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 :)
> 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.
> 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.
You must have some incredible judgment then. Do you trust all of your coworkers with having that same level of judgment?
Actually studies suggest that for "knowledge workers" like programmers 25 minutes is the average amount of time it takes to recover from an interruption to a task. So half an hour lost to an interruption isn't that bad an estimate. Anecdotally I've certainly had times deep into debugging complex problems where an interruption has needed a lot longer than 30 minutes to recover from.
This. I find I can generally get back into feature writing within 5-10 minutes. Debugging can take much longer. This is the number one reason for staying late, because I know that if I leave this issue now, it will take me half of tomorrow just to get back to this particular spot.
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.
sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results
As someone who has worked independently and for others in offices and remotely, the above statement is the exact opposite of reality.
When people are in the office non-production is perversely seen as production. Where warming a seat and having lots of busy work meetings and filling white boards full of inanity is "the gears of work".
When working remotely, the sole indicator of accomplishment is actual production. All of the bullshit is pushed aside.
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.
As humorous as that is, your "heed the man" advice is quaintly archaic. A business like Yahoo is nothing but the combined work of a bunch of smart people. We've seen -- time and time again -- that many such companies are driven and succeed because of a subset of those people, so it is dangerous, dangerous ground to offend them. Because they become the upstarts that grind places like Yahoo into dust.
The world has changed. We all have the tools, the technology, the capacity to scale, the communications mediums, and the audience. It is nothing like it was.
EDIT: Places like Reddit, Digg, Slashdot are by far busiest during the North American work day. These are by and large people working in offices.
You're unfortunately being down voted because others don't agree so I uprooted since you're on topic.
I was a remote employee for the last almost two years at Cheezburger with many others. We had a culture of emails not taking forever and a day to respond to and if you needed a response now you could Skype, google talk, jabbr, phone call whoever you needed.
The whole organization was committed to it.
On top of that, everyone I knew worked like mad. There were definitely pros and cons and I'm sure the pros outweighed the cons.
I'm finding the swinging karma quite humorous to watch, in any case.
I agree mostly with your point, but the problem is this - the gargantuan size of the company leads to problems, there are always going to be a couple of ass holes who sneak under the radar, the people who do the minimum amount of work possible, working from wherever they want and being paid for it. It's a shame that the actions of these people can make employers naturally suspicious of hiring people to work remotely when I'm sure most are decent and hard working.
...but you are under more pressure to produce results.
No, really, it is the opposite. You're fine as long you as you sit on your computer from 9 to 5.
Working from home, there's a constant pressure to produce actual results, because that's what you are judged by. I find it more stressful and there's more tendency to do overtime (you're already home anyway, right?).
I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.
There are many ways around this, chat clients being the most obvious. Also, continuously interrupting people can be very counterproductive, specifically if you do intellectual work.
We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like
There's many people for which working remotely isn't actually a choice, barring a change of employer.
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?
I've done consulting jobs both locally and remotely, and if you ask me, in a few years time we'll consider non-remote working (when it isn't necessary for the job) a thing of foolishness.
I think this is exactly right. It is easy to measure 'time in chair', but that isn't a metric of productivity. Productivity is harder to measure so 'time in chair' is often the substitute.
When you work remotely you don't have 'time in chair' as a proxy for productivity so you have no choice but to prove yourself through your output.
When in an office you can stare at the wall all day and have it considered "work".
Working remotely isn't for everyone. Some people do not have the self-discipline. Don't allow those people to work remotely or don't hire them at all.
There are other benefits to working in the same meat-space: culture, easy collaboration, etc. I don't believe pressure to produce results is one of them. I also think that most of those advantages are disappearing or gone with chat, email, skype, google hangouts, and other collaboration solutions.
I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to
It really depends on people/culture, but I find a shared IRC channel where people idle and are reasonably responsive to be the #1 way to have relatively friction-free quick coordination, even with people in the same building. Physical colocation is 2nd-best, email/Skype 3rd-best.
In fact, I think local is superior to remote mainly in the opposite case: where you need lengthy meetings, especially with more than two people. In that case, videoconferencing and email get unwieldy. But for routine quick queries I find IRC a lot better than walking over to someone's office, to the extent that someone local who doesn't use IRC (or isn't responsive on it) feels more distant to me than someone remote who does.
> 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.
That's great that this is the case for you in the situation you were in; but the assertion that "people who work in an office together share instant communication, and people who work remotely have slow communication" is obviously false.
I've worked plenty of real world offices where communication was done only via email and took ages.
On the other hand, the job I work at now, I work remotely 4 days a week and communication is instantaneous. We have a company IRC server and if you're working it's expected you'll be on there. There's always phones but IRC + email work 99% of the time.
Remote work is the future; the reasons to work in an office together are evaporating. As remote video conferencing improves (and as someone who uses it every week, let me tell you, it still sucks) the benefits of being together in person disappear.
This is an idiotic move by Yahoo!, and shows that they have no clue what the are doing.
This seems like an overly broad sword to cut with though - an explicit assumption that working in the office is by definition more productive than working remote.
Employees can be unproductive in the office just as much as remote employees can be super-productive at home. Yahoo just seems to be taking the easiest to see metric for "productive".
This is an old debate, but you getting immediate responses to your queries and them getting immediate responses to their work means that you're interrupting each other when an email would've been non-intrusive.
That's basically my #1 problem where I work: we're in big open-spaces and you get interrupted all the time. Sometimes just having someone talk next to you can be enough to break your train of thought.
That being said, I agree it's very helpful to be able to talk in person sometimes. I think the solution is just something hybrid, you work remotely a certain portion of the time and get to the office for the other days.
I would be interested to hear yahoo's reason for giving up on remote work though. This article is a bit unsubstantial.
At my company, we have a place called Quarantone, where people can go not to be disturbed for a couple of hours, that aside, if you are at your desk, it generally means that contact is fine :)
That seems like a good compromise. But then you need quite a bit of spare room in the office dedicated to your "Quarantone". That can be quite hard to find if depending on where your company is located.
>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.
It sounds like you don't have very much experience working as a remote employee or with remote employees. I feel like I'm under more pressure when I'm remote. I'm constantly trying to stay focused because I'm paranoid that the company will say "you aren't doing anything" and remove my WFH privileges. In the office I spend more time on HN and other time wasting because it's much harder to make the argument that you aren't getting your job done when you are physically in the office for 9-10 hours.
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.
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.
What better place do you have in mind? I don't live in the bay area anymore because of some of these very problems. I moved to the New York area instead and am somewhat regretting it. The bay area has problems but it is a pretty decent place for tech folks. I'm genuinely interested if you have done your home work and know of better options. The other place we are considering is Austin. Chicago would be there too but we have had it with cold weather.
Well, my take on this is unique only because I did work for Yahoo for years, and in the beginning I worked on-site, but then for years after that I worked 100% remotely from my house in Spring Hill, Florida. The way I work is remotely, and I will work on-site for a small time, and after trust is built up, the work is largely done remotely from then on.
People at Yahoo need to "work" first to qualify for "remote work". I think this is the right direction. Get the team together, develop team spirit and then transform the company.
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.
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 based on some paranoid perception that “they’re slacking” – it seems more like a change meant to help strengthen the culture at Yahoo by making it easier for teams to bond.
I'm sure that's how the executives in charge of this boneheaded decision explain it to themselves, but try applying just a pinch of real world logic to that thought and it shrivels like a slug under salt.
Do you really think that people who have been forced to start working in the office under threat of termination are going to form a positive, collegial bond? If they form a bond at all, it will be one based on shared resentment of the Dilbert-esque reality they now inhabit.
> Do you really think that people who have been forced to start working in the office under threat of termination are going to form a positive, collegial bond? If they form a bond at all, it will be one based on shared resentment of the Dilbert-esque reality they now inhabit.
I think that in hard times, you either do form a bond or you go form a bond somewhere else. I think that's the decision that was just taken at Yahoo.
They could just have fired all the remote workers - but that would have been truly stupid.
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.
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.
This "team spirit" argument makes no sense to me at all. What group on Earth has more "team spirit" than the contributors and maintainers on major open source projects?
For someone in Mayer's position, effective leadership means acting more like Linus Torvalds than Bill Lumbergh.
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 is their hail-mary complexity reduction step. It's a way to shave off a few percent without having to terminate people. Unfortunately, the cultural side effects are going to be massive. It's bad for the executive image as well. "We're out of ideas."
WFH exists for sociological reasons in addition to the obvious benefits (geographic reach, lower stress levels). Engineers are smart. They know they're not all going to climb the ladder and become top dogs. Not everyone wants that, either. The right to WFH gives people the tacit ability to "grow away" to a 10-hour work week, taking pressure off the competition for visibility and rank and allowing the organization to actually function. It gives people a path whereby, instead of climbing the organizational ladder, their efficiency gains are paid back to them in the ability to retain employment with a reduced work footprint. If you're twice as efficient as a typical office drone (which is not hard) then you can work a 20-hour week.
When you go back to the ass-in-chair regime, management has more control and the social stakes are higher. People aren't going to be happy putting in 40-50 dedicated hours and not having control. To a myopic executive who thinks everyone should be like him or her, that seems like a good thing because it makes people "hungry", but it's actually dysfunctional because the competition for rank is extremely counterproductive.
Next up is the Micromanagement Death Spiral. Macroscopic underperformance leads to individual overperformance by managers, the problem being that managerial overperformance (heightened control, micromanagement) is toxicity. That will exacerbate the company's macroscopic issues and lead to more micromanagement... the vicious cycle.
No doubt will this reduce head count but on what expense? My guess is that it pushes more talented people out which can start the downward spiral. This is something we have seen in Finland with Nokia: when the company decided to give people the choice to leave and get a severance package, it meant that the best people left to join startups and to do something else. After you start to bleed talent like this it's hard to go back.
Agree weed out but Y likely met with their top employees well ahead of the announcement to discuss strategy, intent, duration (almost certainly temporary) and get feedback?
If Y and MM indeed did have those discussions ahead of time then I like this - shake things up with change and maybe even some chaos - it is needed - even if there are some negative consequences mixed in.
x weeks from now, post weed out, we will see Y go right back to standard WFH.
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.
The author asserts that the new policy is based on "flimsy foundations". How does he know if the foundations are flimsy or not? Does he have inside knowledge of the productivity of remote vs. local employees at Yahoo? Is he assuming it's the same as at 37signals? Might it not be?
He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". How does he know there was no consultation? How does he know local employees didn't give feedback to management that the extra communication overhead with remote workers didn't create difficulties in collaboration?
He also writes that this policy change reveals that "Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not.". Why is this assumed? Why isn't it plausible that management studied the problem and found that having collaborators in disparate locations hampered progress?
The entire article seems needlessly reactionary and assumes things about the working culture at Yahoo that may not be true. Perhaps this vehement reaction is due to the fact that the author has a new book coming out advocating remote working?
Without agreeing or disagreeing with your first three paragraphs, I want to share with you that the very last sentence puts your arguments at risk of being derailed by accusations of Ad Hominem Tu Quoque--that you are speculating about the author's motivations with exactly the same lack of insight that you decry. Worse, that line is also likely to distract people who notice that it's an Ad Hominem Circumstantial.
I personally think your argument would be best served by saying something along the following lines:
The author asserts that the new policy is based on "flimsy foundations". He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". He also writes that this policy change reveals that "Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not."
What evidence is there that any of these conjectures and speculations are true?
That would make the point about the lack of evidence in the post rather than about the author.
I appreciate the input, but on the contrary, I don't think an author's history and interests should be ignored when evaluating their argument. The world is full of people who excel at making compelling arguments for whichever side of an issue suits their interests. Personally, knowing that an author has a upcoming book whose thesis might be undercut by the decisions he's criticizing makes any doubt cast upon this article much more compelling. Which is why I mentioned it :)
Well, then you end up with threads very much like the ones associated with anything John Gruber posts. They end up being about John Gruber rather than about his opinions. Which is great for people who find discussions about people interesting. I do the first time all those points are raised, but I can't help noticing that they become repetitive.
But to indulge you, consider whether you are confusing correlation with causation. It could be that he writes this post to promote his book (causation).
Nevertheless, it could also be that the post and the book are correlated, and that the root cause is his own personal success with remote working arrangements.
That's not an ad hominem, it's pointing out a relevant conflict of interest. DHH is heavily invested in promoting remote work arrangements. It doesn't invalidate his arguments, it does help explain why he's flying off the handle over this.
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.
If you can look past DHH being DHH, his points are valid. That said, I think he missed the main thrust of Yahoo's decision: they are looking to increase collaboration, and they believe face-to-face collaboration is more advantageous than remote or semi-remote collaboration. I would assume this is because they think collaboration is an important part of the overall productivity of their staff.
I've been a remote or semi-remote [1] for 8 years, mostly for smaller organizations under 50 people. As a developer, I LOVE working remotely, and it creates a huge increase in my personal productivity. It also enables a saner work/life balance.
That said, enabling productive _collaboration_ does take work. My guess is Yahoo is so far behind the eight ball, they want to take this out of the equation until they can right the ship.
Rather than "you're an idiot" sort of post, I'd like it see 37 signals write up how they enable remote collaboration. [2]
Trust is the foundation of great collaboration, but you need more than that to actually make it work. And, scaling that up to thousands of people would be even more difficult.
[1] Semi-remote being three days in the office, two days at home.
[2] My guess is they still use campefire, but it would still be an interesting write up in 2013.
Collaboration requires coordination and clear expectations. You can't expect blind face time to result in productivity gains. A company without remote collaboration probably wont have onsite collaboration either.
Like many people above noted, global companies do this all the time.
"He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". How does he know there was no consultation? How does he know local employees didn't give feedback to management that the extra communication overhead with remote workers didn't create difficulties in collaboration?"
I'm sure they consulted every remote worker before they effectively shitcanned most of them.
Working from home is boring. I spent 1 1/2 years working from home but now much prefer working in my client's office with the team. It seems no one else is either willing to admit this, or I am the only one who prefers the social interactions and the ability to resolve and issue face-to-face in 2 minutes rather than struggling on Skype, or waiting for emails.
I worked a year from home and came to similar conclusions. It was fun for the first month or so, but after that I was missing the face-to-face conversations, the happy hours and the general "buzz" of an office.
the ability to resolve and issue face-to-face in 2 minutes rather than struggling on Skype, or waiting for emails.
If you're not coordinating your remote workers on an IRC-like system, you're likely doing it wrong. (That's my experience, if someone else has successfully used other systems I'd like to hear about it)
Also, if most of the team is on site and the remote people are a small minority, things are going to suck, unless management is also off-site.
I think you are spot on - I've done a lot of working from home, but it's by far the most satisfying when there's a chat room (or IRC) system setup. It makes it fun, I feel more connected, and I think we are more productive that way.
Your priority isn't everyone else's priority. The luxury you exercise in walking over and disturbing someone to enlist them to help you fix your problem comes at a price of latency to them in how long it takes them to get back on task after you walk away happy that you got your problem fixed and that you had a social interaction.
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.
I'd like to see ratio between remote and office employees for 37signals. My bet is they're not, contrary to the popular belief, mostly remote-work company.
All of the comments I keep reading that criticize this decision assume that the A-players were working from home, and that the A-players will hate the decision. Possibly true.
But a lot of the anonymous internal feedback was that over the years, previous management had filled Yahoo up with B-players. If that's true, I can easily imagine that there's quite a large overlap between those who work from home and the B-players. It's such an easy way to slack off if you're not motivated or capable. And nowhere do I read people saying, "Hey, maybe this was what the situation was." I only read people saying, "Yahoo is boneheaded for not respecting their people." Let's consider all the possibilities.
I think a mandate having everyone work from home for a month would be more telling at who the real producers are. This would force succinct communication and everything is on the record. Working remotely forced you to communicate in a more transparent way and actually gives a good manager more evidence to judge an employee by. Of course counting hours is easier for a manager to do.
It's worth noting that the author doesn't really know how Yahoo arrived at that decision. Yahoo very well may have evaluated remote work productivity or be aware of other situations or metrics that make it clear, they needed to terminate remote work programs. I feel pretty confident that Marisa Mayer didn't just wake up and make a rash decision to terminate remote work without fully evaluating and understanding the situation, the impact and the benefits.
Wow. Why are we all of a sudden so interested in what Yahoo is doing these days? They aren't a leader in, well, anything, but now the internet is in a frenzy about this work-from-home recall.
How's this for an idea? Let's see if Yahoo is a company worth looking at for leadership. They aren't? Oh. Then let their policies die with them.
Exactly this. As a full time remote worker, I fear the "monkey-see-monkey-do" fallout that could come of it. Yahoo may not be a "leader" in anything, but their CEO is one of the most respected people in Silicon Valley. When she makes a move such as this one, people notice.
I have absolutely no data on this, but it struck me as a lazy and sneaky way of making layoffs. It looks tough and decisive "She has a vision!" without spooking Wall Street with the "Yahoo starts the layoffs!" headlines.
Sometimes Wall Street responds favourably to shedding employees. I guess it just depends on the general outlook of the company. If the outlook is good, then they are just 'cutting costs' and 'shedding cruft.' If the outlook on a company is shaky or bad, then it's just seen as a desperate move to keep the company afloat.
One crucial piece of info missing from this article is how long this "no more remote work" policy will be in effect.
Yahoo's cut a lot of staff and (acqui-)hired a lot of new people over the past few months, and so for the sake of team re-building, I can see why they might want to have all staff in one place for a while.
Even if staff are working remotely, it's always better for them to have met and bonded in person at some point - more trust, camaraderie, and goodwill. Maybe this is Marissa Mayer's way of getting everyone on the same page for a few months, and then afterwards people will be able to work remotely again as usual.
If this is a temporary measure to team-build more effectively, then it makes sense. If it's permanent, then I agree with the author DHH that it's a foolish and shortsighted move.
I'm a remote worker. I've worked remotely for teams based in the US for one of those big names you know and more recently for a London-based company with offices just a couple of hours commute from my house deep in the Swedish countryside. I've worked about 6 years full-time remote in the last 10.
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.
Here and in all the remote-working threads people come along to say it doesn't work and that you need to sit together to be a team. Well, I guess these are inexperienced people who haven't worked out how to do it effectively is all.
I hope there is a new enlightenment in remote-working for us programmers. There's so many diverse companies and meaningful organizations I'd be happy to dedicate my thinking hours too if their management could just consider it possible...
> 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 your individual "getting things done" that doesn't get addressed when you aren't in the office. When you are there, taking advantage of the opportunity to address this exceeds the value of what I'm sure most people would describe as your primary job function.
> Here and in all the remote-working threads people come along to say it doesn't work and that you need to sit together to be a team. Well, I guess these are inexperienced people who haven't worked out how to do it effectively is all.
I would agree with this. Obviously remote working can work. That isn't to say that there aren't trade offs. There absolutely are. Like all trade offs, the exchange is a bargain for some contexts and an unacceptable price for others.
When you are there, taking advantage of the opportunity to address this exceeds the value of what I'm sure most people would describe as your primary job function.
I think it's more a side-effect of the typical meeting. They tend to be so low bandwidth, that most people view any way out of them as increasing their productivity.
I've not found remote meetings much better in this regard.
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.
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.
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.
> That would be highly dependent on the quality of the company culture.
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.
I get the stigma of "cool companies" that have chefs that serve organic meals 4 times a day, but are those benefits really all that superficial? As a new graduate who has to move to likely a very expensive part of the US to work for them, making the transition easier by eliminating some worries from my life (like doing lots and lots of grocery shopping) is a pretty nice benefit.
No, not at all. Serving meals makes it much easier to convince your team to go to lunch together (though many folks will eat at their desks, PLEASE DISCOURAGE THIS). Lunching together with your team frequently is the single best benefit of a company that offers cafes for employees. It's one of the ways non-urgent but important information propagates around an organization.
For me I think it's actually a clever marketing move by DHH and 37 Signals to create a "stir" around the issue. My guess is they don't really care what Yahoo's reasons are behind it but are very pleased with the timing...you can't help but notice at the bottom of the post - Interested in learning more about remote work? Checkout our upcoming book REMOTE: Office Not Required.
I think it's likely that you're missing a layer. The book is really just marketing for the DHH/37signals/RoR brand.
Developing that brand makes people more loyal to their products and ecosystem, which probably makes them a lot more money over the long run than book sales.
We've had business relationships with Yahoo in the past and everyone we dealt with there had a complete lack of accountability. No one seemed to care when we found problems, and it would take months for simple things to be fixed on their side.
This change will no doubt cause some loss of talented people, but if they want to drastically change the culture at Yahoo I don't see any other way. They need to get everyone working together both physically and mentally.
Hopefully they'll move all development back home as well. Their dev teams in India were dreadful with turnaround times and bugs.
The following (from the posting), "When management has to lay it on so thick that they don’t trust you with an afternoon at home waiting for the cable guy without a stern “please think of the company”, you know something is horribly broken.", reminds me of this quote...
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?[1]
216 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadIn 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 :)
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.
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.
You must have some incredible judgment then. Do you trust all of your coworkers with having that same level of judgment?
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.
As someone who has worked independently and for others in offices and remotely, the above statement is the exact opposite of reality.
When people are in the office non-production is perversely seen as production. Where warming a seat and having lots of busy work meetings and filling white boards full of inanity is "the gears of work".
When working remotely, the sole indicator of accomplishment is actual production. All of the bullshit is pushed aside.
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.
As humorous as that is, your "heed the man" advice is quaintly archaic. A business like Yahoo is nothing but the combined work of a bunch of smart people. We've seen -- time and time again -- that many such companies are driven and succeed because of a subset of those people, so it is dangerous, dangerous ground to offend them. Because they become the upstarts that grind places like Yahoo into dust.
The world has changed. We all have the tools, the technology, the capacity to scale, the communications mediums, and the audience. It is nothing like it was.
EDIT: Places like Reddit, Digg, Slashdot are by far busiest during the North American work day. These are by and large people working in offices.
I was a remote employee for the last almost two years at Cheezburger with many others. We had a culture of emails not taking forever and a day to respond to and if you needed a response now you could Skype, google talk, jabbr, phone call whoever you needed.
The whole organization was committed to it.
On top of that, everyone I knew worked like mad. There were definitely pros and cons and I'm sure the pros outweighed the cons.
I agree mostly with your point, but the problem is this - the gargantuan size of the company leads to problems, there are always going to be a couple of ass holes who sneak under the radar, the people who do the minimum amount of work possible, working from wherever they want and being paid for it. It's a shame that the actions of these people can make employers naturally suspicious of hiring people to work remotely when I'm sure most are decent and hard working.
No, really, it is the opposite. You're fine as long you as you sit on your computer from 9 to 5. Working from home, there's a constant pressure to produce actual results, because that's what you are judged by. I find it more stressful and there's more tendency to do overtime (you're already home anyway, right?).
I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.
There are many ways around this, chat clients being the most obvious. Also, continuously interrupting people can be very counterproductive, specifically if you do intellectual work.
We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like
There's many people for which working remotely isn't actually a choice, barring a change of employer.
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?
I've done consulting jobs both locally and remotely, and if you ask me, in a few years time we'll consider non-remote working (when it isn't necessary for the job) a thing of foolishness.
When you work remotely you don't have 'time in chair' as a proxy for productivity so you have no choice but to prove yourself through your output.
When in an office you can stare at the wall all day and have it considered "work".
Working remotely isn't for everyone. Some people do not have the self-discipline. Don't allow those people to work remotely or don't hire them at all.
There are other benefits to working in the same meat-space: culture, easy collaboration, etc. I don't believe pressure to produce results is one of them. I also think that most of those advantages are disappearing or gone with chat, email, skype, google hangouts, and other collaboration solutions.
It really depends on people/culture, but I find a shared IRC channel where people idle and are reasonably responsive to be the #1 way to have relatively friction-free quick coordination, even with people in the same building. Physical colocation is 2nd-best, email/Skype 3rd-best.
In fact, I think local is superior to remote mainly in the opposite case: where you need lengthy meetings, especially with more than two people. In that case, videoconferencing and email get unwieldy. But for routine quick queries I find IRC a lot better than walking over to someone's office, to the extent that someone local who doesn't use IRC (or isn't responsive on it) feels more distant to me than someone remote who does.
That's great that this is the case for you in the situation you were in; but the assertion that "people who work in an office together share instant communication, and people who work remotely have slow communication" is obviously false.
I've worked plenty of real world offices where communication was done only via email and took ages.
On the other hand, the job I work at now, I work remotely 4 days a week and communication is instantaneous. We have a company IRC server and if you're working it's expected you'll be on there. There's always phones but IRC + email work 99% of the time.
Remote work is the future; the reasons to work in an office together are evaporating. As remote video conferencing improves (and as someone who uses it every week, let me tell you, it still sucks) the benefits of being together in person disappear.
This is an idiotic move by Yahoo!, and shows that they have no clue what the are doing.
Employees can be unproductive in the office just as much as remote employees can be super-productive at home. Yahoo just seems to be taking the easiest to see metric for "productive".
That's basically my #1 problem where I work: we're in big open-spaces and you get interrupted all the time. Sometimes just having someone talk next to you can be enough to break your train of thought.
That being said, I agree it's very helpful to be able to talk in person sometimes. I think the solution is just something hybrid, you work remotely a certain portion of the time and get to the office for the other days.
I would be interested to hear yahoo's reason for giving up on remote work though. This article is a bit unsubstantial.
Corporate IM is one solution to this.
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.
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 based on some paranoid perception that “they’re slacking” – it seems more like a change meant to help strengthen the culture at Yahoo by making it easier for teams to bond.
Do you really think that people who have been forced to start working in the office under threat of termination are going to form a positive, collegial bond? If they form a bond at all, it will be one based on shared resentment of the Dilbert-esque reality they now inhabit.
I think that in hard times, you either do form a bond or you go form a bond somewhere else. I think that's the decision that was just taken at Yahoo.
They could just have fired all the remote workers - but that would have been truly stupid.
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.
This "team spirit" argument makes no sense to me at all. What group on Earth has more "team spirit" than the contributors and maintainers on major open source projects?
For someone in Mayer's position, effective leadership means acting more like Linus Torvalds than Bill Lumbergh.
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 is their hail-mary complexity reduction step. It's a way to shave off a few percent without having to terminate people. Unfortunately, the cultural side effects are going to be massive. It's bad for the executive image as well. "We're out of ideas."
WFH exists for sociological reasons in addition to the obvious benefits (geographic reach, lower stress levels). Engineers are smart. They know they're not all going to climb the ladder and become top dogs. Not everyone wants that, either. The right to WFH gives people the tacit ability to "grow away" to a 10-hour work week, taking pressure off the competition for visibility and rank and allowing the organization to actually function. It gives people a path whereby, instead of climbing the organizational ladder, their efficiency gains are paid back to them in the ability to retain employment with a reduced work footprint. If you're twice as efficient as a typical office drone (which is not hard) then you can work a 20-hour week.
When you go back to the ass-in-chair regime, management has more control and the social stakes are higher. People aren't going to be happy putting in 40-50 dedicated hours and not having control. To a myopic executive who thinks everyone should be like him or her, that seems like a good thing because it makes people "hungry", but it's actually dysfunctional because the competition for rank is extremely counterproductive.
Next up is the Micromanagement Death Spiral. Macroscopic underperformance leads to individual overperformance by managers, the problem being that managerial overperformance (heightened control, micromanagement) is toxicity. That will exacerbate the company's macroscopic issues and lead to more micromanagement... the vicious cycle.
If Y and MM indeed did have those discussions ahead of time then I like this - shake things up with change and maybe even some chaos - it is needed - even if there are some negative consequences mixed in.
x weeks from now, post weed out, we will see Y go right back to standard WFH.
He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". How does he know there was no consultation? How does he know local employees didn't give feedback to management that the extra communication overhead with remote workers didn't create difficulties in collaboration?
He also writes that this policy change reveals that "Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not.". Why is this assumed? Why isn't it plausible that management studied the problem and found that having collaborators in disparate locations hampered progress?
The entire article seems needlessly reactionary and assumes things about the working culture at Yahoo that may not be true. Perhaps this vehement reaction is due to the fact that the author has a new book coming out advocating remote working?
our forth quarter reviews just finished
I personally think your argument would be best served by saying something along the following lines:
The author asserts that the new policy is based on "flimsy foundations". He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". He also writes that this policy change reveals that "Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not."
What evidence is there that any of these conjectures and speculations are true?
That would make the point about the lack of evidence in the post rather than about the author.
But to indulge you, consider whether you are confusing correlation with causation. It could be that he writes this post to promote his book (causation).
Nevertheless, it could also be that the post and the book are correlated, and that the root cause is his own personal success with remote working arrangements.
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.
I've been a remote or semi-remote [1] for 8 years, mostly for smaller organizations under 50 people. As a developer, I LOVE working remotely, and it creates a huge increase in my personal productivity. It also enables a saner work/life balance.
That said, enabling productive _collaboration_ does take work. My guess is Yahoo is so far behind the eight ball, they want to take this out of the equation until they can right the ship.
Rather than "you're an idiot" sort of post, I'd like it see 37 signals write up how they enable remote collaboration. [2]
Trust is the foundation of great collaboration, but you need more than that to actually make it work. And, scaling that up to thousands of people would be even more difficult.
[1] Semi-remote being three days in the office, two days at home.
[2] My guess is they still use campefire, but it would still be an interesting write up in 2013.
Like many people above noted, global companies do this all the time.
I'm sure they consulted every remote worker before they effectively shitcanned most of them.
it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices
Seems to be a statement that good collaboration is only possible when employees occupy the same physical space.
Yahoo has offices across the glove, don't they? Are they going to also ban teams/employees in different offices from working together?
Personally I like working from home as the default and meeting in person when needed/appropriate.
If you're not coordinating your remote workers on an IRC-like system, you're likely doing it wrong. (That's my experience, if someone else has successfully used other systems I'd like to hear about it)
Also, if most of the team is on site and the remote people are a small minority, things are going to suck, unless management is also off-site.
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.
But a lot of the anonymous internal feedback was that over the years, previous management had filled Yahoo up with B-players. If that's true, I can easily imagine that there's quite a large overlap between those who work from home and the B-players. It's such an easy way to slack off if you're not motivated or capable. And nowhere do I read people saying, "Hey, maybe this was what the situation was." I only read people saying, "Yahoo is boneheaded for not respecting their people." Let's consider all the possibilities.
How's this for an idea? Let's see if Yahoo is a company worth looking at for leadership. They aren't? Oh. Then let their policies die with them.
Yahoo's cut a lot of staff and (acqui-)hired a lot of new people over the past few months, and so for the sake of team re-building, I can see why they might want to have all staff in one place for a while.
Even if staff are working remotely, it's always better for them to have met and bonded in person at some point - more trust, camaraderie, and goodwill. Maybe this is Marissa Mayer's way of getting everyone on the same page for a few months, and then afterwards people will be able to work remotely again as usual.
If this is a temporary measure to team-build more effectively, then it makes sense. If it's permanent, then I agree with the author DHH that it's a foolish and shortsighted move.
Sure, invite all teams to meet at an office for 2-3 weeks of networking, team-building etc. That's a great idea, but not what is happening here.
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.
Here and in all the remote-working threads people come along to say it doesn't work and that you need to sit together to be a team. Well, I guess these are inexperienced people who haven't worked out how to do it effectively is all.
I hope there is a new enlightenment in remote-working for us programmers. There's so many diverse companies and meaningful organizations I'd be happy to dedicate my thinking hours too if their management could just consider it possible...
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 your individual "getting things done" that doesn't get addressed when you aren't in the office. When you are there, taking advantage of the opportunity to address this exceeds the value of what I'm sure most people would describe as your primary job function.
> Here and in all the remote-working threads people come along to say it doesn't work and that you need to sit together to be a team. Well, I guess these are inexperienced people who haven't worked out how to do it effectively is all.
I would agree with this. Obviously remote working can work. That isn't to say that there aren't trade offs. There absolutely are. Like all trade offs, the exchange is a bargain for some contexts and an unacceptable price for others.
I think it's more a side-effect of the typical meeting. They tend to be so low bandwidth, that most people view any way out of them as increasing their productivity.
I've not found remote meetings much better in this regard.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I think that has more to do with the meetings than the office.
Developing that brand makes people more loyal to their products and ecosystem, which probably makes them a lot more money over the long run than book sales.
This change will no doubt cause some loss of talented people, but if they want to drastically change the culture at Yahoo I don't see any other way. They need to get everyone working together both physically and mentally.
Hopefully they'll move all development back home as well. Their dev teams in India were dreadful with turnaround times and bugs.
Surely you can imagine other ways to make people accountable, dedicated, empowered and effective than focusing on the place and hours they work?
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?[1]
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/111168-how-in-the-hell-could...