No more remote work at Yahoo • Hacker News Board

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#31

Post by tompko » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:24 PM UTC

shanelja wrote: post #10

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to. More productive for who? You? Better hope that person wasn't in the middle of something important when you broke his/her train of thought that will take a good half hour for them to recover.

No train of thought takes half an hour to recover, that is massively scaled up to make my point sound ridiculous. That aside, if I feel it is important enough that it required an immediate response prompting me to go all the way to their desk, then it's most likely more productive for the entire company. I should probably post-face this with the fact that I am one of only 2 devs at my company, the rest are content pr…

Actually studies suggest that for "knowledge workers" like programmers 25 minutes is the average amount of time it takes to recover from an interruption to a task. So half an hour lost to an interruption isn't that bad an estimate. Anecdotally I've certainly had times deep into debugging complex problems where an interruption has needed a lot longer than 30 minutes to recover from.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#32

Post by leddt » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:25 PM UTC

nikon wrote: post #27

Working from home is boring. I spent 1 1/2 years working from home but now much prefer working in my client's office with the team. It seems no one else is either willing to admit this, or I am the only one who prefers the social interactions and the ability to resolve and issue face-to-face in 2 minutes rather than struggling on Skype, or waiting for emails.

I worked a year from home and came to similar conclusions. It was fun for the first month or so, but after that I was missing the face-to-face conversations, the happy hours and the general "buzz" of an office.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#33

Post by redm » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:26 PM UTC

It's worth noting that the author doesn't really know how Yahoo arrived at that decision. Yahoo very well may have evaluated remote work productivity or be aware of other situations or metrics that make it clear, they needed to terminate remote work programs. I feel pretty confident that Marisa Mayer didn't just wake up and make a rash decision to terminate remote work without fully evaluating and understanding the situation, the impact and the benefits.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#34

Post by ebbv » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:27 PM UTC

nikon wrote: post #27

Working from home is boring. I spent 1 1/2 years working from home but now much prefer working in my client's office with the team. It seems no one else is either willing to admit this, or I am the only one who prefers the social interactions and the ability to resolve and issue face-to-face in 2 minutes rather than struggling on Skype, or waiting for emails.

There's advantages and disadvantages to both but I think you're in a minority if you overall prefer working in an office all the time.

Personally I like working from home as the default and meeting in person when needed/appropriate.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#35

Post by throwaway1979 » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:27 PM UTC

jijji wrote: post #5

I'm Sorry, but I would prefer to live in a place where on the hottest day in summer, the ocean water is not freezing cold. Or a place where my kids can grow up and not have to worry about drinking polluted groundwater. Or a place where even though I live 5 miles from work, it still takes me an hour each way to get there. Or a place where the housing is not so out of touch with reality that a 2 bedroom shack costs $60…

What better place do you have in mind? I don't live in the bay area anymore because of some of these very problems. I moved to the New York area instead and am somewhat regretting it. The bay area has problems but it is a pretty decent place for tech folks. I'm genuinely interested if you have done your home work and know of better options. The other place we are considering is Austin. Chicago would be there too but we have had it with cold weather.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#36

Post by jorde » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:27 PM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #19

This is an excellent analysis of the situation. I generally prefer to work in the office over remote work, because it's preferable from a networking perspective, but a zero-tolerance approach to it is ridiculous. My personal hunch is that this is a move to reduce headcount. Yahoo's top management doesn't want to put the company through a layoff, and they're not organized enough to know which projects to cut, so this…

No doubt will this reduce head count but on what expense? My guess is that it pushes more talented people out which can start the downward spiral. This is something we have seen in Finland with Nokia: when the company decided to give people the choice to leave and get a severance package, it meant that the best people left to join startups and to do something else. After you start to bleed talent like this it's hard to go back.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#37

Post by djt » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

What works for a company the size of 37 signals may not work for a company with thousands of workers.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#38

Post by cujo » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

Wow. Why are we all of a sudden so interested in what Yahoo is doing these days? They aren't a leader in, well, anything, but now the internet is in a frenzy about this work-from-home recall.

How's this for an idea? Let's see if Yahoo is a company worth looking at for leadership. They aren't? Oh. Then let their policies die with them.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#39

Post by bcks » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:29 PM UTC

I have absolutely no data on this, but it struck me as a lazy and sneaky way of making layoffs. It looks tough and decisive "She has a vision!" without spooking Wall Street with the "Yahoo starts the layoffs!" headlines.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#40

Post by pshin45 » Mon, Feb 25, 2013, 2:29 PM UTC

One crucial piece of info missing from this article is how long this "no more remote work" policy will be in effect.

Yahoo's cut a lot of staff and (acqui-)hired a lot of new people over the past few months, and so for the sake of team re-building, I can see why they might want to have all staff in one place for a while.

Even if staff are working remotely, it's always better for them to have met and bonded in person at some point - more trust, camaraderie, and goodwill. Maybe this is Marissa Mayer's way of getting everyone on the same page for a few months, and then afterwards people will be able to work remotely again as usual.

If this is a temporary measure to team-build more effectively, then it makes sense. If it's permanent, then I agree with the author DHH that it's a foolish and shortsighted move.