Meanwhile, I leave a notebook system connected to a VPN session for days on end when I’m monitoring processes. Every few hours, I’ll check on them, but I’m certainly not doing work 24x7.
Well to be fair about, I am one of the most talented software people most people will ever meet I don’t do jack shit when I have gotten to work from home. I guess I do better than most but it still isn’t good by my standards. There are just too many temptations. That is why I don’t do it these days. I purposely took a job that is a mix of software engineering and real on the floor manufacturing engineering. It makes me shine like a superstar because I can do more things there more quickly than any ten of my telecommuting coworkers can do on their best day combined. An honest evaluation is that 4/5ths of them could be gone with no noticeable loss to the company and they are expensive employees. The other 1/5th are talented and they are the ones I rely on but they aren’t as nearly as effective as they could be because they aren’t physically there.
People are constantly amazed when they ask me about critical problem and want me to organize a meeting about it to come to resolution and say that it is urgent and I need to organize it within three days. Three days my ass. I just walk out of my office and start pulling people off the production floor for a meeting right that instant. They said it was urgent right? The remote people are almost the ones that balk at that tight turnaround but I run some things that are critical to some people’s ability to survive. This isn’t a Dilbert cartoon. We get it done better than the military every single day (mission). Not all businesses are that critical to essential life functions but the world would be a better place if more people acted rather than just opt for endless iterations through e-mail or instant messaging. I am not a fan of telecommuting in this economy unless the person does exceptional work and takes a huge pay cut for the privilege.
Privilege my ass. If a person does exceptional work from home, the company should consider it a fair deal all around, as both parties are saving money in the end.
Shit mentality you’ve got there.
Are you saying that a telecommuter’s presence in the office would contribute nothing? That it isn’t helpful to others to have access to their knowledge real-time, or have them on-site when you need quick response to a real-time issue? That it’s not helpful to have senior people coaching newer ones one-on-one throughout the day? Tele-commuting saves a few bucks on cubicles, but employers are losing out on things as well. People who think working from home is just as productive simply because it’s possible are kidding themselves. A physical presence adds value and not just for client facing tasks.
We’re seeing a backlash because companies over-did it, encouraged by employees. As companies are finding out that there’s more to a lot of jobs than what someone does at their cubicle, they’re reigning it back. Some jobs it will still work for, but fewer than was originally thought.
Oh come on. A fair number of jobs require people to be at their desks, working most of the time, not interacting with coworkers, coaching anyone, or sitting in meetings of dubious productive value.
I’m a programmer; in order to do my job to the optimum level, I need long stretches of uninterrupted time. The in-person jobs I’ve had that really allow that are few and far between. Cubicles are horrible places for programmers to work, there’s way too much noise and socializing going on. In-person meetings are at least 80% useless time for me.
I respond to real-time issues as fast as anyone in the office does; I have a phone, email, and IM on all the time during work hours, and the phone/email the rest of the time. And my work is right there; call me during off hours and I’ll get the job done faster than someone who has to be in the office to do work simply because I can be in my office in 2 minutes instead of taking time to drive there.
Same thing if someone does need help or coaching; there’s little that I can’t do remotely with screen-sharing utilities. Other than shoot the shit and socialize. You’re right, I can’t wander into someone’s office and spend an hour yammering about my weekend as easily as I could in the office.
Not all jobs are like that, and not all people are suited for telecommuting. But to insist that there is no value for telecommuting or that it’s always sub-par to being in person is just wrong.
I’m leaning toward the side here that says this outrage is a tempest in a teacup and Mayer isn’t a bitch for wanting to straighten out the work-at-home slackers who aren’t even logging in, but wait a second here. If the change really only affects a few hundred workers out of 14 thousand, the claim that she laid down the law after seeing that parking lots were slow to fill up in the morning and quick to empty at 5 rings hollow to say the least. If it’s true, it would seem that she has more problems with her in-house workers rather than those who worked from home.
In short, she may be right, but this doesn’t appear to have been well handled.
On thinking about this whole issue, I think a lot of the distaste for meetings comes from the misguided idea that overly frequent status updates are a good idea. I’ve been on projects where the initial plan was to have morning and afternoon meetings, every day, until somebody woke up to the fact that this didn’t leave us enough alone time to work on the components we’d been assigned. Certainly, you do have to get everybody on the project team together on a regular basis, just so they all understand how the pieces fit together, but you don’t need to herd everybody into a conference room every single damn day.
Is Yahoo! going to turn all 14K+ employees into an enormous “tiger team”? Of course not, that would be stupid. They wouldn’t do anything stupid, would they?
My point is that tele-commuting appears to have been over-adopted. Just because a job can be done remotely doesn’t always mean it should be. Just as there are benefits for some roles, there are deficits for others, and a company has to decide if the former out-weigh the latter to get the most value. What Yahoo will likely discover is that a far smaller percentage of jobs should be done off-site.
We’re going to have to agree to disagree regarding the accessibility of people off-site being just as good (re. your comments about phone, e-mail, screen-sharing, etc.) In my lengthy experience, troubleshooting goes faster when the person is present, period. A LOT of the time, the problem you’re being asked about is the result of some extraneous factor that is immediately clear when you’re in the room, but takes an hour of “It’s still doing it!” “Well, it’s working fine on my screen and there’s nothing in the error logs! Try…” conversations.
And a lot of what I learned from senior people came from “Hey, what’s this?” discussions. Not “there’s a problem” but “why’s this here?” questions. I wouldn’t e-mail someone at home and set up screen share for an idle question, but ask the person in the next cube, no problem. And someday when something goes glitchy, I’d remember Athena said we needed that bit in the .ini file once and it’s not there now.
In the same way tele-commuting isn’t always a bad thing, working in an office needn’t always be a huge time-waste of meetings and cake parties.
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You are an ass for asking for a cite in a Pit thread.
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How exactly would one cite a prediction? :dubious:
Empirical evidence derived from similar actions taken by other companies in the past.
You would think it’s a win-win. I wonder if much of the corporate opposition to telecommuting arises out of some kind of wish to assert authority? Compared with other enticements and morale boosters employers might consider, letting people telecommute seems cheap compared to the satisfaction and very significant savings it offers the worker. I think the reason they don’t do it is to retain a kind of bargaining chip.
I wouldn’t call that a cite, per se.
Also, some posters have the annoying habit of asking for a cite because they don’t have the guts to just openly disagree with the statement.
A lot of telecommuters are just phoning it in.
There’s an exchange in “Sneakers” between Robert Redford and Ben Kinglsey, meeting after 30 or 40 years. “You went to work for organized crime.” “Trust me, it’s not that organized.”
Employees always picture boardrooms full of Mr. Burns’ steepling their fingers and plotting diabolical schemes to manipulate them, but people are people and they’re no more consistent, effective, or diabolical than your local PTA chapter. The imagery is people reading into things based on their own perspective, which is why there are like five different personas assigned to Mayer in the thread.
I’ve spent the past about ten years working with remote teams. I’m in Minnesota. Teams are in London (mostly currently), Malyasia, Ireland, China, Thailand, India (the other current). I go into the office almost every day (for a while I had one official telecommute day, but now I only telecommute if I’m not feeling 100%, the weather is bad, or someone is coming to fix the washing machine).
For me, its a luxury to have a face to face meeting in a room - and about 1000% more productive. You get body language. You establish a personal relationship I just don’t get on the phone. And with all the web tools out there, there is still nothing that is as good as getting up in front of a whiteboard (post it notes as a technique also work a lot better in person, the screen equivalents are just not as good). We still fly people all over the world to have these face to face meetings and create these face to face connections, and if executives didn’t think they weren’t valuable, travel budgets would be a lot smaller.
For my husband’s dev teams, they work as pair programmers - and you can’t do that remotely effectively either. He’s had very good success with pair programming in terms of efficiency and cost
By the way, I wouldn’t put it beyond Yahoo (and Best Buy, which I know better) to have decided that stopping telecommuting has two functions - the stated “it gets people into the office for a collaborative experience” and the unstated “some people will quit and we will get rid of headcount without the reorg costs associated with severance.”
I would hope they weren’t that stupid - that sort of diabolocial scheme only makes sense if you don’t care which people leave.
What seems more likely, and probably applies somewhat here, is that they’re so ticked about the low productivity numbers of the telecommuters in general that they simply don’t give a damn if some of them quit. It’s like catching someone stealing with a hidden camera and they try to turn it around by saying “You were spying on me?” Screw your outrage - gtfo.
The revamping of my.yahoo was the biggest mistake that Yahoo has ever done. Marissa Mayer has ruined the making of each my.yahoo in the world and many of the my.yahoo users will quit Yahoo. I have used my.yahoo for years and had everything set to my own liking. Now, I no longer have choices of what I like to see in my.yahoo. At least, she should let me keep what I have built and like. Do not force anything on me like I am a dog. Other users feel the same as I do. I am now forced to accept the new concept of my.yahoo on Mar 10, 2014 without any recourse to preserve my old my.yahoo completely. Marissa Mayer is going to ruin Yahoo. :mad:
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You think they do? Bean counters count beans. Only the numbers matter.
I have worked for too many companies whose executives that think employees are disposable and interchangeable, even tech people in critical functions. They don’t have any grasp of accumulated experience and business knowledge and if you tried to explain it to them, they would only get confused and shut down.
What the eff is my.yahoo?