Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

I think companies need to move past the whole "no remote working allowed" thing. Old style management coupled with fear of procrastination are two reasons many companies don't embrace remote working. If you have proper management and metrics in place, it's easy to ensure remote workers are hitting targets and putting hours in; source control, time management, Google Hangouts/Skype for meetings, email. There is no excuse.

Marissa Meyer seems to be stuck in the old world of IT thinking herself. While she's taken Yahoo! to a better place because of her leadership, Yahoo! have lost a fair share of remote talent because of the rules she put in place banning remote working. Tonnes of companies embrace it (Github for one) and it opens up your recruitment opportunities 100 fold.

The only downside of remote workers is that they are separate from the core physical team, so they don't nearly get close to enough opportunities to partake in social bonding and that rapport you establish with your co-workers getting to physically speak to them in the office and eat lunch with them. Remote working means you are detached from the company culture which depending on the place could either be a good or bad thing. If a job is just a job to you and you are good at what you do, then this is hardly an issue.

"core physical team"

What is that, in the context of remote work?

I worked remotely for 3 years at my last job. The lead lived half way across the country from HQ, as did I, and as did the lead QA. More importantly, we regularly traveled for different installations and tests, so today to talk to Joe you were calling Texas, but week he'd be in NM, and so on. Meanwhile you were on your own rotation. I perhaps exaggerate the amount of travel, as there were plenty of times where most people were at HQ except for the permanent remote workers, but the larger point is that it had to work with no core team in one place, because many times during the year there was no such beast.

It works.

Core team as in people physically in the one location within the same time zone who can solve problems in person. As someone who works for a company where people are moving about it does work most of the time and quite well, but the time zone differences can sometimes be frustrating when you need an answer on something important the other person is sleeping.

I understand some places might not have a core team, but a lot of places do. Sometimes it is required to have people you can physically talk to, Internet connections can be unreliable as can Skype and syncing files across the country or world can sometimes hinder progress if one or the other have slow Internet connections.

In case of Marissa Mayers, i think the ban of remote working is more towards trimming their workforce from poisonious group of remote workers that did not perform. They just suck the money out of Yahoo, and many of them are.

I assume remote working will be unbanned in near future if the condition allowed.

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