No more remote work at Yahoo

i'm not sure i would describe myself as a remote worker but instead, a worker that comes in when there are advantages to coming in: a set of meetings, a day where I need tons of facetime to nail things down, things that that are worth the commute.

This is about 2x a week. I consciously batch these days up with as much of this as possible. I work at home the other 3 days (on average again, some weeks I'm in the whole week, some week I am at home the whole week).

I find this incredibly productive. I crush the people that work in the office full time. I have time to be healthy with the regained hours from commuting (40min in my case). I can afford a house.

Sorry, but the butts in seats mentality is crazy and I'm not going back. Even for Google (where I've worked), which was nice, but failed on this score.

Boring for you, not me.

What I find boring is being told about how drunk some lad got at the week end, or some one's latest recipe, or how a hubby is a git, or how the immigrants are taking all the jobs or how benefits claimants are scroungers or how blah, blah, blah............ all of with puts me off working in an office, well, working at all. And even if I politely make it clear I'm not interested, the drone of social BS continues in the back ground.

Others thrive on that, but in my experience, spend a lot of time gossiping and not working. Meanwhile, I'm at home working twice as hard because I'm worried other will think I'm being lazy and watching TV or some such. But that is just my experience.

Truth is it all depends on culture, personality, role and circumstance.

From that link:

Conflict of Interest: Where a source seeks to convince by a claim of authority or by personal observation, identification of conflicts of interest are not ad hominem – it is generally well accepted that an "authority" needs to be objective and impartial, and that an audience can only evaluate information from a source if they know about conflicts of interest that may affect the objectivity of the source. Identification of a conflict of interest is appropriate, and concealment of a conflict of interest is a problem.

OK, finding the original is hard work - in fact not possible

  YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT 
  FORWARD

...

  To become the absolute best place to work, communication 
  and collaboration will be important, so we need to be 
  working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we 
  are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions 
  and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, 
  meeting new people, 

But ... it just does not make sense ...

1. If we take as read that working in physical proximity increases communication (often, not always certainly) then why have multiple offices? Who exactly is supposed to work together with whom? Why is the San Francisco office not the one and only office? Why have a Beijing office if people there cannot work with people in Bangalore

2. I hope I am not villifying Meyer - I think she has taken on a difficult high profile role. I have never run a 10,000's people company. Its probably quite difficult.

3. Scaling remote working. No organisation seems to effectgively scale past the dunbar number - communication and collaboration drops alarmingly. (Its not intra-group comms that drops, its the inter-group comms.)

Aren't most of those people gone? :) Doug Cutting (Hadoop) is at Cloudera now...