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No more remote work at Yahoo

37signals.com

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Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#71

Post by kayoone »

I do not understand the general uproar against this. I have been working remote alot in my life and i find its not the ideal way to work productive for me and it certainly isnt the ideal way to build a great working culture.

Its more like everyone cooking their own meal, communication is hardly ever as good as it should be in remote teams and you are just more disconnected from the core.

Personally i like my time alone and i get alot of stuff done in less time, but i enjoyed sitting in an office with 4 other engineers alot more. It was alot more fun and not alot less productive, if at all... Working remotely from home makes me feel alone after a few weeks now, i might even call it depressed.

While i think working remotely for some time (1-2 days a week) is awesome, i dont see the future of work as being remote only... I dont want to mix private with work life too much, which happens alot when working from home and i want to feel relaxed at home and not always think about getting back to my desk to get some more work done. And i know alot of people that think the same.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#72

Post by PakG1 »

willvarfar wrote: post #54
jobu wrote: post #49

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 w…

> if they want to drastically change the culture at Yahoo I don't see any other way Surely you can imagine other ways to make people accountable, dedicated, empowered and effective than focusing on the place and hours they work?

Can you? If the situation was truly bad at Yahoo, I can't. That if is an important if, of course, but the question stands.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#73

Post by kjackson2012 »

I worked for Yahoo in the years surrounding the Microsoft debacle. Let me tell you in no uncertain terms that Yahoo was the worst company I worked for.

I had very little work to do. Period. End of statement. I spent most of my time doing practically nothing except playing ping pong and foosball and getting paid for it. A lot of my coworkers and a lot of Yahoos were in the same boat. Needless to say, that once the Microsoft acquisition failed and the layoffs started happening, most of us were out of there.

On top of that, there was very much a prima donna attitude around Yahoo, with a great deal of self-entitlement. I remember a couple of threads on devel-random complaining about the lack of ping pong balls, and how that insulted us as Yahoos since it meant that management didn't trust us. Oh the humanity of not providing everyone with $2 worth of ping pong balls!

Yahoo was filled with lazy workers, and an extremely fat layer of lazy management. I vaguely remember Rasmus running a script that calculated around 70 employees per VP. As well, the internal politics at Yahoo was astounding. One of my friends worked on an iPhone app on his own free time, and when he tried to get approval, it was held up for months because people were arguing over things like color schemes, and which group should own the app. It was pathetic.

I like what Marisa Mayer is doing. I think by getting rid of some privileges like remote working, it is enforcing a discipline that hasn't been at Yahoo, at least during the years that I was there. Showing up to work is a small price to pay for being paid a great wage and having the opportunity to work for what will hopefully become a first class company again. People need to show up and work and interact with their peers, instead of hiding at home and people not knowing wtf is going on with them. Sure, some people will quit, but quite bluntly, anyone worth their salt would have already left Yahoo by now. Anyone who is happy working in the environment that was Yahoo over the past 5 years is not an A player by any stretch, so it's safe to assume that you can afford to lose them.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#74

Post by jonny_eh »

raganwald wrote: post #45
mef wrote: post #23

The author asserts that the new policy is based on "flimsy foundations". How does he know if the foundations are flimsy or not? Does he have inside knowledge of the productivity of remote vs. local employees at Yahoo? Is he assuming it's the same as at 37signals? Might it not be? He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". How does he know there was n…

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 p…

That's not an ad hominem, it's pointing out a relevant conflict of interest. DHH is heavily invested in promoting remote work arrangements. It doesn't invalidate his arguments, it does help explain why he's flying off the handle over this.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#75

Post by jebblue »

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.

Your priority isn't everyone else's priority. The luxury you exercise in walking over and disturbing someone to enlist them to help you fix your problem comes at a price of latency to them in how long it takes them to get back on task after you walk away happy that you got your problem fixed and that you had a social interaction.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#76

Post by gcp »

cletus wrote: post #53

37signals comes down against a decree of no more remote working. I am shocked (shocked that there is gambling going on in this establishment). Much like hiring practices this is and will continue to be a divisive issue. This one however seems to be largely driven by personal preference: if you want to work from home, you can't understand why anyone is against it. If you don't, then you do. I fall in the camp of not n…

I don't think working remotely scales.

Scales to what? I don't understand how this argument can be made when most companies have multiple, globally distributed offices, which turns their workforce effectively remote on the grand scale.

On all on-site jobs I've done so far, the remote offices were effectively other companies as far as communicating is concerned. People who're used to in-face communication have a huge barrier to overcome. This is a big difference from working remote, where it doesn't matter, because the communication channels are set up.

I simply don't see how this claim can stand even basic scrunty.

Firstly, working from an office doesn't not exclude a flexible work schedule. I've gone through phases where I don't get into work until 3pm.

This works fine until something urgent comes up and a meeting is called at 11am, and management wonders why you are "late". Maybe Google is better at avoiding this than your average company, but maybe at some point in your career you'll find they're not :)

The rest of your argument is either very questionable (false negatives are OK as long as the result is positive - a more positive result is better than a barely positive one), or very squishy (camaraderie, team cohesion, culture) with no hard data to back it up, so no point in arguing over it.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#77

Post by johnjlocke »

cletus wrote: post #53

37signals comes down against a decree of no more remote working. I am shocked (shocked that there is gambling going on in this establishment). Much like hiring practices this is and will continue to be a divisive issue. This one however seems to be largely driven by personal preference: if you want to work from home, you can't understand why anyone is against it. If you don't, then you do. I fall in the camp of not n…

The main point DHH article wasn't a debate about whether co-located or distributed teams are better or more efficient. The article states that Yahoo does not have a management team in place that they can trust to supervise a remote team.

If the people overseeing the work teams have to resort to making sure that everyone is in their seats for roll call in order to manage them, Yahoo has some much deeper problems than remote workers that need to be addressed.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#78

Post by raganwald »

jonny_eh wrote: post #74
raganwald wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

That's not an ad hominem, it's pointing out a relevant conflict of interest. DHH is heavily invested in promoting remote work arrangements. It doesn't invalidate his arguments, it does help explain why he's flying off the handle over this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Circumstantial

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#80

Post by gcp »

cbsmith wrote: post #68
willvarfar wrote: post #41

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…

> 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. It seems like you've drawn a particular conclusion from this, but I think you are missing an entirely different one. If you "don't get anything done" every time you come in to the office, that would suggest there is something more important than…

When you are there, taking advantage of the opportunity to address this exceeds the value of what I'm sure most people would describe as your primary job function.

I think it's more a side-effect of the typical meeting. They tend to be so low bandwidth, that most people view any way out of them as increasing their productivity.

I've not found remote meetings much better in this regard.

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