21–30 of 48 posts
Gruber summed up this sentiment as “Yahoo employees have been allowed to work remotely, and they have not excelled”. In other words, Yahoo is a rudderless basket case, so it must be because of those 2-4% of the work force who are “goofing off”. Heh. How the hell did he contort himself into inferring that from what Gruber wrote?!
It is called dishonesty. It is the entire reason anyone knows who DHH is.
But without data to back it up, it's still just rhetoric. The fact is, even a relatively small group of people can ruin something for everyone. Ask anyone who has worked on teams for any length of time, and they'll tell you just how much damage even one person can do.
How do you predict who these people will be, or what kind of damage they'll do? By and large, you don't. That doesn't mean people don't try: the so-called "poisonous people" phenomenon has plagued the open-source community for long enough that entire books have been written on the subject. But the problem remains, and there's still no fair and reliable way to predict who will turn toxic.
Without that, you've basically got two options. You can decide that the costs associated with abuse are worth preserving the privilege, and mitigate the damage as best you can. Or, if the damage is too severe or the problem too persistent, you can declare that the poisonous people have ruined it for everybody. Yahoo took the former approach for a long time, and it hasn't worked out for them. Now they're trying the latter. Is it truly fair to blame them for that?
> Most estimates put the number of remote workers between 300 and 500. Which estimates are those? Overall, this post reeks of victimizing. > So yes, remote workers are keeping Yahoo from being the “absolute best place to work”. Stop attacking a strawman! Nobody's arguing that remote workers are the one stumbling block between Yahoo and mountains of glory. But there's clearly a culture that needs to be attacked, and i…
Wait, so instead of revoking telecommuting privileges on the case-to-case basis, it makes more sense to ban telecommuting? I mean, just to make it perfectly clear, you're advocating that it doesn't matter whether someone is abusing a privilege or not, everyone gets punished. I invite you to stop and think about what message that sends, both to the good people already employed at Yahoo and to anyone evaluating Yahoo as a potential employer.
"Gruber summed up this sentiment as “Yahoo employees have been allowed to work remotely, and they have not excelled”. In other words, Yahoo is a rudderless basket case, so it must be because of those 2-4% of the work force who are “goofing off”. Heh."
That was a leap of logic, for sure. What this really says is: if 2-4% of your workforce isn't working out because they're remote, then 2-4% of your workforce should not be working remote. It does not place the blame entirely on those remote workers, though.
I imagine this is a small move in a larger, company-wide shift. It just seems to be getting the most press for some reason.
"But that’s exactly why it’s been so easy to place the blame on them for Yahoo’s ails. " One thing is shutting down telecommuting because it is believed it's not working, another is "blaming" it for Yahoo ails, a statement that I haven't seen anywhere else apart from this article. It's probably part of a larger set of measure that the new CEO has been undertaking to revive a stagnating company, talking about "blaming…
> Most estimates put the number of remote workers between 300 and 500. Which estimates are those? Overall, this post reeks of victimizing. > So yes, remote workers are keeping Yahoo from being the “absolute best place to work”. Stop attacking a strawman! Nobody's arguing that remote workers are the one stumbling block between Yahoo and mountains of glory. But there's clearly a culture that needs to be attacked, and i…
But there's clearly a culture that needs to be attacked, and if one of the elements of that culture is that remote workers ARENT LOGGING INTO THE VPN then maybe Yahoo shouldn't have remote workers for the time being. Wait, so instead of revoking telecommuting privileges on the case-to-case basis, it makes more sense to ban telecommuting? I mean, just to make it perfectly clear, you're advocating that it doesn't matte…
I don't see anywhere that people are blaming remote workers for all of Yahoo's troubles. People are starting to care about Yahoo now and not just look at them with pity. Mayer is trying to clean up that company. When you are turning around a large institution like Yahoo, you're going to piss off a lot of people. These are all signs that someone is actually trying to turn things around there, instead of continuing the…
Gruber summed up this sentiment as “Yahoo employees have been allowed to work remotely, and they have not excelled”. In other words, Yahoo is a rudderless basket case, so it must be because of those 2-4% of the work force who are “goofing off”. Heh. How the hell did he contort himself into inferring that from what Gruber wrote?!
>How the hell did he contort himself into inferring that from what Gruber wrote?! It is called dishonesty. It is the entire reason anyone knows who DHH is.
I understand you may not like the guy, but I'm pretty sure DHH's fame came mostly from creating Ruby on Rails.
> Most estimates put the number of remote workers between 300 and 500. Which estimates are those? Overall, this post reeks of victimizing. > So yes, remote workers are keeping Yahoo from being the “absolute best place to work”. Stop attacking a strawman! Nobody's arguing that remote workers are the one stumbling block between Yahoo and mountains of glory. But there's clearly a culture that needs to be attacked, and i…