No more remote work at Yahoo

I'm a remote worker. I've worked remotely for teams based in the US for one of those big names you know and more recently for a London-based company with offices just a couple of hours commute from my house deep in the Swedish countryside. I've worked about 6 years full-time remote in the last 10.

Working for home is not for everyone but for some of us its speeds us up not slows us down. The days I go into the office for meetings are the days I get nothing real done.

Here and in all the remote-working threads people come along to say it doesn't work and that you need to sit together to be a team. Well, I guess these are inexperienced people who haven't worked out how to do it effectively is all.

I hope there is a new enlightenment in remote-working for us programmers. There's so many diverse companies and meaningful organizations I'd be happy to dedicate my thinking hours too if their management could just consider it possible...

I get the stigma of "cool companies" that have chefs that serve organic meals 4 times a day, but are those benefits really all that superficial? As a new graduate who has to move to likely a very expensive part of the US to work for them, making the transition easier by eliminating some worries from my life (like doing lots and lots of grocery shopping) is a pretty nice benefit.

Without agreeing or disagreeing with your first three paragraphs, I want to share with you that the very last sentence puts your arguments at risk of being derailed by accusations of Ad Hominem Tu Quoque--that you are speculating about the author's motivations with exactly the same lack of insight that you decry. Worse, that line is also likely to distract people who notice that it's an Ad Hominem Circumstantial.

I personally think your argument would be best served by saying something along the following lines:

The author asserts that the new policy is based on "flimsy foundations". He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". He also writes that this policy change reveals that "Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not."

What evidence is there that any of these conjectures and speculations are true?

That would make the point about the lack of evidence in the post rather than about the author.

That seems like a good compromise. But then you need quite a bit of spare room in the office dedicated to your "Quarantone". That can be quite hard to find if depending on where your company is located.

We've had business relationships with Yahoo in the past and everyone we dealt with there had a complete lack of accountability. No one seemed to care when we found problems, and it would take months for simple things to be fixed on their side.

This change will no doubt cause some loss of talented people, but if they want to drastically change the culture at Yahoo I don't see any other way. They need to get everyone working together both physically and mentally.

Hopefully they'll move all development back home as well. Their dev teams in India were dreadful with turnaround times and bugs.