Yahoo CEO: No more working remote -- get to the office or quit

Damn silly workers. Actually expecting Yahoo! to stick to what it promised when they were hired. How dare they!

(By the way, you had a decent point about arbitrary earlier. Not the best word choice there, at least not in all of the cases).

 

Oh, come on. What proportion of Yahoo!'s workers came there under a "promise" that telecommuting would always be an option? And what company can be expected to live up to such a promise even if it was made?

I'm not defending Yahoo! here so much as I am pointing out the silliness of what some are suggesting. I have a ton of sympathy for any Yahoo! employee who is now going to have to cobble together home/child arrangements -- I've been there, done that more than once -- but it's foolishness to think that circumstances must never change.

 

Devil's advocate, but if this was pegged as a pay cut, which it in essence is, then people would look at it differently. Everyone bemoans newspaper people who have furloughs, or have their benefits taken away. Why don't tech workers get the same grace?

 

How is this a pay cut? Gas money? Not all that compelling.

I would be surprised if anybody had a promise of working from home. In fact I would be a bit surprised if Yahoo even had a formal policy before this. Usually those kinds of arrangements just happen.

 

I worked at a Too Big To Fail bank for a bit, and telecommuting was both common and a very formal part of the work policy. You had to submit for approval to do it, which could sometimes take months (and it could take months to actually get you the permissions to access what you needed from home after that, even after you were approved).

It's a big enough deal that I can't imagine there wasn't a formal policy.

 

For some folks it will be akin to a pay cut, since what they weren't paying for before they'll now have to pay for (e.g., child care). For many others, even though it won't be a pay cut, it'll make the job less attractive. There's no getting around that.

 

So they just decided to stop coming in? Come on. If working from home is important to you, it's something you are going to find out during the interview process.

And yes, this is a cut in benefits. Not just gas money, but lost time.

 

It is also fair to be pissed about it when they change, especially if you were doing the job well under the circumstances.

As for those who weren't doing their jobs properly, my guess is they still won't do them very well even now that they have to be in the office.

 

Everyone thinks they do their job well. Most are wrong.

 

And if they are doing a bad job and don't know it, it is at least in part because a manager isn't doing a good job of providing feedback.

 

Maybe Yahoo should find workers that can do their job without their hand being held.

 

Every CEO who tries to shake up a floundering (but still proud) company is going to be met with braying resistance. I know. I raged when Sam Zell did it to me. Yahoo's employees are looking at this a bit like they're still a Big Dog in the tech world, because that's what they've been for so long, and the reality is they're in real trouble. It really doesn't matter that Meyer is a hypocrite, that she probably rose through the ranks of Google at least in part because she used to date Larry Page, or that this move is totally unfair because her kid can hold up a meeting with a tantrum and Pat Forde's kid can't. She's the boss, and she gets to set the rules. She's trying to figure out a way to shake up the culture there, and if that means make them more like Google, the culture she's familiar with and knows is successful, then I get that. It sucks to essentially serve at the whims of your employer -- especially if the top boss is demanding and obsessive or in the case of Zell, a complete fucking moron -- but that's the crappy reality of the American work force, isn't it?

I've always thought these edicts are all kinds of silly, personally. But that's in part because my experience with it was attached to terrible managers, insecure busy-bodies who wanted people in the building because they needed to have their ass kissed as much as possible. Not my direct boss, who didn't care at all, or even my sports editor, who didn't care either, but their bosses, who didn't know how to manage a fern, much less a newsroom. In the first decade of my newspaper career, I came into the office frequently because it was a place of creativity and excitement. I loved it. Later, it became a place of incompetence and misery. I actually had a top manager put in my annual "evaluation" that I needed to smile more in the office. There were no issues with my work -- in fact I was pretty good at it -- I just needed to be a cheerier person at the behest of the editor. To improve morale. Because, you know, my smile would have made a big difference every time they had security escort someone from the building after 20 years of service because they were good at journalism but bad at office politics.

If it were up to me, all that would matter is if you do your work. That's what ultimately matters. But I do agree that single people get screwed often in this scenario, and they're sometimes cast as unfeeling monsters if they balk at working extra to cover for someone with family obligations.

The job won't love you back. That's absolutely the truth. And these days, it's hard to want to pledge loyalty and put in unpaid hours for a place that will put your ass in the street in a half second if it bumps the stock price a dime, even if the bump is only temporary. But this the reality we've arrived at as a country, and it's not going to get any better. I have no doubt that Meyer has little sympathy for people who try to juggle family and work because she got to where she is by spending most of her 20s and 30s inside the office. I suspect she views "perspective" and "balance" as a weakness. That's part of why she is where she is today.

I'd like to see Yahoo succeed because the amount of power Google and Facebook now weild is a little scary. I don't know if making people come into the office really will foster more creativity of if it's really just a way to force people out the door. Maybe it's both. You've got to try something, right? Maybe she's the next Sam Zell, and maybe she's a real innovator who turns the company around. I do know that a lot of people with factory jobs (or better yet, a factory job and a construction job on the "weekends") must find this debate hilarious.