Working from Home (Yahoo CEO stops it)

[punjabi_khota]

100 miles each way ? Brutal.

[veer]

well, he used to live in Houston and his parents in Beaumont.. but his dad passed away last year and now he sort of takes care of his mom living there. Company allows only one day to work from home.. so he drives back and forth other four days. He had to get rid of his truck early this year because of his commute..

[Jersey #10]

It's a sour grape story for me. I don't have the option of working from home so I am happy with this move.

[Desi Cartman]

100 miles each way ? Brutal.

I drive 30 miles each way .. :((

[Lurker]

well, he used to live in Houston and his parents in Beaumont.. but his dad passed away last year and now he sort of takes care of his mom living there. Company allows only one day to work from home.. so he drives back and forth other four days. He had to get rid of his truck early this year because of his commute..

100 miles is an extreme case, and in this situation obviously has absolute reasons for that. However 50-60 miles one way is not too much of a surprise in certain areas. Folks around NYC, Baltimore-Philly, Bay Area, LA often do travel that distance. Specially those who own a house, for those renting it is easier to find a place closeby. In Bay Area & LA, a lot of people use bike to commute for this reason. The bikes are allowed to zip between traffic lanes and are thus able to traverse the distance quick(er).

[Desi Cartman]

My honest(cynical) take on that is that is more of a hogwash than a genuine reason. Put it this way, if tomorrow gas gets to $1/gallon and cars suddenly have 10 times the existing mileage, would you change your stance to start driving everyday to work? Most likely not. Those who use saving planet as an excuse are also those who advocate working from home, the latter reasoning drives the former not the other way around.

Forget gas, money , pollution but time alone most people waste on commuting to work is almost 10% of the day and 15% of awake time. And yes its only logical for some jobs and that too for only few days a week.

Ummm because everybody else does?? But for IT, few areas work this way. The guys from Finance still show up at work, so do HR, Sales & Marketing. Very few, if any, guys on the Wall Street would be working from home. Plus there has to be a certain way of "working". As in putting in simple effort of getting up, taking a shower, having breakfast and coming to work...than showing up in pink pajamas at home and start answering emails. No?

Quite a few people can work from home, I never said that a bank teller should be able to work from home :giggle:

People are different, and companies are different. Yes technology has its place, specially in a company with locations across different cities, and country.Personally I would not like to work in any place that does not have human interaction. Thats how you learn about business, meet people and grow up the corporate ladder. Most times those who work from home are also those who not too many people know. Again, companies are different so your experience may entirely be different.

Thats why my solution is 2-3 days a weeek work from home and rest from office but Im 100% against the ban. At the very least, employees who can, should be allowed to work every now and then especially if helps them save an annual day. It also works for the employers as most people even if they are sick, still end up working from home so they save a lot sickes

[Ram]

Clearly a publicity gimmick from Yahoo. If their eventual intent was to have people not work from home, there's a very simple and elegant way of doing it - At a policy level, allow it, but make the employees jump thru so many hoops that they are simply too embarrassed to even avail the option. I have seen this happen with my own eyes in one of my previous companies. Yahoo could have done that. In terms of what is more productive, I would say it would depend entirely on the nature of your job + your personality traits. I personally prefer in-person interactions to e-mail/phone conversations for the following reasons - 1) My job requires me to have at least 3-4 meetings/day with our business partners/client advisors. So it would be impossible for me to establish a relationship with our counterparts on the Client side and get things done over phone in an effective way. I have found that in person interactions typically leads to more vigorous debates and produce more creative solutions. I cannot recall the number of times when would go into a room with a complex business problem, get to the white-board and come to a solution in an iterative fashion. That would have been impossible in a e-mail/phone scenario. 2) Having been exposed to the brutal, take-no-prisoners wall-street/hedge-fund culture, I have learnt the hard-way not to stay too far away from the rumors, rumblings and the ruminations of office politics. It pays to keep your ears/eyes open for tell-tale signs of what is happening and what to expect. You could be THE hardest working guy in the team, but if you are unable to control the perception your team members have of you, it could lead to bad outcomes. And staying at home and going about your business may not be the most effective way to manage reputations. 3) At the end of the day, work is about managing relationships to produce the outcomes you need. If you work with intelligent, assertive guys who sometimes make upwards of a quarter of a million dollars/yr, then you need to be able to stand your ground when you think you are right. That confidence evolves only as you interact more and more with that person. Having the opportunity to see someone in person gives you a chance to assert yourself and send them a strong message that you are no mere pushovers, the other person's title/years of experience notwithstanding. Having said all of this, I dont think it is fair to make a blanket generalization of things. I have seen some of ex-colleagues of mine who work only from home to be the most productive of all team members in terms of accomplishing things. At the end people are going to be who they are, irrespective of where you force them to work from. However, you'd want your employer to be humane enough to allow from WFH when it comes to extraneous circumstances (sickness, weather etc)

[Lurker]

Clearly a publicity gimmick from Yahoo. If their eventual intent was to have people not work from home' date=' there's a very simple and elegant way of doing it - [b']At a policy level, allow it, but make the employees jump thru so many hoops that they are simply too embarrassed to even avail the option. I have seen this happen with my own eyes in one of my previous companies. Yahoo could have done that.

Yahoo did the right thing by bringing this out in the open, instead of scheming a mechanism of outwitting its employees. I am a little surprised that you advocate creating a false sense of policy which at its core means employees would fail to comply. Personally I would much rather have my employer tell me directly to come to work or stop collecting the paycheck.

[Lurker]

Forget gas, money , pollution but time alone most people waste on commuting to work is almost 10% of the day and 15% of awake time. And yes its only logical for some jobs and that too for only few days a week.

That is an exaggeration that is commonly seen in our generation bandhu. It is not exactly that commute time has gone from 1 hr per person in previous generation to 5 hr per person today. You were driving 10-15 miles, now you are driving twice. And most of industrialized era has been like that. People were travelling from Virar to Churchgate in 70s as well. Lets not try to show as if our generation is undergoing a sudden problem. Agli baar Doctor ke yehan jaao to wo bhi remote webcam pe check kar lega. Chalega? :giggle:

Thats why my solution is 2-3 days a weeek work from home and rest from office but Im 100% against the ban. At the very least, employees who can, should be allowed to work every now and then especially if helps them save an annual day. It also works for the employers as most people even if they are sick, still end up working from home so they save a lot sickes

Taking time off for sickness is entirely different than working 2-3 days a week (which incidentally works up to 40-60% days per week lol). Doubt those who take sick days end up taking more than say half a dozen off for work. As mentioned earlier people/companies are different but it is good to see this discussion out in the open. Too many people have taken advantage of this policy. :((:((

[triam]

As mentioned earlier people/companies are different but it is good to see this discussion out in the open. Too many people have taken advantage of this policy. :((:((

True too many people take advantage, but that onus falls on the manager and HR to fix that loophole if the individual abuses it. There is a strong likelihood yahoo will lose employees due to this policy to other more employee friendly tech giants. The relation ship between what work means what your employer is to an employee has changed completely for good or bad. Employees no longer can trust their employers implicitly and believe that their best and honest effort will always be rewarded and/or recognized. Also, yes our previous generations did it does not meyan we should be going through the same pains, isnt the whole goal of the human experience to make our lives easier with the advances in science and technology? Although I have never worked from home, I believe as an employee it is my right if I choose to exercise it, it goes in the same ball park as working 16-18 hours when things go bad and your employer expects you to stay and fix the issues.

[Desi Cartman]

That is an exaggeration that is commonly seen in our generation bandhu. It is not exactly that commute time has gone from 1 hr per person in previous generation to 5 hr per person today. You were driving 10-15 miles, now you are driving twice. And most of industrialized era has been like that. People were travelling from Virar to Churchgate in 70s as well. Lets not try to show as if our generation is undergoing a sudden problem. Agli baar Doctor ke yehan jaao to wo bhi remote webcam pe check kar lega. Chalega? :giggle: Taking time off for sickness is entirely different than working 2-3 days a week (which incidentally works up to 40-60% days per week lol). Doubt those who take sick days end up taking more than say half a dozen off for work. As mentioned earlier people/companies are different but it is good to see this discussion out in the open. Too many people have taken advantage of this policy. :((:((

O yaar if we wasted 2 hrs in the 70s then we should continue to do it ?

[yoda]

An entire group should be remote or no one (barring personal reasons on off days) should be remote at all. It is an extreme inconvenience to those in the office to chase down those working from home, engage in alternate modes of communication, explain issues and get things done. There is no question that it is very difficult to collaborate if people are at different locations. There is nothing more efficient than face to face discussions. That said, if given a choice, I would work from home all 5 days of the week, or better yet from Hawaii.

[b555]

Some opinions of Yahoo employees themselves :

I have been at Yahoo for four years and lets just say the house needed and still needs a lot of cleaning up and Marissa is doing just that. So I am glad that the change in policy was made. Many people are misled by the various stories going around. If your child is sick it is ok to work from home for that day and my boss and others are ok with that. The change primarily affects those who permanently work from home. If we want to change, compete, and make a come back all hands have to be on deck, in meetings, contributing ideas, involved, etc. People will use the argument that look at Google and how it allows employees to work from home. My question would be have you seen their P&L? They make boatloads of money. We are fighting to stay relevant. So getting your ass into the office and working on projects is not too much to ask. If you don't like it well too bad, the exit door is over there.

Another current and longterm Yahoo developer here, who is extremely happy that the WFH shenanigans are being put to an end. I too have seen this abused far too often, although IMO it's usually not by full time WFH, but more often the San Francisco city dweller who just happens to spend two, sometimes three, days of the week working from his house because "the commute to Sunnyvale is too tiring". Hey, clue people.. nobody made you live in San Francisco. A lot of the negative commentary from external sources has come from non-developers. People who work in solitary jobs doing rote-work with little need for new knowledge acquisition are fine candidates for WFH. In fact, the biggest complainers on the internal mailing lists seem to come from Operations types, which, given my general experience of Ops at Yahoo, unfortunately does describe their typical role -- a poor reflection on the way Ops has been managed at Yahoo. But developers, at least in my experience, understand there's a difference between working hard and working smart. Yes, you may be able to work hard at home and get a lot of coding done, but it doesn't help if you're coding something in an inefficient way because you didn't overhear the conversation at lunch about this neat new open-source library someone in your team found. Or, you decide to code up a new utility package at home, only to find someone else in your team has already done an equivalent, only you don't know about it because you were not in the office on the brownbag lunch day where they described it. I think (and studies show) full-time WFH people may be more "productive" in terms of raw output, but whether that output is the "most effective" output for the company/team is a whole 'nother question. The other shoe that I also expect is about to drop is a deliberate move to colocate project teams in the same office, rather than having distributed teams across different offices. The amount of time wasted going back and forth with 12 hour differences is a huge drain on everyone in a project. A recent high-profile project within Yahoo included physically relocating core (Yahoo pun intended) engineers from Beijing to Sunnyvale for 2 months to sit alongside the developers on the new personalized Frontpage. Expect to see more of this.

I dont think all the employees think this is such a bad idea

[Sachinism]

Honor system is the perfect way of putting it. Wasn't there a survey by a British thinktank recently that most people who use Remote working tend to abuse it? May have to dig it up. In my experience more people misuse the previlige and end up doing everything from slacking to picking up a 2nd job. Of course your experience is entirely different.

I'd be surprised if there was anyone who didn't abuse it. May not be to a great extent, but you're more likely to get distracted.

[Crookbond]

No more remote work at Yahoo http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3453-no-more-remote-work-at-yahoo

The leadership vacuum at Yahoo is not going to be filled by executive decrees issued on such flimsy foundations. Imagine you’re a remote worker at Yahoo and you read that. Hell, imagine you’re any kind of worker at Yahoo and you read that. Are you going to be filled with go-getter spirit and leap to the opportunity to make Yahoo more than just “your day-to-day job”? Of course not, you’re going to be angry at such a callous edict, declared without your consultation. What this reveals more than anything is that Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not. In their blindness they’re reaching for the lowest form of control a manager can assert: Ensuring butts in seats for eight hours between 9-5+. Though while they can make people come to the office under the threat of termination, they most certainly cannot make those same people motivated to do great work. Great work simply doesn’t happen in environments with so little trust. Revoking the “yard time privileges” like this reeks of suspicions that go far beyond just people with remote work arrangements. Read this line one more time: “please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration”. 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.

I can't put it any better.

[Lurker]

O yaar if we wasted 2 hrs in the 70s then we should continue to do it ?

Yes, that was eggajacly the point, was it not? :cantstop: Point is rather simple - Today's entitlement crowd often makes it sound as if they are moving mountains to get to work, reality is that is hardly the case.

[Lurker]

An entire group should be remote or no one (barring personal reasons on off days) should be remote at all. It is an extreme inconvenience to those in the office to chase down those working from home' date= engage in alternate modes of communication, explain issues and get things done. There is no question that it is very difficult to collaborate if people are at different locations. There is nothing more efficient than face to face discussions. That said, if given a choice, I would work from home all 5 days of the week, or better yet from Hawaii.

That is a simple reality that anyone who has been in a Managerial role, or above, understands and acknowledges. When ***** hits the fan and one has to look for crisis management, the first person(s) you go to are often those who are at work. Good luck chasing working from home blokes who most likely will be reachable via voicemail.

[punjabi_khota]

100 miles is an extreme case, and in this situation obviously has absolute reasons for that. However 50-60 miles one way is not too much of a surprise in certain areas. Folks around NYC, Baltimore-Philly, Bay Area, LA often do travel that distance. Specially those who own a house, for those renting it is easier to find a place closeby. In Bay Area & LA, a lot of people use bike to commute for this reason. The bikes are allowed to zip between traffic lanes and are thus able to traverse the distance quick(er).

There is a huge difference between taking the train for 1 hour or driving one hour. The former is a nuisance but you can read, sleep, etc, but the latter is killing. Most people coming into NYC from 50 miles away don't drive. Same for Boston. The drive into Boston is so depressing (I did it once or twice!), but the train is pretty awesome and you can actually work most days if you are so inclined.

[Lurker]

True too many people take advantage, but that onus falls on the manager and HR to fix that loophole if the individual abuses it.

It works both ways. Yes the Management absolutely has the role to play. Then again there is a responsibility of the employees as well. Or have we suddenly turned into a blood-thirsty generation who are going to do the right thing only when the Management tells us to? I hope not. By the by when the Management does try to fix it, like in this case, why the brouhaha then? Surely we should accept it and move on :winky:

There is a strong likelihood yahoo will lose employees due to this policy to other more employee friendly tech giants. The relation ship between what work means what your employer is to an employee has changed completely for good or bad. Employees no longer can trust their employers implicitly and believe that their best and honest effort will always be rewarded and/or recognized.

Absolutely. Those (Yahoo employees) who think other companies will make a bee-line for them to work from home should resign right away and see how goes? Should be rather easy for them I think :--D

Also, yes our previous generations did it does not meyan we should be going through the same pains, isnt the whole goal of the human experience to make our lives easier with the advances in science and technology?

Absolutely. But lets also not try to put ourselves and pedestal and complain every single time. Our parents, and those earlier, had as much difficulty, if not more, in raising family. Let us not make arguments, not saying you are, that we are the most overworked, overstressed generation ever and hence deserve perks for that.

Although I have never worked from home, I believe as an employee it is my right if I choose to exercise it, it goes in the same ball park as working 16-18 hours when things go bad and your employer expects you to stay and fix the issues.

Absolutely. And frankly if 16-18 hours becomes the norm it is time to change the job.:winky:

[Lurker]

There is a huge difference between taking the train for 1 hour or driving one hour. The former is a nuisance but you can read' date=' sleep, etc, but the latter is killing. Most people coming into NYC from 50 miles away don't drive. Same for Boston. The drive into Boston is so depressing (I did it once or twice!), but the train is pretty awesome and you can actually work most days if you are so inclined.[/quote'] Oh yes absolutely. And it depends on age, gender and a bunch of other things. I mean I dont quite expect a 45 year old woman to be riding bikes in LA afterall. I am sure there are some though. Trains and buses, where available, are a great medium. And most long distance commuters do avail them. Do bear in mind that US is a tricky country. In most European and Asian countries mass transport is in much better shape (except India of course. By the way if you think driving into Boston is depressing try Chicago and Atlanta. The latter will drive you nuts. :beee: Boston is heavenly in comparison.