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Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

>The shift in policy affects roughly 200 of Yahoo's 12,000 employees.

I see this statistic and I'm reminded at how much of a disingenuous uproar the policy change caused. Every time I read comments regarding this issue I'm more convinced the real issue is who issued the policy, and not the change itself.

A new mother canceling work at home while simultaneously raising her own child in the office is not hypocritical. It supports her position. And yes, a private nursery is a perk she receives as CEO.

A CEO gets a nursery: Outrage! CEO gets a private bathroom, private airplane, private car, meetings on the golf course, etc: normal operating procedure. I wonder why the nursery gets singled out for ridicule?

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Couldn't really care less about her myself. No work from home changes it from a company I might work for to one I won't. It's incredibly valuable to be able to just sit and code some days with no interruptions. I did a stint at IBM once too and they were all for flexible working and had many studies backing it up. They saved a lot of money on offices and got better work done.

Re childcare, it does seem crude to rub the CEO only nursery in employees faces like she does by having it at the company. I know companies that provide free day care to all employees. If I was an employee like her who wanted my kid around and not in her position, I'd jump ship and go to one of those. Does she go around telling her employees how much more she earns than them as well? I hope not.

Per the article, Yahoo need innovation, not raw productivity. A bunch of Yahoo employees at home coding thousands of tested lines a day aren't going to help the company if it's all the same old crap Yahoo has been putting out for years.

I see this statistic and think it makes the stated reasoning even less logical.

From the article:

"people are more productive when they're alone," and then stressed "but they're more collaborative and innovative when they're together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together."

Really? 200 of 12,000 people were the difference between a collaborative environment and a non-collaborative one?

I am willing to accept that their reasons may have been good, and may work for them. I simply disagree with virtually everything that they have chosen to describe as their reasoning.

It seems a bad thing to me to expect that employees give up telecommunication even for family reasons when the CEO doesn't have to endure such a tough choice because they get a special CEO nursery.

Male CEO's can act like alpha animals, take what they want and flaunt blingy perks, but let a woman build a nursery... Employees never get the same perks as CEO's.

Right because male CEO's have never been ridiculed.

When they are they laugh in the face of the peon daring to question his greatness.

I don't understand where this response is coming from. I said nothing about gender. I can't actually think of a situation in which male CEOs, and male managers in general ("pointy haired bosses"), aren't relentlessly mocked. Attempting to portray a sexist double-standard seems like a stretch and a refusal to address the actual issue.

On the other hand, can you really combine taking care of a baby with getting real work done? For some people and some babies, sure. But i switched positions on this topic when confronted with the noisy reality of my own son.

That's total BS. As a CEO she is paid well enough to easily afford having a live in nanny or a nanny for the day. Having a nursery just for herself comes across at completely unfair. Would you be willing to work for such a boss? I'm going to guess most of their best coders could easily get a job working somewhere else.

She pays for it herself. It isn't a perk.

I'm guessing regular employees wouldn't be allowed to build something with similar proximity if they pooled their cash. Still a perk.

Does her no tele-commuting policy not make her inconsiderate of employees who can't afford to build their own nurseries in order to spend the same amount of time with their families that she does? The message she is sending is that she expects people working for her to make a sacrifice that she has gone out of her way to avoid.

Your response I think only enhances the point parfe was making towards the end. She probably could afford most of the perks her jobs provides, but for some reason a nursery gets singled out as some outlandish thing. The fact is that they are perks, and being as she is at the highest position in a large company, she correspondingly gets the best perks. If you were offered or fought for a great perk as part of compensation for a position, would you turn it down because you could afford the perk without them giving it to you for free?

Or, saying it another way, as a software engineer, you are paid well enough to easily afford your vacation days unpaid. Having paid vacation days for yourself when so many people in the world don't comes across as completely unfair. Would you be willing to work with such a person?

> for some reason a nursery gets singled out as some outlandish thing.

It's got nothing to do with the monetary value of the perk. It's not outlandish, just in terrible taste as both a human and a leader. We work from home for many reasons, and being closer to our families is often one of those reasons. She outlawed WFH in order to have employees focus better on work, the communication clearly being "there is work time, and there is family time, and the twain shan't meet" -- and then promptly built a family-time haven for herself at the office.

That's what makes it offensive. It isn't that employees can't afford to be with their kids -- at least, not the same way that they can't afford a private jet and so forth. The message is, "We all need to buckle down and make sacrifices to rebuild Yahoo!... well, except for me. I can have it all."

> She probably could afford most of the perks her jobs provides, but for some reason a nursery gets singled out as some outlandish thing.

You're being obtuse. Obviously, the nursery is getting singled out because of the no-telecommuting policy. The policy conveniently doesn't impact her because she has the ability to build a nursery to address the issue of family time, a luxury her employees don't have. And so she is getting criticized for being inconsiderate of her employees and putting them in a difficult situation that she doesn't have to endure.

The issue isn't having perks as a CEO but using one's position to avoid dealing with a personal situation while expecting employees to make the sacrifice. It's uncompassionate. That seems like a reasonable criticism of a boss.

The internet has basically become a place for disingenuous uproar. There should just be a site called disingenuousuproar.com

On it!

Not to mention that she paid for it herself.

I see this statistic and I'm reminded at how much of a disingenuous uproar the policy change caused.

Yup. This.

It's also interesting to see how much of the uproar comes from folk who work at Yahoo (as far as I can tell - none of it.)

The two folk I know who work there, who would both love to telecommute, think the move to ban telecommuting was a really, really good one. They're both smart, driven techie folk who could get a job anywhere. Jobs that would probably pay more than they're getting at Yahoo. They've gone from polishing their resumes and considering resignation a few months back, to totally enthusiasm now.

Whatever Mayer is doing internally from what I can see, from talking to folk who actually work there, it seems to be working.

The private bathroom, private airplane, private car, meetings on the golf course, etc are ultimately superfluous. Slash them, and nothing bad happens.

The nursery is an entirely matter altogether. Without it, you either work from home or find daycare for the baby.

I do not see the distinction you drew between daycare and a car service. Why is one superfluous and the other not? Why does nothing bad happen if you cut the private plane, but something bad happens if you cut the nursery? I hardly think finding daycare for your child is a "bad" thing. At least not any worse than needing to take the time to drive yourself to work in a personal vehicle you pay to maintain.

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