191–200 of 217 posts
Yahoo! needs to be in high-contact mode for a time while it gets its company culture sorted out. There is no room for people who aren't willing to commit to full participation in the company and its day-to-day functioning in the highest bandwidth form there is; being present.
This is not a strike at working remotely in general, its Yahoo! dealing with Yahoo!'s issues.
in this day and age the notion that remote work hinders communication or scalability is absolutely absurd. Sure, it may hinder certain types of social interaction and communication, but in terms of collaborative engineering, it does not. Open source projects have managed tens, hundreds and even thousands of developers on single projects using rather primitive mailing lists, irc channels and source control. These days…
From the link you shared (which I strongly agree with):
There’s no halfsies in a distributed team. If even one person on the team is remote, every single person has to start communicating online... no more dropping in to someone’s office to chat, no more rounding people up to make a decision
So the in-office members are forced into contortions to accommodate the remotes. That may be OK if the team is committed to the practice, like stack exchange is. But if Yahoo! is run like a traditional company, designed around in-office work with occasional exceptions made for remotes, then those remotes burden the in-office team members, and absolutely hinder communication.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just the meetings, some of it is also useless distractions like non-pc gossip about how exactly someone got promoted even though they lack both skill and experience. It's distracting and it takes time for people to repeatedly tell their coworkers that they're busy and they need to work without offending anyone.
Those "useless distractions" tend to be more important than one realizes. Random conversations on random subjects actually can serve a purpose.
"Hey did you know there's this cool company that's planning to mine asteroids?"
"Check out the new strategy for expansion"
"Look at this cool new library"
The following is stuff I just don't care for:
"She got to where she is by sleeping around"
"Why haven't they promoted me yet? I've been here x years"
You can argue that the former is useful to know, but I don't have ambitions of going the managerial route. I just want to build cool stuff.
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…
Funny, I feel it's almost the opposite. Remote work can be very difficult for a small business or startup, especially for the early team. Generally speaking, you want everyone within earshot and available for ad hoc ideation sessions, discussions, debates, or projects.
The larger the company, the more likely it'll be organized into discrete functions, work scope, teams, deadlines, and so forth. And hence, each employee will have a clearer sense of what he or she is accountable for on each day, with less moment-to-moment variance. This situation makes remote working easier and more scalable.
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 Mic…
The way to "fix" entitled, lazy employees and management is to "light their shit up," so to speak. Give people work, set goals, and hold them accountable. You can't get a completed app approved and on the street in months? Fire the managers involved. Somebody complains that they don't have ping pong balls? Take away the ping pong table. Stopping remote work will not improve performance. Firing poor performers is the…
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." Funny, I feel it's almost the opposite. Remote work can be very difficult for a small business or startup, especially for the early team. Generally speaking, you want everyone within earshot and available for ad hoc ideation sessions, discussions, debates, or projects. The larger the company, the more likely it'll be organized into discrete functions, work scope, teams, deadli…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those "useless distractions" tend to be more important than one realizes. Random conversations on random subjects actually can serve a purpose.
That would be highly dependent on the quality of the company culture. For example, the following is good random interaction: "Hey did you know there's this cool company that's planning to mine asteroids?" "Check out the new strategy for expansion" "Look at this cool new library" The following is stuff I just don't care for: "She got to where she is by sleeping around" "Why haven't they promoted me yet? I've been here…
Bingo.
> You can argue that the former is useful to know, but I don't have ambitions of going the managerial route.
While there can be significant advantage in knowledge exchange, most of the big wins are from random moments of inspiration that come from interactions with people.
I think more importantly than that though, if you have a huge organization that has a dysfunctional culture you have a major problem of inertia that is only magnified if significant chunks of the organization disengaged from day-to-day interactions. Your odds of turning that ship around are tremendously improved if you have people interacting day to day.
By no means do I mean to let Yahoo's management off the hook: this decision is entirely the result of bad management, and I think upset employees would be perfectly justified in blaming poor management for the change. That doesn't make this decision a bad decision or one that reflects a lack of trust or respect for employees. If one has any respect or trust for employees, one ought to want to see them as part of the solution (something that I'd argue hasn't always been the case at Yahoo), and one ought to have the willingness to be take drastic measures to effect change, and be honest with them about what those measures are, in order to help the organization get out of its quagmire.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way to "fix" entitled, lazy employees and management is to "light their shit up," so to speak. Give people work, set goals, and hold them accountable. You can't get a completed app approved and on the street in months? Fire the managers involved. Somebody complains that they don't have ping pong balls? Take away the ping pong table. Stopping remote work will not improve performance. Firing poor performers is the…
Firing people left and right and taking away perks is a fantastic way to run morale that's probably already pretty low. I see what you are saying with regards to the need to light fires under people, but there's other, more positive and more productive ways to go about it.
As I posted on the 37s blog: Management paranoia is not the only reason why someone would want to decrease the amount of remote work. There are team spirit benefits to bringing people together physically, and depending on the type of work being undertaken, remote work may have more downsides than upside. I don’t see this as an aggression against remote workers, or an attempt at controlling remote workers more closely…
From what I've seen, Yahoo doesn't seem like a "work from home if you want" kind of company. It seems like each person who is working remotely had an exception to a general policy, and now those exceptions are just blindly cancelled. In this case, "saying no work from home" just means many of those people are not going to work for Yahoo anymore. That's pretty terrible for team spirit.