Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No more remote work at Yahoo

37signals.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 217 posts

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#201

Post by pshin45 »

New article from Business Insider with "inside information" for what that's worth:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-may...

"'For what it's worth, I support the no working form home rule. There's a ton of abuse of that at Yahoo. Something specific to the company.' This source said Yahoo's large remote workforce led to 'people slacking off like crazy, not being available, spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo! projects.'"

"Mayer saw another side-benefit to making this move. She knows that some remote workers won't want to start coming into the office and so they will quit. That helps Yahoo, which needs to cut costs. It's a layoff that's not a layoff."

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#203

Post by enraged_camel »

officemonkey wrote: post #199
enraged_camel wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you fire the people who deserve to get fired you actually increase morale.

That's not necessarily true. Office politics matter. If you fire popular people - even if they are under-performers - then it will hurt morale.

Firing is always messy business. It's a good idea to avoid it unless it is absolutely necessary.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#204

Post by officemonkey »

enraged_camel wrote: post #203
officemonkey wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fire the people who deserve to get fired you actually increase morale.

That's not necessarily true. Office politics matter. If you fire popular people - even if they are under-performers - then it will hurt morale. Firing is always messy business. It's a good idea to avoid it unless it is absolutely necessary.

Agreed. However, I'm running a business, not a social club.

If I have a few bad apples (the lazy, self-entitled employees of a previous post) and they're not responding to being held accountable, the whole staff needs to know I will use all tools available.

Frankly, if you manage properly, there's very little firing you have to do. Most bad employees, when they see you hold people accountable, will find another job. The only ones who stick around are the one's who are holding out for unemployment.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#205

Post by cbsmith »

willvarfar wrote: post #91
cbsmith wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I distress that a flippant bit of colour can derail my point.

Perhaps your point wasn't clearly presented then, because it seemed to me that the substantive argument you made was about notions of your own productivity and the value you consequently provided to your company, and I responded with a serious attempt to address that point in context that was broader than peculiarities of your own situation.

If that was actually a flippant remark, I'll be happy to focus the conversation on your intended point, once I grok what it is.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#206

Post by edderly »

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…

That observation about work as transactional vs social is great, thank you. It has summed up a problem which I hadn't found an adequate definition for.

It tallies with my experience that remote workers, integrated into a mostly office based environment does largely end up being transactional. Another problem is that there can be transactional workers in the office, and I would characterize those folks as usually the least likely to participate with remote workers too. So you can get a double hit.

However, the best remote setups I've seen have been where someone who largely works remotely is heavily social usually using their occasional time in the office effectively.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#207

Post by SatvikBeri »

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…

I think your analysis is correct in the case of convex organizations, but Yahoo is probably primarily concave. In that case 19th-century management "move towards the median" techniques actually are effective.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#208

Post by trhtrsh »

drharris wrote: post #175
nirvana wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know exactly where Meyer came from, and a fair bit of inside baseball about her time there. If you disagree with my argument, please make a counter argument. Snide comments are useless.

She IS an engineer. What else do you need to understand engineering culture, other than to have been one for years?

She was an engineer, very briefly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#209

Post by [deleted] »

cbsmith wrote: post #187
gcp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it says the the OP's company doesn't have a good teleconferencing setup.

Well, more generally it says that there is value in having on site meetings. I think it is fair to say that the OP's measure of his net productivity doesn't match that of his coworkers/employer... else they'd leave him alone when he came in to the office. Now, you can argue whose perceptions are accurate, but in the end the employer's perceptions are kind of all that matters.

[deleted]

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#210

Post by willvarfar »

cbsmith wrote: post #205
willvarfar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distress that a flippant bit of colour can derail my point.

Perhaps your point wasn't clearly presented then, because it seemed to me that the substantive argument you made was about notions of your own productivity and the value you consequently provided to your company, and I responded with a serious attempt to address that point in context that was broader than peculiarities of your own situation. If that was actually a flippant remark, I'll be happy to focus the conversat…

Because I am just a couple of hours commute from some of my workmates now I do head into the office and do the social bit sometimes.

But when I worked for moto I spent years in teams I never, ever met.

I wouldn't want you to be under the impression that the social bit is necessary for a good effective team nor good effective work.

Post reply on HN