Story here.
I suppose most of us thought the wave of the future was working from home. However Yahoo has decided that telecommuters have to come back to the office. And it turns out that Google discourages permanent telecommuting also. The reason given is that being at work encourages interaction with colleagues, interaction that does not happen at home. In fact, the Google and Facebook campuses both are designed to encourage this. They also give free food to encourage people to stay forever.
While the article notes that call-center employees are more productive at home, these places are not call centers, where the work is a pretty constant stream and creative interaction is not required.
There are suspicions that this is to get Yahoo! people to work harder, but that surely isn’t the reason that Facebook and Google discourage telecommuting.
Is this the beginning of the end of permanent work at home for engineers and programmers and the like? How has your experience been? I’m personally happier to go to work, not because of distractions at home but because people dropping in is more effective than email, and I hate the phone.
I would think that there is still a place for the telecommuting developer. If requirements are rock solid and the developer does not need the interaction that Google and others are looking for, I don’t know why it should change. For my business, it is far cheaper for me to allow my folks to work remotely than to lease out office space for them. Without that overhead, I make more money, and so do they.
Until the final product begins to suffer, I have no plans to change a thing. Of course, my shop is about the size of a flea on Google’s ass so my situation may not have any bearing in the larger picture. YMMV.
I’m a software developer with a 120 mile round trip commute, and the two days I get to work at home each week are the main reason I have remained at my job after my company was acquired by a corporate giant five years ago. If the telecommuting option were taken away, I would be looking for a new job pretty quickly. I suspect that a lot of people at Yahoo will be doing the same.
There was some discussion over this at Slashdot. There (and it was pointed out there) a lot of folks seem to believe that every worker can handle and be productive while telecommuting on an equal basis as every other worker. I don’t think that’s true.
I assume that for many companies, especially the larger you get, it’s too much hassle to sort out who should or shouldn’t be “trusted” to do so, especially with possible extra equipment challenges, so they just make blanket policy that’s easier.
I understand banning permanent, or nearly permanent telecommuters. The ones that always work from home, or nearly so. That’s up to management.
I don’t understand banning the concept of telecommuting entirely. Some days it’s just more practical to work from home, when the alternative is taking a day off entirely.
I suspect they will ease off that a bit once they get their point across. Form what I have read, the problem was that many employees were milking the company, and not making themselves available when they should have been. One current Yahoo! employee said the following on Quora.
and another employee said:
Suffice it to say that at least some employees there think it will have a positive effect.
I’ve been permanently teleworking for 3 years. It’s a small company and I’ve had no problem staying in contact; my productivity would likely be higher if I were in the office with the other developers, but I’d also be more expensive, so they’re fine with this arrangement.
OTOH, there was another permatel dev (I just invented a new word!) who essentially fell off the map and was getting paid for doing nothing. He’d stop in every 3 months or so, we’d give him a bunch of work, and then he’d leave and not do any of it. It took a year to convince my boss that he needed to go.
IBM is having difficulties with this–on the one hand, telecommuting (particularly full-time) means they don’t need a desk, chair, lights, water, or air conditioning for people not in the office, which cuts costs for IBM and for the companies they’re contracting with. At one point, 60% of IBM’s employees worked from home pretty much full-time.
They’re switching to using Delivery Centers, which is based off of the novel idea that, rather than being scattered all over the country and working from home, they live in the same town the office is in and drive in to work at their desk every day. In theory, this makes it easier to train new people, disseminate information, and gives people more of a sense of community. The downside is that 60% of their employees never go into the office, and a certain sizeable chunk of those people can’t: they tend to have commitments and disabilities and schedules which don’t work well with the idea of going in to the office for nine solid hours every day. Or, they can’t justify moving to, say, Dubuque.
I don’t work at Google, but my impression is that trust is not the issue there. Most people exchange massive amounts of email during the course of a day, so not seeing any might be a good warning sign.
Certainly some days you just want to get something done, and working from home can give you fewer interruptions. (Before laptops and ready net access we put a sign on our door saying do not disturb.)
I think telecommuting is important, but it in most cases it shouldn’t be permanent, at least of the point of never coming into the office, except in cases where that just doesn’t matter, like call centers. That is, there are huge benefits to working from home to both the employee and employer, like less commuting, less distractions, lower costs, but there’s also benefits to being in the office, meetings, collaborations, and other such things. I think the best deal would be to find the appropriate balance between these sorts of things.
Let’s take developers as an example. Let everyone work from home say 3 days a week and come into the office 2 days a week. Rotate the days around, aiming to keep teams of people that need to be together as much as possible, and you can then still have people in the office a couple days a week for meetings with teams and supervisors and social interaction with their coworkers, and they can still work from home the other days. You still get some benefits of having a smaller office and lower cost while still being able to get people together and socialize and all that. If that’s not enough, have company gatherings once a month or whatever for larger meetings or whatever.
See, here’s the thing, I really like having people around at work, it’s good for getting fresh ideas and collaborating on things, but there’s plenty of times where I’d just be better off if I could be left alone and work on whatever I’m doing. At home, I can easily just be in my office, but since I have a cube at work, I have to deal with all the distractions at the office. So actually getting code done at work can be very tedious.
What the heck do people at Yahoo do all day at work anyway? This is like an announcement from Radio Shack that the company is going to focus on its core mission.
This would have been good. If Mayer had done the public outrage would be a lot less.
As a matter of fact the outcry from telecommuting advocates has been predictable and extensive. More surprising to me is that the opponents of telecommuting seem to be just as vocal; it’s as if their rage against anyone so presumptuous and self-entitled as to telecommute comes boiling to the surface. From the smug nastiness of their taunts and jeers following online newspaper articles you’d think telecommuting was the greatest evil that exists in American business and that it must be stamped out. Curiously, the numbers suggest that there are far more of these curmudgeons than there are actual bosses who are sufficiently big in their bosshood that they can boss-walk around an office. In other words many of them must be ordinary worker bees themselves, but they’ve drunk so deeply of the corporate Kool-Aid they can’t see beyond a one-size-fits-all mentality.
Open offices can certainly be a problem when you need alone time to get tasks done. IMHO the more your daily work consists of face-to-face meetings and other verbal communication, the more comfortable you can be in an open office. Talking to one or two other people in a noisy office is easier for many than sitting alone in your cube trying to do non-verbal (non-oral) work.
Marissa Mayer is a politically liberal CEO in perhaps the most liberal metro area in the country–and she does this. If this is what we can expect from our business leaders, we are seriously screwed. I’d say the soon-to-be-former Yahoo telecommuters are already screwed–just think of the cost of commuting they will now incur. It could amount to an effective pay cut of thousands of dollars a year in some cases; at the same time it will net the company next to nothing in the short term. They can simply shut down the physical infrastructure that supports telecommuting because it’s still necessary for day to day business functions.
I work for a large company in the IT industry, and I’m very happy that my company allows telecommuting. I consider it a major perk of the job, honestly. I live about 40 miles from company headquarters and the drive is horrible. Of my group, one is local, one is in Ireland, one is in Toronto, and one is somewhere back east, so coming in to the office wouldn’t be much use anyway. Also, most of my projects don’t require much interaction beyond email and attending meetings via conference call. So far there haven’t been any complaints about my work. We have a lot of remote folks, so it’s pretty well accepted.
I would be very unhappy if they revoked my telecommute privileges, to the point where I would probably dust off my resume and go looking for something closer. If they’re going to make me go in to work every day, I’d rather have a 10 mile commute than a 40 mile one.
I thought I’d share this tidbit from the L.A. Times article, here.
Seriously? She’s leading by counting cars in the parking lot?
It reminds me of some Victorian-era office melodrama, such as Anthony Trollope might have written. “I shall lose my place! I took my lunch at 12:30 instead of noon, and while I was gone the Assistant Department Overminion pointed to my empty chair and demanded of the Senior Clerk, ‘where is this man!’. I fairly got it from the Senior Clerk when I came back in at 1:25.”
This suggests to me that the problem with telecommuting is with those who abuse the privilege, and they are the same people who would be goofing off in the office. They need to go anyway, but that’s not because some of them are telecommuters.
The issue of the loss of in-person interaction and the possible loss of creative (i.e., profitable) exchanges among staff has been considered and there is already a high-tech solution.
Yes, the robot avatar for telecommuting workers has arrived. It is a mobile and motorized computer with a camera, microphone, speakers, and monitor. So the avatar can wander through the office and the employee can chat with coworkers, look at and display ideas, and never have to suffer the other employees halitosis or diseases.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer seems like she is probably a fairly bright middle manager / senior executive. But she sounds like a terrible CEO. At least terrible at being the sort of CEO that a company like Yahoo needs to compete with Google and Facebook. Yahoo is not going to become a great company by micromanaging resume reviews, taking away telecommuting and counting cars in the parking lot.