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No more remote work at Yahoo

37signals.com

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Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#2
I think that this is all being blown far out of proportion, when people are in the office, there is a lot more intent, you are there to work, sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results.

In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.

We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like, in addition to our $120,000 per year wages, our paid healthcare, our free office snacks and clothes washing and our free donated dairy cow.

I wonder if, in a few years if the bubble pops, we will look back fondly on the days of decadence and wish things where still the same?

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Also, totally unrelated, just realized I've been a member of HN for 6 months, cool landmark :)

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#3
I would guess they're changing culture, then firing those that don't fit (or have lost all intrinsic motivation) through performance reviews, then making the rest sing and dance until they get burned out, finally replacing those that left or were fired with new blood baptized by the new regime.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#4
post #2

I think that this is all being blown far out of proportion, when people are in the office, there is a lot more intent, you are there to work, sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results. In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting aro…

> In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.

More productive for who? You? Better hope that person wasn't in the middle of something important when you broke his/her train of thought that will take a good half hour for them to recover.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#5
I'm Sorry, but I would prefer to live in a place where on the hottest day in summer, the ocean water is not freezing cold. Or a place where my kids can grow up and not have to worry about drinking polluted groundwater. Or a place where even though I live 5 miles from work, it still takes me an hour each way to get there. Or a place where the housing is not so out of touch with reality that a 2 bedroom shack costs $600K, when in any other part of the country that same house would be less than $60K.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#8
Are none of their teams distributed? I'd imagine if you have a distributed team, what's the difference if an employee works from home occasionally. The theory being that their boss or most of their team isn't in their location already.

I can understand if Yahoo is making a shift to shore up some things in house. Hopefully if that is the case, they return to a policy that allows more work from home.

This is a battle that Gen Y'ers are going to have with aging management who can only manage people they can see/touch/watch. I thought we as an IT culture were doing better moving away from those old tenants but news like this doesn't make it look good.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#9
post #2

I think that this is all being blown far out of proportion, when people are in the office, there is a lot more intent, you are there to work, sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results. In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting aro…

I think of it in another way: The ship is sinking. It's bad. Time to throw out the gold crates. Time to throw out the limping crew.

Sure the limping fellas can spot land. Maybe hes even good at it. Better than others. However the ship is going down, its time to try whatever possible in hopes of saving it.

Re: No more remote work at Yahoo

#10
post #2

I think that this is all being blown far out of proportion, when people are in the office, there is a lot more intent, you are there to work, sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results. In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting aro…

> In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to. More productive for who? You? Better hope that person wasn't in the middle of something important when you broke his/her train of thought that will take a good half hour for them to recover.

No train of thought takes half an hour to recover, that is massively scaled up to make my point sound ridiculous. That aside, if I feel it is important enough that it required an immediate response prompting me to go all the way to their desk, then it's most likely more productive for the entire company.

I should probably post-face this with the fact that I am one of only 2 devs at my company, the rest are content production / design / marketing.

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