely for work optimisation. Mayer is clearly trying to change the culture of Yahoo, and in the attempts of doing so she has found that remote workers don't fit in the type of culture of strong collaboration and unity she wants Yahoo to become. And therefore, she has decided to change that. Simply stated.

There can't be any way for us to understand whether these remote workers under performed at Yahoo or not! However, when you try to make a defining culture, even the smallest of things matter. And perhaps, remote workers are not in line with the culture Yahoo is building. Regardless of how small the workforce is.

What will be interesting to me is how many of these remote workers are truly remote? As in, how many of them work in a completely different location than Yahoo HQ? To be honest, going down to work when you're living 5 blocks away from the office isn't particularly characterised as remote, knowing that the boss can call you in any second.

"But that’s exactly why it’s been so easy to place the blame on them for Yahoo’s ails. "

One thing is shutting down telecommuting because it is believed it's not working, another is "blaming" it for Yahoo ails, a statement that I haven't seen anywhere else apart from this article.

It's probably part of a larger set of measure that the new CEO has been undertaking to revive a stagnating company, talking about "blaming minorities" is plain exaggerating.

I think the most important aspect in remote working is not only whether the company believes in a result oriented culture or not. What gets ignored, is that a lot of knowledge is embedded in the culture. Like a random conversation in the hallway or how someone reacts to a crisis. What remote workers also miss is the level of energy and the optimism/pessimism that is going around.

Without high fidelity feedback, a remote worker may be totally mislead about certain issues, including his or her own performance. Hence the onus is always on the remote worker to stay in deep contact with her or his peers. And companies that allow remote working should also make this explicit.

Will be interesting to read how 37signals works around these issues.

Why does every one think they know better than Yahoo's CEO about how to manage Yahoo itself?

This post wasn't very well thought-out.

"Gruber summed up this sentiment as “Yahoo employees have been allowed to work remotely, and they have not excelled”. In other words, Yahoo is a rudderless basket case, so it must be because of those 2-4% of the work force who are “goofing off”. Heh."

That was a leap of logic, for sure. What this really says is: if 2-4% of your workforce isn't working out because they're remote, then 2-4% of your workforce should not be working remote. It does not place the blame entirely on those remote workers, though.

I imagine this is a small move in a larger, company-wide shift. It just seems to be getting the most press for some reason.

While his claims certainly aren't airtight, ie the cynical idea that Yahoo is blaming its remote workers for the trouble, I do think there is some truth to the general sentiment; failing companies often grasp for any action they can take to stop the bleeding, and these actions, undertaken in haste or amidst great anxiety, can yield very little value or even cause harm. I'm not sure if that is what is happening at Yahoo, but I've definitely seen it happen before.

Lets be honest here, 37signals is being a wolf in sheep's clothes here with their recent Yahoo posts.

Yahoo just ended their remote workforce program because they need better collaboration to occur which they believe can only happen face to face.

37signals sells colloborarion software for remote employees.

People seem to miss that it's in 37signals best interest to bash Yahoo for this move.

DHH is leaning toward looking obsessed with this, at this point. But, I think Yahoo, no matter the reason for original attempt has received so much negative press that this will in the long run end up costing them.

To be fair to Yahoo, nowhere do they mention that the remote workers are at fault for the company or the workforce struggles. They only want them performing better.

I'm pro remote working, but I can't see the fault in that.

Why are people still posting and upvoting these articles? DHH has made it clear that he doesn't want his articles on Hackernews, which he described as a "cesspool".

It's easy to make asinine generalizations about things.