Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is a Gold Plated Bitch

Ok, so Yahoo is a success story before this and no changes are required …

It’s not just ONE company doing it. It’s MOST of the large tech companies. If you’re already successful, you can experiment with being different. Yahoo needs success yesterday.

Meh. Some Rhinos might keep the employees inside, at their desks.

moat + sharks + lasers

I think he’s bringing it up to refute the idea that the top talent could just pick up and go somewhere where they allow unlimited telecommuting, by pointing out that there really aren’t that many places for those people to go. If you want to work for a top level tech firm, and stay at home all day, there’s not a huge number of options out there anymore.

I couldn’t agree more and, if she wanted to reverse her own bad PR here, she could have easily made that nursery big enough to offer onsite daycare… for all her telecommuting employees who are suddenly going to need it. That could be a win-win, but instead it’s win for Marissa Mayer and fuck the rest of y’all. Good luck with that commute + day care. I’d probably quit without finding another job first because it would cost more to commute and pay for day care than it would to just eat beans and live off savings until another job is procured.

I would assume that Marissa Mayer and co. are looking at the same data that made Facebook and Google move to a less telecommuting-focused style and are making the same decision not out of a desire to ape their betters but because when you’ve got 2 and 2, you’re gonna make 4.

Obviously Yahoo sucks, but to just mimic whatever others are doing isn’t going to make them suck less. “Wait – they don’t work from home at Apple? Okay, no more telecommuting. Also, facebook has scooters. Let’s get some scooters and a giant red slide like YouTube. Doesn’t facebook also have free haircuts? Okay, everybody is getting a haircut.”

There are a lot of things other companies are doing that work well that are worth imitating, but you can’t just take a tour of their HQ and decide to copy pasta everything you see and think your product is going to get better. Adding nice perks like free lunches will help attract and retain good people, but taking away perks like telecommuting is just going to cheese the people presently doing so off. Way to take away one of the few advantages of working at Yahoo. The theory behind removing that perk is it will create a more collaborative and productive environment, which may turn out to be the case, but I’m curious about what led to her decision. Because her competitors are doing it, or because there’s clear evidence that working from home lessens productivity? I’d be taken aback if it is the latter, primarily considering such a thing doesn’t seem to exist. I know all the cool kids are doing it, and yes Yahoo needs to make some very serious changes earlier than yesterday – like, ten years ago – but changing one of the few things that may have actually been helping them seems foolhardy. Plus it’s kind of shitty for the employees.

Please keep in mind when reading my posts that I don’t know anything.

If goats are the status quo, you get you some goats. Or there will be questions about your company’s lack of goats.

And even though a successful company having a particular policy isn’t proof that the policy causes success, it is proof that the policy does not prevent success.

They’re getting a lot of bad press over this which doesn’t help make them seem like the cool web company. Not only may they lose employees, they may lose customers as people would rather use the cool search engine instead of the stodgy one.

It would have been better if they prohibited WFH going forward. But people may have made significant changes in their life and living arrangements based on this. People may have moved away, they may have taken in invalid family members, etc. Just expecting people to be able to drop all that and drive into work shows they don’t really care about the employees.

This reeks of out-of-touch executives who don’t consider how it affects the lower-level employees. Since they have face-to-face meetings all day, they think everyone should be in the office. Nevermind that the code monkeys spend 10 hours a day developing code and office chatter can be very distracting. Likely the developers will be working in a huge cubicle farm while the executives are in their private office with adjacent nursery.

So great idea to force all the WFH folks to come into the office. Now all the employees will have one more thing to grouse about and they’ll be able to do it face-to-face. Surely that will launch productivity through the roof.

It does? Oh, shit…don’t tell my boss! :eek:

Seriously, I think you’ll find it varies widely by company. I have no idea what Yahoo’s specific child-related telecommuting policies have been until this point. My company is more than happy to let me do my paperwork at home, at my kid’s piano recital or whereever the heck I care to, and as long as the work is turned in (by FAX or in person) on time and is accurate. In a few months, it will *all *be done by computer, so I’ll turn in my paperwork by hitting Send, from whatever beach I’m lounging on at the time. I could be watching the whole neighborhood’s kids at the same time, and my boss honestly doesn’t care.

Why would employees suddenly need to find day care? Wouldn’t they have needed that before?

Why? It benefits me and it doesn’t harm you. Why isn’t that a compelling argument?

That is completely not what I consider to be essential to telecommuting. You are at home so you can allocate your time and resources as it suits you, so long as your output remains satisfactory. If that means working in your pajamas or taking breaks to look after your kids, then that’s the whole point.

Because the opinion of you, the employee, about what does or does not harm the company is not based on any analysis, but merely on the fact that you want the option to telecommute.

Sure, but that’s just a starting point.

In the world we live in, in which middle class white-collar people are subjected to increasing uncertainty, lack of job security, increasing demands for productivity, increasing demands on time, in areas with job availability facing bad commutes and high costs of living, having to have two incomes, etc., etc., etc., I think it’s well past time for management to cede a significant portion of decision-making discretion to employees as partners rather than just as pawns to be moved around. I think it’s time for managers to give up the idea that they have the power to have things exactly the way they want them, and allow employees to have some things that they want “just because they want it,” so long as the product outputs are good enough.

Now, I’m not saying that “good enough” has been determined for this or any other particular case, but just that the idea that company management should have the default position of “because I say so.”

Yahoo is a lot more than their main website/search engine. The meat of their business comes from selling digital ad space (display ads) for a syndicated network of websites (ie: They can run my banner ad on a hundred different sites at once, instead of me having to go to each site to try and book the space on my own.)

Aren’t those exactly the reasons why management can do whatever the fuck they want?

Maybe, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Yahoo hasn’t been doing good. And several reasons were given, among them, the fact it’s not actually not that many employees affected and many of those were in the habit of disappearing for long stretches.

It seems the reverse is happening here. It’s not management making a blanket policy but people making blanket judgments on Yahoo and Mayer without looking at the details.

I work from home occasionally. My staff work from home occasionally. The benefit to the employee is that they don’t have to commute to work. With IM, email, phone, and video, it is nearly the same as being in the office. The benefit to the company is they don’t have to have as much real estate space to maintain.

If I need to talk to someone on my team and they are busy watching their kids or other non-work stuff, their work from home privileges are going to be in question. When my team is at home, my expectation is no different than if they were in the office. If they are needed, they should be available. Working from home is not a substitute for child care. That’s not fair to the child nor the business.

This is the key, here. You are basically sitting around imagining things to get pissed off about.